Category: Articles

The passage of the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s “anti-defamation” resolution by the UNHRC is a completely non-momentous event, the kind therefore that will evoke cries of anguish from outraged friends of liberty everywhere. It is another installment in the non-luminous history of an increasingly irrelevant organization that seems only to be in the business of brokering perks, passing unenforceable resolutions, and offering obnoxious pedants a chance to grouse about America and Europe.

Crafted by the Pakistani delegation, the resolution urges states to provide “protection against acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general.” Essentially, its force is diminished by the simple fact that the twenty-three nation majority voting in favor of the resolution were Muslim nations. Eleven nations, mostly Western, opposed the resolution, and 13 countries, including India, abstained. The United States did not vote on the resolution because it is not a member of the council.

According to Pakistan’s ambassador, Zamir Akram, “Defamation of religions is the cause that leads to incitement to hatred, discrimination and violence toward their followers.” That is stuff and nonsense of course. It is like saying that impugning General Motors workmanship is the cause of a car wreck. If religions, by a stretch, are products of culture, then the fact that they are sometimes “defamed” (read: criticized) might just have something to do with quality control and less to do with the insidious intentions of their detractors. To resituate the causes of religious violence and hatred from its source to the “defamers” is a standard tactic redolent of the Victim’s Handbook available at your local Discourse and Broomsticks Bookstore.

Before I am called out for the “false analogy” in that last paragraph (I know the difference between a religion and a Buick) let me offer a good reason not to take the UNCHR resolution seriously.

Language, practices and beliefs are the elements of religion. These elements, if they are benign in their effects, are the private, collective business of the adherents of a faith. But because religion is practiced in a social context, its effects on its own members and on unbelievers who choose to reject its doctrines are not strictly its own business. Speaking mainly of the western democratic mind-set, religions do not have the right to coerce belief. They do not have the right to kill the (ever-changing) enemies of God. They do not have the right to seek the protection of law (or even a tepid UNHRC resolution) for their view that religion occupies a status different from those institutions—banks, legislatures, labour unions—that do not claim exemption from ridicule. Whatever laws may pertain to the establishment and function of such institutions, they do not possess “rights” as the United Nations and other constitutional agencies have come to define the term. Religions, as social institutions with dues-paying members who share—more or less–a common world view and praxis, do not have rights.

The claim that religion is entitled to special protection because it is a different species of social institution is based on the belief that its focus is “transcendent” and its object sublime. But that is a doctrine belonging to faith and conscience, not to society. The sheer growth of any religion—Christianity, Islam, or any future competitor-faith – would doubtless make the crucial distinction between religion and society muddier (history has dealt with the coextension of religion and the state many times), but the steady progress toward human rights has depended on keeping the difference clearly in view. The idea of “universal human rights” (like the idea of a global community) is merely a modern form of nominalism, of course, but it at least performs the service of postulating a civil community – a human community – that regardless of the growth or decline of any particular community or special interest, encircles it and ideologically rises above it. The Jewish kingdoms, Christendom, and the worldwide Ummah, however populous and powerful these religious associations may have been or may be, are stubbornly particular in relation to the modern understanding of a global civil community. The humiliating failure of the United Nations in this episode is in not offering a convincing argument about why the idea of universal values erodes the claim that religions have special status.

Religions occupy not sacred space but real space regarded as sacred. The languages they use, whether Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit, or Urdu, are human languages that can be used for liturgy, poetry or to incite to riot and murder. The practices they encourage, ranging from Pentecostal highs to requiem lows, find their explication within the life of the religious community: no one outside the group is beholden to find it meaningful, moving, rich or true. When it is called insignificant, backward, intrusive, or harmful the redress of the religious community is not to seek legal protection for private systems of belief. The oxymoronics of victimology need to be outed: the bombing of abortion clinics by pro-life Catholics and the killing of Muslims at prayer by differently-inclined Muslims in Jamrud is not the exercise of free speech. It is not discourse. It is not the pursuit of the higher good. And it is certainly not “caused” by defamers. Whatever else 9/11 was, it was not a private act or the exercise of free speech. It was a liturgical act directed at innocent victims. Real victims. The profanation of religion is the option of its adherents, not of those who ridicule the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is the option of popes who preach shoddy science and mullahs who scream banalities at Friday prayer.

The claim of victimization has always had a strong appeal: the early Christian apologists were past masters of the art: “The more we are mown down by you the more we grow,” a snide Tertullian says to an unlistening emperor. “The blood of our martyrs is the seed of the church.” But to give the Christians their due, they took it on the chin and not once, as far as I know, did they seek anti-defamation legislation from the Roman Senate. Their “defamers,” from Celsus to Marcus Aurelius, were silver throated and persuasive. And their recourse was argumentation. One further thing: The religiously-induced violence of the last century exceeds by leaps and bounds, in terms of lives lost and atrocities committed, anything witnessed in the ancient world. Put the UN resolution in that pipe before smoking it.

In the long run the resolution will be promoted as it was passed by those who support the victimist view that the trouble with religion is people who don’t like religion. (It is telling that 13 countries abstained, spinelessly indecisive about what to think or believe, or more likely not wishing to cause offense to Muslim sponsors or western opponents.) What needs to be watched is the United Nations’ stunning inability to reconcile its promotion of human rights with a new calculus that sees religion as possessing human rights. It doesn’t. Contraception, bombings, stonings and beheadings, adolescent marriage, female circumcision, the eradication of civil law and educational rights for girls and women – religion has a lot to say about each of these things. Scandalously, the UN has now leant respectability to the idea that moral outrage is only the “right” of those whose religious feelings have been hurt.

R. Joseph Hoffmann is Chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER) at the Center for Inquiry and Editor of CAESAR: A Journal of Religion and Human Values. He is Scholar in Residence at Goddard College and editor of The Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Prometheus Books, 2006).

This is an extract from From Fatwa to Jihad, Atlantic, published April 2.

The argument against offensive speech is the modern secularized version of the old idea of blasphemy, reinventing the sacred for a godless age. Until the abolition of the offence in 2008, blasphemy was committed in British law if there was published ‘any writing concerning God or Christ, the Christian religion, the Bible, or some sacred subject using words which are scurrilous, abusive or offensive, and which tend to vilify the Christian religion’. The origins of the law go back a millennium. After the Norman Conquest of 1066 two orders of courts were established.

Church courts decided all ecclesiastical cases, under the guidance of canon law, which legislated on moral offences. The civil or king’s courts were concerned with offences against the person or property. In 1401 King Henry IV’s statute De heretico comburendo empowered bishops to arrest and imprison suspected heretics, including ‘all preachers of heresy, all school masters infected with heresy and all owners and writers of heretical books’. If a heretic refused to abjure, or if he later relapsed, he could be ‘handed over to the civil officers, to be taken to a high place before the people and there to be burnt, so that their punishment might strike fear into the hearts of others’.

Despite the concern with God and Christianity, the outlawing of
blasphemy was less about defending the dignity of the divine than
protecting the sanctity of the state. In 1676 John Taylor was convicted
of blasphemy for saying that Jesus Christ was a ‘bastard’ and a ‘whoremaker’ and that religion was a ‘cheat’. ‘That such kind of wicked and blasphemous words were not only an offence against God and religion’, observed the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Matthew Hale, in front of whom Taylor was tried, ‘but a crime against the laws, States and Government; and therefore punishable in this court; that to say religion is a cheat, is to dissolve all those obligations whereby civil societies are preserved; and Christianity being parcel of the laws of England, therefore to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in subversion of the law.’

Any challenge to Christian doctrine was, in other words, also a challenge to the secular social order. The heresy that troubled Lord Chief Justice Hale was the kind of heresy that promoted ‘subversion of the law’, the kind of dissent that might unstitch civil society. The outlawing of blasphemy was therefore a necessary defence of traditional political authority.

Four hundred years after Taylor’s conviction, Lord Denning, perhaps
Britain’s most important judge of the twentieth century, made, in 1949,
much the same point about the relationship between blasphemy and
social disorder, though he drew the opposite conclusion about the
necessity of the law. Historically, he observed, ‘The reason for this law
was because it was thought that a denial of Christianity was liable to
shake the fabric of society, which was itself founded on Christian
religion.’ But, Denning added, ‘There is no such danger in society now
and the offence of blasphemy is a dead letter.’

Not only had Christianity become unwoven from the nation’s social
fabric, but over the next half-century other faiths and cultures wove
themselves in. The multicultural transformation of Britain made even
less plausible the traditional arguments for the blasphemy law. In
1985, three years before the Rushdie affair, the Law Commission, an
independent statutory body charged with reviewing the law and
recommending changes, published a report on blasphemy entitled
Offences against Religion and Public Worship. ‘In the circumstances now prevailing in this country,’ the Commission argued, ‘the limitation of protection to Christianity and, it would seem, the tenets of the Church of England, could not be justified.’ It should be abolished ‘without replacement’.

But if the reweaving of Britain’s social fabric provided an argument
for the abolition of the blasphemy law, it also provided a reason, in
some people’s minds, for its refashioning into a new offence that
embraced non-Christian faiths and cultures. ‘A significant number of
lawyers, clergymen and laymen’, wrote Richard Webster in A Brief History of Blasphemy, a book that came out a year after the Satanic Verses controversy and was highly critical of Rushdie and his supporters, ‘have begun to take the view that some protection of people’s religious feelings is necessary not primarily for religious or spiritual reasons but in the interests of social harmony.’

One such figure was Lord Scarman. Two years before he wrote his famous report on the Brixton riots, he was one of the Law Lords who presided over the last great blasphemy trial in Britain. In 1977 Mary Whitehouse, founder of the pro-censorship National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, and a doughty defender of ‘public morality’, had brought a private prosecution for blasphemous libel against the newspaper Gay News. It had published a poem by James Kirkup called ‘The Love that Dares to Speak its Name’, about the love of a centurion for Jesus Christ at the crucifixion. Whitehouse won the case and Gay News appealed against the conviction.

In 1979 the case finally came to the House of Lords, the highest
appeal court in Britain. The Law Lords, one of whom was Lord Scarman,
upheld the original verdict. ‘I do not subscribe to the view that the
common law offence of blasphemous libel serves no useful purpose in
the modern law,’ Scarman wrote in his judgement. But such a law must
be extended ‘to protect the religious beliefs and feelings of non-
Christians’. Blasphemy ‘belongs to a group of criminal offences designed to safeguard the internal tranquillity of the kingdom. In an increasingly plural society such as that of modern Britain it is necessary not only to respect the differing religious beliefs, feelings and practices of all but also to protect them from scurrility, ridicule and contempt.’

In 1985 the Law Commission looked into this and rejected such an
extension, arguing that the deficiencies of the law ‘are so serious and
so fundamental that . . . no measure short of abolition would be adequate to deal with these deficiencies’. The Commission dismissed the idea that religion should have special protection, observing that ‘Reverence for God . . . does not differ fundamentally in character from reverence accorded to any person against whom those according respect are unwilling to entertain grounds of criticism.’

Anticipating the arguments of Rushdie’s critics that there is a difference between legitimate criticism and unacceptable abuse, the Law Commission pointed out that ‘one person’s incisive comment (and indeed seemingly innocuous comment) may be another’s “blasphemy” and to forbid the use of the strongest language in relation, for example, to practices which some may rightly regard as not in the best interests of society as a whole would, it seems to us, be altogether unacceptable’. In other words, the way of saying
something is part of what is said. To say that you must write differently
is in practice to say that you must write about different things.

The Law Commission inquiry was, however, far from united in its
view. Two of the five members appended a Note of Dissent to the majority report. The dissenters were particularly influenced by an outside working party that had insisted that some legal constraints were necessary for the protection of social harmony. ‘If scurrilous attacks on religious beliefs go unpunished by law,’ the working party suggested, ‘they could embitter strongly held feelings within substantial groups of people, could destroy working relationships between different groups, and where religion and race are intimately bound together could deepen the tensions that already are a disturbing feature in some parts of this country.’ The Note of Dissent proposed the replacement of blasphemy by a new offence that recognized ‘the duty on our citizens, in our society of different races and people of different faiths and of no faith, not purposely to insult or outrage the religious feelings of others’.

In the end both the majority and minority views came to fruition.
The blasphemy law was finally repealed in 2008. But it had already been replaced by a number of laws that secularized the offence of blasphemy.

Two years before the blasphemy law was abolished, parliament had passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which made it an offence to incite hatred against a person on the grounds of their religion. The aim was to extend to Muslims, and other faith groups, the same protection that racial groups, including Sikhs and Jews, possessed under Britain’s various Race Relations Acts. In fact, it was already an offence to perpetrate hate speech. In 1998 the Public Order Act had been amended to make it an offence to ‘display any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress’.

Such hate speech laws are now widespread. France, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Brazil and South Africa are among the many nations that ban, in one way or other, and in one context or other, speech that is offensive or incites hatred. Some of these bans are very wide-ranging. Sweden defines hate speech as
statements that threaten or ‘express disrespect’. Canada prohibits the
incitement of hatred against any ‘identifiable group’. In Australia, the
state of Victoria prohibits speech ‘that incites hatred against or serious
contempt for, or involves revulsion or severe ridicule of another on the
grounds of his race or religious beliefs’. Israel bans speech that ‘hurts
religious feelings’. In Holland it is a criminal offence deliberately to
insult a particular group. Germany bans speech that ‘violates the dignity of or maliciously degrades or defames’ a group. In each case the law defines hate speech in a different way. But what is common is the use of the law to expand the boundaries of hate speech.

What is being created through such laws is a new secular notion of
the sacred. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim pointed out that
the most significant aspect of a religion was not the worshipping of a
deity but the carving out of a sacred sphere, a social space that was set apart and protected from being defiled. Traditionally, the sacred was a means by which to ensure that certain institutions, beliefs and practices could not be publicly challenged. Blasphemy laws were simply the most visible of such means. In today’s more secular age, it is culture and identity, rather than simply religion and God, that the law seeks to protect from public assault. Even laws that ostensibly protect faith – such as Britain’s Racial and Religious Hatred Act – are framed in terms of protecting a community’s culture and identity. In today’s world, identity is God, in more ways than one.

Kenan Malik

Nigel Warburton is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University, as well as the author of a number of bestselling books on the subject. Below is an excerpt from his latest book, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction, on liberty versus licence to say what you want.

Defenders of free speech almost without exception recognize the need for some limits to the freedom they advocate. In other words, liberty should not be confused with licence. Complete freedom of speech would permit freedom to slander, freedom to engage in false and highly misleading advertising, freedom to publish sexual material about children, freedom to reveal state secrets, and so on. Alexander Meiklejohn, a thinker who was particularly concerned to nurture the sorts of debates that are fruitful for a democracy made this point:

When self-governing men demand freedom of speech they are not saying that every individual has an unalienable right to speak whenever, wherever, however he chooses. They do not declare that any man may talk as he pleases, when he pleases, about what he pleases, about whom he pleases, to whom he pleases.

This is important. The kind of freedom of speech worth wanting is freedom to express your views at appropriate times in appropriate places, not freedom to speak at any time that suits you. Nor should it be freedom to express any view whatsoever: there are limits.

John Stuart Mill, the most celebrated contributor to debates about the limits of individual freedom, despite advocating considerably more personal freedom than most of his contemporaries were comfortable with, set the boundary at the point where speech or writing was an incitement to violence. He was also clear that his arguments for freedom only applied to ‘human beings in the maturity of their faculties’. Paternalism – that is, coercing someone for their own good – was in his opinion appropriate towards children, and, more controversially, towards ‘those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered in its nonage’. But it was not appropriate towards adult members of a civilised society: they should be free to make their own minds up about how to live. They should also be free to make their own mistakes.

Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr’s memorable observation that freedom of speech should not include the freedom to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre captures an important point that is easily ignored when rhetoric about freedom takes over: defenders of freedom of speech need to draw a line somewhere. The emotive connotations of the word ‘freedom’ should not blinker us to such an extent that we forget this. Allowing someone to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre might cause a stampede resulting in injury or even death, and a hoax might also undermine theatregoers’ reactions to a genuine cry of ‘fire’. Holmes made his comment in a Supreme Court judgement (Schenck v United States) relating to the First Amendment. He gave this judgement in 1919, but the offending act, printing and circulating 15,000 anti-war leaflets to enlisted soldiers during wartime, took place in 1917. The pamphlets declared that the drafting of soldiers was a ‘monstrous wrong against humanity in the interest of Wall Street’s chosen few’. For Holmes the context of any expression in part determined whether it could justifiably be censored. While this expression of ideas might have had First Amendment protection in peacetime, the same ideas expressed during a war should be treated differently and did not merit that protection. Here the war effort could have been seriously undermined, so Holmes declared these special circumstances justified a special restriction on freedom:

The question in every case is whether the words are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.

Holmes, like Mill, was committed to defending freedom of speech in most circumstances, and explicitly defended the value of a ‘free trade in ideas’ as part of a search for truth: ‘the best test of truth,’ he maintained, ‘is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market’. Holmes wrote passionately about what he called the ‘experiment’ embedded in the US Constitution arguing that we should be ‘eternally vigilant’ against any attempt to silence opinions we despise unless they seriously threaten the country – hence the ‘clear and present danger’ test outlined in the quotation above. Holmes as a judge was specifically concerned with how to interpret the First Amendment; his was an interest in the application of the law. Mill in contrast was not writing about legal rights, but about the moral question of whether it was ever right to curtail free speech, either by law, or by what he described as the tyranny of majority opinion, the way in which those with minority views can be sidelined or even silenced by social disapproval.

Both Mill and Holmes, then, saw that there had to be limits to free speech and that other considerations could on occasion defeat any presumption of an absolute right (legal or moral) to freedom of speech. Apart from the special considerations arising in times of war, most legal systems which broadly preserve freedom of speech still restrict free expression where, for example, it is libellous or slanderous, where it would result in state secrets being revealed, where it would jeopardize a fair trial, where is involves a major intrusion into someone’s private life without good reason, where it results in copyright infringement (e.g. using someone else’s words without permission), and also in cases of misleading advertising. Many countries also set strict limits to the kinds of pornography that may be published or used. These are just a selection of the restrictions on speech and other kinds of expression that are common in nations which subscribe to some kind of free speech principle and whose citizens think of themselves as free.

Nearly 600 people joined the One Law for All anti-racist rally against
Sharia and religious-based laws in Britain and elsewhere and in defence of
citizenship and universal rights in Trafalgar Square and marched towards Red
Lion Square in London. Hundreds then joined our public meeting to discuss
and debate Sharia, Sexual Apartheid and Women’s Rights. Our protest was met
with widespread support and left many feeling inspired and invigorated. It
was also covered by the mainstream media, including BBC Radio 4, BBC 5Live,
BBC Wales, and the Times.

The rally of several hundred heard a number of speakers denouncing the
policy of accommodation and appeasement of the political Islamic movement. A
C Grayling in his speech said: ‘Once you start fragmenting society, once you
start allowing different groups in society to apply different standards, you
get very profound injustices and it is almost always women who suffer these
injustices. We have to fight hard to keep one law for everybody.’

Parisa who was refused a divorce from a violent husband said: ‘Ten years of
my life is gone because of Sharia law. I want to stop it. Please help to
stop it. It is not fair. I had a good uncle who helped me to escape but what
about others who don’t have a chance to run away. I saw that many, many
times.’

Terry Sanderson, the president of the National Secular Society, said: ‘We do
not need another legal system running in parallel… Sharia is creeping into
our legal system and society and we must stop it in its tracks and now!’

Fariborz Pooya, head of the Iranian Secular Society, said ‘the introduction
of Sharia is a betrayal of thousands of women and children and leaves them
at the mercy of Islamist groups.’

After listening to a number of speeches, including from Sargul Ahmad, Jalil
Jalili, Shiva Mahbobi, Reza Moradi, Maryam Namazie, Saeed Parto, Sohaila
Sharifi and Bahram Soroush the crowd then marched through Strand and Kings
Way to Red Lion Square with demands to end Sharia law in the UK and
elsewhere. At Conway Hall, they heard live music from the group, Raised
Voices, then joined a public meeting and heard a panel of distinguished
speakers discuss Sharia Law, Sexual Apartheid and Women’s Rights. The
meeting was chaired by Sohaila Sharifi (Central Council of Equal Rights Now
– Organisation against Women’s Discrimination in Iran). Speakers included
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (Journalist and British Muslims for Secular Democracy
Chair), Naser Khader (Democratic Muslims Founder), Kenan Malik (Writer and
Broadcaster); Yasaman Molazadeh (One Law for All Legal Coordinator); Maryam
Namazie (Equal Rights Now – Organisation against Women’s Discrimination in
Iran, One Law for All and Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain Spokesperson),
Pragna Patel (Southall Black Sisters and Women Against Fundamentalism
founding member), Fariborz Pooya (Iranian Secular Society and Council of
Ex-Muslims of Britain Chair), and Carla Revere (Lawyers’ Secular Society
Chair). Sargul Ahmad (International Campaign against Civil Law in Kurdistan
Iraq head) also spoke about the situation in Iraq under Sharia and the need
for international solidarity.

March 7 was One Law for All’s first warning to the British government and
the political Islamic movement. As Maryam Namazie said on the day: “We won’t
stand idly by whilst the British government relegates a huge segment of our
society to sham courts and regressive rules and appeases the Islamists here
or elsewhere. And we will bring the political Islamic movement to its knees
in Britain in much the same way that people are doing in Iran and
elsewhere.” She added: “We will keep growing in numbers and strength until
we get rid of Sharia councils and religious tribunal’s altogether.”

See footage and photos of the rally, march and public meeting here.

To donate to our organisation, sign the petition and find out more, visit One Law for All

or contact:
BM Box 2387
London WC1N 3XX, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 7719166731
onelawforall@gmail.com

More than 50% of Saudi Arabia’s workforce is made up of migrant workers (around 8 million of them) and the situation they find themselves in is often dire. Having none of the (limited) rights of Saudi nationals, these migrant workers find themselves as second class citizens at best and if ever there were a situation in which Apartheid analogies were appropriate, this is it.

Impoverished foreign workers are drawn to Saudi Arabia with the promise of a better life and the chance to send money back to their families. Workers come to Saudi Arabia using a sponsorship system, whereby their future employer agrees to certain conditions of employment and accommodation and on arrival takes possession of the worker’s passport, who then isn’t allowed to change jobs or leave the country without the sponsor’s permission. While the deals can sound appealing, they often don’t work out that way. For example, there is the case of Mohamed Sakoor, a Sri Lankan migrant:

The agent promised him a monthly salary of 800 Saudi riyals — about $213 — plus free food, housing, medical care and round-trip air fare.As soon as Sakoor arrived at the Riyadh airport, he began to think he had made a mistake. There was no one there to meet him as promised. He called the office of his Saudi sponsor and was rudely brushed off.

“If you have money, take a cab here,” he was told. “If you don’t have money, go back to Sri Lanka.”

Sakoor had no money and no prospects in Sri Lanka. So he spent the next two days at the airport, going hungry and sleeping on the terminal floor. He finally sold his watch to a taxi driver and got just enough cash to share the cab with four other new arrivals. They dropped him off at a restaurant owned by Sakoor’s sponsor.

Sakoor spent the next two nights at the restaurant before he finally started his job.

A typical day goes like this: to work at 7:30 a.m.; break from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., when almost everything stops because of the heat; on the job again until at least 10:30 p.m.

Sakoor says it was three months before he got paid; now, his pay is routinely 20 days late. Despite what his contract says, he gets no overtime even if he works 14 or 15 hours a day, seven days a week, as he often does. But if he is five minutes late, he says, his sponsor will dock him half a day’s wages.

In two years, Sakoor has never missed work because of illness. If he did, he would lose more pay. The promise of medical care is a joke, he says — all anyone gets is a bottle of aspirin.

For migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, there is little chance to complain about such conditions. While trade unions were finally permitted in 2002, the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights reports that ‘foreign workers are expressly excluded: only Saudi citizens can join labor unions (the condition is to be a Saudi of a minimum of 25 years old, and to have worked for not less than 2 years in a given company)’.

It will come as no surprise that female migrant workers fare particularly badly:

Female domestic workers have particular challenges and are vulnerable to exploitation. Some are forced to live in complete isolation and forbidden to leave the home in which they work. In addition to being overworked and underpaid, female migrant workers also face the risk of enduring physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their employers. Even when abuse is reported by foreign workers, it is extremely rare for Saudi employers to be prosecuted.

Tales of extreme working hours coupled with various forms of abuse, often sexual, are commonplace. Take this report from 2002, for example:

When 29-year-old Ramani Prianka accepted a job in Saudi Arabia, she thought it would be a pleasant way to earn more money than she could ever make in her native Sri Lanka.After all, she would be working indoors — as a housemaid — for a well-to-do, educated Saudi couple. He was the manager of a big hospital; she was the principal of a school.

How tough could it be? Very tough, Prianka quickly discovered. The house had 20 rooms and 13 bathrooms, and Prianka, the only maid, was expected to clean every one every day. There were nine children, and Prianka had to wash all their clothes and cook all their food. Seven days a week, she was up at 4:30 a.m. and never got to bed before midnight. All this for the equivalent of $26 a week.

After nine months, depressed and exhausted, Prianka had enough. As the family slept, she sneaked out of the villa, flagged down a taxi and told the driver to take her to the Embassy of the Republic of Sri Lanka.

Prianka was not the only Sri Lankan maid to seek refuge in the embassy’s safe house this hot June morning. There was Pushpa Chandra, 30, who was sick of fighting off sexual advances from her sponsor’s teenage son. And as tears slid down her smooth brown cheeks, a tiny 26-year-old woman whispered that she had been raped by her sponsor’s adult son.

Now, she sobbed, she thought she was pregnant.

Last year, at least 2,800 Sri Lankan housemaids ran away from their Saudi sponsors, claiming they had been overworked, sexually abused or physically mistreated by jealous wives. They are among the countless foreign “guest workers” in Saudi Arabia who live and work under conditions that are sometimes compared to modern-day slavery.

The situation remains much the same. In 2007 – the most recent year that Amnesty International has been able to visit Saudi Arabia – Amnesty reported that ‘[d]iscrimination fuelled violence against women, with foreign domestic workers particularly at risk of abuses such as beatings, rape and even murder, and non-payment of wages’.

That same year, Human Rights Watch expressed its concerns about the treatment of migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, stating that ‘[n]ot only do the authorities typically fail to investigate or prosecute abusive employers, the criminal justice system also obstructs abused workers from seeking redress’. Tenaganita reports:

According to HRW, approximately 2 million women from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and other countries work as domestic helpers here. Many of them face a slew of problems, from late payment of salaries, extended working hours, beatings, and sexual assault, during the length of a typical two-year contract.

An indication of how bad things can get for domestic workers are the shelters for runaway maids run by both the Philippine and Indonesian diplomatic missions in Riyadh and Jeddah.

“There are around 300 maids now at our shelter in Riyadh, which is down from around 560 maids a few months ago, and there are around 45 maids at the shelter in Jeddah,” says Eddy Zulfuat, vice consul at the Indonesian Embassy in Riyadh.

HRW found that female migrant workers ‘are routinely underpaid, overworked, confined to the workplace, or subject to verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. Despite being victims of abuse themselves, many domestic workers are subject to counteraccusations, including theft, adultery or fornication (in cases of rape), or witchcraft’.

In 2000, Amnesty reported that:

Many migrant workers suffer at the hands of their employers, on whom they are completely dependent. Some are not paid. Some are beaten. Some are raped. If arrested, foreign nationals may be deceived or coerced into signing a confession in Arabic, a language they may not understand. They are frequently tortured and ill-treated. They are more likely than Saudi Arabians to be sentenced to death and the judicial punishments of flogging and amputation.

They are forced to suffer in silence and solitude. They are given no information about the system that will decide their fate and sometimes no clue as to the nature of that fate, even if it is the death penalty. They are usually denied prompt contact with their friends, family or consular officials, and are never allowed legal representation in court. Almost all of them lack the support, influence or money to seek pardon, commutation or reduction of their sentence.

By 2007 the only ‘improvement’ was that marginally more Saudi citizens were now being executed than foreign nationals. The situation remained appalling:

Human Rights Watch interviewed Sri Lankan domestic workers sentenced to prison and whipping in Saudi Arabia after their employers had raped and impregnated them. Three months ago, an Indonesian domestic worker in al-Qasim province was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for witchcraft, a reduction from an original sentence of death. The Indonesian embassy did not learn about the arrest, detention or trial of the worker until one month after the sentencing.

Whether as victims or defendants, foreigners confront several serious problems in getting a fair investigation or trial in Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system. Many migrant workers do not have access to interpreters, legal aid or basic information about their cases. The Saudi government often takes months or years to inform foreign missions if their nationals have been arrested or hospitalized, preventing them from extending badly needed assistance.

Given this situation, where is the outcry? When it comes to the systematic discrimination and abuse meted out to over half of Saudi Arabia’s workforce, there is silence in the West. While Israel-bashing is fast becoming something of an international pastime, we hear next to nothing of this human rights nightmare in Saudi Arabia. Major solidarity campaigns? No. Academic boycotts? No. Protest rallies? No. Demonstrations outside Saudi embassies? No. Petitions to the government? No. Boycott Saudi oil? You must be joking!

Selective outrage? Yes, indeed.

This article also appeared at Harry’s Place.

The human cogs of the torture machine seemed as unhappy as their victims. Which meant, I thought as I scribbled in a notebook, ‘There’s no rational explanation for the machine’s existence at all.’

Not least of the problems facing coalition authorities after the fall of Saddam Hussein was the question of ‘de-Ba’athification’. In a country where there was one agent of the state for every twenty civilians, where the five secret police forces were themselves monitored by additional secret police forces, where almost everyone from military generals to primary school teachers were forced into collusion with Ba’athist ideology… where did you draw the line? Where does the forced complicity of the Iraqi barber forced at gunpoint to inform on his or her clients become the conscious evil of the high-ranking believer?

For as the Ba’ath Party psychologist Dr Laith tells us, ‘It was as if I had two or more personalities. I would do my best as an officer with my duties and then I would come home and speak against the regime. All Iraqis have two or more characters.’ American journalist Wendell Steavenson wanted to do for Ba’athism what Hannah Arendt and Robert Lifton had done for Nazism: to understand the perpetrators as well as the victims.

She focuses on Kemal Sachet, a Ba’athist general and military hero who fell in and out of favour under Saddam’s system of capricious evil. Through the character of Sachet, she speaks to his family, his colleagues and his friends, drawing an expansive picture of a people staring at the blood on their trembling hands. We are constantly aware of the backdrop: a traumatised and disintegrating nation pummelled by coalition forces and psychotic terrorists. Steavenson: ‘I always wore a big black tent abaya as disguise in the back of the car, texted my whereabouts to a friend every hour, and took care never to walk down the street.’

Any attempt to understand a perpetrator of evil involves the risk of misunderstanding: to tease out the tiny flickers of humanity inside terrible men, the cheesy filial in-jokes, the annual donations to some orphanage or hospital, the mawkish horror of the SS guard who buys marzipan for his daughter on the way back from a shift at the ovens. Yet although Steavenson writes about Sachet’s personal life, she does not succumb to the slobbering awe that afflicts even radicals when they are faced with undeniable power. In the book she argues with and contradicts her subjects – there is a great passage where she debates Muslim grievances with a supporter of the ‘resistance’ – but her narrative seeks less to understand than to tell a story, never forgetting that context is all.

Yet Sachet seems to have been quite humane by the Ba’ath’s miserable standards, deploring the senseless loss of life caused by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and once helping to clean out a storm drain in his general’s uniform. Indeed, Sachet’s later life appears marked by a series of urges towards good deeds, but Steavenson is sceptical as to whether these were attempts at genuine atonement or a last-minute scramble for a place in heaven. ‘He gave money to the needy,’ Steavenson writes, ‘He thought of Allah and his kingdom of heaven and compensated his guilt with humility. When he held the hand of a frail old man dying in a hospital bed he would say to himself, ‘Ten credits.’ Sachet fears Saddam during his lifetime, but as the grave looms before him he realises that the only dictator that counts is the one in the sky. The title of Steavenson’s book comes from a Koranic verse about the scales of justice on which every soul is weighed. One good or evil deed can cause a decisive swing, even ‘if there be (no more than) the weight of a mustard seed’.

Ultimately, Steavenson’s book is a study of what Kant called ‘moral luck’ and what Stephen King called ‘black serendipity’. Most people in democratic countries will never be in a position where they are complicit with killing and oppression – although haven’t we all met some pompous bully in a position of minor authority, and thought something like: ‘Stalin would have loved you’? But what if you are born under dictatorship? What if you are conscripted to a fascist army? What if the fascist army comes to your village and threaten to shoot your children unless you collaborate? Can you redeem yourself with little acts of kindness and subversion?

This is your descent into the moral swamp of what another Ba’athist doctor calls ‘Yes… But’; ‘What could I do?; ‘ But I helped many, many people!; ‘I suffered also, you know’; and the ultimate trumping, ‘You cannot understand what it is like to live under such a regime!’

A travelogue with the language and scope of a novel, Steavenson’s book will be essential reading for historians studying the political literature of Iraq: a nation that, like the souls of the dead, still hangs in the balance.

The Weight of a Mustard Seed, Wendell Steavenson, Atlantic 2009

Geert Wilders, the right wing Dutch MP, was refused entry to the UK on Thursday, on the grounds that his presence would threaten public order and damage community relations. It was said that any extremist will be refused entry to the UK. This is a dangerous statement. It is a real threat to individual and civil liberty. By this argument any one who espouses any idea regarded as extreme by the British government will be banned from the UK.

This is the world after September 11 and the world which has been pulled into a so-called “war on terror” by the neo-conservative US government. “Any thing goes!” Under the guise of security, any violation of human rights, human dignity and individual and civil rights will be justified. People, not only in the US, but worldwide expressed their anger and loathing for Bush and whatever he stood for.

You would have expected that the Bush-Blair legacy will be wiped out. But no, it is business as usual. One might oppose to these statements, arguing that, the ban is on an anti-Islamist and not the other way around, so this has nothing to do with the war on terror. My response is: The war on terror was not, as it was proclaimed, only on Islamist terrorists. It was against individual and civil freedoms we have taken for granted in the west. It was a war on human civilization. It was a war of terrorists against humanity.

Fear and intimidation are the tools used by the ruling classes and right wing thugs to curtail our rights and liberties as citizens. Fear and intimidation are the strongest tools against freedom and civility. Islamists have used it to gain power and use it to expand their power. The right wing governments are using the threat by the Islamists to achieve what they can otherwise not achieve so easily.

The only way to safeguard our freedom and civil rights, to ensure we live in a free society is to achieve “unconditional freedom of speech and expression.” The secret is in the word “unconditional.” Otherwise, we have always the big brothers to interpret the limitations and conditions, and before we know it they can take all our rights away. (And this does not only happen in the East. Nazi Germany is next door and only sixty years ago!)

I am in total opposition to Wilders’ ideas. I believe he is a racist. He belongs to extreme right. He is a threat to humanity and all the good and progressive ideas developed by it. However, I defend his right to express his ideas and his right to show his appalling film. I also defend the right of those who oppose him, to protest against him. This is what freedom of expression is about. If we defended only the freedom of expression of the like-minded, this would be an empty gesture in defence of freedom. Ironically, this is what Wilders is doing. He campaigns for the banning of the Koran, and opposes the ban on his freedom of expression. This is a double standard. But what else can one expect from a right wing politician?

To me, both Fitna and the Koran are appalling products of backward, reactionary, discriminatory and bigoted minds. I loathe them both. I am struggling to build a world free of both types of mentalities. Nevertheless, I strongly believe in unconditional freedom of expression. So, neither Fitna nor Koran should be banned. Both Wilders and Islamist should enjoy freedom of expression. Only when someone is putting these reactionary and racist views into practice against another human being, violating their rights, the state should intervene. We should work hard to make a world in which the likes of both Fitna and the Koran belong to the museum of pre-history.

Anti-liberal actors in the international arena, such as the Muslim states of the Middle East, are pursuing a path of attempting to suppress what they call “defamation of religion”. Their campaign is achieving some success, and I believe we must take it very seriously.

The whole idea of defamation of religion is nonsense. Taken literally, it would mean that I could not utter any falsehood that is damaging to the reputation of a religion (so, it might lead people to leave the religion or doubt its doctrines, or fail to be convinced to convert to it). But a religion has no right to flourish, be believed, retain adherents, gain converts, or anything of the sort. On the contrary, it is in the public interest that the truth and credibility of various religions be tested continually, and it is quite within my rights to try to convert people from their current religion to my religion of choice or to an anti-religious position. Much like political ideologies, religions have to take their own chances. Many things will be said for and against various religions, and some of those things will not be true, even if they are said sincerely.

In that sense, the flourishing of a religion is simply not analogous to the flourishing of citizens. The concern that the state has to protect the flourishing of its citizens in no way applies to religions. If a religion dies out through a peaceful process of deconversions or a failure to reproduce itself, the state should be entirely neutral about whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Even apart from that fundamental point, the justification for defamation law can’t simply be scaled up to apply to the “defamation” of something like a religion. On the contrary, we should ensure that speech about the public actions of elected officials and other public figures, the actions of business corporations, the actions of religious organisations and communities of religious believers, and the truth of religious doctrines, etc., is not chilled by applying concepts of “defamation” beyond their very narrow area of justification. In some cases, this might require narrowing of the existing law (e.g. in its application to large business corporations).

Let’s look at this issue of justification. If The Sydney Morning Herald accuses me of being a pedophile, it will be very difficult to remove that slur without taking some kind of action in the courts. If the slur is believed by my friends, they will shun me. If it’s thought more widely that there’s any truth in the slur, then my career will undoubtedly be ruined. Indeed, in situations like that individuals can be ostracised – and so destroyed as social beings – and it seems that the only way to counter the possibility is by invoking the majesty of the law to clear their names and/or provide heavy damages for the loss. That provides some deterrence to giant media corporations, which wield private power, acting in ways that can ruin individual lives. Media corporations take potential legal liability for defamation seriously, and that’s usually a good thing. It gives some reassurance to those of us who are not media magnates.

By contrast, consider the public actions (not, for example, the sex lives) of elected officials. It’s well known that these actions are controversial and that any criticism, no matter how trenchant (or plausible-seeming), has to be taken with a grain of salt. Furthermore, elected officials have enormous resources with which to put across their own viewpoints and defend themselves without recourse to the majesty of the law for vindication. Moreover, whereas the sex life of an individual citizen is not, prima facie, a matter whose discussion is of public interest, there is great public interest in conducting robust discussions of the public actions of elected officials.

Accordingly, it should at the very least be extremely difficult for elected officials to succeed in defamation cases relating to criticism of their public actions. Over the past 15 years or so, Australian law has been moving in that direction, and it has long been so in the US.

When it comes to religious organisations, and to religious claims about prophets, gods, and so on, there is even less need to resort to the majesty of the law. If it’s claimed that Muhammad was a pedophile, that has no effect on Muhammad, who is long dead, has no friends to shun him, has no career that can be ruined. Moreover, there are literally hundreds of millions of followers of Muhammad to defend him, and many of them wield enormous power and influence, and have easy access to the mass media. Furthermore, it’s known that issues surrounding the lives of ancient and medieval prophets and saints are matters of heated and almost intractable controversy, so any false claims will be taken with a grain of salt by reasonable people. Such people either ignore the claims or look a bit more deeply, rather than accepting them uncritically. Indeed, the greater problem that we face is that even true claims in criticism of religion will not be taken seriously by the general population. At the same time, there is a strong public interest in discussing the origins and credibility of religions. Was Muhammad a good role model for contemporary Muslims or not? Are the traditional claims about his life even credible? With such questions, there is an overwhelmingly strong case that there should not be anything like a defamation action available. That case is even stronger than the equivalent case applying to the public actions of elected officials.

Similarly for claims about the behaviour of religious organisations. These organisations wield enormous power and influence, and their actions are inevitably controversial. Organisations such as the Catholic Church have practically unlimited resources to defend themselves against untrue claims, without needing recourse to law, and even true claims are likely to be greeted with disbelief by adherents and cynicism by many others. It’s true that many less rational people will swallow nonsense such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, but even more will accept religious dogma, and the fundamental rightness of an organisation such as the Church, as a result of childhood indoctrination. It is in the public interest to discuss the actions of these organisations without enacting laws that chill the debate.

When it comes to actual religious doctrines and rejection of those doctrines, the case against anything like a concept of “defamation” is stronger still. If someone says “The Abrahamic God does not exist”, well, even if God does exist he will not be shunned by friends or have his career ruined. There is no equivalent to destroying him as a social person. Claims about God’s existence or non-existence are highly, intractably, controversial, and many people treat all such discussion with derision, despite its philosophical importance. Although most citizens are probably more worried about their children, their mortgages, and so on, it is important to conduct philosophical inquiry into religious claims, and we must ensure that the discussion is not chilled by any such concept as “defamation of religion”.

I could go on and on about how the justification for some kind of concept of defamation in liberal societies is an extremely narrow one, and how attempts to broaden it into concepts of group defamation, or even worse, defamation of religion, are fundamentally flawed. It seems that the immediate target of those who seek to prevent defamation of religion is to prohibit claims that something about Islam tends to lead its adherents to terrorism. But that claim is surely at least arguable: whether or not it can be defended at the end of the day, it is a controversial, yet important claim that merits fearless discussion. We should be very reluctant to suppress such claims, and of course Muslim leaders and intellectuals have enormous resources available to them to put their own side of the story without taking such a controversial and debatable psychological/sociological/theological thesis to the courts for an official ruling.

Thus, it would be incredibly simplistic to say, “Defamation of individuals is a bad thing; therefore anything analogous to it is a bad thing.” Even the first part of this is misleading if it’s intended as a broad generalisation – if the individuals concerned are elected officials and the “defamation” relates to their public conduct (not, say, to their sexual practices) then it is by no means obvious that any false criticisms should be cognisable by the law as a “bad thing”. The law should not apply to criticism of the public acts of elected officials in the same way that it does to statements about the character or private conduct of ordinary citizens. The private conduct of elected officials may fall somewhere in between, but it should normally receive protection from defamatory claims.

Once we move beyond individuals to organisations, communities, bodies of religious or political doctrine, and so on, it is even less obvious that any legal concept of defamation is applicable. Indeed, it should be obvious that all the indicia point the other way: i.e., there should not be a legal concept of “defamation of religion”, whatever, exactly, the concept is supposed to amount to. It is in the public interest that scrutiny of religion go ahead from every possible angle (philosophical, historical, sociological, etc.) without the ensuing discussion being chilled by anything analogous to defamation law.

We should be camapaigning to confine defamation law as narrowly as possible, not extend it even further. What I would support (and this already exists in some, perhaps many, jurisdictions) is a narrowly-confined tort of interference in privacy, according to which even true publications about the strictly private behaviour of individuals can be met by a claim for damages. Such revelations can greatly damage individuals as social beings, and the individuals concerned may have no other practical redress when confronted by media corporations. But such a tort would need to be confined narrowly in some way so that it applies only to revelations in the mass media, not to everyday gossip. In any event, this is quite remote from ideas of defamation of religion. If such a privacy tort is justified, it’s on a totally different basis, and it shows why the sorts of concerns that might justify certain narrow exceptions to freedom of speech don’t lead to a concept such as defamation of religion.

The concept of defamation of religion is a very worrying development. If it starts to gain legal force, it has terrible potential as an encroachment on freedom of speech. I submit that we should take this very seriously and fight against it tooth and nail. Our whole Enlightenment legacy is at stake here, and if the UN continues to take an illiberal path I see no reason for compunction about criticising the UN. The UN may or may not be a useful institution, but it is certainly not beyond trenchant criticism and satire, as and when the criticism or satire is merited.

There’s no need to believe that the credibility of the UN must be retained at all costs. Doubtless, the organisation has done some good, but it has failed to achieve its crucial goal of ensuring “never again” for Nazi-like genocides and atrocities. It can’t take much credit for the fact that there was never a World War III between the NATO allies and the former Soviet Union and its satellites – surely that related more to a balance of terror between nuclear-armed states. I doubt that it has done much to contribute to the fundamental freedoms enjoyed in liberal societies. In any event, no matter how wonderful the UN may be, it should attract criticism just like any other powerful organisation.

Freedom of speech has been squeezed and squeezed. Yes, it’s not an absolute value that can’t be overridden by other values in any circumstances whatsoever. I doubt that there are any such absolute values. But exceptions to the presumption of freedom of speech need to be justified, case by case, with compelling argument and evidence, and the exceptions then need to be defined as narrowly as possible, not used by analogy for dubious new exceptions.

The time has come to shout “Enough!” We’ve been moving too far in the direction of creating more and larger exceptions to freedom of speech. We need a loud, popular movement to push the other way.

This article was first published at Russell Blackford’s blog Metamagician and the Hellfire Club and is republished here by permission.

The Qur’an, Muslims believe, is the final revelation of the creator of
the universe, a book dictated by an angel to the final in a long line
of prophets sent by Allah to guide human affairs and to make known the
will of the creator for how we should order our lives. Indeed, time and
again, it makes this bold claim, so this really seems a non-negotiable
article of faith and statement of reality. As such, it is said to be
a book whose message is universal in scope, and whose message is not
historically or geographically specific or conditioned, but which speaks
with equal relevance to us all, in all places and at all times. Islam,
the religion proclaimed by the Qur’an, means simply ‘submission’, and
we are called to acknowledge the divine origins of the book and to submit
our will and intellect to the proposition that this book and this religion
constitute the undeniable pinnacle of moral teaching and literary creativity,
and that we must all adopt this ‘total way of life’ or face stern consequences
after death.

As a non-Muslim, coming to the Qur’an unburdened by the heavy
influence of communal reinforcement that is given by being brought up
to accept these notions as self-evidently true, I am at a complete loss
as to understand how anyone can hold such a high opinion of a book which,
it turns out, is so crude, so blatantly a product of a specific time and
place, and so filled with childish threats and superstition. Reading
the Qur’an is an arduous task, for in translation at least it is not a
book whose literary style naturally commands admiration in the reader;
in fact it is an exceedingly tedious book, made up of a collection of
disjointed and often self-contradictory texts, filled with tiresome repetition
of certain key phrases and themes, and brimming over with threats of
torture and torment for those who will not accept its authority. It seems
to me vitally important in a time in which this book and this religion
are proclaimed so widely and so loudly to be the Truth and to be beyond
criticism that those of us who value the fruits of the Enlightenment –
rational, secular thought and discourse, freed from the often horrific superstitions
of ignorant men of the past – should endevour to both examine and critically
evaluate Islam and its much vaunted ‘holy book’.

The Enlightenment and the huge social changes it ushered in are
precious gifts that it is our duty to protect against the forces of
resurgent irrationalism in the world today. The values and achievements
of the Enlightenment are things which should be open to all, regardless
of skin colour or ethnicity: in short, they are not simply a luxury for
white Western elites. In seeking to ‘understand’ Islam and in offering
an unthinking and servile ‘respect’ for the Qur’an, many feel they are
championing the cause of minorities and protecting them from bigotry and
Western ‘cultural imperialism’. This is utter condescending nonsense. There
is no reason why brown skinned people should be left in the chains of superstition
and there is no reason why the things many of them hold dear should be beyond
rational criticism. Beliefs have consequences, and in the case of this
particular religion one of those consequences is that many of its followers
feel duty-bound to attempt to roll back the Enlightenment and to ‘Islamify’
the West. This is an unpopular statement to make, considered in the minds
of many self-proclaimed liberals and progressives to border on ‘bigotry’
or to actually constitute a form of ‘racism’. But bigotry and racism are
enemies of Enlightenment rationalism – they belong to precisely the same
realm of irrational, petty, provincial thinking that produced competing
religions, all proclaiming to be bearers of the Truth without a shread
of real evidence, and all quite unsatisfactory if we are to be serious
about developing further together as a global community in the years to
come.

In this article, I shall look at exactly what the Qur’an says,
and I hope to demonstrate to the reader quite what a divisive, primitive,
and insulting book it actually is; not to provoke hostility towards Muslims,
nor to be deliberately and gratuituously offensive, but for the important
reasons outlined above.

The intended readership of the Qur’an – universal or localised?

As already noted, mainstream Muslims proclaim the Qur’an to be
the final revelation of the creator of the universe, a book given in
a specific time and place, but a book whose message is not dependent
on that time and place. Hypothetically, the belief goes, the Word of
God could have been given anywhere in the world, in an place, time, or
language, and its message would have been exactly the same. Given the Qur’an’s
constant proclamation that it is of divine origin, we would be safe in assuming
that its message will be found to be universally applicable, equally relevant
to all, and lacking signs that it is culturally or historically conditioned.
In fact, unsurprisingly, this is far from the case.

The readership of the Qur’an is clearly presupposed to be male,
and this is a book for men, by men. We find numerous examples of the
audience being given information and instructions about women, in texts
that speak of women in the third person. So, for example, we read statements
such as ‘Your wives are a tilth for you’ (2.223), ‘And those of you who
die and leave wives behind’ (2.240), ‘And when you divorce women’ (2.231),
‘And when you have divorced women’ (2.232), ‘And Allah has made wives
for you from among yourselves, and has given you sons and grandchildren
from your wives’ (16.72), ‘when you marry the believing women’ (33.49),
‘Enter the garden, you and your wives; you shall be made happy’ (43.70),
‘when you divorce women’ (65.1), and so in, in passage after passage.

The readership of the Qur’an is also clearly presupposed to be
made up of Arabs. So, we read ‘Surely We have revealed it — an Arabic
Quran — that you may understand’ (12.2), ‘And thus have We revealed
it, a true judgment in Arabic’ (13.37), ‘In plain Arabic language’ (26.195),
‘An Arabic Quran without any crookedness, that they may guard (against
evil)’ (39.28), ‘A Book of which the verses are made plain, an Arabic
Quran for a people who know’ (41.3), ‘Surely We have made it an Arabic
Quran that you may understand’ (43.3). Most telling of all, we read ‘And
if We had made it a Quran in a foreign tongue, they would certainly have
said: Why have not its communications been made clear? What! a foreign (tongue)
and an Arabian!’ (41.44)

So much for the much vaunted universal message for a universal
audience. There is plenty more evidence that the Qur’an, more than simply
being a book specifically tailored for Arab men, is also a book firmly
situated in a particular place and time. Animals and food are written of
in the Qur’an, often in the many passages presenting the natural world
as evidence of Allah as creator, and the choice of animals and food, and
the uses of animals that are referred to, situate the text both historically
and geographically. So, for example, we read of camels – important animals
for Arabs but irrelevant as examples for readers in places such as Europe,
where they were largely unknown at the time of the writing of the Qur’an:

And (as for) the camels, We have made them of the signs of the
religion of Allah for you; for you therein is much good; therefore mention
the name of Allah on them as they stand in a row, then when they fall
down eat of them and feed the poor man who is contented and the beggar;
thus have We made them subservient to you, that you may be grateful (22.36).

Will they not then consider the camels, how they are created?
(88.17)

We read of working animals, again situating the Qur’an as a product
of its time, as opposed to being a universal trans-historical book.:

And He created the cattle for you; you have in them warm clothing
and (many) advantages, and of them do you eat.
And there is beauty in them for you when you drive them back
(to home), and when you send them forth (to pasture).
And they carry your heavy loads to regions which you could not
reach but with distress of the souls; most surely your Lord is Compassionate,
Merciful.
And (He made) horses and mules and asses that you might ride upon
them and as an ornament; and He creates what you do not know (16.5-8).

Allah is He Who made the cattle for you that you may ride on
some of them, and some of them you eat (40.79).

Of the ‘gardens of bliss’ promised to believers after death, we
read that there will be ‘thornless lote-trees, and banana-trees (with
fruits)’ (56.28-9). Elsewhere, we read of palm trees, grapes, olives,
pomegranates and clover (6.99, 12.49, 13.4, 16.11, 16.67, 17.91, 18.32,
23.19, 36.34, 80.28). All of these were useful examples for the Arabs
of Muhammad’s time, but are useless as examples for many people in other
places and other times. Of how much relevance is talk of bananas to the
Inuit? How many Scandinavians would have found palm tress a meaningful
example? The claim that the Qur’an’s message is of equal relevance to all
people in all times is revealed to be utterly bogus.

Central concerns of the Qur’an – universally relevant or historically
situated?

Reading the Qur’an, we find that huge chunks of the text are devoted
to Muhammad’s disputes with his fellow Arabs and their rejection of his
message. If the message of the Qur’an transcends time and place, then why
is there so much talk of this issue? We read much of the ‘polytheists’
– those who followed the traditional Arab religions of Muhammad’s time,
and how many of them have rejected the message of Islam and scoffed at Muhammad’s
claim to be a prophet, and we also read of Jews and Christians (‘followers
of the Book’) who likewise rejected the Qur’an :

Those who disbelieve from among the followers of the Book do not
like, nor do the polytheists, that the good should be sent down to you from
your Lord, and Allah chooses especially whom He pleases for His mercy, and
Allah is the Lord of mighty grace (2.105).

And those who disbelieve say: This is nothing but a lie which
he has forged, and other people have helped him at it; so indeed they
have done injustice and (uttered) a falsehood (25.4).

And those who disbelieve say: Why has not the Quran been revealed
to him all at once? Thus, that We may strengthen your heart by it and
We have arranged it well in arranging (25.32).

And they wonder that there has come to them a warner from among
themselves, and the disbelievers say: This IS an enchanter, a liar.
What! makes he the gods a single God? A strange thing is this, to be
sure! (38.4-5)

He it is Who sent His Apostle with the guidance and the true religion,
that He may make it overcome the religions, all of them, though the
polytheists may be averse (61.9).

Those who disbelieved from among the followers of the Book and
the polytheists could not have separated (from the faithful) until there
had come to them the clear evidence: An apostle from Allah, reciting pure
pages, Wherein are all the right ordinances (98.1-3).

So, we read that many Arab polytheists of Muhammad’s time rejected
his new monotheistic religion, calling it a lie that he had invented,
questioning why the whole Qur’an was not ‘revealed’ at one time, and calling
Muhammad himself an ‘enchanter’ and a ‘liar’. These are records of arguments
that Muhammad had with those he tried to convert to his new faith, but
teach us absolutely nothing of value for how to live in the modern world.

For those who accept Muhammad’s claims, the Qur’an promises numerous
rewards after death, with a life of bliss in gardens of paradise, complete
with an unending supply of delicious food and drink, as well as wives
and a life of relaxation and pleasures. But for those who reject Muhammad
and his message (largely the aforementioned polytheists), the author of
the Qur’an, with seemingly endless repetition, offers threats and promises
of unspeakable suffering after death. As we shall see, the author seems
to relish the thought of the infliction of these punishments with great enthusiasm,
and a sadistic and perverse mentality is clearly in evidence.

What does the Qur’an say about non-Muslims?

In their proper historical context, the following texts from the
Qur’an can be seen as threats made by Muhammad to people of his time who
rejected his message. However, for Muslims the Qur’an is not a text that
refers only to the time of Muhammad, but instead offers a universal message
for all peoples and all time, given by God and perfect in its every statement.
Given this is the case, the Qur’an calls upon Muslims today to understand
the fate of those who do not accept Islam to be an eternity of unending
torture and torment, not simply of a ‘spiritual’ variety, but in literal,
corporeal terms. If you are an atheist or a follower of another religion
(there may be some exceptions among Jews and Christians, as we will
see later), then here is what the perfect Word of God has to say to about
you:

Surely those who disbelieve, it being alike to them whether you
warn them, or do not warn them, will not believe. Allah has set a seal upon
their hearts and upon their hearing and there is a covering over their eyes,
and there is a great punishment for them (2.6-7).

Allah is the enemy of the unbelievers (2.98).

(As for) those who disbelieve, surely neither their wealth nor
their children shall avail them in the least against Allah; and these
are the inmates of the fire; therein they shall abide. (3.116).

Let it not deceive you that those who disbelieve go to and fro
in the cities fearlessly. A brief enjoyment! then their abode is hell,
and evil is the resting-place.(3.196-7).

[S]urely Allah will gather together the hypocrites and the unbelievers
all in hell (4.140).

[A] painful chastisement shall befall those among them who disbelieve
(5.73).

And (as for) those who disbelieve and reject Our communications,
these are the companions of the flame (5.86).

And they who reject Our communications are deaf and dumb, in utter
darkness; whom Allah pleases He causes to err and whom He pleases He
puts on the right way (6.39).

And (as for) those who reject Our communications, chastisement
shall afflict them because they transgressed (6.49).

And leave those who have taken their religion for a play and an
idle sport, and whom this world’s life has deceived, and remind (them)
thereby lest a soul should be given up to destruction for what it has
earned; it shall not have besides Allah any guardian nor an intercessor,
and if it should seek to give every compensation, it shall not be accepted
from it; these are they who shall be given up to destruction for what they
earned; they shall have a drink of boiling water and a painful chastisement
because they disbelieved (6.70).

Who then is more unjust than he who rejects Allah’s communications
and turns away from them? We will reward those who turn away from Our
communications with an evil chastisement because they turned away (6.157).

And (as for) those who reject Our communications and turn away
from them haughtily– these are the inmates of the fire they shall abide
in it (7.36).

Surely (as for) those who reject Our communications and turn away from
them haughtily, the doors of heaven shall not be opened for them, nor shall
they enter the garden until the camel pass through the eye of the needle;
and thus do We reward the guilty. They shall have a bed of hell-fire and
from above them coverings (of it); and thus do We reward the unjust. (7.40-1).

What! do the people of the towns then feel secure from Our punishment
coming to them by night while they sleep? What! do the people of the
towns feel secure from Our punishment coming to them in the morning while
they play? What! do they then feel secure from Allah’s plan? But none feels
secure from Allah’s plan except the people who shall perish (7.97-99).

Evil is the likeness of the people who reject Our communications
and are unjust to their own souls. Whomsoever Allah guides, he is
the one who follows the right way; and whomsoever He causes to err, these
are the losers. And certainly We have created for hell many of the jinn
and the men; they have hearts with which they do not understand, and they
have eyes with which they do not see, and they have ears with which they
do not hear; they are as cattle, nay, they are in worse errors; these
are the heedless ones. (7.177-9).

Whomsoever Allah causes to err, there is no guide for him; and
He leaves them alone in their inordinacy, blindly wandering on (7.186).

I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve (8.12).

And had you seen when the angels will cause to die those who disbelieve,
smiting their faces and their backs, and (saying): Taste the punishment
of burning (8.50).

Surely the vilest of animals in Allah’s sight are those who disbelieve,
then they would not believe (8.55).

Allah will bring disgrace to the unbelievers (9.2).

[A]nd announce painful punishment to those who disbelieve (9.3).

The idolaters have no right to visit the mosques of Allah while
bearing witness to unbelief against themselves, these it is whose doings
are null, and in the fire shall they abide (9.17).

Allah has promised the hypocritical men and the hypocritical women
and the unbelievers the fire of hell to abide therein; it is enough for
them; and Allah has cursed them and they shall have lasting punishment
(9.68).

O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites
and be unyielding to them; and their abode is hell, and evil is the
destination (9.73).

And never offer prayer for any one of them who dies and do not
stand by his grave; surely they disbelieve in Allah and His Apostle and
they shall die in transgression (9.84).

Surely those who do not hope in Our meeting and are pleased with
this world’s life and are content with it, and those who are heedless
of Our communications: (As for) those, their abode is the fire because of
what they earned (10.7-8).

Whoever desires this world’s life and its finery, We will pay
them in full their deeds therein, and they shall not be made to suffer
loss in respect of them. These are they for whom there is nothing but
fire in the hereafter, and what they wrought in it shall go for nothing,
and vain is what they do (11.15-16).

They shall have chastisement in this world’s life, and the chastisement
of the hereafter is certainly more grievous, and they shall have no protector
against Allah. A likeness of the garden which the righteous are promised;
there now beneath it rivers, its food and shades are perpetual; this
is the requital of those who guarded (against evil), and the requital
of the unbelievers is the fire (13.34-5)

Hell is before him and he shall be given to drink of festering
water: He will drink it little by little and will not be able to swallow
it agreeably, and death will come to him from every quarter, but he
shall not die; and there shall be vehement chastisement before him. The
parable of those who disbelieve in their Lord: their actions are like
ashes on which the wind blows hard on a stormy day; they shall not have
power over any thing out of what they have earned; this is the great error
(14.16-18).

Therefore do not think Allah (to be one) failing in His promise
to His apostles; surely Allah is Mighty, the Lord of Retribution. On
the day when the earth shall be changed into a different earth, and the
heavens (as well), and they shall come forth before Allah, the One, the
Supreme. And you will see the guilty on that day linked together in chains.
Their shirts made of pitch and the fire covering their faces (14.47-50).

(As for) those who do not believe in Allah’s communications, surely
Allah will not guide them, and they shall have a painful punishment
(16.104).

Whoever desires this present life, We hasten to him therein what
We please for whomsoever We desire, then We assign to him the hell; he
shall enter it despised, driven away (17.18).

And whomsoever Allah guides, he is the follower of the right way,
and whomsoever He causes to err, you shall not find for him guardians
besides Him; and We will gather them together on the day of resurrection
on their faces, blind and dumb and deaf; their abode is hell; whenever
it becomes allayed We will add to their burning (17.97).

We have prepared for the iniquitous a fire, the curtains of which
shall encompass them about; and if they cry for water, they shall be
given water like molten brass which will scald their faces; evil the
drink and ill the resting-place (18.29).

Surely you and what you worship besides Allah are the firewood
of hell; to it you shall come (21.98).

And (as for) those who strive to oppose Our communications, they
shall be the inmates of the flaming fire (22.51).

And (as for) those who disbelieve in and reject Our communications,
these it is who shall have a disgraceful chastisement (22.57).

And when Our clear communications are recited to them you will
find denial on the faces of those who disbelieve; they almost spring upon
those who recite to them Our communications. Say: Shall I inform you of
what is worse than this? The fire; Allah has promised it to those who disbelieve;
and how evil the resort! (22.72)

Think not that those who disbelieve shall escape in the earth,
and their abode is the fire; and certainly evil is the resort! (24.57)

As to those who do not believe in the hereafter, We have surely
made their deeds fair-seeming to them, but they blindly wander on. These
are they who shall have an evil punishment, and in the hereafter they
shall be the greatest losers (27.4-5).

And (as to) those who disbelieve in the communications of Allah
and His meeting, they have despaired of My mercy, and these it is that
shall have a painful punishment (29.23).

They ask you to hasten on the chastisement, and most surely hell
encompasses the unbelievers; On the day when the chastisement shall
cover them from above them, and from beneath their feet; and He shall
say: Taste what you did (29.54-5).

Will not in hell be the abode of the unbelievers? (29.68)

And as to those who disbelieved and rejected Our communications
and the meeting of the hereafter, these shall be brought over to the
chastisement (30.16).

[S]urely He [Allah] does not love the unbelievers (30.45).

And of men is he who takes instead frivolous discourse to lead
astray from Allah’s path without knowledge, and to take it for a mockery;
these shall have an abasing chastisement. And when Our communications
are recited to him, he turns back proudly, as if he had not heard them,
as though in his ears were a heaviness, therefore announce to him a painful
chastisement (31.6-7).

And whoever disbelieves, let not his disbelief grieve you; to
Us is their return, then will We inform them of what they did surely
Allah is the Knower of what is in the breasts. We give them to enjoy
a little, then will We drive them to a severe chastisement (31.23-24).

And as for those who transgress, their abode is the fire; whenever
they desire to go forth from it they shall be brought back into it, and
it will be said to them: Taste the chastisement of the fire which you
called a lie. And most certainly We will make them taste of the nearer
chastisement before the greater chastisement that haply they may turn.
And who is more unjust than he who is reminded of the communications of
his Lord, then he turns away from them? Surely We will give punishment to
the guilty (32.20-22).

Surely (as for) those who speak evil things of Allah and His Apostle,
Allah has cursed them in this world and the here after, and He has prepared
for them a chastisement bringing disgrace (33.57).

Surely Allah has cursed the unbelievers and has prepared for them a
burning fire, to abide therein for a long time; they shall not find a protector
or a helper. On the day when their faces shall be turned back into the fire,
they shall say: O would that we had obeyed Allah and obeyed the Apostle!
And they shall say: O our Lord! surely we obeyed our leaders and our great
men, so they led us astray from the path; O our Lord! give them a double
punishment and curse them with a great curse (33.64-8)..

So Allah will chastise the hypocritical men and the hypocritical
women and the polytheistic men and the polytheistic women (33.73).

And (as for) those who strive hard in opposing Our communications,
these it is for whom is a painful chastisement of an evil kind (34.5).

[T]hose who do not believe in the hereafter are in torment and
in great error (34.8).

And (as for) those who strive in opposing Our communications,
they shall be caused to be brought to the chastisement (34.38).

(As for) those who disbelieve, they shall have a severe punishment
(35.7).

This is the hell with which you were threatened. Enter into it
this day because you disbelieved (36.63-4).

And thus did the word of your Lord prove true against those who
disbelieved that they are the inmates of the fire (40.6).

Surely those who disbelieve shall be cried out to: Certainly Allah’s
hatred (of you) when you were called upon to the faith and you rejected,
is much greater than your hatred of yourselves (40.10).

Have you not seen those who dispute with respect to the communications
of Allah: how are they turned away? Those who reject the Book and that
with which We have sent Our Apostle; but they shall soon come to know,
when the fetters and the chains shall be on their necks; they shall be
dragged into boiling water, then in the fire shall they be burned (40.69-72).

Therefore We will most certainly make those who disbelieve taste
a severe punishment, and We will most certainly reward them for the evil
deeds they used to do. That is the reward of the enemies of Allah —
the fire; for them therein shall be the house of long abiding; a reward
for their denying Our communications (41.27-8).

And (as for) those who dispute about Allah after that obedience
has been rendered to Him, their plea is null with their Lord, and upon
them is wrath, and for them is severe punishment (42.16).

Woe to every sinful liar, who hears the communications of Allah
recited to him, then persists proudly as though he had not heard them;
so announce to him a painful punishment. And when he comes to know
of any of Our communications, he takes it for a jest; these it is that
shall have abasing chastisement. Before them is hell, and there shall
not avail them aught of what they earned, nor those whom they took for
guardians besides Allah, and they shall have a grievous punishment. This
is guidance; and (as for) those who disbelieve in the communications of
their Lord, they shall have a painful punishment on account of uncleanness
(45.7-11).

And on the day when those who disbelieve shall be brought before
the fire: You did away with your good things in your life of the world
and you enjoyed them for a while, so today you shall be rewarded with
the punishment of abasement because you were unjustly proud in the land
and because you transgressed (46.20).

That He may cause the believing men and the believing women to
enter gardens beneath which rivers flow to abide therein and remove from
them their evil; and that is a grand achievement with Allah and (that)
He may punish the hypocritical men and the hypocritical women, and the
polytheistic men and the polytheistic women, the entertainers of evil
thoughts about Allah. On them is the evil turn, and Allah is wroth with
them and has cursed them and prepared hell for them, and evil is the resort
(48.5-6).

And whoever does not believe in Allah and His Apostle, then surely
We have prepared burning fire for the unbelievers (48.13).

Therefore woe to those who disbelieve because of their day which
they are threatened with (51.60).

So woe on that day to those who reject (the truth), those who
sport entering into vain discourses. The day on which they shall be
driven away to the fire of hell with violence (52.11-13).

And if he is one of the rejecters, the erring ones, he shall have
an entertainment of boiling water, and burning in hell. Most surely
this is a certain truth. Therefore glorify the name of your Lord, the
Great (56.92-6).

So today ransom shall not be accepted from you nor from those
who disbelieved; your abode is the fire; it is your friend and evil
is the resort (57.15).

And (as for) those who disbelieve and reject Our communications,
they are the inmates of the fire, to abide therein and evil is the resort
(64.10).

But what is the matter with them that they do not believe, and
when the Quran is recited to them they do not make obeisance? Nay!
those who disbelieve give the lie to the truth. And Allah knows best
what they hide, so announce to them a painful punishment (84.20-24).

Has not there come to you the news of the overwhelming calamity?
(Some) faces on that day shall be downcast, laboring, toiling, entering
into burning fire, made to drink from a boiling spring. They shall have
no food but of thorns, which will neither fatten nor avail against hunger
(88.1-7).

So today those who believe shall laugh at the unbelievers; On thrones,
they will look. Surely the disbelievers are rewarded as they did (88.34-6).

And (as for) those who disbelieve in our communications, they
are the people of the left hand. On them is fire closed over (90.19-20).

Surely those who disbelieve from among the followers of the Book
and the polytheists shall be in the fire of hell, abiding therein; they
are the worst of men (98.6).

These are clearly not the writings of a rational mind. Deranged
by religious delusions, the author or authors of these passages would
no doubt be considered mentally ill or psychologically unbalanced were
this ‘holy’ book to be written today. Yet, as a religious text, the Qur’an
is all too often given a special exemption from normal criticism, and
we are told that we must show it ‘respect’, despite the hateful attitude
it takes towards those who do not accept Islam. Around the world, children
are taught to revere the Qur’an as the very words of the creator of the
universe, as a perfect book with a timeless message, yet how can texts
like those I have just cited do anything but instill a negative or contemptuous
attitude towards non-Muslims? And why would anyone in their right mind
claim that this book should be held up as the most important book ever
written, or even as a great work of literature?

Sadly, there is worse to come.

Next page

The Qur’an and the ‘Abrahamic religions’

In modern discussions of religion and its place in a pluralistic
society, much is often made of three ‘great monotheisms’ – Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam – and their apparent similarities. Liberal apologists
for Islam in particular like to refer to the shared backgrounds of these
‘Abrahamic faiths’ and to claim that the Qur’an shows respect for Jews
and Christians as fellow ‘people of the Book’. As it turns out, when
looking at what the Qur’an actually says, it is by no means clear that
Muhammad had a lot of respect for Jews and Christians, and there is little
consistency in his message regarding them and their respective religions.

According to the Qur’an, it contains a ‘perfect’ message from the
creator of the universe, and it is held that previously two peoples have
been granted books similar to the Qur’an – Jews and Christians – but that
they have somehow deviated from and corrupted the original revelations.
As such, Jews and Christians are held to be Muslims who have strayed from
the original path given by Allah, and the Qur’an is seen to ‘correct’ the
supposed ‘errors’ found in the Old and New Testaments (i.e. wherever they
disagree with the Qur’an) and to finalise God’s message to humanity.

By way of contrast, a rather more obvious and plausible intepretation
of the elements of the Qur’an that overlap with Judaism and Christianity
is that Muhammad took what he liked from the Old and New Testaments and
ignored the rest; or, in the case of Jesus, simply fabricated new sayings.
Muhammad clearly admired aspects of Judaism and Christianity and when he
set out creating his own Arab monotheism borrowed heavily from their sacred
texts, in particular from the Hebrew Bible. In the Qur’an, we find many
of the Israelite characters taken over by Muhammad as ‘prophets’ of Islam,
with their Jewish names replaced by Arab names. Likewise, Jesus becomes
‘Isa’, a ‘prophet’ of Islam who bears almost no relation to the Jesus of
the New Testament and is instead found exhorting his listeners to follow
‘Allah’. The claim that the Qur’an shows respect to the ‘prophets’ of Judaism
and to Jesus is rendered problematic by what the Qur’an does with these
characters. Take Abraham, for example – a foundational figure in Judaism.
In the Qur’an, Abraham becomes ‘Ibrahim’ and it is claimed that he was
a Muslim; indeed, Adam is presented as the first Muslim, and every character
‘borrowed’ from the Old and New Testaments are seen as Muslims, not Jews
in the religious sense:

And they say: Be Jews or Christians, you will be on the right
course. Say: Nay! (we follow) the religion of Ibrahim, the Hanif,
and he was not one of the polytheists (2.135).

Ibrahim was not a Jew nor a Christian but he was (an) upright
(man), a Muslim, and he was not one of the polytheists (3.67).

Say: We believe in Allah and what has been revealed to us, and
what was revealed to Ibrahim and Ismail and Ishaq and Yaqoub and the
tribes, and what was given to Musa and Isa and to the prophets from their
Lord; we do not make any distinction between any of them, and to Him do
we submit (3.84).

And who has a better religion than he who submits himself entirely
to Allah? And he is the doer of good (to others) and follows the faith
of Ibrahim, the upright one, and Allah took Ibrahim as a friend (4.125).

Surely We have revealed to you as We revealed to Nuh, and the
prophets after him, and We revealed to Ibrahim and Ismail and Ishaq
and Yaqoub and the tribes, and Isa and Ayub and Yunus and Haroun and
Sulaiman and We gave to Dawood (4.163).

Surely Ibrahim was an exemplar, obedient to Allah, upright, and
he was not of the polytheists (16.120).

Then We revealed to you: Follow the faith of Ibrahim, the upright
one, and he was not of the polytheists (16.123).

And when We made a covenant with the prophets and with you, and
with Nuh and Ibrahim and Musa and Isa, son of Marium, and We made with
them a strong covenant (33.7).

And so on.

In the Qur’an, we find numerous references to the Biblical Lot
(‘Lut’ in the Qur’an) and his escape from the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah, including the assertion (taken from the Old Testament) that
one of the ‘sins’ leading to God’s wrath was homosexuality:

And (We sent) Lut when he said to his people: What! do you commit
an indecency which any one in the world has not done before you? Most
surely you come to males in lust besides females; nay you are an extravagant
people. And the answer of his people was no other than that they said:
Turn them out of your town, surely they are a people who seek to purify
(themselves). So We delivered him and his followers, except his wife; she
was of those who remained behind. And We rained upon them a rain; consider
then what was the end of the guilty (7.80-4).

And (We sent) Lut, when he said to his people: What! do you commit
indecency while you see? What! do you indeed approach men lustfully rather
than women? Nay, you are a people who act ignorantly. But the answer
of his people was no other except that they said: Turn out Lut’s followers
from your town; surely they are a people who would keep pure! But We delivered
him and his followers except his wife; We ordained her to be of those
who remained behind. And We rained on them a rain, and evil was the rain
of those who had been warned (27.54-8).

And (We sent) Lut when he said to his people: Most surely you are
guilty of an indecency which none of the nations has ever done before
you; What! do you come to the males and commit robbery on the highway,
and you commit evil deeds in your assemblies? But nothing was the answer
of his people except that they said: Bring on us Allah’s punishment, if
you are one of the truthful. He said: My Lord! help me against the mischievous
people. And when Our messengers came to Ibrahim with the good news, they
said: Surely we are going to destroy the people of this town, for its people
are unjust (29.28-31).

The Jesus of the Qur’an, ‘Isa’, is also a Muslim and another ‘prophet’
of Allah. So, on the lips of this de-Judaised Jesus we find expressions
such as:

I have come to you indeed with wisdom, and that I may make clear
to you part of what you differ in; so be careful of (your duty to) Allah
and obey me: Surely Allah is my Lord and your Lord, therefore serve
Him; this is the right path (46.63-4).

O children of Israel! surely I am the apostle of Allah to you,
verifying that which is before me of the Taurat and giving the good
news of an Apostle who will come after me, his name being Ahmad (61.6).

Isa son of Marium said to (his) disciples: Who are my helpers in
the cause of Allah? The disciples said: We are helpers (in the cause)
of Allah (61.14).

All of this raises the question of how much the Qur’an really shows
‘respect’ for Judaism and Christianity, given it basically raids their
books, renames their ‘prophets’, and places plainly unhistorical Islamic
sayings on their lips. Some say that imitation is the highest form of flattery,
so perhaps this is the most charitable interpretation of this use of
material lifted from the Bible, but when it comes to the Qur’an’s verdict
on Jews and Christians themselves, the flattery is much less in evidence.

The Qur’an and the ‘People of the Book’

Having co-opted key figures from Judaism and Christianity, claiming
them as Muslims in the Qur’an, the question arose as to how to explain
the fact that Jews and Christians largely rejected Islam and proclaimed
doctrines radically different to Muhammad’s. The answer came in the form
of denigrating Jewish and Christian belief as deviant forms of Islam. Given
everyone from Adam onwards is claimed to have been a Muslim, any religion
following from this must by definition be a corruption of the original.
We have already seen some of the volumenous condemnation of Arab polytheists
that is found in the Qur’an, but with Jews and Christians the position is
somewhat more complex.

While creating a narrative which claims figures from the Old Testament
as Muslims, Muhammad nonetheless did not go so far as to write Jews out
of the picture altogether. Drawing on the many instances in the Old Testament
in which the Israelites are condemned for their sinfulness, apostasy,
and so on (condemned in these texts by fellow Israelites and YHWH, the
God of Israel, of course), the Qur’an presents the Jews in an essentially
negative light. We read of ‘the iniquity of those who are Jews’
and ‘their hindering many (people) from Allah’s way’ (4.160), that ‘many
of them certainly act extravagantly in the land’ (5.32), that dietry laws
were given to the Jews ‘on account of their rebellion’ against God (6.146),
and that the Israelites made ‘mischief in the land twice’ and behaved
‘insolently with great insolence’ (17.4). Of the ‘prophets’ sent by Allah,
we read that the Israelites ‘killed’ (2.91, 3.181, 4.155) and ‘slew’ them
(3.21, 3.112). Jews are also held to be responsible for seeking to have
Jesus killed, but in the Qur’anic account, Jesus was not actually crucified
but instead was raised to heaven:

Therefore, for their breaking their covenant and their disbelief
in the communications of Allah and their killing the prophets wrongfully
and their saying: Our hearts are covered; nay! Allah set a seal upon them
owing to their unbelief, so they shall not believe except a few.
And for their unbelief and for their having uttered against Marium a grievous
calumny.
And their saying: Surely we have killed the Messiah, Isa son of Marium,
the apostle of Allah; and they did not kill him nor did they crucify him,
but it appeared to them so (like Isa) and most surely those who differ therein
are only in a doubt about it; they have no knowledge respecting it, but
only follow a conjecture, and they killed him not for sure.
Nay! Allah took him up to Himself; and Allah is Mighty, Wise.
And there is not one of the followers of the Book but most certainly believes
in this before his death, and on the day of resurrection he (Isa) shall
be a witness against them.
Wherefore for the iniquity of those who are Jews did We disallow to them
the good things which had been made lawful for them and for their hindering
many (people) from Allah’s way.
And their taking usury though indeed they were forbidden it and their devouring
the property of people falsely, and We have prepared for the unbelievers
from among them a painful chastisement (4.155-61).

What we see are the basic building blocks for Muslim anti-Semitism
over the centuries: the conviction that Jews are a people in rebellion
against God, a defiant and arrogant people that killed His messengers and
sought to kill Jesus, a people made up of usurers and thieves, and a people
who try to ‘hinder’ Muslims from following Islam.

When it comes to Christianity, Muhammad presents Jesus as a prophet
of Islam, counts his mother as a Muslim, and also views those who agreed
with his supposed Islamic teachings (such as the disciples – see 5.111)
as Muslims. Muhammad appears to know the Jewish scriptures in far more
detail than canonical Christian writings, and offers very few quotes from
the New Testament in the Qur’an (one such example is his use the idea of
‘the camel pass[ing] through the eye of the needle’ (7.40), which on Jesus’
lips refers to the difficulty of the rich entering heaven (Matthew 19:24),
while in the Qur’an this saying is not attributed to Jesus and refers to
those who reject the Qur’an). He certainly does seem to have been influenced
by various non-canonical and heterodox Christian ideas and writings in
circulation at the time. For example, the Qur’an repeats a miracle story
of Jesus bringing clay birds to life (5.110), which is also found in the
pre-Qur’anic non-canonical Christian work ‘The Infancy
Gospel of Thomas‘. Likewise, the idea that Jesus only appeared to
be crucified while actually being raised to heaven (‘they did not kill him
nor did they crucify him, but it appeared to them so’) was believed in some
heterodox Gnostic Christian circles. In his work ‘Against Heresies’, the
Church Father Irenaeus expounds the doctrine of a Gnostic writer called Basilides,
who claimed of Jesus’ crucifixion:

Wherefore he did not himself suffer death, but Simon, a certain
man of Cyrene, being compelled, bore the cross in his stead; so that this
latter being transfigured by him, that he might be thought to be Jesus,
was crucified, through ignorance and error, while Jesus himself received
the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them.

Amongst the Gnostic writings discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt
in 1945 there is a Gnostic ‘Apocalypse of Peter‘
which also presents a substitute for Jesus being crucified:

And I said “What do I see, O Lord? That it is you yourself
whom they take, and that you are grasping me? Or who is this one,
glad and laughing on the tree? And is it another one whose feet and
hands they are striking?” The Savior said to me, “He whom you saw
on the tree, glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus. But this
one into whose hands and feet they drive the nails is his fleshly
part, which is the substitute being put to shame, the one who came into
being in his likeness. But look at him and me.

Another Gnostic Christian parallel is found in this Jesus passage in the
Qur’an:

And when Allah will say: O Isa son of Marium! did you say to men, Take
me and my mother for two gods besides Allah he will say: Glory be to Thee,
it did not befit me that I should say what I had no right to (say); if
I had said it, Thou wouldst indeed have known it; Thou knowest what is
in my mind, and I do not know what is in Thy mind, surely Thou art the great
Knower of the unseen things (5.116).

The idea of a Trinity made up of a Father, Mother, and Son has never been
a part of orthodox Christian doctrine, but the Qur’an is aware of it,
so one may safely assume that either Muhammad had misunderstood Christian
belief or had encountered Christians presenting this vision of the Trinity.
The ‘Gospel of the
Egyptians‘, another text found at Nag Hammadi, includes the lines:

Three powers came forth from him; they are the Father, the Mother, (and)
the Son, from the living silence, what came forth from the incorruptible
Father. These came forth from the silence of the unknown Father.

The Qur’an clearly condemns such a conception of God, but also condemns
the orthodox view of Jesus as Son of God, as opposed to simply a human
prophet sent to call the few Jews who had remained true to Islam. The rejection
of Jesus by the majority of the Jews of his time is presented as further
evidence of their deviation from Islam (which their ‘prophets’ supposedly
expounded), while the early Christians are presented as loyal Muslims.
The fact that from early on in Christian history Jesus was presented as
divine, not simply as a prophet, is taken as yet more evidence of deviation
from the true faith. Consequently, while the Qur’an is generally more vocal
in condemning Jews than Christians, orthodox Christian belief is nonetheless
scorned:

O followers of the Book! do not exceed the limits in your religion, and
do not speak (lies) against Allah, but (speak) the truth; the Messiah, Isa
son of Marium is only an apostle of Allah and His Word which He communicated
to Marium and a spirit from Him; believe therefore in Allah and His apostles,
and say not, Three. Desist, it is better for you; Allah is only one God;
far be It from His glory that He should have a son, whatever is in the
heavens and whatever is in the earth is His, and Allah is sufficient for
a Protector (4.171).

Certainly they disbelieve who say: Surely Allah, He is the Messiah, son
of Marium; and the Messiah said: O Children of Israel! serve Allah, my Lord
and your Lord. Surely whoever associates (others) with Allah, then Allah has
forbidden to him the garden, and his abode is the fire; and there shall be
no helpers for the unjust. Certainly they disbelieve who say: Surely Allah
is the third (person) of the three; and there is no god but the one God,
and if they desist not from what they say, a painful chastisement shall
befall those among them who disbelieve (5.72-3).

And the Jews say: Uzair is the son of Allah; and the Christians say:
The Messiah is the son of Allah; these are the words of their mouths;
they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before; may Allah destroy
them; how they are turned away! They have taken their doctors of law and
their monks for lords besides Allah, and (also) the Messiah son of Marium
and they were enjoined that they should serve one God only, there is no god
but He; far from His glory be what they set up (with Him) (9.30-1).

They say: Allah has taken a son (to Himself)! Glory be to Him: He is
the Self-sufficient: His is what is in the heavens and what is in the
earth; you have no authority for this; do you say against Allah what you
do not know? Say: Those who forge a lie against Allah shall not be successful.
(It is only) a provision in this world, then to Us shall be their return;
then We shall make them taste severe punishment because they disbelieved
(10.68-70).

And say: (All) praise is due to Allah, Who has not taken a son and Who
has not a partner in the kingdom, and Who has not a helper to save Him
from disgrace; and proclaim His greatness magnifying (Him) (17.111).

And warn those who say: Allah has taken a son. They have no knowledge
of it, nor had their fathers; a grievous word it is that comes out of
their mouths; they speak nothing but a lie (18.4-5).

And they say: The Beneficent God has taken (to Himself) a son. Certainly
you have made an abominable assertion. The heavens may almost be rent
thereat, and the earth cleave asunder, and the mountains fall down in
pieces, that they ascribe a son to the Beneficent God. And it is not worthy
of the Beneficent God that He should take (to Himself) a son (19.88-92).

Nay! We have brought to them the truth, and most surely they are liars.
Never did Allah take to Himself a son, and never was there with him any
(other) god– in that case would each god have certainly taken away what
he created, and some of them would certainly have overpowered others; glory
be to Allah above what they describe! (23.90-1)

He, Whose is the kingdom of the heavens and the earth, and Who did not
take to Himself a son, and Who has no associate in the kingdom, and Who
created everything, then ordained for it a measure (25.2).

When the Qur’an appears to make favourable mention of Jews and Christians
it is important to bear these texts in mind. It is often asserted that
the Qur’an promises salvation not just to Muslims but also to some among
the ‘People of the Book’ – Jews and Christians – yet in reality the Qur’an
is clear that the only Jews and Christians who will not be sent into the
flames in the afterlife are in fact those who reject core Jewish and Christian
beliefs and submit to Islam. Given holding Jesus to be the Son of God and
believing in a triune God are key Christian beliefs and the Qur’an utterly
condemns them as ‘abominable lies’, it is clear that most Christians are,
according to the Qur’an, ‘disbelievers’ whose ‘abode is the fire’, and that
they are consequently damned to ‘severe punishment’ along with the rest
of us.

In some places, the Qur’an appears to promise salvation for some Christians
and Jews:

Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews, and the Christians,
and the Sabians, whoever believes in Allah and the Last day and does
good, they shall have their reward from their Lord, and there is no fear
for them, nor shall they grieve (2.62).

They are not all alike; of the followers of the Book there is an upright
party; they recite Allah’s communications in the nighttime and they adore
(Him). They believe in Allah and the last day, and they enjoin what is
right and forbid the wrong and they strive with one another in hastening
to good deeds, and those are among the good (3.113-4).

But these texts, taken out of context, are deceptive. For example, the
Qur’an states that ‘Surely those who believe and those who are Jews and
the Sabians and the Christians whoever believes in Allah and the last day
and does good — they shall have no fear nor shall they grieve’ (5.69).
On its own, this appears to state that Jews and Christians can gain salvation
along with Muslims. However, a few lines later we read:

Certainly they disbelieve who say: Surely Allah, He is the Messiah, son
of Marium; and the Messiah said: O Children of Israel! serve Allah, my Lord
and your Lord. Surely whoever associates (others) with Allah, then Allah has
forbidden to him the garden, and his abode is the fire; and there shall be
no helpers for the unjust. Certainly they disbelieve who say: Surely Allah
is the third (person) of the three; and there is no god but the one God,
and if they desist not from what they say, a painful chastisement shall
befall those among them who disbelieve (5.72-3).

This indicates that where the Qur’an appears to hold out salvation to Christians,
it does not mean actual Christians at all, but rather people who were Christians
and now reject Christian beliefs that do not accord with Islam. The same
also holds true for Jews. Some passages appear to state that Jews can be
saved, but these are not in fact followers of Judaism, but rather Jews who
have accepted Islam.

In places, the Qur’an appears to speak favourably of Christians who have
not accepted Islam. For example, we read that:

Certainly you will find the most violent of people in enmity for those
who believe (to be) the Jews and those who are polytheists, and you will
certainly find the nearest in friendship to those who believe (to be) those
who say: We are Christians; this is because there are priests and monks
among them and because they do not behave proudly (5.82).

However, again, placing this in context, it is followed by the claim

And when they hear what has been revealed to the apostle you will see
their eyes overflowing with tears on account of the truth that they recognize;
they say: Our Lord! we believe, so write us down with the witnesses (of
truth). And what (reason) have we that we should not believe in Allah and
in the truth that has come to us, while we earnestly desire that our Lord
should cause us to enter with the good people? Therefore Allah rewarded
them on account of what they said, with gardens in which rivers flow to abide
in them; and this is the reward of those who do good (to others). And (as
for) those who disbelieve and reject Our communications, these are the companions
of the flame (5.83-6).

In other words, while Christians are called ‘the nearest in friendship’
to Muslims, they are still condemned if they do not go on to convert to
Islam. Note also the claim that the most violent enemies of Muslims include
Jews: more fuel for the fire of Islamic anti-Semitism.

It turns out that even the apparently respectful references to Christian
priests and monks and the assertion that Christians ‘do not behave proudly’
are torn to pieces in other sections of the Qur’an, where we read:

Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do
they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion
of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax
in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.
And the Jews say: Uzair is the son of Allah; and the Christians
say: The Messiah is the son of Allah; these are the words of their mouths;
they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before; may Allah destroy
them; how they are turned away!
They have taken their doctors of law and their monks for lords besides
Allah, and (also) the Messiah son of Marium and they were enjoined that
they should serve one God only, there is no god but He; far from His glory
be what they set up (with Him).
They desire to put out the light of Allah with their mouths, and
Allah will not consent save to perfect His light, though the unbelievers
are averse.
He it is Who sent His Apostle with guidance and the religion of
truth, that He might cause it to prevail over all religions, though the
polytheists may be averse.
O you who believe! most surely many of the doctors of law and the
monks eat away the property of men falsely, and turn (them) from Allah’s
way; and (as for) those who hoard up gold and silver and do not spend
it in Allah’s way, announce to them a painful chastisement,
On the day when it shall be heated in the fire of hell, then their
foreheads and their sides and their backs shall be branded with it; this
is what you hoarded up for yourselves, therefore taste what you hoarded
(9.29-35).

So, while one text speaks admiringly of Christian monks, in this passage
we see them condemned, along with orthodox Christian belief. Muslims are
told to fight Jews and Christians until they submit, and then to impose
a tax on them ‘in acknowledgment of [Muslim] superiority and [that] they
are in a state of subjection’. A response could be that both texts stand,
and that the second refers only to corrupt, wealth hoarding monks. The problem
with this is that the second text roundly condemns orthodox Christian belief
(which was taught by the same priests and monks spoken of as ‘nearest in
friendship’ to Muslims in the first text), as indeed does the first. Neither
text actually shows any genuine respect for Christian belief. The first
text speaks admiringly of Christians, but then goes on to condemn those
among them who will not convert to Islam to hell, while the second speaks
universally negatively of Jews and Christians and also condemns them to
hell. This is also a key text supporting the idea that Jews and Christians
living in Muslim countries should lead a subservient existence as second
class citizens (the Dhimmi) and should pay a special tax to their
Muslim overlords.

Given this, it should come as little surprise to find that the Qur’an
contains many more passages in which Jews and Christians are condemned:

And they say: None shall enter the garden (or paradise) except
he who is a Jew or a Christian. These are their vain desires. Say: Bring
your proof if you are truthful.
Yes! whoever submits himself entirely to Allah and he is the doer
of good (to others) he has his reward from his Lord, and there is no
fear for him nor shall he grieve.
And the Jews say: The Christians do not follow anything (good) and
the Christians say: The Jews do not follow anything (good) while they
recite the (same) Book. Even thus say those who have no knowledge, like
to what they say; so Allah shall judge between them on the day of resurrection
in what they differ (2.111-3).

Surely We have sent you with the truth as a bearer of good news
and as a warner, and you shall not be called upon to answer for the companions
of the flaming fire.
And the Jews will not be pleased with you, nor the Christians until
you follow their religion. Say: Surely Allah’s guidance, that is the
(true) guidance. And if you follow their desires after the knowledge that
has come to you, you shall have no guardian from Allah, nor any helper
(2.119-20).

And they say: Be Jews or Christians, you will be on the right course.
Say: Nay! (we follow) the religion of Ibrahim, the Hanif, and he was
not one of the polytheists.
Say: We believe in Allah and (in) that which had been revealed to
us, and (in) that which was revealed to Ibrahim and Ismail and Ishaq
and Yaqoub and the tribes, and (in) that which was given to Musa and
Isa, and (in) that which was given to the prophets from their Lord, we do
not make any distinction between any of them, and to Him do we submit.
If then they believe as you believe in Him, they are indeed on the
right course, and if they turn back, then they are only in great opposition,
so Allah will suffice you against them, and He is the Hearing, the Knowing
(2.135-7).

And certainly Allah made a covenant with the children of Israel,
and We raised up among them twelve chieftains; and Allah said: Surely I
am with you; if you keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate and believe in My
apostles and asslst them and offer to Allah a goodly gift, I will most certainly
cover your evil deeds, and I will most certainly cause you to enter into
gardens beneath which rivers flow, but whoever disbelieves from among
you after that, he indeed shall lose the right way.
But on account of their breaking their covenant We cursed them and
made their hearts hard; they altered the words from their places and they
neglected a portion of what they were reminded of; and you shall always
discover treachery in them excepting a few of them; so pardon them and
turn away; surely Allah loves those who do good (to others).
And with those who say, We are Christians, We made a covenant, but
they neglected a portion of what they were reminded of, therefore We excited
among them enmity and hatred to the day of resurrection; and Allah will
inform them of what they did.
O followers of the Book! indeed Our Apostle has come to you making
clear to you much of what you concealed of the Book and passing over much;
indeed, there has come to you light and a clear Book from Allah;
With it Allah guides him who will follow His pleasure into the ways
of safety and brings them out of utter darkness into light by His will
and guides them to the right path.
Certainly they disbelieve who say: Surely, Allah — He is the Messiah,
son of Marium. Say: Who then could control anything as against Allah when
He wished to destroy the Messiah son of Marium and his mother and all
those on the earth? And Allah’s is the kingdom of the heavens and the
earth and what is between them; He creates what He pleases; and Allah has
power over all things,
And the Jews and the Christians say: We are the sons of Allah and
His beloved ones. Say: Why does He then chastise you for your faults?
Nay, you are mortals from among those whom He has created, He forgives
whom He pleases and chastises whom He pleases; and Allah’s is the kingdom
of the heavens and the earth and what is between them, and to Him is the
eventual coming (5.12-18).

O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends;
they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for
a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the
unjust people (5.51).

Say: O followers of the Book! do you find fault with us (for aught)
except that we believe in Allah and in what has been revealed to us and
what was revealed before, and that most of you are transgressors?
Say: Shall I inform you of (him who is) worse than this in retribution
from Allah? (Worse is he) whom Allah has cursed and brought His wrath
upon, and of whom He made apes and swine, and he who served the Shaitan;
these are worse in place and more erring from the straight path.
And when they come to you, they say: We believe; and indeed they
come in with unbelief and indeed they go forth with it; and Allah knows
best what they concealed.
And you will see many of them striving with one another to hasten
in sin and exceeding the limits, and their eating of what is unlawfully
acquired; certainly evil is that which they do.
Why do not the learned men and the doctors of law prohibit them
from their speaking of what is sinful and their eating of what is unlawfully
acquired? Certainly evil is that which they work.
And the Jews say: The hand of Allah is tied up! Their hands shall
be shackled and they shall be cursed for what they say. Nay, both His
hands are spread out, He expends as He pleases; and what has been revealed
to you from your Lord will certainly make many of them increase in inordinacy
and unbelief; and We have put enmity and hatred among them till the day
of resurrection; whenever they kindle a fire for war Allah puts it out,
and they strive to make mischief in the land; and Allah does not love
the mischief-makers.
And if the followers of the Book had believed and guarded (against
evil) We would certainly have covered their evil deeds and We would certainly
have made them enter gardens of bliss
And if they had kept up the Taurat and the Injeel and that which
was revealed to them from their Lord, they would certainly have eaten
from above them and from beneath their feet there is a party of them keeping
to the moderate course, and (as for) most of them, evil is that which they
do
O Apostle! deliver what has been revealed to you from your Lord;
and if you do it not, then you have not delivered His message, and Allah
will protect you from the people; surely Allah will not guide the unbelieving
people.
Say: O followers of the Book! you follow no good till you keep up
the Taurat and the Injeel and that which is revealed to you from your
Lord; and surely that which has been revealed to you from your Lord shall
make many of them increase in inordinacy and unbelief; grieve not therefore
for the unbelieving people (5.59-68).

According to these passages from the Qur’an, Jews and Christians
are ‘cursed’, ‘apes and swine’, servants of Satan, ‘unbelieving’, and
‘evil’. Muslims are informed that they should not becomes friends of Jews
or Christians who are ‘unjust people’ and ‘friends of each other’ . These
‘companions of the flaming fire’ are presented as corrupters of Islam who
will not rest until Muslims reject Islam and follow them. Despite the apparently
varying positions on Jews and Christians found in the Qur’an, it is very
clear that it shows them no intrinsic respect, condemns their beliefs,
and warns Muslims not to trust or associate with them. At best, Muslims
are enjoined to ‘pardon them and turn away’ (5.13), while at worst they
are commanded to ‘fight’ them ‘until they pay the tax in acknowledgment
of superiority and they are in a state of subjection’ (9.29).

Having already found that large sections of the Qur’an are devoted
to nothing more than claiming Allah as creator of the universe, the finality
and superiority of Islam, eternal rewards for Muslims, eternal punishment
for non-Muslims, and lengthy condemnation of followers of other religions
(often using the most insulting and degrading language), let us now examine
some of its other teachings.

Next page

Warfare in the Qur’an: Defensive and Offensive

In the Qur’an there are a number of passages dealing with how warfare
should be conducted, and it is worth quoting from some of these at length:

And fight in the way of Allah with those who fight with you,
and do not exceed the limits, surely Allah does not love those who exceed
the limits.
And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence
they drove you out, and persecution is severer than slaughter, and do
not fight with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in
it, but if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of
the unbelievers.
But if they desist, then surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
And fight with them until there is no persecution, and religion should
be only for Allah, but if they desist, then there should be no hostility
except against the oppressors.
The Sacred month for the sacred month and all sacred things are (under
the law of) retaliation; whoever then acts aggressively against you, inflict
injury on him according to the injury he has inflicted on you and be
careful (of your duty) to Allah and know that Allah is with those who
guard (against evil) (2.190-4).

Fighting is enjoined on you, and h is an object of dislike to you;
and it may be that you dislike a thing while it is good for you, and it
may be that you love a thing while it is evil for you, and Allah knows,
while you do not know.
They ask you concerning the sacred month about fighting in it. Say:
Fighting in it is a grave matter, and hindering (men) from Allah’s way and
denying Him, and (hindering men from) the Sacred Mosque and turning its
people out of it, are still graver with Allah, and persecution is graver
than slaughter; and they will not cease fighting with you until they turn
you back from your religion, if they can; and whoever of you turns back from
his religion, then he dies while an unbeliever– these it is whose works
shall go for nothing in this world and the hereafter, and they are the inmates
of the fire; therein they shall abide (2.216-17).

Surely those who disbelieve spend their wealth to hinder (people) from
the way of Allah; so they shall spend it, then it shall be to them an
intense regret, then they shall be overcome; and those who disbelieve
shall be driven together to hell.
That Allah might separate the impure from the good, and put the impure,
some of it upon the other, and pile it up together, then cast it into
hell; these it is that are the losers.
Say to those who disbelieve, if they desist, that which is past shall
be forgiven to them; and if they return, then what happened to the ancients
has already passed.
And fight with them until there is no more persecution and religion
should be only for Allah; but if they desist, then surely Allah sees what
they do.
And if they turn back, then know that Allah is your Patron; most
excellent is the Patron and most excellent the Helper.que and turning
its people out of it, are still graver with Allah, and persecution is
graver than slaughter; and they will not cease fighting with you until
they turn you back from your religion, if they can; and whoever of you
turns back from his religion, then he dies while an unbeliever– these it
is whose works shall go for nothing in this world and the hereafter, and
they are the inmates of the fire; therein they shall abide (8.36-40).

We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve, because
they set up with Allah that for which He has sent down no authority, and
their abode is the fire, and evil is the abode of the unjust.
And certainly Allah made good to you His promise when you slew them
by His permission, until when you became weak-hearted and disputed about
the affair and disobeyed after He had shown you that which you loved;
of you were some who desired this world and of you were some who desired
the hereafter; then He turned you away from them that He might try you;
and He has certainly pardoned you, and Allah is Gracious to the believers.
When you ran off precipitately and did not wait for any one, and the
Apostle was calling you from your rear, so He gave you another sorrow instead
of (your) sorrow, so that you might not grieve at what had escaped you,
nor (at) what befell you; and Allah is aware of what you do.
Then after sorrow He sent down security upon you, a calm coming upon
a party of you, and (there was) another party whom their own souls had
rendered anxious; they entertained about Allah thoughts of ignorance quite
unjustly, saying: We have no hand in the affair. Say: Surely the affair
is wholly (in the hands) of Allah. They conceal within their souls what
they would not reveal to you. They say: Had we any hand in the affair,
we would not have been slain here. Say: Had you remained in your houses,
those for whom slaughter was ordained would certainly have gone forth to
the places where they would be slain, and that Allah might test what was
in your breasts and that He might purge what was in your hearts; and Allah
knows what is in the breasts.
(As for) those of you who turned back on the day when the two armies
met, only the Shaitan sought to cause them to make a slip on account of
some deeds they had done, and certainly Allah has pardoned them; surely
Allah is Forgiving, Forbearing.
O you who believe! be not like those who disbelieve and say of their
brethren when they travel in the earth or engage in fighting: Had they
been with us, they would not have died and they would not have been slain;
so Allah makes this to be an intense regret in their hearts; and Allah gives
life and causes death and Allah sees what you do.
And if you are slain in the way of Allah or you die, certainly forgiveness
from Allah and mercy is better than what they amass.
And if indeed you die or you are slain, certainly to Allah shall
you be gathered together (3.151-8).

And what reason have you that you should not fight in the way of Allah
and of the weak among the men and the women and the children, (of) those
who say: Our Lord! cause us to go forth from this town, whose people are
oppressors, and give us from Thee a guardian and give us from Thee a helper.
Those who believe fight in the way of Allah, and those who disbelieve
fight in the way of the Shaitan. Fight therefore against the friends
of the Shaitan; surely the strategy of the Shaitan is weak (4.75-6).

What is the matter with you, then, that you have become two parties
about the hypocrites, while Allah has made them return (to unbelief)
for what they have earned? Do you wish to guide him whom Allah has caused
to err? And whomsoever Allah causes to err, you shall by no means find
a way for him.
They desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so
that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends
until they fly (their homes) in Allah’s way; but if they turn back, then
seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among
them a friend or a helper.
Except those who reach a people between whom and you there is an alliance,
or who come to you, their hearts shrinking from fighting you or fighting
their own people; and if Allah had pleased, He would have given them power
over you, so that they should have certainly fought you; therefore if they
withdraw from you and do not fight you and offer you peace, then Allah
has not given you a way against them.
You will find others who desire that they should be safe from you
and secure from their own people; as often as they are sent back to the
mischief they get thrown into it headlong; therefore if they do not withdraw
from you, and (do not) offer you peace and restrain their hands, then
seize them and kill them wherever you find them; and against these We have
given.you a clear authority (4.88-91).

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His apostle
and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should
be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off
on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace
for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous
chastisement,
Except those who repent before you have them in your power; so know
that Allah is Forgiving, Merciful (5.33-4).

In the manner of the people of Firon and those before them; they disbelieved
in Allah’s communications, therefore Allah destroyed them on account of
their faults; surely Allah is strong, severe in requiting (evil).
This is because Allah has never changed a favor which He has conferred
upon a people until they change their own condition; and because Allah is
Hearing, Knowing;
In the manner of the people of Firon and those before them; they rejected
the communications of their Lord, therefore We destroyed them on account
of their faults and We drowned Firon’s people, and they were all unjust.
Surely the vilest of animals in Allah’s sight are those who disbelieve,
then they would not believe.
Those with whom you make an agreement, then they break their agreement
every time and they do not guard (against punishment).
Therefore if you overtake them in fighting, then scatter by (making
an example of) them those who are in their rear, that they may be mindful.
And if you fear treachery on the part of a people, then throw back to
them on terms of equality; surely Allah does not love the treacherous.
And let not those who disbelieve think that they shall come in first;
surely they will not escape.
And prepare against them what force you can and horses tied at the frontier,
to frighten thereby the enemy of Allah and your enemy and others besides
them, whom you do not know (but) Allah knows them; and whatever thing you
will spend in Allah’s way, it will be paid back to you fully and you shall
not be dealt with unjustly.
And if they incline to peace, then incline to it and trust in Allah;
surely He is the Hearing, the Knowing.
And if they intend to deceive you– then surely Allah is sufficient
for you; He it is Who strengthened you with His help and with the believers
And united their hearts; had you spent all that is in the earth, you
could not have united their hearts, but Allah united them; surely He is
Mighty, Wise.
O Prophet! Allah is sufficient for you and (for) such of the believers
as follow you.
O Prophet! urge the believers to war; if there are twenty patient ones
of you they shall overcome two hundred, and if there are a hundred of you
they shall overcome a thousand of those who disbelieve, because they are
a people who do not understand.
For the present Allah has made light your burden, and He knows that
there is weakness in you; so if there are a hundred patient ones of you
they shall overcome two hundred, and if there are a thousand they shall
overcome two thousand by Allah’s permission, and Allah is with the patient.
It is not fit for a prophet that he should take captives unless he has
fought and triumphed in the land; you desire the frail goods of this world,
while Allah desires (for you) the hereafter; and Allah is Mighty, Wise.
Were it not for an ordinance from Allah that had already gone forth,
surely there would have befallen you a great chastisement for what you had
taken to.
Eat then of the lawful and good (things) which you have acquired in
war, and be careful of (your duty to) Allah; surely Allah is Forgiving,
Merciful.
O Prophet! say to those of the captives who are in your hands: If Allah
knows anything good in your hearts, He will give to you better than that
which has been taken away from you and will forgive you, and Allah is Forgiving,
Merciful.
And if they intend to act unfaithfully towards you, so indeed they acted
unfaithfully towards Allah before, but He gave (you) mastery over them;
and Allah is Knowing, Wise (8.52-71)..

(This is a declaration of) immunity by Allah and His Apostle towards
those of the idolaters with whom you made an agreement.
So go about in the land for four months and know that you cannot weaken
Allah and that Allah will bring disgrace to the unbelievers.
And an announcement from Allah and His Apostle to the people on the
day of the greater pilgrimage that Allah and His Apostle are free from
liability to the idolaters; therefore if you repent, it will be better
for you, and if you turn back, then know that you will not weaken Allah;
and announce painful punishment to those who disbelieve.
Except those of the idolaters with whom you made an agreement, then
they have not failed you in anything and have not backed up any one against
you, so fulfill their agreement to the end of their term; surely Allah
loves those who are careful (of their duty).
So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters
wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie
in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer
and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving,
Merciful.
And if one of the idolaters seek protection from you, grant him
protection till he hears the word of Allah, then make him attain his place
of safety; this is because they are a people who do not know.
How can there be an agreement for the idolaters with Allah and with
His Apostle; except those with whom you made an agreement at the Sacred
Mosque? So as long as they are true to you, be true to them; surely Allah
loves those who are careful (of their duty).
How (can it be)! while if they prevail against you, they would not
pay regard in your case to ties of relationship, nor those of covenant;
they please you with their mouths while their hearts do not consent; and
most of them are transgressors.
They have taken a small price for the communications of Allah, so
they turn away from His way; surely evil is it that they do.
They do not pay regard to ties of relationship nor those of covenant
in the case of a believer; and these are they who go beyond the limits.
But if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, they
are your brethren in faith; and We make the communications clear for
a people who know.
And if they break their oaths after their agreement and (openly) revile
your religion, then fight the leaders of unbelief– surely their oaths
are nothing– so that they may desist.
What! will you not fight a people who broke their oaths and aimed
at the expulsion of the Apostle, and they attacked you first; do you fear
them? But Allah is most deserving that you should fear Him, if you are believers.
Fight them, Allah will punish them by your hands and bring them to
disgrace, and assist you against them and heal the hearts of a believing
people (9.1-14).

O you who believe! the idolaters are nothing but unclean, so they shall
not approach the Sacred Mosque after this year; and if you fear poverty
then Allah will enrich you out of His grace if He please; surely Allah is
Knowing Wise.
Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor
do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow
the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until
they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state
of subjection (9.28-9).

Allah has promised to the believing men and the believing women gardens,
beneath which rivers flow, to abide in them, and goodly dwellings in
gardens of perpetual abode; and best of all is Allah’s goodly pleasure;
that is the grand achievement.
O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites
and be unyielding to them; and their abode is hell, and evil is the destination.
They swear by Allah that they did not speak, and certainly they did
speak, the word of unbelief, and disbelieved after their Islam, and they
had determined upon what they have not been able to effect, and they did
not find fault except because Allah and His Apostle enriched them out of
His grace; therefore if they repent, it will be good for them; and if they
turn back, Allah will chastise them with a painful chastisement in this
world and the hereafter, and they shall not have in the land any guardian
or a helper (9.72-4).

O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to
you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those
who guard (against evil) (9.123).

Surely Allah will defend those who believe; surely Allah does not
love any one who is unfaithful, ungrateful.
Permission (to fight) is given to those upon whom war is made because
they are oppressed, and most surely Allah is well able to assist them (22.38-9).

Allah knows indeed those among you who hinder others and those who
say to their brethren: Come to us; and they come not to the fight but
a little,
Being niggardly with respect to you; but when fear comes, you will
see them looking to you, their eyes rolling like one swooning because of
death; but when the fear is gone they smite you with sharp tongues, being
niggardly of the good things. These have not believed, therefore Allah
has made.their doing naught; and this is easy to Allah.
They think the allies are not gone, and if the allies should come
(again) they would fain be in the deserts with the desert Arabs asking
for news about you, and if they were among you they would not fight save
a little.
Certainly you have in the Apostle of Allah an excellent exemplar for
him who hopes in Allah and the latter day and remembers Allah much.
And when the believers saw the allies, they said: This is what Allah
and His Apostle promised us, and Allah and His Apostle spoke the truth;
and it only increased them in faith and submission.
Of the believers are men who are true to the covenant which they made
with Allah: so of them is he who accomplished his vow, and of them is
he who yet waits, and they have not changed in the least
That Allah may reward the truthful for their truth, and punish the
hypocrites if He please or turn to them (mercifully); surely Allah is Forgiving,
Merciful.
And Allah turned back the unbelievers in their rage; they did not
obtain any advantage, and Allah sufficed the believers in fighting; and
Allah is Strong, Mighty.
And He drove down those of the followers of the Book who backed them
from their fortresses and He cast awe into their hearts; some you killed
and you took captive another part.
And He made you heirs to their land and their dwellings and their
property, and (to) a land which you have not yet trodden, and Allah has
power over all things (33.18-27).

(As for) those who disbelieve and turn away from Allah’s way, He shall
render their works ineffective.
And (as for) those who believe and do good, and believe in what has
been revealed to Muhammad, and it is the very truth from their Lord,
He will remove their evil from them and improve their condition.
That is because those who disbelieve follow falsehood, and have given
them their dowries, taking (them) in marriage, not fornicating nor taking
them for paramours in secret; and whoever denies faith, his work indeed
is of no account, and in the hereafter he shall be one of the losers.
So when you meet in battle those who disbelieve, then smite the necks
until when you have overcome them, then make (them) prisoners, and afterwards
either set them free as a favor or let them ransom (themselves) until
the war terminates. That (shall be so); and if Allah had pleased He would
certainly have exacted what is due from them, but that He may try some
of you by means of others; and (as for) those who are slain in the way
of Allah, He will by no means allow their deeds to perish (47.1-4).

And whoever does not believe in Allah and His Apostle, then surely
We have prepared burning fire for the unbelievers.
And Allah’s is the kingdom. of the heavens and the earth; He forgives
whom He pleases and punishes whom He pleases, and Allah is Forgiving,
Merciful.
Those who are left behind will say when you set forth for the gaining
of acquisitions: Allow us (that) we may follow you. They desire to change
the world of Allah. Say: By no means shall you follow us; thus did Allah
say before. But they will say: Nay! you are jealous of us. Nay! they do
not understand but a little.
Say to those of the dwellers of the desert who were left behind: You
shall soon be invited (to fight) against a people possessing mighty prowess;
you will fight against them until they submit; then if you obey, Allah
will grant you a good reward; and if you turn back as you turned back before,
He will punish you with a painful punishment (48.13-16).

And if those who disbelieve fight with you, they would certainly turn
(their) backs, then they would not find any protector or a helper.
Such has been the course of Allah that has indeed run before, and
you shall not find a change in Allah’s course.
And He it is Who held back their hands from you and your hands from
them in the valley of Mecca after He had given you victory over them; and
Allah is Seeing what you do.
It is they who disbelieved and turned you away from the Sacred Mosque
and (turned off) the offering withheld from arriving at its destined
place; and were it not for the believing men and the believing women, whom,
not having known, you might have trodden down, and thus something hateful
might have afflicted you on their account without knowledge– so that
Allah may cause to enter into His mercy whomsoever He pleases; had they
been widely separated one from another, We would surely have punished
those who disbelieved from among them with a painful punishment (48.22-25).

O you who believe! do not take My enemy and your enemy for friends:
would you offer them love while they deny what has come to you of the
truth, driving out the Apostle and yourselves because you believe in Allah,
your Lord? If you go forth struggling hard in My path and seeking My pleasure,
would you manifest love to them? And I know what you conceal and what you
manifest; and whoever of you does this, he indeed has gone astray from
the straight path.
If they find you, they will be your enemies, and will stretch forth
towards you their hands and their tongues with evil, and they ardently
desire that you may disbelieve.
Your relationship would not profit you, nor your children on the day
of resurrection; He will decide between you; and Allah sees what you do
(60.1-3).

It may be that Allah will bring about friendship between you and those
whom you hold to be your enemies among them; and Allah is Powerful; and
Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
Allah does not forbid you respecting those who have not made war against
you on account of (your) religion, and have not driven you forth from
your homes, that you show them kindness and deal with them justly; surely
Allah loves the doers of justice.
Allah only forbids you respecting those who made war upon you on account
of (your) religion, and drove you forth from your homes and backed up
(others) in your expulsion, that you make friends with them, and whoever
makes friends with them, these are the unjust (60.7-9).

Looking at these passages, we can see that a number
of Islamic justifications for war are found in the Qur’an:

1. War to prevent a land, people, or community that has embraced Islam
from external attackers (‘those who wage war against Allah and His apostle
and strive to make mischief in the land’).
2. War to protect Muslim communities from oppression and persecution
(‘fight with them until there is no persecution’, ‘whoever then acts aggressively
against you, inflict injury on him according to the injury he has inflicted
on you’).
3. War against ‘idolators’ (‘slay the idolaters wherever you find
them’, ‘Fight those who do not believe in Allah … until they pay the
tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection’).
4. Warfare in which the cause is unspecified (‘when you meet in battle
those who disbelieve’).

All of these forms of warfare are problematic to the extent that the
Qur’an in no way gives clear definitions of the context in which the attacks
and fighting has taken place. The idea of fighting a people who are persecuting
Muslims among them seems fairly clear, but the notion of a people who ‘wage
war against Allah’ is ambiguous: are they attacking a Muslim land or community
in an unprovoked manner, or are they attacking Muslims because those Muslims
are seeking to subjugate their land to Islam? Either way, the Qur’an’s
answer to the question of how to defend Muslims is brutal, and it states
of such ‘disbelievers’: ‘they should be murdered or crucified or their
hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should
be imprisoned’ (5.33). Only those who ‘repent before you have them in your
power’ (5.34) are allowed to escape this.

The case of commands to make war on ‘idolators’ seems to refer mainly
to Arabia (home to the ‘Sacred Mosque’) and appear to be orders to wipe
out the last vestiges of pre-Islamic Paganism from the land (given polytheism
and idolatry are closely linked concepts). However, looking at 9.28-9
it is again unclear as to whether the ‘idolators’ of 9.28 are seperate to,
or equated with, the Jews and Christians referred to in 9.29, where Muslims
are commanded to ‘Fight those who do not believe in Allah … out of those
who have been given the Book’. Either way, in these texts, the object seems
to be simply to subjugate those who will not accept Islam, including Jews
and Christians. Muslims are commanded to ‘slay the idolaters wherever
you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait
for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay
the poor-rate, leave their way free to them’ (9.5). So, here the Qur’an
claims that Muslims should ‘slay’ or take into captivity those who do not
accept Islam and give them a chance to submit to Islam. According to 9.5,
so long as these captives pray to Allah and pay a tax for the poor, they
will then be left alone. Indeed, 9.11 states that ‘if they repent and keep
up prayer and pay the poor-rate, they are your brethren in faith’. However,
‘if they break their oaths after their agreement and (openly) revile your
religion, then fight the leaders of unbelief — surely their oaths are nothing
— so that they may desist’ (9.12). These texts state that if ‘idolators’
are attacked by Muslims and then submit to Islam they then become ‘your
brethren in faith’. If this submission was in fact a ruse and they later
go on to ‘revile’ Islam they must again be put to the sword until they again
submit, this time paying the tax ‘in acknowledgment of superiority and
they are in a state of subjection’ (9.29).

In the passages that speak of war in general terms, it is unclear
why the Muslims are meeting non-Muslims in battle. Perhaps again
the battle is defensive, but perhaps the Muslims have been attacked by those
who do not wish to submit to Islam, or, again, perhaps the Muslims are engaging
in an attack to subjugate ‘idolators’ or ‘unbelievers’. According to 60.9,
‘Allah only forbids you respecting those who made war upon you on account
of (your) religion’, yet according to other texts, especially those referring
to ‘idolators’, Muslims need show no respect to those who refuse to accept
Islam. Such ambiguity marks out the all too human and contradictory nature
of the Qur’an, and while 60.9 sounds reasonable, the other passages sound
like the ravings of a religious maniac. Again, even if 60.9 sounds reasonable,
it is far from clear what making war ‘on account of (your) religion’ actually
means. For example, it could be used to refer to an army making war on
account of refusing to submit to Muslim attempts to subjugate a people
to Islam. In other words, Qur’anically speaking, a non-Muslim military attack
on Muslims which was an attempt to halt Muslim expansionism and imperialism
would still be counted as an act of aggression against Islam, as opposed
to a defensive act on the part of the non-Muslim army which did not wish
to submit to Islam.

What all these texts have in common is that they present warfare entirely
in religious terms, and in terms of the concerns of Muslims only. We read
nothing, for example, of Muslims being called to wage war on behalf of
a nation of non-Muslims who are suffering persecution from other non-Muslims.
And even if they were called to do so, such a command would certainly be
accompanied by the requirement to ‘convert’ these people to Islam. The resulting
concern for fellow Muslims, and a perceived sense of international brotherhood
amongst Muslims, in a sense mirrors other forms of ‘in-group’ solidarity,
such as ethnonationalism. While Muslims are not a ‘race’, the Qur’an encourages
them to see the world in a similar way to that of ethnonationalists, who
present the concerns of ‘their people’ as paramount and who foster a sense
of global ‘unity’. That such a sense of exclusivist solidarity continues
among many Muslims today is clearly illustrated by the demonstrations that
have occurred regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and in the ongoing
conflicts in the Middle East. In the run up to the invasion of Afghanistan
and Iraq, Muslims across the world mobilised en-masse to protest. Similarly,
the recent Israeli operations in Gaza brought many Muslims onto the streets.
But when it comes to conflicts and issues in which Muslims are not involved,
the level of concern shown by Muslims for these issues is dramatically less.
How many Islamic organisations take part in demonstrations in solidarity
with Tibet? Palestine is presented as an important issue by and for Muslims
because it involves the perceived occupation of ‘Muslim land’, while the
Chinese occupation of Tibet hardly gets a look-in when it comes to most
Muslim organisations’ list of priorities because it is not an issue that
is seen to affect Muslims or Islam.

Many Islamists present events such as the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq and the ensuing Western occupation of those countries as evidence
of a ‘war against Islam’. This is not simply the result of paranoia and
hyperbole, but is in fact directly derived from the worldview found in
the Qur’an itself. Because the Qur’an presents every instance of hostility
in which Muslims are involved as having religious significance, an understanding
of current world events from an orthodox Qur’anic perspective will by necessity
view issues such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as being religiously
significant. When Osama bin Laden denounces the presence of Western troops
in Saudi Arabia, he is not simply presenting a grievance about perceived
Western interference or imperialism in religious language: he is speaking
in the language of the Qur’an. When Western Muslims offer justifications
for and ‘understanding’ of Jihadist attacks on Western troops in Afghanistan
and Iraq, they are simply being loyal followers of the Qur’an. What would
Muhammad be doing were he around today? Through reading the Qur’an, it should
be clear that he would be sending Islamic fighters to Iraq, Afghanistan,
the Palestinian territories, and elsewhere to fight the ‘unbelievers’ who
are ‘occupying Muslim land’.

When Jihadists travel to Iraq to launch attacks on Western troops,
they are heeding the call of the Qur’an – the call to fight against the
armies of the ‘disbelievers’. As a predominantly non-Muslim army that currently
maintains a military presence in Iraq – an Islamic country – Western troops
are, from a Qur’anic point of view, oppressors and occupiers, and the very
agents of Satan: ‘Those who believe fight in the way of Allah, and those
who disbelieve fight in the way of the Shaitan. Fight therefore against
the friends of the Shaitan; surely the strategy of the Shaitan is weak’ (4.76).
Likewise, the presence of Israelis – ‘disbelieving’ Jews – on what has been
‘consecrated’ as ‘Muslim land’ represents in the Qur’anic worldview an act
of oppression against Islam and Hamas are simply following the commands of
the Qur’an when they seek to ‘cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve’
(3.151). After all, as we have seen, the Qur’an warns Muslims that Jews are
amongst ‘the most violent of people in enmity for those who believe’, that
they are known for ‘hindering many (people) from Allah’s way’, that they
are ‘cursed’, that they serve Satan, and that they were ‘made apes and swine’
by Allah. Hamas dreams of a future in which a mighty Islamic victory will
be won with the destruction of the State of Israel, and it is not hard to
see from where they draw their inspiration: ‘Fight those who do not believe
in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His
Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those
who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of
superiority and they are in a state of subjection’. The fact that Hamas are
hugely out-gunned by Israel does not matter. After all, does not the Qur’an
speak of believers fighting ‘against a people possessing mighty prowess’?
And does it not offer the promise that ‘you will fight against them until
they submit’? And, indeed, it also promises Muslims that ‘if there are
twenty patient ones of you they shall overcome two hundred, and if there
are a hundred of you they shall overcome a thousand of those who disbelieve’.
And what if many Muslims fall in the fight against Israel? Of what matter
is that when every Jew killed by a Hamas fighter is destined for eternal
hellfire and every Muslim who falls fighting against Israelis is destined
for eternal joy in the gardens of paradise? Muslims who do not adhere to this
simplistic and dangerous view of the world do so not because of the
Qur’an, but in spite of it.

The Qur’an’s passages on warfare are obviously writings referring to
events in a specific time and place. They are not a collection of instructions
on the ethics of modern warfare, and they provide absolutely no useful
material for guiding political leaders and military commanders on how
or when to prosecute a military campaign today. The Qur’an understands
warfare in terms of localised battles on horseback using swords, not in
terms of tanks, machine guns, missiles, and fighter jets. But the fundamental
problem we face with the Qur’an is that it consistently and repeatedly claims
itself to be the perfect words of the creator of the universe. Consequently,
if this ridiculous claim continues to be adhered to by billions of people
around the world, we are placed in grave danger that people who take the
Qur’anic view of the world seriously will mix its centuries old superstitious
and supremacist content with access to modern weapons of mass destruction.
What seems absolutely clear from reading the Qur’an on warfare is that
it is farcical to describe Islam as intrinsically a ‘religion of peace’,
unless by ‘peace’ one means a state in which resistance to the dominance
of Islam is vanquished. A society in which everyone bows towards Mecca
in ‘acknowledgment of [the] superiority’ of Islam, and in which those who
do not accept Islam are kept ‘in a state of subjection’ may well be on
paper a ‘peaceful’ society, but this peace comes at the cost of human freedom
and is bought with the blood of those who refuse it.

Next page

The ethical and legal rulings of the Qur’an

Islam is a religion founded on the principle of unquestioning submission
to the supposed will of God; indeed, the word Islam means submission. On
the topic of how human beings should conduct their lives, the Qur’an explicitly
demands an unthinking, uncritical acceptance of its rulings. As such, it
presents a totalitarian vision of the ordering of human affairs. Of Allah,
the Qur’an states that ‘He cannot be questioned concerning what He does’
(21.23) and that ‘the command of Allah is a decree that is made absolute’
(33.38). Likewise, Muhammad appears to be beyond criticism and beyond question:

The Prophet has a greater claim on the faithful than they have
on themselves (33.6).

Certainly you have in the Apostle of Allah an excellent exemplar for
him who hopes in Allah and the latter day and remembers Allah much (33.21).

And it behoves not a believing man and a believing woman that they should
have any choice in their matter when Allah and His Apostle have decided
a matter (33.36).

Let’s examine some of these ‘absolute decrees’ over which we do not have
any choice.

In the Qur’an we find the basis for many of the well known aspects of Muslim
practice. For example, we find that the eating of meat from pigs is forbidden
(2.173, 5.3), that fasting during Ramadan is required (2.185), that Muslims
should participate in the Hajj (2.196), that drinking alcohol is
forbidden (2.219, 5.90), that gambling is forbidden (2.219, 5.90), that
earning interest on loans is forbidden (2.275-6), that washing is required
before prayer (5.6), that women should wear head coverings (24.31), and
that sex outside of marriage is forbidden (4.24, 24.2-3, 60.12).

For some acts, punishment is to be given in this world, while for some,
eternal punishment will follow after death. In terms of worldly punishments,
we find rulings such as the following:

O you who believe! retaliation is prescribed for you in the matter
of the slain, the free for the free, and the slave for the slave, and the
female for the female (2.178).

And (as for) the man who steals and the woman who steals, cut off their
hands as a punishment for what they have earned, an exemplary punishment
from Allah; and Allah is Mighty, Wise (5.38).

(As for) the fornicatress and the fornicator, flog each of them, (giving)
a hundred stripes, and let not pity for them detain you in the matter of
obedience to Allah, if you believe in Allah and the last day, and let a
party of believers witness their chastisement. The fornicator shall not
marry any but a fornicatress or idolatress, and (as for) the fornicatress,
none shall marry her but a fornicator or an idolater; and it is forbidden
to the believers (24.2-3).

If the hypocrites and those in whose hearts is a disease and the agitators
in the city do not desist, We shall most certainly set you over them, then
they shall not be your neighbors in it but for a little while; Cursed:
wherever they are found they shall be seized and murdered, a (horrible)
murdering. (Such has been) the course of Allah with respect to those who
have gone before; and you shall not find any change in the course of Allah
(33.60-2).

So, in the Qur’an we find a primitive system of ‘justice’ based on retaliation,
the cutting off of hands, flogging, and ‘murdering’. Such brutal notions
underpin the Shari’ah law system of which we hear so much.

While murder and theft are universally regarded as criminal acts, the
Qur’an demands vicious punishments for misconduct in the private sphere and
lays down many rulings on marriage. According to the Qur’an, anyone having
sex outside of marriage should be whipped a hundred times, without pity,
and before witnesses. This is not simply a ruling against adultery, for ‘fornication’
covers any kind of sexual activity which is not taking place between a husband
and wife. Therefore, in a society governed by the Qur’an, cohabiting couples
or gay couples could expect to be dragged before a ‘party of believers’
and severely flogged. Assuming these ‘fornicators’ then repented of their
supposed ‘sin’, they would only ever be allowed to marry other ‘fornicators’
because ‘Bad women are for bad men and bad men are for bad women. Good
women are for good men and good men are for good women’ (24.26). As for
freedom of choice or for gay rights, when it comes to Qur’an, you can forget
it.

The question of arranged marriages has become a thorny issue in recent years,
especially in regard to Muslim communities in the West. It is often stated
that arranged marriages are not a part of Islam and derive from other cultural
traditions. However, one searches the Qur’an in vain for any condemnation
of ‘marriages’ of this sort, which simply tells Muslims to ‘marry those
among you who are single and those who are fit among your male slaves and
your female slaves’ (24.32) and that ‘Allah has made wives for you from among
yourselves’ (16.72). As noted earlier, the Qur’an clearly presupposes a male
audience and it frames issues of marriage and divorce in terms of instructions
to a male readership. For example, we read that Muslim men must ‘not marry
the idolatresses until they believe’ and must ‘not give (believing women)
in marriage to idolaters until they believe’ (2.231). Men are instructed
what to say and do regarding their wives when ‘they ask you about menstruation’:
‘Say: It is a discomfort; therefore keep aloof from the women during the
menstrual discharge and do not go near them until they have become clean;
then when they have cleansed themselves, go in to them as Allah has commanded
you’ (2.222). With the exception of the period of mentruation, men are told
that ‘[y]our wives are a tilth for you, so go into your tilth when you like’
(2.223). Likewise, regarding the termination of marriages, we read instructions
on ‘when you divorce women’ (2.231) and ‘when you have divorced women’ (2.232).

The Qur’an clearly presupposes polygamy, defined, of course, in terms
of men having multiple wives, not women having multiple husbands. Marriages
are easily ended and in order to divorce a woman, the man simply pronounces
twice that he is divorcing her (2.229); however, in the Qur’an no such right
exists for women wishing to divorce their husbands. Various provisions are
made for the fair treatment of divorced women and the Qur’an tells men to
‘set them free with liberality’ (2.231), but it still reminds the reader
regarding women that ‘the men are a degree above them’ (2.228).

When it comes to Muhammad and his wives, the Qur’an addresses him directly:

O Prophet! surely We have made lawful to you your wives whom
you have given their dowries, and those whom your right hand possesses out
of those whom Allah has given to you as prisoners of war, and the daughters
of your paternal uncles and the daughters of your paternal aunts, and the
daughters of your maternal uncles and the daughters of your maternal aunts
who fled with you; and a believing woman if she gave herself to the Prophet,
if the Prophet desired to marry her — specially for you, not for the (rest
of) believers (33.50).

Clearly, then, Muhammad was offered quite a selection of potential wives.
One of his wives in particular has been the subject of much controversy.
This is hardly surprising, given what we read in the Hadith collection of Imam al-Bukhari:

Narrated ‘Ursa:

The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with ‘Aisha while she was six
years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years
old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death).

Muhammad’s marriage to ‘Aisha is clearly particularly problematic given
the Qur’an’s claim that ‘you have in the Apostle of Allah an excellent exemplar’
and that, regarding his decisions, ‘it behoves not a believing man and
a believing woman that they should have any choice in their matter when
Allah and His Apostle have decided a matter’.

The existence of records of Muhammad’s marriage to ‘Aisha (and his reported
intercourse with her at only nine years of age) are used as justifications
for child marriage in the Muslim world today. In June 2008, LBC TV in Lebanon
aired an interview with Dr. Ahmad Al-Mub’i, a Saudi Marriage Officiant,
who stated: ‘The
Prophet Muhammad is the model we follow. He took ‘Aisha to be his wife when
she was six, but he had sex with her only when she was nine’. In the same
month, a story emerged from Yemen involving a nine year old girl who ‘walked
out of her husband’s house … and ran to a local hospital, where she complained
that he had been beating and sexually abusing her for eight months’. As
the New York Times reported at the time: ‘Hard-line Islamic conservatives,
whose influence has grown enormously in the past two decades, defend it,
pointing to the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a 9-year-old’.

The case of ‘Aisha clearly demonstrates the fact that Islam developed
in a place and time incredibly far removed from modernity. Perhaps Muhammad’s
behaviour regarding ‘Aisha was normal and acceptable for the period, just
as undoubtedly the ideas and world view found in the Qur’an were acceptable
at the time it was written, but the danger inherent in the Qur’an and in
the uncritical admiration of Muhammad that it encourages is all too obvious
in the examples of child marriages in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

The ethical and legal rulings of the Qur’an are clearly the work of a
deeply conservative and reactionary mind. They are not presented with any
kind of logical argument to back them up, but that is entirely to expected
in a pre-modern book proclaimed to contain the very words of the creator
of the universe. So, just how impressive are the moral and legal aspects
of the Qur’an? It is a book that encourages blind submission to a system
that presupposes a male dominated society, that presents women as something
akin to property, that strips human beings of the right to make their own
decisions in the private sphere, that bans the free expression and enjoyment
of sexuality outside of inflexible laws that are stifling and homophobic,
that accepts the validity of slavery, and that seeks to control human behaviour
through threats of violence and death, coupled with threats of eternal torment
after death.

What would a society based on the Qur’an look like?

For orthodox Muslims, the Qur’an is a perfect book and Muhammad is the
model human. If we accepted both of those assertions to be correct, then
what form would a society based on those ideas take?

• Non-Muslims, with the possible exception of some Jews and Christians,
  would be banned from the country, for ‘Allah is the enemy of the unbelievers’
  (2.98), who are ‘unjust’ (6.157), ‘evil’ (7.177), and ‘the vilest of animals
  in Allah’s sight’ (8.55). Children would be raised to have contempt for
  non-Muslims, who are destined for eternal torment in the flames of hell.
• Jews and Christians would be second class citizens, banned from
  proselytising or publicly declaring their faith, seen as ‘unjust’, and shunned
  by Muslims, for ‘whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely
  he is one of them’ (5.51).
• Jews would be seen as untrustworthy and anti-Semitism would almost
  certainly be endemic.
• All criticism of Islam, the Qur’an, and Muhammad would be banned.
• The society would be male dominated and men would have multiple
  wives.
• Women would be required to wear the hijab or a similar garment.
• Arranged marriages would be permitted, as would child marriages. 
• Homosexuality would be outlawed and any sexual activity outside
  marriage would result in public floggings.
• The criminal justice system would be based on retaliation and enforced
  with violent punishments. All court cases would be brought before religious
  leaders.
• Slavery would be permitted.
• Consumption of pork and alcohol would be forbidden, as would ‘games
  of chance’.
• Evolutionary biology would be rejected in favour of creationism.
• Studying, learning, and reciting the Qur’an would be seen as the
  most important aspect of a child’s education.

This society represents the antithesis of Enlightenment thinking and
the liberal, secular, free societies that have developed with the modernisation
of the West. Almost every aspect of social and intellectual progress that
has been made over the last couple of centuries would be undone by a society
such as this. In short, we would see a society with many similarities to
countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistian under the Taliban.
The people of those countries are not intrinsically, genetically inclined
towards living in socially backward, superstitious, and brutal regimes.
At the very heart of the problems seen in the Middle East and beyond lies
a deep reverence for the Qur’an and an attempt to puts its teachings into
practice. Put simply, strict Islamic societies quickly become failed societies,
and the Qur’an underpins the backwardness and stagnation that we see in
many majority Muslim countries. Many like to point to the supposed ‘golden
age’ of Islam, and talk of successful, tolerant societies of the past that
were (nominally) Muslim. However, they are missing the point. Muslim societies
of the past that did not represent a totalitarian theocratic nightmare were
only so because of a lacklustre approach to enforcing the teachings and rulings
of the Qur’an. Muslims are liberal and questioning and thoughtful precisely
when they throw off the shackles of Islam. When we encounter self-professed
Muslims exhibiting the qualities that we associate with a modern, rational,
and cosmopolitan outlook, this is not the result of their proclaimed devotion
to Allah, Muhammed, and the Qur’an, but rather it is the result of the influence
of, and their acceptance of, secularism and Enlightenment values.

Islam, ‘Islamism’, and the importance of intellectual honesty

At present, many apologists for Islam, including a large number of non-Muslims,
claim that there is a wide gulf between authentic Islam and ‘political
Islam’ or ‘Islamism’. Islam, they say, is a personal religious belief system
based on respect for others and reverence for the creator of the universe,
whereas Islamism is some kind of totalitarian perversion. Islam, they claim,
is a religion that has been ‘hijacked by extremists’. This is obviously
a nice idea to have, given it splits Muslims up into ‘normal citizens just
like you and me’ (‘Muslim moderates’) and right-wing theocrats (‘Islamists’).
But is such a simple destinction logical or accurate? Given what we found
having delved into the Qur’an, this idea of Islam Vs Islamism seems to be
wholly artificial. The fact of the matter is that the Qur’an quite clearly
advocates ‘political Islam’. Indeed, ‘political Islam’ is a misnomer for
Islam itself is by definition political. Islam as presented in the Qur’an
is, quite simply, Islamism, and the Qur’an is a manual for the Islamification
of societies. Muhammad, the supposed ‘prophet’ of Islam, was by modern standards
an Islamist – indeed, he was the very first Islamist. The Qur’an does not
present itself as having a message that is one of many valid options. It
doesn’t provide arguments in its favour that can be rationally evaluated.
It simply demands submission and backs this demand up with gruesome threat
after threat of both violence in this world and in the afterlife.

Having said that, it is certainly not the case that everyone identifying
themself as a Muslim is an Islamist seeking to transform the society they
live in along the lines of the Qur’an and the Hadith. There are indeed
moderate Muslims and I have met plenty. The Roman Catholic Church commands
its followers to reject the use of contraception, but that hasn’t stopped
huge numbers of self-identified Catholics from using it. Likewise, the Qur’an
tells Muslims that God hates unbelievers, but every day I meet Muslims
who do not give the impression that they see me as a ‘vile animal’. However,
there are, unfortunately, large numbers of Muslims in the West who to varying
degrees hold views wholly incompatible with a pluralistic society based
on individual rights and who would very much like to see objectionable
Qur’anic teachings put into practice. There are also large numbers of Muslim
so-called ‘community leaders’ who spend much of their time complaining about
how the West isn’t accomodating enough to Muslims, how they are ‘offended’
by this or that, and how we must show ‘respect’ for Islam (by which they
mean we should adopt a pandering and subservient position regarding this
one particular religion). Various recent studies have highlighted the worrying
views held by many Muslims in the West. For example, in 2008 The Centre for
Social Cohesion produced a report entitled
‘Islam on Campus: A survey of UK student opinions’. The study, based on a
poll of 1,400 students as well as field work and interviews, revealed of
British Muslim students that:

• 32% said killing in the name of religion can be justified.
• 60% of active members of campus Islamic societies said killing
  in the name of religion can be justified.
• 50% would be unsupportive of a friend’s decision to leave Islam.
• 24% do not feel that men and women are fully equal in the eyes
  of Allah.
• 59% felt it was important to Islam that Muslim women wear the hijab.
• 54% were supportive of an Islamic political party to represent
  the views of Muslims at Parliament.
• 28% said Islam was incompatible with secularism.
• 40% said that they thought that it was unacceptable for Muslim
  men and women to mix freely.
• 25% said they had not very much or no respect at all for homosexuals,
  as opposed to 4% of non-Muslim students.
• 57% said that British Muslim servicemen should be allowed to opt
  out of taking part in military operations in Muslim countries.

A 2007 poll of
1,000 of the wider Muslim population in Britain conducted by the think
tank Policy Exchange found that:

• 86% of Muslims feel that religion is the most important thing in
  their life.
• 36% of 16 to 24-year-olds believe if a Muslim converts to another
  religion they should be punished by death.
• 74% of 16 to 24-year-olds would prefer Muslim women to choose to
  wear the veil.
• 58% believe that ‘many of the problems in the world today are a
  result of arrogant Western attitudes’.
• Only 37% accept that ‘one of the benefits of modern society is
  the freedom to criticise other people’s religious or political views, even
  when it causes offence’.

A 2006 Populus poll for The Times found that 37% of British Muslims believe that ‘the Jewish
community in Britain is a legitimate target “as part of the ongoing struggle
for justice in the Middle East”‘.

A 2005 Daily Telegraph poll found that 32% of British Muslims agreed with the notion that ‘Western
society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it
to an end’.

As a whole, then, around a third of British Muslims hold views that would
be described as ‘Islamist’. In reality, that means 1 in 3 British Muslims
are clearly significantly influenced by the ideas found in the Qur’an. If
a massive 86% of British Muslims claim that religion is the most important
thing in their life and a significant 63% were unwilling to agree that ‘one
of the benefits of modern society is the freedom to criticise other people’s
religious or political views’ then this still indicates a problem, and with
the Muslim population reportedly growing ten times faster than the rest of society it is a problem that needs
addressing. The way to address the problem of large numbers of people adhering
to a belief system that is directly opposed to Enlightenment thinking, secularism,
and liberalism is to reaffirm our commitment to those ideals. We need to
stop cowering in fear of being accused of ‘bigotry’ or ‘Islamophobia’, or
‘racism’, or any of the other labels that are all too often attached to those
who dare to critically examine Islam, and we also need to be firm in our rejection
of far-right political parties and organisations that are attempting to make
problems related to Islam ‘their issue’ and who are seeking to slide a racist
agenda in under the guise of ‘defending the West’. As a committed anti-racist
I will not be told by genuine bigots that they ‘speak for me’, because they
most certainly do not.

It is a worrying situation when only 37% of British Muslims see validity
in being able to criticise religious beliefs, but such a number is perhaps
unsurprising given the patronising attitude that many ‘politically correct’
liberals have adopted with regard to Muslims and Islam. Because Muslims
in the West are a minority group, and a group made up largely of members
of ethnic minorities, a strange form of self-censorship has been adopted
regarding Islam, the Qur’an, and Muhammad. Where anti-Semitism, homophobia,
and other forms of intolerance are found in Muslim communities, all too often
the reaction from liberals is a kind of embarassed attempt at ‘explaining’
or excusing these views, or they are simply glossed over. Likewise, when
some Muslims work themselves up into a frenzy over supposed ‘insults’ to
their religion, the reflexive reaction among all too many is simply to cave
in and apologise. This is a pathetic and hypocritical approach to take to
what is, after all, an ideology. In the West, we don’t hold back from criticising
Marxism for fear of ‘offending’ Marxists, and we don’t adopt an uncritical
stance with regard to the Bible either (quite the opposite). There is no
valid reason why we should treat Islam and the Qur’an any differently. There
seems to be a kind of condescending attitude towards Muslims which has served
only to enbolden reactionaries and encourage even ‘moderates’ to feel they
should have a special exemption from having their beliefs challenged. The
novelist Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane, offers excellent criticism of this approach:

It is striking, she points out, how, in the name of respect for
minorities, minority voices themselves get silenced. The liberal idea of
respect, Ali notes, is patronising: ‘It is a kind of moral superiority. What
liberals mean when they talk about respect is that they can handle complex
fiction, ambiguity, criticism, but other people can’t, especially people in
minority communities, because they are too sensitive’.

For Ali, the giving of offence is not just inevitable. It is also important
because it is ‘necessary for social progress’. Women, she points out, are
often the ones to pay the price for prohibitions against giving offence.
In the past, liberals recognised the importance of free speech to the overcoming
of social iniquities. Today, too many liberals see ‘a clash between freedom
of expression and the defence of minority communities’.

Ali is absolutely right. Criticism is indeed necessary for social progress,
and it was criticism of religious authority that helped usher in modernity
in the West. By refusing to criticise Islam, and by allowing the Qur’an to
go basically unchallenged, we are doing nothing to advance the cause of
ethnic minority communities in the West and we fail to understand what lies
beneath many of the vast social problems in the Middle East. Having examined
the Qur’an, I am of the view that it is vitally important that we shed the
light of reason on its contents loudly and widely. If self-proclaimed Muslim
moderates mean what they say when they claim to be moderates and opposed to
Islamism and Shari’ah, we also need to see a lot more criticism of the Qur’an
coming from Muslims themselves.

I cannot personally see how the Qur’an and Islam can ultimately be ‘saved’.
Given the sheer level of backward, violent, and hateful content in the Qur’an,
it seems quite impossible to me that it can ever be ‘reinterpreted’ in the
same way that liberal Christian thinkers have sought to reinterpret the New
Testament. It seems clear that the Qur’an offers an either/or scenario to
the reader. Either you submit totally or not at all. Either the Qur’an is
the perfect, revealed Word of God or it’s not. Either Muhammad was a ‘prophet’
or he was not. Either you follow God or you follow Satan. Either you are
a ‘good’ person or you are a ‘bad’ person. Either you agree with religiously
sanctioned murder, floggings, and the chopping off of hands or you rightly
reject this for the barbarity that it is. Let’s hope there is a middle ground,
at least for now. But most of all let us hope for the continuing success
of the values of the Enlightenment, values we should promote, cherish, and
seek to protect and defend. And as supporters of freedom and rationalism
let’s have the courage of our convictions to say we really don’t care if
people think that the Qur’an is ‘holy’ – we still have the right to criticise
it. We should also make it clear that we don’t give a damn about stupid words
like ‘Islamophobia’ and we will not cower in fear of such censorious labels.
Nothing should be beyond criticism, least of all a book that shows such utter
contempt for those who do not accept its claims.

What procedural process does the BBC have in place to deal with serious complaints about one of its programmes? I recently have had the opportunity to discover this from the point of view of a complainant. The background is as follows.

In April 2008 I posted an article concerning a BBC World Service radio programme that gave a completely one-sided account of the reception in Britain of a lecture by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, in which he floated the notion of some recognition within the British legal system of certain civil applications of Sharia law that are currently practised under the auspices of the Islamic Sharia Council. (Given the characteristically convoluted expression of his views, what Dr Williams was actually proposing for consideration remains somewhat obscure; indeed, he later acknowledged some “unclarity” in his remarks.)

In my article I reported that my written complaint that the item was inaccurate (by omission) in the reporting of the responses to the Archbishop’s suggestions, and biased in the way it presented the workings of Sharia courts in Britain and of Muslim experience in Britain, was rejected by the editor of the World Service programme in question, Gavin Poncia. I subsequently went to the next stage of the BBC complaints procedures, and wrote to the Editorial Complaints Unit. The Head of Editorial Complaints, Fraser Steel, investigated the matter and concluded that he didn’t feel he had grounds for upholding my complaint.

The relevant correspondence was also passed to the Executive Editor of World Service Production, Anne Tyley, who in a thoughtful response acknowledged that the item was “flawed” in certain respects, and partially agreed with some of my criticisms. However, she nevertheless felt that my strongly negative view was not justified by the programme’s contents taken as a whole.

I then proceeded to the third stage, the Editorial Standards Committee of the BBC Trust, an independent body that adjudicates on matters pertaining to the Corporation. I have been impressed by the thoroughness with which the Committee dealt with the matter. Before it met to consider my complaint I was sent a forty page dossier giving a very detailed summary, including significant quotations and the citing of submitted supporting documents, of the basic elements of my communications at all three stages, with an equivalent summary of the responses from the relevant BBC personnel. I was also invited to submit any additional material I thought would be supportive of my case.

The BBC Trust Editorial Standards Committee has now issued its detailed report (pp. 7-8, 32-44) of the proceedings, informing me that:

The Committee upheld both elements of your complaint and found that the item had breached the BBC’s guidelines on accuracy and impartiality.

There are several observations worth making on this whole process. The first is to give credit to the BBC for the opportunity it gives for complainants to submit criticisms of its programmes to which the BBC personnel concerned are obliged to reply. Most important, given the natural propensity of programme makers to defend their productions, and of their immediate superiors to support them, is that if complainants are dissatisfied with the responses at the first two stages of the procedures they have the opportunity to submit the complaint to an adjudicating body independent of the BBC management.

Nevertheless, I have to add an important caveat to this commendation of the BBC. The fact remains that both the programme makers and the Head of Editorial Complaints rejected my complaint that the item had contravened BBC editorial guidelines on impartiality and accuracy. This was in spite of the fact that the programme gave a completely uncritical portrayal of the workings of Sharia courts in Britain, totally ignoring widely publicised concerns such as those of the Government advisor on Muslim women, Shaista Gohir, who
stated:

Although Islam gives women numerous Islamic rights, many Muslim women would fear discrimination due to patriarchal and cultural reasons. Muslims, particularly women, may be pressurised by families and communities into using Sharia courts.

It is notable that the presenter’s abnegation of his role of questioning the two Muslim interviewees on these well-known concerns about Sharia court practice in Britain was of a piece with the introductory report that also avoided all mention of them. It is unsurprising that on this section of the programme the BBC Trust Committee noted the failure to indicate that “there were other relevant viewpoints to the ones expressed in the programme”, and concluded that “the item had not met the impartiality guidelines”.

Again, the programme producers evidently saw no serious breach of editorial guidelines in the fact that the Religious Affairs Correspondent, Frances Harrison, portrayed the situation for Muslims in Britain in an unrelentingly negative light. Apart from the obligatory allusion to widespread “Islamophobia”, listeners were told that “the Muslim communities in Britain, the Muslims I’ve talked to, feel a great sense of alienation”, experience a diminution of their freedom, and are supposedly faced with a pervasive attitude of “this idea that if you’re a Muslim, if you wear a headscarf you’re a terrorist”. Given the heightened emotions among more extreme Muslims in the political climate of recent years, presenting such a one-sided view of the supposed plight of Muslims in Britain to a World Service audience verges on the irresponsible.

The BBC Trust Committee noted in regard to this part of Frances Harrison’s contribution “that additional context was needed and that the description was not sufficiently nuanced so as to present an appropriately accurate and balance picture of the position of Muslims in Britain”, concluding that “the item had breached the impartiality and accuracy guidelines”.

How does one account for the current affairs section of the BBC World Service broadcasting a programme item so deficient in the above respects? I can only hazard a guess that there is a pervasive mindset among the programme makers such that on a controversial topic relating to British Muslims, overwhelmingly comprising an ethnic minority, they feel some kind of obligation to present a viewpoint that makes no concessions to the less palatable views to be found among the general population.

Even so, this hardly explains the uncritical portrayal of the workings of current Sharia courts, and the one-sidedly bleak picture of the Muslim experience, which suggests a propensity to portray this aspect of British life in as dark a colour as they reasonably could, complemented by an unquestioning acceptance of selectively sought Muslim viewpoints. Conceivably this is perceived as their demonstrating to a World Service audience a non-partisan “objectivity” in dealing with controversial social and political affairs. It’s as if they are so intent on producing a “warts and all” portrait of the situation for Muslims in the UK that they end up bending over backwards and presenting nothing but purported warts. It’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that there are certain bien pensant viewpoints prevalent among many BBC personnel that are taken as a given so that the team involved with a programme item such as the one in question engage in what might almost be described as a wilfully partial presentation of the issues.

Unfortunately there is no obligation on the BBC to publicise successful complaints against any of their programmes on the BBC website, nor for there to be any broadcast statement of the findings of the Trust Editorial Standards Committee. This means that only a miniscule proportion of the World Service listeners who heard the item in question will learn that it contravened BBC guidelines on accuracy and impartiality.

This brings me to the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and the very different way this organisation deals with serious complaints. In a previous article I reported on my complaint to the PBS Ombudsman concerning the blatant contraventions of their Editorial Standards policies in their co-produced documentary “Einstein’s Wife” and the accompanying website and school lesson plans. The three Einstein specialists who were interviewed for the film have testified
that immediately after the film was broadcast in 2003 they wrote to the writer/producer Geraldine Hilton and to PBS protesting about “the distasteful manipulation of facts” and “entirely false claims” made in the film. They report that they received no response from either party.

My detailed complaint about the film and website to the PBS Ombudsman, Michael Getler, in March 2006 was sent on by VP Oregon Public Broadcasting, David Davis, to Geraldine Hilton, who replied to the criticisms. A superbly comprehensive report of the situation at that stage was posted by Mr Getler on the Ombudsman’s webpage in December 2006. On the basis of his examination of the relevant material he concluded that there was “a factually flawed and ultimately misleading combination of film and Web presentations”, and recommended shutting down the website pending a scholarly investigation.

In the event, PBS commissioned the author and academic (journalism) Andrea Gabor to rewrite the website material. Unfortunately the book chapter on the same subject that she published in 1995 reveals
that her mode of historical research left a great deal to be desired, and this was again evident
in the revised website posted in September 2007.

I submitted my criticisms of the revised website to David Davis, who replied that he would inform me if he and his colleagues intended to take further action. I later repeated my concerns that PBS had not explicitly acknowledged its breaching editorial standards policies and had also failed to notify schoolteachers that the “Einstein’s Wife” lesson plans, available for downloading for some four years, had been withdrawn. However, Mr Davis failed to address my criticisms
of the current website
or to respond to my noting PBS’s failure to make a public acknowledgement that the film and website had contravened PBS editorial standards. Michael Getler’s final word on the matter in December 2007 was that the film and web presentation remained unsatisfactory and recommended that they should be “pulled”. PBS chose to ignore the advice of their own Ombudsman, and there the matter rests.

What is only too apparent from the above is that, unlike the BBC, PBS has no machinery for independent adjudication on complaints about its programmes. This circumstance was made more invidious in the instance in question by the fact that the senior executive dealing with the complaint, David Davis, had a conflict of interest, in that he was also an executive producer of “Einstein’s Wife”. It is surely a matter of concern that a broadcasting and educational organisation as influential as PBS should lack an adequate procedure for independent adjudication on well-documented complaints of its breaching its Editorial Standards policies on verifying the accuracy of a broadcast production and associated website material. PBS have only themselves to blame if commentators conclude that their programme makers can ignore these policies with impunity.

Allen Esterson’s website is here.

Posted February 4 2009

The combination of the passage of proposition 8 in California and Barack Obama’s decision to have Rick Warren give the invocation at his inauguration caused an outcry on the left concerning the issue of gay rights. Among the various arguments that arose during this time, one ideological split struck me as particularly noteworthy, and potentially troublesome. On the one hand there seemed to be a certainty on the left that homosexuality is rooted in biology. On the other hand the right seemed just as certain that homosexuality is not rooted in biology but is instead freely chosen as a “lifestyle.”

My specific concern with this split pertains to the short-sightedness on the part of the left when advancing the argument that gay rights are somehow dependent on the roots of homosexuality being located inside the genetic code or some other physical cause. Now there may well be such a link. Certainly there is some evidence to support it, though such evidence is not considered conclusive at this time. At the end of the day this will be a question for science to answer. Insofar as politics is concerned, however, the question at hand is one of civil rights. After reviewing the argument as I understand it, I can only conclude that the strategy of linking the civil rights of gay people to the notion that homosexuality is rooted in physiology is misguided. We begin our analysis with a real world example rooted in such an argument.

The following is a rough transcript from “The Ron Reagan show,” a radio show broadcast from Seattle by self-described liberal atheist Ron Reagan. Here he is having a discussion with Chuck Wolfe, the president and CEO of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and Leadership Institute. Also speaking is a caller to the show from Seattle.

Ron Reagan: Had Rick Warren offered the opinion that black and white people should not be allowed to marry, I don’t suppose that under those circumstances we can imagine Obama would have had had him anywhere near the inauguration but how is that really any different from what he’s saying about gay people?

Caller: Well I know the difference between those two and I know you do too…we don’t have enough people that agree there is a similarity between, you know, the color of your skin and your sexual orientation.

Ron Reagan: Both conditions of birth.

Caller: Yeah I think so too, and a lot of people think so, and in this great city a lot of people think so, but a lot of people don’t, and until you have agreement that it’s not something you can choose, widespread agreement, you’re not going to get to make that comparison.

Ron Reagan: Well I can make that comparison anytime I want; I don’t have to have people agreeing with me.

Rick Wolfe: I think your comparison is fair.

Ron Reagan: I do too, I do too.

Now there is no question that those who are opposed to homosexuality would like very much to push back against the idea that homosexuality is a condition of birth. Here is an excerpt from a NARTH (National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality) paper titled: “Homosexuality and Biological Factors: Real Evidence — None; Misleading Interpretations: Plenty.”

Now what is the truth? First, that not a single genetic, physiological, anatomical, or neuroanatomical correlate of homosexuality has been demonstrated. Secondly, that contrary to the impression they confer, precisely the studies of the last 15-20 years have made the existence of such correlates more unlikely than before. Thirdly, that these realities are either not perceived or purposely kept out of awareness because most academic publications on homosexuality are influenced or determined by the predominant gay ideology.

Clearly these two sides disagree on the subject of whether or not homosexuality has its roots in physical causes. The left feels that it is important to promulgate the notion that sexuality has biological roots and is a condition of birth, and the right is certain that this line of thinking is a “predominant gay ideology” of the left that must be combated.

The left should ask itself however: Is it really necessary to prove the biological roots of homosexuality in order to advance the cause of gay rights? If the right were to become victorious in proving that there is no “gay gene” would this have an impact on the culture war in a way that was meaningful? To answer these questions, let us consider the core arguments.

The argument from the left can be boiled down to something like the following:

1. Sexuality, including homosexuality, is rooted in biology and is a function of genes (or some other physical factor).
2. We are not able to choose the things about ourselves that are determined by biology.
3. Therefore homosexuality is not a function of choice, it stems from nature.
4. Human attributes that stem from nature, like the color of our skin or the orientation of our sexual desire cannot (will not) be made the basis for social discrimination.

The argument seems coherent enough assuming that one accepts all the propositions. For the sake of argument let us accept the first three. But what about the forth proposition? The entire reason for proving that homosexuality is rooted in nature is to get to that fourth proposition, for as the caller to the radio show stated, “until you have agreement that it’s not something you can choose, widespread agreement, you’re not going to get to make that comparison,” i.e. the comparison between the natural attributes “sexual orientation” and “skin color.” But the caller and the argument make an assumption here that is demonstrably false: They both assume that if a given attribute of a human being is rooted in nature this will be a sufficient condition for that attribute to be excluded from consideration when determining whether or not the possessor of that attribute should be granted civil rights. Unfortunately this assumption does not hold.

In the world of power and politics the question of whether or not a particular attribute of a person can be made the basis for discrimination against them is purely a function of the power dynamics of the society they live in, and the commonly shared values that hold sway in that society at that particular historical moment. The question of whether the attribute being controlled by society is biological or is generated by a free mind is utterly irrelevant. Consider Nazi Germany. It did not help the Jews one bit that part of what “makes up a Jew” can be based on a biological lineage. In fact it was precisely this heritage that the Nazi’s used to identify “suspected Jews.” Nor would some fellow who had converted to Judaism of his own free will be safe if after being arrested for his beliefs he declared “I am a Jew of my own free choice, I was not born a Jew.” Women were not given the right to vote because it was discovered that they had a biological basis for their “condition” of being women, nor were African Americans given civil rights because they had dark skin as a “condition of birth.” It was precisely their “conditions of birth” that were used, in conjunction with a whole host of arbitrary and false assertions about what these physical differences signified, to justify their subjugation in the first place.

The civil rights of these disenfranchised groups were granted to them not because of their conditions of birth, but in spite of the conditions of their birth and the false and cruel judgments that society had heretofore made about those conditions. The civil rights of African Americans and of women were granted to them by society not because they have this or that physical attribute, but because those conditions are now considered by our society to be irrelevant to the question of their humanity. Our civil rights are based on what we have in common as sentient free willed creatures capable of pursuing life liberty and happiness in spite of all the various differences between us.

Now just as the particular values of a given society determine how the “natural conditions” of birth will be viewed and treated by that society, so too will the free actions of those who live in that society be scrutinized and judged according to that society’s values. In the case of our own society it is the political and religious right that would like us all to share their judgments about homosexuality, which they regard as immoral and perverse. Their argument runs roughly like this:

1. Sexuality, including homosexuality, is a choice.
2. Homosexuality is perverse and/or immoral.
3. Therefore people who engage in homosexuality are perverse and/or immoral.
4. Perverse and immoral people should not be granted the same rights as other people.

The argument constructed by the left, which we have just considered, is an attempt to take away proposition number one. If homosexuality is not a choice, if sexualities arise in bodies as an expression of genetic code or some other physical factor then, so the argument goes, it will not be possible to accuse homosexuals of being immoral since morality implies a choice, and they do not have a choice since their sexuality is determined by their biology. Is this really the argument that the left would like to make its stand on?

Consider the following thought experiment. Let us assume that absolutely conclusive research has discovered a gene that is 100% determinative in causing homosexuality. There is universal agreement among the sciences on this matter. Also let us assume that it is easy to test for this genetic marker.

If it could be shown through genetic testing for this new marker that 90% of people professing to be gay were gay because of the gene but 10% were gay by choice (so demonstrated because they did not have the gene), would the left then be OK with allowing social sanctions to be placed on that remaining 10% who do not have the luxury of pointing to their genes to “justify” their behavior?

Is it plausible that the revelation of such a genetic marker would end the debate on the right? Yes it is conceivable that some percentage of people who are opposed to homosexuality are only so opposed because they believe it is a choice and not a biological phenomenon. But given that the reasons behind most of the judgments against homosexuality are rooted in religious texts it seems more likely that opponents of homosexuality would merely shift their argument and dispense with proposition 1. They could suggest that the gene itself was a manifestation of biological error or that the gene was “evil,” or “from the devil.” They could recommend the development of gene therapy to expunge the gene. Given our history it is not hard to imagine that a biologically based attribute could be turned against a particular group as a sign of their inferiority or imperfection. In any case there is no logically necessary connection between letting go of proposition 1. and ceding the matter by letting go of proposition 2.

Let us consider an alternative thought experiment. Let us assume that after much research, exhaustive documentation of the human genetic code, brain scans, and so forth, no physical cause for homosexuality is found. Proposition 1. is proven correct. Will the left now concede the whole argument? Will gay people cease and desist from their behavior and agree to proposition two, namely that their behavior is immoral? While it is conceivable that some gay people are only comfortable with their sexuality because of a belief that it is biologically rooted, it seems extremely unlikely that this argument would go very far as it is patently clear that many people do not believe that homosexuality is immoral, regardless of its source.

So now we come to the crux of this entire matter: All of the propositions in all of these arguments are in the end irrelevant to the issue of gay rights except for proposition number two, the proposition that homosexuality is immoral.

The war over gay rights is a war over values and beliefs. On the one hand we have groups of individuals who, largely for reasons rooted in religious beliefs, would like to prevent homosexuals from being granted certain legal rights. Against these groups stand other groups who would like to grant individuals who express the attribute “homosexual” the same set of legal rights currently granted to those who express the attribute “heterosexual,” regardless of the source of this attribute though they seem not to want to explicitly argue for this last point.

This reluctance is curious. Why is it that advocates for gay rights spend so much time fighting for the idea that homosexuality is a biological condition when it seems clear that a) they would not consider homosexuality immoral even if it were determined that homosexuality arises out of choice and b) proof that homosexuality is rooted in genetics would in no way guarantee that persecution of homosexuals would cease?

There are a number of answers to this question but I would like to focus on one in particular here. I think it may be due in part to what philosopher Austin Dacey calls “The Privacy Fallacy.” The Privacy Fallacy is the belief, currently popular in the secular left, that discussion of moral valuations, particularly moral valuations that come from religions, should be banished to the private sphere. The original purpose of this move was to make “matters of conscience—religion, ethics, and values” private. “By making conscience private,” Dacey writes, “secular liberals had hoped to prevent believers from introducing sectarian beliefs into politics. But of course they couldn’t, since freedom of belief means believers are free to speak their minds in public.”

The obsession with some on the left with the biological roots of homosexuality is, I think, a direct result of the Privacy Fallacy. Seeking to avoid a conflict over values, which are “private” and “relative” and therefore “uncontestable,” the left has chosen to try to avoid the entire argument that must inevitably occur by hiding behind the possibility of removing homosexuality from a moral calculus via biological fate. But this move is merely delaying the inevitable, and avoiding important facts at hand.

It is the beliefs and values codified in our constitution that protect our liberties. Each and every value in that document must be fought for, every day, intellectually, morally, and passionately. The reason that we have a separation of church and state is not to shove secularists into a corner from which they cannot speak and to allow advocates for this or that particular religion to say whatever they wish, but to allow for a full collision of all ideas under the umbrella of a free and open society.

The idea that homosexuality is immoral and should treated by society as an attribute that disqualifies the possessor from the legal rights associated with marriage or the legal ability to raise children is an idea that can be questioned and critiqued directly without reference to the cause or causes of homosexuality. If our secular society is to make rational progress on this issue then the claim that homosexuality is immoral must be critiqued directly and honestly using all the tools of reason and not sidestepped with arguments that ultimately have little bearing on the case.

AIDS was first reported by US physicians in New York and California in 1981 when young men and women were falling ill of diseases that are usually kept in check by a healthy immune response. It was soon apparent that these individuals’ immune systems were failing. Within just a few years the causal agent of the mysterious disease was discovered; a human retrovirus that would come to be named HIV. Soon after the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS, an antibody test became available and over the past 25 years more than two dozen drugs have been approved for treating HIV infection. HIV treatments improve the health and extend the lives of millions of people worldwide. Despite the thousands of published scientific articles that document these facts, a small group of rogue scientists and pseudoscientists continue to proclaim that HIV does not cause AIDS, HIV antibody tests are invalid, and HIV treatments are merely a pharmaceutical industry scam. Pseudoscientists ignore the volumes of epidemiological evidence that indisputably shows that HIV is sexually transmitted during vaginal intercourse, accounting for the AIDS crisis in Africa. Those who promote these false ideas are AIDS denialists, akin to Holocaust deniers who stake their claims by manipulating history. AIDS deniers are also similar to 9/11 Truth Seekers who warp principles of structural engineering to claim that the World Trade Center was imploded by the US government.

AIDS denialism has recently come into the public eye through the death of one of the most notorious AIDS denialists, Christine Maggiore of Los Angeles. Maggiore was a vocal proponent of AIDS denialism and is well known for having refused to take steps to prevent the transmission of HIV to her children. Christine Maggiore tested HIV positive but later came to refute her own HIV diagnosis after learning of Berkeley biologist Peter Duesberg, who continues to question whether HIV could ever cause AIDS. As a credentialed scientist, Duesberg appears credible. Maggiore grasped at AIDS pseudoscience to support her wishful beliefs that HIV does not cause AIDS. Maggiore’s own baby was denied medications, and died at age three of what the LA coroner ruled was AIDS. Christine Maggiore herself died in December 2008 from pneumonia.

AIDS denialism has gained additional recent media attention. One month before Maggiore’s death, an episode of the popular television show Law and Order – Special Victims Unit portrayed a woman of similar circumstances with the story built entirely around AIDS denialism. The Maggiore story and its portrayal on Law and Order have helped draw public attention to the ongoing problem of AIDS denialism.

Also in the news recently is the stepping down of South African President Thabo Mbeki, who had refused to accept HIV as the cause of AIDS, blocked the use of HIV treatments, and failed to prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of South Africans. Like Christine Maggiore, Mbeki was influenced by AIDS pseudoscientists. He embraced the denialism of a few fringe scientists over the word of his own South African experts. But Mbeki is not the only head of state to bow to denialist propaganda. In the United States, former President George W. Bush’s refusal to lift the federal ban on syringe exchange for HIV prevention as well as his unyielding promotion of abstinence-only prevention programs provide examples of denialist public health policy. Pseudoscience is the lynchpin in all AIDS denialism, whether it is Christine Maggiore’s own personal tragedy or Presidents Mbeki and Bush’s public health disasters.

All pseudoscience is grounded in belief systems that masquerade as science in the absence of any empirical basis. AIDS pseudoscience cherry-picks research results, misrepresents scientific findings, and refutes mainstream research results without basis. One of the peculiarities of AIDS pseudoscience is its near obsession with the original research that discovered HIV as the cause of AIDS, particularly the research of the famous and controversial virologist Robert Gallo. AIDS pseudoscientists focus on Gallo and the earliest of HIV research while ignoring the subsequent two decades of science. AIDS pseudoscience is also quite diverse and often contradictory. Some AIDS pseudoscientists proclaim that HIV does not exist at all while others claim that HIV is a harmless ‘passenger’ virus that does not cause AIDS. Other denialists claim that HIV does exist and does cause AIDS, but that the virus is not sexually transmitted. Despite the vast inconsistencies of various branches of AIDS pseudoscience, there is little debate or argument among themselves.

If the denialists are right in saying that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, then what do they say does cause AIDS? AIDS pseudoscientists claim the causes of AIDS are poverty, oxidizing stress, substance abuse, and HIV treatments themselves. They say that the cause of AIDS differs depending on where people live. In the US, pseudoscientists claim that AIDS is caused by substance abuse and HIV treatments. In Africa where there is little substance use and HIV treatments have only recently become available, pseudoscientists state that AIDS is caused by poverty and stress.

Invariably, AIDS pseudoscience bolsters conspiracy theorizing, the very foundation for AIDS denialism. These particular conspiracies promote the ideas that HIV tests are flawed and government researchers are working with Big Pharma to poison minorities and gays for profit. AIDS pseudoscientists generally make their arguments by manipulating scientific findings. There are, however, noteworthy examples of pseudoscientific experiments and even illegally conducted ‘clinical trials’ of fraudulent AIDS cures.

There are also AIDS pseudoscientists who do not dispute HIV as the cause of AIDS, but claim that HIV is not sexually transmitted or is not transmitted by vaginal sexual intercourse. The spread of HIV is attributed to contaminated blood, non-sterile syringes, and anal sex. Despite decades of conclusive evidence that HIV is spread by heterosexual/vaginal intercourse, these contrarians claim that vaginal sexual transmission of HIV is a myth designed to suppress sexuality and promote condom use. Just as those who claim that HIV does not cause AIDS rely on pseudo-immunology, those who promote the idea that HIV is not vaginally sexually transmitted do so on the basis of pseudo-epidemiology. The most common examples of pseudo-epidemiology come in the form of selective reviews of research literature and cherry picked results. Just as pseudo-immunology causes harm by convincing people to disregard their HIV test results and persuading them to avoid HIV treatments, pseudo-epidemiology tells people that condoms are unnecessary during vaginal intercourse and ineffective at preventing HIV transmission during anal sex. Thus, just as pseudo-immunology fuels the denial of HIV as the cause of AIDS, pseudo-epidemiology tells people that they need not worry about using condoms.

AIDS pseudoscientists have gained credibility via the credentials of a few rogue academics. Most AIDS pseudoscientists do not have academic affiliations. However, the few that do are the most persuasive. In addition to Berkeley biologist Peter Duesberg, a more recent AIDS pseudoscientist is Emeritus Professor Henry Bauer of Virginia Polytechnic University. Dr. Bauer has formulated a convoluted argument that HIV may not exist and if HIV does exist it could not possibly cause AIDS. To build his case, Bauer uses population-specific HIV testing data in relation to population-wide AIDS surveillance data. For example, he shows how gender distributions of HIV infections from military recruits tested for HIV in the 1980s do not reflect the US national AIDS cases more than a decade later. Bauer violates every simple rule of epidemiology by treating cross-sectional studies as if they were longitudinal, failing to differentiate HIV incidence from prevalence, and not distinguishing viral from bacterial diseases. Bauer also proclaims that people test HIV positive because the HIV test is easily fooled by multiple antibodies, or cross contamination. Most remarkably, he claims that Africans and people of African heritage are more likely to test ‘HIV positive’ because they have a greater abundance and diversity of antibodies that confound the test.

Before becoming a leader among AIDS pseudoscientists, Henry Bauer was the Editor of the Journal of Scientific Exploration – a primary outlet for UFOlogy and the study of magnetic auras. He himself is among the world’s leading authorities on the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. That is right, the Loch Ness Monster. Nevertheless, Henry Bauer has become a major pillar in AIDS pseudoscience with a large internet following. Simply put he is telling us what anyone would want to hear, that HIV cannot cause AIDS.

How does AIDS pseudoscience present itself as legitimate science? Aside from the obvious role of the Internet and ‘self-published’ books, pseudoscience has found its way into forums that are easily mistaken as scientific and scholarly publications. Until a few years back, AIDS pseudoscientists had their own homegrown outlet called Continuum, which was produced for the sole purpose of disseminating AIDS denialism and AIDS pseudoscience. Although most of the content in Continuum did not appear scientific, some of the more repugnant examples of AIDS pseudoscience did appear in Continuum. Most notorious was a pseudoscientific experiment conducted by the AIDS denialist Roberto Geraldo that used undiluted blood plasma in HIV antibody testing, violating the test procedures and protocols. He then used the results to claim that HIV antibody tests are invalid and that everyone tests HIV positive. Fortunately, Continuum went out of existence.

The pseudoscience outlet Journal of Scientific Exploration printed Henry Bauer’s articles on HIV not causing AIDS, along side articles on paranormal activity and alien abductions. Mohammed Ali Al-Bayati, a toxicologist who claims HIV does not cause AIDS, published a case report of Christine Maggiore’s 3 year old daughter that contradicted the LA coroner’s findings to conclude that the girl died of an allergic reaction to an antibiotic. The paper was published in an outlet called Medical Veritas: The Journal of Medical Truth which has published other articles by Al-Bayati including “Analysis of causes that led to Eliza Jane Scovill’s cardiac arrest and death”, “Analysis of causes that led to subdural bleeding, skull and rib fractures, and death in the case of baby Averial Buie”, and “Analysis of causes that led to baby Ryan’s hemorrhagic pneumonia, cardiac arrest, intracranial bleeding, and retinal bleeding”. One author, several papers, one journal.

The obvious pseudoscience outlets are not as disturbing as journals that appear far more scientific but are not mainstream. The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, for example, is an online outlet for rightwing politically motivated articles and has become a home for AIDS pseudoscience as well. One article published in this journal reported a possible mathematical model to account for AIDS by oxidation, of course without any supporting data. They have also published several writings by Henry Bauer including one proclaiming ‘We all have HIV’ based on Giraldo’s pseudoscience. Most perplexing are those peer-reviewed scientific journals that have become home to AIDS pseudoscience. One notable example is the International Journal of HIV and STDs, a journal that I have published in myself. My experience with this journal has been that papers are sometimes peer-reviewed and other times not. Nearly every article that has been published that questions vaginal intercourse transmission of HIV has been published in this one journal. These selective review articles conclude that HIV is not transmitted during vaginal intercourse, all by the same few authors. What is most worrying about this instance is that pseudoscience becomes mixed with genuine peer-reviewed research making it difficult for the nonscientist to tease them apart.

AIDS pseudoscience embodies the same characteristics as any other form of pseudoscience. AIDS pseudoscience has ideological, cultural, or commercial goals. There is rarely anything that even resembles research, and when there are pseudoscience experiments they are conducted to justify denialist beliefs. AIDS pseudoscience is built on exaggerated claims that lack precise measurements. When challenged, pseudoscience reacts with hostility. Like all pseudoscience, AIDS pseudoscience is almost always promoted by individuals who are not in contact with mainstream science. Pseudoscientists invoke authority for support of their ideas and their major tenets are not falsifiable. Explanations offered by AIDS pseudoscience tend to be vague and opaque. The concepts of AIDS pseudoscience tend to be shaped by individual egos and personalities. Pseudoscientists are particularly apt at providing selective evidence to support their own claims.

What can we do about AIDS pseudoscience? The strongest remedy for AIDS pseudoscience is exposing it for what it is. Pointing out the illogical inconsistencies of AIDS pseudoscience can help distinguish it from science. Examining who AIDS pseudoscientists are and their fringe ideas can also help. As discussed above, Henry Bauer can prove that HIV does not cause AIDS and believes that hoax pictures of the Loch Ness Monster are indeed authentic. In addition to stating that HIV is harmless and that AIDS is caused by toxins, Peter Duesberg says that ALL cancers are caused by environmental toxins without ant genetic basis. Kary Mullis won a Nobel Prize for developing PCR and states that there is no proof that HIV causes AIDS. He also claims to have been abducted by aliens. It only stands to reason that we should question the claims of ‘scientists’ who have spent time with little green men as well as those who proclaim the existence of big green monsters lurking under Scottish waters. Critical thinking is the key to refuting pseudoscience and trust in science is the antidote for conspiracy thinking. AIDS pseudoscience and denialism will not simply go away if ignored and more than will intelligent design and 9/11 truth seeking. Each of us has a responsibility to think critically and to debunk pseudoscience every chance we get.

Seth Kalichman is the author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy published by Copernicus Books. All royalties from the sale of Denying AIDS are donated to purchase HIV treatments in Africa. For more information visit Denying AIDS.

Mr. President, Your stirring inauguration speech
was a great moment for all Americans. When you
said, “We are a nation of Christians and
Muslims, Jews and Hindus ­ and nonbelievers.” it
was an especially heartening moment for atheists,
agnostics, secularists, and humanists. Treated
as invisible throughout the 2008 election
campaign, we were enormously cheered to hear you
including us as you took office. This should
remind every American how important it will be to
have a president genuinely devoted to reaching
out to people of different backgrounds and beliefs.

But, as you begin your term, we nonbelievers are
still troubled by much that has gone on during
the last year. You know how offensive to gays was
your choice of Rick Warren to deliver the
invocation at the inauguration, but do you know
how offensive it was to secularists that this man
declared on national television that he would
never vote for an atheist? Nonbelievers are often
scorned, or treated as if we don’t exist. On
occasion recently it has been done in your name
and, yes, by you yourself. So to clear the air,
we have a few questions we hope you will answer.

We have heard you speak confidently as a
Constitutional scholar committed to maintaining
the separation of church and state while voicing
your determination to bring your faith into the
public square and espousing expanding government
support for faith-based social services But
whether or not Jefferson’s “wall of separation”
is actually breeched, we worry: can’t this
undermine the spirit if not the letter of
America’s secular Constitution? And why did you
submit to an informal religious test during the
campaign, by being cross-examined by Warren about
your personal religious beliefs? He asked: “What
does it mean to you to trust in Christ? And what
does that mean to you on a daily basis?” Wasn’t
answering these questions yielding to the
religious right, a possibly dangerous precedent?
Would you do it again? Would you advise future candidates to do the same?

In your Labor Day speech in Detroit, which was
shortened to nine minutes because of Hurricane
Gustav, you mentioned God and prayer no fewer
than six times, and concluded by leading the
audience in silent prayer for those in possible
danger. Among the audience were thousands of
people who do not pray. Perhaps you were trying
to spare their sensitivities by imposing a silent
prayer, but wouldn’t it have been more genuinely
inclusive to acknowledge the nonbelievers in the
audience? Why not say: “For those threatened by
Gustav, let’s have a moment of silence, whether in prayer or meditation”?
The “values” and “unity” event that kicked off
the Denver convention turned out to be a
religious celebration, pure and simple. Leah
Daughtry ignored the Secular Coalition for
America’s request to participate. And every
convention session began with a prayer. Wouldn’t
it be more unifying and respectful of all
people’s beliefs to reach out to nonbelievers as
well, and to recast the event next time so that
it’s really about “values” and not just
“religious values”? And why not begin sessions
with not just prayer but also meditation, so that
everyone, believer and nonbeliever is made to
feel at home. Further, why not add a fourteenth
caucus, the Secular Caucus, to the list of convention meetings?

Each of these moments during the campaign is
destructive of the principle of treating all
people with respect. Each reflects the widespread
assumption that religious values, norms and
practices apply to everyone. As President, you
have a great opportunity to extend the spirit of
multiculturalism in a new direction: to those who
do not pray, who do not worship, who do not go to
church. We are cheered by your inauguration remarks, and ask you to keep on.

Ronald Aronson is Distinguished Professor of the History of Ideas at Wayne State University. His new book is Living Without God.

Two attractive women approach you. Introducing themselves, one tells you that she is the personification of Duty, and invites you to follow her down the road of virtue, piety, sacrifice and hard slog. The second beauty represents Pleasure: she wants to guide you down a path of indolence, vice and hedonism. Which do you choose?

This was the famous ‘choice of Hercules’, put to him while he was a farm labourer in exile: appropriated by various religions and mythologies, it can be argued that millions of people who have never read the classics still think of life in these terms of virtue versus pleasure: the good life versus the Good Life. A C Grayling’s achievement is to expose this dichotomy as false.

Of course people can’t truly dedicate themselves either to duty or pleasure alone. The majority of lives are a combination of both, and people who walk one road – Florence Nightingale or Hunter S Thompson – tend to become legendary for their choice of mistress. Yet the convention has it that duty is always worthwhile whereas pleasure is generally worthless self-indulgence.

But is this true? Ideas of duty animate terrorists and suicide bombers but the outcome of these drives tends to be destruction of life, including their own. Those who dedicate themselves to pleasure, by contrast, tend to be happier and therefore better disposed to those around them. Yet even those of us who dedicate ourselves to hedonism will suffer pain and loss at some time.

And surely the purpose of duty in a society – having people who commit themselves to defending their country or pounding the streets in uniform on Friday nights – is so that others will be free to experience pleasure: i.e. not murdered, raped, assaulted or vapourised.

Duty as an end in itself, though, is no goal at all, as Grayling, in his erudite, conversational style, effortlessly shows:

If anything, the example of humourless, disapproving, repressive moralisers whose pointing fingers have blighted enough lives to fill armies many times over, ought to be enough to remind us that the phrase ‘the good life’ genuinely merits its double meaning: for the valuable life (the life truly worth living for the one living it) and the pleasurable life (of which affection, laughter, achievement and beauty are integral characteristics) are one and the same.

In a series of essays on social taboos Grayling shows how the false dichotomy of Hercules has corrupted the twenty-first century. One major aspect is that longevity of life has been prioritised over quality of life. On her visit to London this year, the Iranian writer Marjane Satrapi gave her impressions of British society:

Anything that has a relationship with pleasure we reject it. Eating, they talk about cholesterol; making love, they talk about Aids; you talk about smoking, they talk about cancer. It’s a very sick society that rejects pleasure… Why should we live like sick people just to give some fresh meat to the ground?

An obvious example is the war on drugs. Governments are happy to destroy Afghan poppy crops that could be developed into morphine to help the sick. Politicians have always used the drug issue as an opportunity for macho posturing on crime policy, yet continued criminalisation leaves the power and the money in the hands, not of the Treasury (who could put it to good use) but of gangster scum that terrorise communities.

My Shiraz Socialist
colleague, Caroline S, is doing some sterling work in showing how the prohibitionist line on prostitution inflicts real harm. In response to the sickening murders of five Norfolk prostitutes – murders that would almost certainly not have happened had these women been working in a legal, unionised, regulated sex industry – Britain’s Home Secretary plans to introduce more of the same: proposals for more criminalisation, pushing women underground and putting them at risk. The war on the world’s oldest profession will get Jacqui Smith some nice headlines but in the long term, it is as doomed as the war on drugs: a pointless and unwinnable battle fought in quicksands of blood.

Advocates of decriminalisation point out that illegal drugs are actually a lot less harmful that alcohol and tobacco. Government seems to have taken this advice to heart: now as well as policing use of illegal drugs it is policing the use of legal ones. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the UK smoking ban: a policy of social exclusion masquerading as a public health initiative. Banner campaigns and strategy documents suggest that bevvy is going the same way.

You can find similar intellectual writhings in contemporary attitudes to sex and relationships. Already hammered by millennia of state-sponsored virginity cults, the modern conception of romance is now driven almost entirely by social status and the fear of dying alone. Grayling points out that adultery, divorce and open marriages are better alternatives than condemning people to lonely, loveless partnerships: our puritan climate makes his common sense revolutionary.

And yet people complain that society is too permissive, yearning for a time a hundred years back, of child labour and child prostitution, when, as Grayling says, ‘if a man’s wife were pregnant or menstruating he might turn to his eldest daughter’ – the Victorian age. Before discussing the petty morality of the twenty-first century, though, Grayling says this:

The great moral questions – the most moral and urgent ones – are not about sex, drugs and unmarried mothers. They are, instead, about human rights, war and genocide, the arms trade, poverty in the Third World, the continuance of slavery under many guises and names, interreligious antipathies and conflicts, and inequality and injustice everywhere. These areas of concern involve truly staggering horrors and human suffering. In comparison to them, the parochial and largely misguided anxieties over sex, drugs, gay marriage and the other matters that fill newspapers and agitate the ‘Moral Majority’ in America and Britain, pale into triviality. It is itself a moral scandal that these questions preoccupy debate in comfortable corners of the world, while real atrocity and oppression exist elsewhere.

Too true, and perhaps the real choice of Hercules should be neither duty nor pleasure but the duty of bringing as much of the world to a state where pleasure is, at least, a possible.

The Choice of Hercules, A C Grayling, Orion 2008

The following comments are not a direct response to Bruce Chilton’s very helpful article on the Jesus Project but in many ways anticipate and respond to some of his observations. I offer it as further commentary on the pros and cons of undertaking yet another “quest,” at a time when New Testament scholarship, in the eyes of some, is a mission without a guiding purpose. JH

Crouching somewhere between aesthetic sound byte and historical detail is Michelangelo’s famous statement about sculpture. “The job of the sculptor,” Vasari attributes to il Divino, “is to set free the forms that are within the stone.” It’s a lovely thought—poetic, in fact. If you accept the theory of Renaissance Platonism, as Michelangelo embodies it, you also have to believe that “Moses” and “David” were encased in stone, yearning to be released—as the soul yearns to be set free from the flesh in the theology of salvation. You will however be left wondering why such a theory required human models with strong arms and firm thighs, and why the finished product bears no more resemblance to real or imagined historical figures than a drawing that any one of us could produce. We may lack Michelangelo’s skill and his deft way with a rasp and chisel, but we can easily imagine more probable first millennium BC heroes—in form, stature, skin-tone and body type—than the Italian beauties he released from their marble prisons. In fact, the more we know about the first millennium BC, the more likely we are to be right. And alas, Michelangelo didn’t know very much about history at all. And what’s more, it made no difference to his art, his success, or his reputation. That is why idealism and imagination are sometimes at odds with history, or put bluntly, why history acts as a control on our ability to imagine or idealize anything, often profoundly wrong things.

If we apply the same logic to the New Testament, we stumble over what I have (once or twice) called the Platonic Fallacy in Jesus research. Like it or not, the New Testament is still the primary artifact of the literature that permits us to understand the origins of Christianity. It’s the stone, if not the only stone. If we possessed only gnostic and apocryphal sources as documentary sources of Christian beginnings, and no movement that preserved them, we would be hard-pressed to say anything, other than that at some time in the first and second century a short-lived, curious, and highly incoherent religious movement fluoresced and faded (many did) in the night sky of Hellenistic antiquity. The Jesus we would know from these sources would be an odd co-mixture of insufferable infant à la the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a hell-robber, like the liberator of the Gospel of Nicodemus, a mysterious cipher, like the unnamed hero of the Hymn of the Pearl, or an impenetrable guru, like the Jesus of the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Despite the now-yellowed axiom we all learned as first year divinity students of a certain generation, and later in graduate school (the one where we are taught that “no picture of early Christianity is complete without availing ourselves of all the sources”) I will climb out on a limb to say that these sources are not so much integral to a coherent picture of early Christianity as they are pebbles in orbit around the gravitational center we call the canon. They are interesting—fascinating even—in showing us how uniformity of opinion and belief can wriggle out of a chaos of alterative visions (maybe the closest analogues are in constitutional history), but they are not the stone that the most familiar form of Christianity was made from. That recognition is as important as it is increasingly irrelevant to modern New Testament discussion.

So, how do we approach the New Testament? What kind of rock is it? We know (to stay with the metaphor) that it’s “metamorphic”—made of bits and pieces formed under pressure—in the case of the New Testament, doctrinal and political pressure to define the difference between majority and minority views and impressions, once but now unfashionably called “orthodoxy” and “heresy.”

Whatever the root-causes of canon-formation, canon we have. The Platonic Fallacy comes into play when New Testament scholarship labors under assumptions that emanated from the literary praxis of Renaissance humanists and then (in methodized form) fueled the theological faculties of Germany well into the twentieth century–before a staggering retreat from “higher criticism” by neo-orthodox, and then existentialist, postmodern and correctness theologians. The sequence of Jesus-quests that began before Schweitzer (who thought he was writing a retrospective!)—and the succession of theories they produced were honest in their understanding of the metamorphic nature of the canon and the textual complexity of the individual books that composed it. The legacy, at least a legacy of method, of the early quests was a healthy skepticism that sometimes spilled over into Hegelianism, as with F. C. Baur, or mischievous ingenuity, as with Bruno Bauer. But what Left and Right Hegelians and their successors—from Harnack to Bultmann to the most radical of their pupils–had in common was a strong disposition to approach the canon with a chisel, assuming that if the historical accretions, misrepresentations, and conscious embellishment could be stripped away, beneath it all lay the figure of a comprehensible Galilean prophet whose life and message could be used to understand the “essence” (the nineteenth century buzzword) of Christianity. The inaccessibility of the core, and the amount of confusion, byways, and dead-ends one encountered in approaching it, made it possible for a thousand possibilities and theories to take temporary root, then wither in the noonday sun.

Whether the program was demythologizing or structuralist exegesis, the methods seemed to chase forgone conclusions about what the gospels were, and what the protagonist must “really” have been like. Judged by the standards of the chisel-bearers of the Tuebingen school, Schweitzer’s caution that the Jesus of history would remain a mystery (“He comes to us as one unknown…”) was both prophetic, and yet merely an interlude in the effort to excavate the historical Jesus. If it was meant to be dissuasive, it became instead a battle cry for better chisels and more theorists. In the latter part of the twentieth century, it has involved a demand for more sources as well. –Not to mention cycles of translations, each purporting to be “definitive,” and thus able to shed light on a historical puzzle that the previous translation did not touch or failed to express. Judas, Philip and Mary Magdalene have achieved a star-status far out of proportion to anything they can tell us about the historical Jesus let alone any consideration of literary merit or influence on tradition. When I say this, I am not asking modern scholarship to embrace the opinions of “dead orthodox bishops,” or “winners” but to get behind the choices the church’s first intellectuals made and their reasons for making them. The politicization of sources, the uninformative vivisection of historically important theological disputes into a discussion of outcomes (winners, losers) may make great stuff for the Discovery channel or the Easter edition of Time, but it is shamelessly Hollywood and depends on a culture of like-minded footnotes, a blurring of pop- and academic cultures, and a troubling disingenuousness with regard to what scholars know to be true and what they claim to be true.

Moreover, it is one of the reasons (I’m loath to say) why a hundred years after the heyday of the “Radical School” of New Testament scholarship—which certainly had its warts—the questions of “total spuriousness” (as of Paul’s letters) and the “non-historicity of Jesus” are still considered risible or taboo. They are taboo because of the working postulate that has dominated New Testament scholarship for two centuries and more: that conclusions depend on the uncovering of a kernel of truth at the center of a religious movement, a historical center, and, desirably, a historical person resembling, if not in every detail, the protagonist described in the gospels. This working postulate is formed by scholars perfectly aware that no similar imperative exists to corroborate the existence (or sayings) of the “historical” Adam, the historical Abraham, or Moses, or David—or indeed the prophets—or any equivalent effort to explain the evolution of Judaism on the basis of such inquiry.

The Platonic Fallacy depends on the “true story” being revealed through the disaggregation of traditions: dismantle the canon, factor and multiply the sources of the gospels, marginalize the orthodox settlement as one among dozens of possible outcomes affecting the growth of the church, incorporate all the materials the church fathers sent to the bin or caused to be hidden away. Now we’re getting somewhere. It shuns the possibility that the aggregation of traditions begins with something historical, but not with a historical individual—which even if it turns out to be false, is a real possibility. Even the most ardent historicists of the twentieth century anticipated a “revelation” available through historical research: thus Harnack could dismiss most of the miracles of the gospels, argue for absolute freedom of inquiry in gospels-research (a theme Bultmann would take up), insist that “historical knowledge is necessary for every Christian and not just for the historian,” all however in order to winnow “the timeless nucleus of Christianity from its various time bound trappings.”[1]

The Jesus Seminar was perhaps the last gasp of the Platonic Fallacy in action. Formed to “get at” the authentic sayings of Jesus, it suffered from the conventional hammer and chisel approach to the sources that has characterized every similar venture since the nineteenth century, missing only the idealistic and theological motives for sweeping up afterward. It will remain famous primarily for its eccentricity, its claim to be a kind of Jesus jury and to establish through a consensus (never reached) what has evaded lonelier scholarship for centuries.

The Seminar was happy with a miracle-free Jesus, a fictional resurrection, a Jesus whose sayings were as remarkable as “And how are you today Mrs. Jones?” It used and disused standard forms of biblical criticism selectively and often inexplicably to offer readers a “Jesus they never knew,” a Galilean peasant, a cynic, a de-eschatologized prophet, a craftsman whose dad was a day-laborer in nearby Sepphoris (never mind the Nazareth issue, or the Joseph issue). These purportedly “historical” Jesuses were meant to be more plausible than the Jesus whose DNA lived on in the fantasies of Dan Brown and Nikos Kazantzakis. But in fact, they began to blur. It betimes took sources too literally and not literally enough, and when it became clear that the star system it evoked was resulting in something like a Catherine Wheel rather than a conclusion, it changed the subject. As long ago as 1993, it became clear that the Jesus Seminar was yet another attempt to break open the tomb where once Jesus lay (I’m reminded of a student’s gospel paraphrase of Luke 24.5, with 24.42 in view) to find a note that read “Gone Fishing,” in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. It was that long ago that I commented in a popular journal that “The Jesus of the Westar Project is a talking doll with a questionable repertoire of thirty-one sayings. Pull a string and he blesses the poor.” I was anticipated in this by none other than John Dominic Crossan (a Seminar founder) who wrote in 1991, having produced his own minority opinion concerning Jesus, “It seems we can have as many Jesuses as there are exegetes…exhibiting a stunning diversity that is an academic embarrassment.” And Crossan’s caveat had been expressed more trenchantly a hundred years before by the German scholar Martin Kaehler: “The entire life of Jesus movement,” he argued, was based on misperceptions “and is bound to end in a blind alley…Christian faith and the history of Jesus repel each other like oil and water.”[2] It can now be fairly asked whether the Jesus Seminar in its more than twenty years of labor did anything to mitigate the academic embarrassment Crossan mentions.

If we add these to the work of the Jesus Seminar the “extra-Seminar Jesuses,” magicians, insurgents, bandits, we end up with a multiplicity that “makes the prospect that Jesus never existed a welcome relief.”[3]

***

Bruce Chilton is one of a number of scholars who comes away from the Jesus Seminar sadder but wiser and hopes that the Jesus Project will not be another stuttering attempt to break rocks and piece them back together to create plausible Jesuses, as Michelangelo created a plausible Moses for the Italians of the sixteenth century. His challenge to the Project is fair enough. In fact, one of the benefits we inherit from the Seminar is a record of success and failure. It raised the question of methodology in a way that can no longer be ignored, without however providing a map for further study. Its legacy is primarily a cautionary tale concerning the limits of “doing” history collectively, and sometimes theologically, and the Jesus Project must take this seriously.

Let me add to this commentary a special concern as I watch the Project unfold. Jesus-research—biblical research in general—through the end of the twentieth century was exciting stuff. The death of one of the great Albright students in 2008, and a former boss of mine at the University of Michigan, David Noel Freedman, reminds us that we may be at the end of the road. Excitement is no longer guaranteed. Albright’s careful scholarship and research, and his general refusal to shy away from the “results” of archaeology, were accompanied by a certain optimism in terms of how archaeology could be used to “prove” the Bible. In its general outline, the Bible was true; there was no reason (for example) to doubt the essential biographical details of the story of Abraham in Genesis. Albright’s pupils were less confident of the biblical record. As William Dever observed in a classic 1995 article in The Biblical Archaeologist, “His central theses have all been overturned, partly by further advances in Biblical criticism, but mostly by the continuing archaeological research of younger Americans and Israelis to whom he himself gave encouragement and momentum…The irony is that, in the long run, it will have been the newer ‘secular’ archaeology that contributed the most to Biblical studies, not ‘Biblical archaeology’.”[4] New Testament archaeology is a different house, built with different stones. To be perfectly fair, the biblical appendix lacks the geographical markers and vivid information that suffuse the Hebrew Bible. If the Old Testament landscape is real geography populated by mythical heroes, the New Testament trends in the opposite direction. That does not argue the “imaginary” or “mythical” status pf its central figure. But it does raise the question. The nature of the sources as religious literature, indeed, raises the question, and the Jesus Seminar it seems to me was most unwise to proceed with its agenda as thougb the question had been laid to rest in a responsible and conclusive way.

New Testament scholars in my opinion have tried to develop an ersatz-“archaeology of sources” to match the more impressive gains in Old Testament studies. The reasons for the “new sources” trend in New Testament research are multiple, but the one I fear the most is Jesus- fatigue. There is a sense that prior to 1980 New Testament scholarship was stuck in the mire of post-Bultmannian ennui. The various quests have been in part a response to a particular historical situation, but to large degree their results have been manufactured rather than arrived at by sound historical methods. Five gospels are better than four. The more sources we have the more we know about Jesus. Q (a) did exist, (b) did not exist (c) is proved” by Thomas or (d) is far more layered and interesting than used to be thought. Judas was actually the primary apostle. No, it was Mary Magdalene. We may find Baur’s view of a synthetic Christianity outworn and simplistic, but one shudders to think what he would make of ours.

When we considered developing the Jesus Project, it was not out of any malignant attempt to “prove” that Jesus did not exist. As a Christian origins scholar by training, I am not even sure how one would go about such a task, or be taken seriously if it were undertaken. Yet the possibility that Christianity arose from causes that have little to do with an historical founder is one among many other questions the Project should take seriously. Inevitably, scholars and critics (if not always the same people) will ask, And just how do you go about doing that?, and neither the answer “Differently” or “Better” will suffice.

The demon crouching at the door in this enterprise, however, is not criticism of its intent nor skepticism about its outcome, but the sense that biblical scholarship in the twentieth century will not be greeted with the same excitement as it was in Albright’s day. Outside America, where the landscape is also changing, fewer people have any interest in the outcomes of biblical research, whether it involves Jericho or Jesus. The secularization of world culture encourages us to value what matters here and now. As one of our members, Arthur Droge (Toronto) mentioned at the recent meeting of the Project in Amherst, NY, most of us were trained in a generation ”that believed certain questions were inherently interesting.” But fewer and fewer people do. Jesus-fatigue—the sort of despair that can only be compared to a police investigation gone cold—is the result of a certain resignation to the unimportance of historical conclusions.

Reaching for the stars and reaching back into history have in common the fact that their objects are distant and sometimes unimaginably hard to see. What I personally hope the Project will achieve is to eschew breaking rocks, and instead learn to train our lens in the right direction and the right objects. Part of that process is to respond to Droge’s challenge: Why is this important? And I have the sense that in trying to answer that question, we will be answering bigger questions as well.

Notes

1. What is Christianity? Translated by Thomas Bailey Sanders. Philadelphia: Fortress Press., 1986, p. 191.

2. http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=hoffmann_27_3

3. Hoffmann, introduction to G A Wells, The Jesus Legend (Open Court, 1996), xi.

4. William Dever, “What Remains of the House that Albright Built?” The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), 464.

R. Joseph Hoffmann (PhD, Oxford) is Chair of CSER, the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion and co-Chair (with Robert M. Price and Gerd Luedemann) of The Jesus Project. He is Scholar in Residence (2009) at Goddard College and teaches History at Geneseo College (SUNY). The proceedings of the first meeting of The Jesus Project will appear in late 2009 under the title Sources of Jesus Tradition: An Inquiry (Humanity Books).

Why is there wavering in my voice when I say that something is ‘wrong, period’? It may be that in the back of my mind I hear someone retort, “But that’s just your opinion” or “Who are you to say?”, skeptical charges to which I have no immediate reply. Or it may be that I expect my interlocutor to go to great lengths to point out to me that somebody who can make that sort of proposition has to be smug, overconfident, and immodest, none of which, he will assuredly imply, are very becoming.

It is common today to hear people speak about wanting to get other people’s perspectives. By definition, perspectives are ways of seeing the world from different spatial (or cognitive) locations. Getting more perspectives thereby gives us more ways of seeing the world. And the more ways we have of seeing the world, the more likely we are to see things more clearly or, if not more clearly, then more complexly. Doubtless, it is an aesthetic capacity: think about how many ways there are of looking at a blackbird. Along with perspectives, one also hears plenty of talk about opinions, interpretations, and readings on radio call-in programs, in college classrooms, and in the public square. Having an opinion seems to imply that neither I nor anyone else can have a final say on the issue. We acknowledge from the start that the things before us are open-ended and bound to change; that opinions are (or may just be) expressions of our feelings, preferences, or tastes; and that I can have my opinion, you can have yours, and there needn’t be any conflict between thine and mine. Indeed, it is perfectly natural for you to opine that P and for me to opine that not-P without there being any contradiction here: for it is P according to you and not-P according to me. Not only is there no contradiction; there is not even a disagreement between us. So, the pay-off of speaking of perspectives, opinions, and the like is that we can tacitly endorse tolerance and, in so doing, keep everything neat and tidy.

The view I have been describing above normally goes by the name of relativism. The tell-tale sign? You say something about a state of affairs only for the next person to challenge your authority by saying something which brings to your attention the fact that you are of a certain race or gender or that you belong to a certain class, social standing, or nation. (I suppose the challenge to the Martian’s universalist claims would be that she is, after all, a Martian.) By the relativist’s lights, you say is or ought, but you mean who. In this way, your interlocutor “unmasks” universal propositions for what they really are—particular interests motivated by particular ends. You either don’t realize (or don’t let on) the extent to which your statements and factual judgments are really shot through by what the philosopher Simon Blackburn in his book Truth: A Guide sheepishly calls “dark forces,” or you don’t acknowledge how partial and personal your seemingly impartial and impersonal views actually are. Either way, you are hoisted on the relativist’s petard.

Needless to say, I reject relativism, but I am not certain that reason, as it is traditionally conceived, will do much to change things. This may sound like a clear case of pessimism, an excessively sober view of the limits of reason, or perhaps a textbook example of Platonic elitism, but it needn’t be any of these at all. My thought is that whatever authority practical reason has—the sort of reason, I mean, that is concerned with moral conduct, political affairs, and values in general—is slight in comparison with traditional authority and with the authority that we implicitly associate with our everyday practices. Rarely indeed has engaging in philosophical argument changed somebody’s mind or gained her rational assent. Normally, she simply opts out or grows silent. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in Cosmopolitanism, our views of the social world tend to change when our individual habits and our communal practices change. Over the past twenty years, homosexuality didn’t, in the public eye, become any less of a perversion or a sin; it simply became more familiar, more recognizable, and, in consequence, less distasteful. In light of this, my suggestion will be that if we wish to make relativism look considerably less appealing to plain persons and if we are nevertheless convinced that practical reason can do some good in the public domain, then we had better develop a conception of public practical reason that can do the trick.

To see why, I want to begin by discussing three traditional, and not unrelated, conceptions of reason: reason as objectivity, reason as justification, and reason as demonstration. My aim will be to give a rough account of why they prove ineffectual against the sort of relativism that one finds in the public sphere.

According to the objectivity conception, any person is capable of detaching himself from his particular interests in order to ascend to a standpoint that is, in the words of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, “a view from nowhere.” The objectivist insists not only that anyone, in principle, can look at things in a disinterested way but also that anything we discover from such a vantage point must apply to everyone or to what there is. In answer to the objectivist, the relativist could reply in one of two ways. First, he might claim that there could be “dark forces” of which one remains unaware, forces that make getting the sort of picture of the world that the objectivist is urging simply impossible (perhaps, unbeknown to you, your unconscious is the spring behind your inquiry). Alternatively, he might grant that we can have a “view from nowhere” but then suggest that such a view has no bearing on our moral conduct. In support of this claim, he might say, for example, that Kant’s supreme moral principle, the categorical imperative, may apply to Western Europeans, but “universalizing maxims” have nothing to do with how people in traditional societies live. “Yes, but ought they?” As if to drive home his point, he might conclude that saying that the categorical imperative carries normative force no matter what one’s experiences are has a decidedly ethnocentric ring to it. In short, for the relativist reason construed as impartiality is a non-starter.

Should you claim that modern science gives us a view of the way the natural world is independently of our conceptions of it, this still leaves in doubt the further claim about whether we can make the same claim about the realm of values. The thought, pitched this way, is that facts are not like values at all. Perhaps conceding this much (though perhaps not), you might try a different tack, now urging that reason has to do with justifying what we believe and how we act. Consider how we justify our behavior. I think Appiah is right to hold that rarely do we offer reasons for actions that we may undertake. Typically, our aim is to explain our behavior (or to exculpate ourselves) after the fact or when things fail to make sense. Could we adduce reasons beforehand? Do we have the capacity to engage in moral deliberations? Of course. No doubt, when the chips are down, when we are in a pinch, or when we are wrought by ambivalence, we will find it necessary to do just this. However, even if it were possible to conceive of a world in which rational agents always deliberated long and hard before they acted, it is still possible that some of them would take up the relativist cause. The cultural relativist may believe that foremost in his moral considerations is a concern to make sure that he does what his culture will endorse. (And even that is not necessarily inconsistent with his acting on a moral principle that furthers the interests of all human beings.)

Still, it could be the case that we can ultimately get what we are after—namely, a knock-down argument against relativism—“on the cheap” for it is often held that relativism is self-refuting. As the third traditional conception of reason would have it, the latter is a process of thought that preserves the truth of our conclusions. Reason, accordingly, helps us draw valid inferences, and, by the rationalist’s lights, relativism falls short of this standard. This conclusion naturally follows from two separate arguments: the first being what Blackburn calls the “recoil argument,” the second what we might term the “argument from multiple cultures.” The recoil argument holds that the relativist’s view has to double back upon itself since, in order to get things going, he has to make a universal claim to the effect that “All cultures have their own views of the good.” But if such a claim is true, then on the relativist view it has to be false. Whence the contradiction.

The second tack taken by the philosopher Russ Shafer-Landau in his introductory book of metaethics Whatever Happened to Good and Evil is also fairly straightforward. There, he asks: how does the cultural relativist deal with the fact that an action can, in principle, take place in two different cultures at the same time? Surely, this jurisdictional problem is at the heart of plenty of moral conflicts. For instance, Native Americans’ desire to practice their own religion may be at odds with federal law. Insofar as such actions take place in two different places at once and insofar as the moral judgment of one can be incompatible with that of another (smoking peyote, say, is immoral and illegal according to federal law, but not so according to religious practice), relativism yields another contradiction.

Summoning the spirit of nihilism from deep within himself, the relativist may now suggest that the canons of reason do not ultimately determine his view of life. Walt Whitman’s dictum from Leaves of Grass seems appropriate here: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am great. I contain multitudes.” That is not to say that he has no possible replies, no places to turn; in fact, he has plenty of room to revise this admittedly straw-man view of relativism. But it is to say that most plain persons, as with many of the characters in the Platonic dialogues, will simply stop playing along. “All right, you got me. I’m not totally rational. So what?”

So what indeed. What went wrong in our approach to refuting relativism? Nothing if one is a philosopher who takes getting things right and being logically consistent quite seriously. But a whole lot if the only game in town is public discourse and if one of our chief aims is to change people’s minds. Aporias are well and good in some places, but they are fighting words in others.

Suppose, then, we were to make a fresh start by asking how relativism came to be the default position among educated and uneducated people in industrialized countries. (I beg off considering the role, in some locales quite small, in others quite significant, that theism of the ethical objective stripe still plays in the US.) Here is the breezy answer: the present incarnation of relativism coincides with the rise of postmodernism, and insofar as both are nothing but fashionable nonsense, they should be dismissed out of hand. Rather satisfying, to be sure, but none too convincing all the same. Worse, it’s not even the whole story. If, however, we try to take relativism seriously as I think we should, then we had better provide an explanation of its existence and then we had better account for its lasting appeal. Having explained its existence and captured its appeal, we should now be able to see more clearly what ethical problems beset relativism. My hope is that such a story will lessen the appeal of relativism for the budding and the world-weary skeptic alike.

*

One of the truisms of the modern world is that there are a lot of people out there who do not live the way that you or I do. This insight was doubtless more vivid for people living in Western Europe during the eighteenth century than it is for us today. But since that time it has become even more abundantly clear not only that people are bearers of cultural traditions and cultural practices but also that in the present day we are more acutely aware of the diversity of such traditions and practices than ever before. Time and time again, cultural anthropologists have confirmed this in their field investigations. But confirmed what exactly? Well, that pluralism in general and value pluralism in particular is the way of the world.

At first blush, it seems quite difficult to square the proposition that there are universal moral principles that obtain once we grant the diversity of ways of living as well as the plurality of values. The fact of pluralism, it seems, is the first factor which accounts for the rise of relativism: with all those cultures out there, you having yours and I having mine, it’s best not to try to harmonize or unify them. So thought Isaiah Berlin.

It is not too much of a stretch to say that value pluralism has often given rise to moral disagreements. And this is the second thing we see in modernity: the prevalence and trenchancy of moral disagreements among competing parties. Does sharia law apply to Muslims living in the UK, or are all Muslims bound by the law of the land? Is affirmative action unconstitutional—is it, that is, righting a historical wrong, or does it violate the constitutional rights of an individual to be treated as an individual and not as a member of a group? And what of abortion, capital punishment, and gay marriage? What too of the US’s role in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict in the Middle East? If these conflicts and others like them are bound to lead to intractable moral disagreements, if no first principles can be adduced, and if no rational assent is to be had, might it not be wise simply to conclude that we should “agree to disagree”? Given that we can come to no consensus as to the right conception of a good life, perhaps we should simply forget about human flourishing, let each of us have our (or our tribe’s) various conceptions, and work to implement laws that protect us from each other. Agreement is a hard bargain; maybe it is enough that we can both get things off our chests without anybody losing—or winning. Supposing as I have done that moral disagreements are as intractable as many people make them out to be, then relativism seems to give us all we can reasonably ask for. It is a healthy dose of reality, just the right thing for a leaner, less optimistic age.

There are two more factors that are sufficient, I think, to explain the prevalence of relativism today. The first is that we are still reckoning with the past—particularly with the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Though I’m not sure that it is the right one, the lesson commonly drawn from the history of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, fascism, communism, and totalitarianism is that we have paid a very high price for seeking to impose our own values on others. Principles of prudence and caution are thus in order, and there is no better brake to cross-cultural oppression than tolerance of difference.

The final, and probably the most pressing, factor explaining the emergence of modern relativism is the fact/value split. Notwithstanding postmodernist skepticism, most of us would agree that science and eye-witness testimony can give us fairly reliable empirical evidence concerning what is the case. And yet we are much less certain about the realm of values. The worry, raised most perspicuously by the sociologist Max Weber when he wrote that the modern world is “disenchanted,” is that values are merely subjective projections onto a valueless world. After all, facts are clear, distinct, and objective whereas values are but opaque, indistinct, and subjective.

In his books Liberalism and the Limits of Justice and Democracy’s Discontents, the political philosopher Michael Sandel clues us into why this is a moral and political problem. According to him, the voluntarist conception that has become common sense since the 1950’s holds that persons exist over and above the ends they freely choose and the values they seek to affirm. For this reason, the proposal that there could be a shared conception of the good life that trumps freedom so conceived (or, rather, that images persons as inherently social or political animals) sounds too much like putting people in straitjackets. Relativism, it turns out, is inconsistent with the republican view that there could be a shared conception of the good life that governs how we understand ourselves in our communities, but it is entirely consistent with the liberal view that all of us are free to pursue our own ends regardless of whether those ends are choice-worthy so long as we do not interfere with others’ pursuit of their respective ends.

Together, value pluralism, the prevalence of moral disagreement, our reckoning with the past, and the fact/value split are necessary and sufficient, I think, to explain the birth of modern relativism. But an account of why something comes into existence is hardly sufficient to explain why it persists. Here, I tread lightly in my investigation of relativism’s appeal. I assume, following Hegel, that the world that we currently inhabit is not entirely at odds with our rational norms. In some way or another, some of our human desires are in fact satisfied by relativism, some of our norms expressed in our institutions. How else to explain why plain persons and humanities professors have glommed onto relativism? How else, in other words, to account for its lasting appeal than by conceding this much at least?

It behooves us to consider, then, what about relativism has gripped us and why it has done so for so long. I can think of three reasons for why this might be so, though I would be willing to admit others besides. I have already mentioned the first reason. It is that relativism seems to be of a piece with a commitment to tolerance. No more need be said on this front. The second reason is that relativism sounds plausibly democratic. Albeit commonplace, the argument that our entitlement to having certain opinions entails the equal plausibility of different opinions is undeniably invalid. Sound familiar? Whereas the premise is true, the conclusion is ostensibly false. Despite our realist belief that there are better and worse judgments about the world (better in the sense that a certain judgment picks out what is the case, worse for the opposite reason), the commitment to democracy, together with an anti-intellectualist wariness towards elitism, seems to recommend relativism. There is a final reason that keeps relativism in the limelight—namely, the multicultural affirmation of identity politics. At least over the past twenty years, we have seen a shift from truth to identity: roughly speaking, a shift from an investigation into what we know of what there is to an expression of firmly held beliefs about and an overriding interest in who we are. And who we are normally amounts not just to listing our cultural and ethnic affiliations but also to identifying what requirements would need to be put in place in order for people to be able to be who they are. Relativism grants the legitimacy of this move and safeguards us from the need for further reflection. In a word, relativism endures because it gives us a good deal of what plenty of people want: a tolerant, democratic, multicultural world.

There are, however, good reasons to think that relativism is a rather stingy philosophy for people living in a confusing time: stingy because it ultimately offers us an impoverished ethical vision of the world and of our place in it. I am constantly struck by its inability to answer the question: why care? Why bother when the matter before us has nothing to do with fulfilling our individual or collective interests? No relativist will be able to get off the couch when you tell her that there is genocide in Darfur, that the conditions of women living in Iran fall well below any reasonable mark, or that there is widespread poverty in Africa. In order to fetishize otherness, the relativist has to presuppose a lack of shared ideals across cultural divides. Perhaps most damning of all is the fact that the relativist has to believe that there are no causes were fighting for, nothing that will move him to reach beyond his tribe in an effort to work out a shared, more universalist ethical vision of the world. In the grips of relativism, we are unable to imagine real social change.

*

Looming in the background of my discussion of relativism has been the worry over what the philosopher Frederick Beiser, in his excellent book on the Enlightenment, aptly refers to as the “fate of reason.” It is my view that for quite some time the health of reason within modern industrialized countries has been less than robust. This, I think, is borne out by the fact that reason construed in terms of objectivity, justification, and demonstration typically fails to do much in the way of changing plain persons’ minds about the desirability of endorsing things such as relativism. My approach, then, has been to rethink public practical reason along the lines of diagnosis. That is, my aim was to provide an explanation for the existence of relativism and to account for its lasting appeal and to do both with the hope of pointing out the principle ways that relativism has deformed our moral lives. In the very least, I think that this manner of approaching the subject matter counts as being a form of moral education for it is concerned with helping people make up their minds and with helping them change their minds about an issue of deep ethical significance. If they are not left with a sour taste in their mouth after reading a story such as this one, then we should feel no further obligation to convince them of why they ought to be moral in the first place. Doing that surely falls outside the scope of moral philosophy. Of course, there is much more to be said on behalf of a public conception of practical reason, a conception which could make positive contributions to our moral worldview as well, but it goes without saying that this way of doing philosophy would bear very little resemblance to philosophizing with a hammer.

Andrew Taggart is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. His work has most recently appeared in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy and in a collected volume on the Frankfurt School.

Mary Midgley’s publisher Routledge calls her a fighter of “scientific pretension” – but what remains with the reader is her passion for science’s defamation.

Observe two of her statements: “Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous”[1] and “Reason’s just another faith”[2]. In many of her writings, she refers to scientists as “prophets”, science as an inclusive institution, or evolution as religion[3].

Many will know the typical antiscience mantras – cropping up like weeds in what should be a growth of knowledge and not its stifling. Creationists or anti-Darwinists play the victim-card, stating the scientific community ostracizes anyone who “dares” speak out against the “doctrine” of Darwinism. Of course, if they simply went to any biology conference or read a biology journal, they would see the ones at the forefront of critiquing (strands of) evolutionary theory are, well, biologists themselves. There is no mullah-like governance deciding “This shall not be considered science!”

Thus it was that the title ‘Evolution as Religion’ leapt out at me. I initially thought that, as a highly regarded moral philosopher, Midgley would provide some answer to this dilemma of why science has become hated and distrusted. I thought that by juxtaposing evolution, which she calls the “creation myth of our age”[4], with traditional religious myths I would gain some insight. But – alas – it was not to be.

Her first apparent stumbling block is the now infamous debacle regarding Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene[5]. Her lack of understanding of the gene-centered view of biology had her fumbling, Nearly 20 years later, she is unrelenting in her attitude. In a 2005 interview, she stated:

I’m not anti-science. What I object to is improper science sold as science. I understand Dawkins thinks he was talking about the survival potential of certain lines rather than the motives of the genes themselves, but I believe he is mistaken. [Scientists] are unaware of when they start bringing their own political and psychological views into the argument. There’s nothing wrong with scientists having such views as long as they are aware of what they are doing … Dawkins may argue that he is using selfishness as a metaphor but he must have been aware of how the concept might be interpreted and used. And Dawkins has to take some responsibility for that.

It seems she has still missed the point entirely. But this introduces the first claim we can lay against her: Her attack on Straw Men.

According to Midgley, Dawkins “must have been aware” of how the concept of selfishness would be seen. As Stangroom highlights, Dawkins constantly stated the contrary throughout The Selfish Gene. It seems that every time Dawkins mentioned he was not supporting selfishness, wickedness, and so on, Midgley ignored it.

In her ‘Evolution as Religion’ article, she writes:

Evolution is the creation myth of our age. By telling us our origins it shapes our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought but also our feelings and actions in a way which goes far beyond … a biological theory. In calling it a myth I am not saying that it is a false story. I mean that it has great symbolic power, which is independent of its truth. Is the word religion appropriate to it? This depends [how] we understand that very elastic word. I have chosen it deliberately because I want to draw attention to the remarkable variety of elements which it covers…[6]

Therefore, Midgley must be “aware of how the concept might be interpreted and used”. Therefore, she shouldn’t be surprised if creationists or Intelligent Design proponents prop her up as support for their anti-science side. She must be aware, as she claims of Dawkins, of the usage of language and terms.

I was surprised to see that New Scientist asked Midgley to comment on the impact of Reason.

Midgley begins her article[7] by assessing the great Nehru, the first prime-minister of independent India. Nehru speaks about placing his trust in materialistic science over and above superstitious mumbo-jumbo. Nehru, an atheist, believed that “the future belongs to science and to those who make friends with science”[8] This is a view I agree with heartily and was therefore interested to see if maybe the philosopher had any decent criticisms.

She correctly sees Nehru’s statement as a manifesto for Reason – but she dismisses it as such because Nehru says “science alone”. She inflects the usual view of the elitism of science, which she defines as “[a] trademark of scientism”. She then defines Scientism as “the belief in the unconditional supremacy of physical science – or of Science with a capital ‘S’ – over all forms of thought.” Once again, she places it within a definition of her own choosing, then critiques this new definition. This is very essence of the Straw man Fallacy. She says:

[T]aken literally, Nehru’s proposition is odd. We might think, for instance, that we obviously need things, such as good laws, good institutions and a clear understanding of history, as well as science, to solve the problems he named (superstition, hunger, poverty, etc.). He surely knew this, but he put science first because he thought it was the only cure for what he considered the central cause of present evils – religion.

To me Nehru is important (India is my ancestral homeland and I have grown up in the same culture, which causes an ‘irrational’ affinity for that beautiful land and people). Sir Salman Rushdie – a man who would be my hero, if I had heroes – writes:

[Gandhi, and Ghandi] alone was responsible for the transformation of the demand for independence into a nationwide mass movement that mobilised every class of society against the imperialist; yet the free India that came into being, divided and committed to a programme of modernization and industrialization, was not the India of his dreams. His sometime disciple, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the arch-proponent of modernization, and it is Nehru’s vision, not Gandhi’s, that was eventually – and perhaps inevitably – preferred.[9] [emphasis mine]

Nehru’s view then is well defended. It was the destruction of Nehru’s secular prospect that led afterwards to the many terrible things in India[10] – all done in the name of a god which Nehru warned people about. Midgley is incorrect in her assessment of Nehru’s views.

Nehru was not about limiting thought – quite the opposite. To propose that the love and trust and value of science are somehow traceable to this bizarre notion of Scientism is a major mistake.

Consider the debate between Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould, regarding punctuated equilibrium. The philosopher Kim Sterelny has written a brilliant account of it entitled Dawkins vs. Gould. Sterelny lucidly outlines each argument and allows the reader to decide, stating that he himself favours Dawkins’ standard Darwinian explanations. My reason for raising this is to show: Yes there is conflict amongst scientists, about science. But that does not mean science as a whole is mistaken or religious or dominated by elitist positions.

Yes the general public might be confused or upset by the scary elitist men. But that is changing, as we attempt to make people aware of the beauty of science.

REFERENCES

1. Mary Midgley ‘Gene Juggling’, Philosophy, vol. 54, no. 210 (1979), pp. 439.

2. Mary Midgley (2008) ‘Reason’s just another faith’. New Scientist, Vol. 199, No. 2666. P.50

3. Mary Midgley (1987) “Evolution as a religion: A comparison of prophecies.” Zygon, Vol. 22, No. 2 June, PP 179-194). All these terms can actually be found in just this one rather horrible lecture.

4. Ibid. p. 179

5. Jeremy Stangroom ‘Misunderstanding Richard Dawkins’

6. Midgley (1987), op. cit., p. 179

7. Midgley (2008) op. cit., P. 50

8. As cited in Midgley (2008)

9. Salman Rushdie ‘Gandhi Now’ in Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002. London: Vintage, p. 283

10. Ibid

Further reading: see Roger Scruton’s appreciation of Midgley.