Category: Articles

Rationalist International expresses shock and deep concern about the attack on Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen today (August 9) by the radical political outfit Majlis Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (MIM) at the Hyderabad Press Club. She was releasing the Telegu translation of her book “Shodd”. Taslima Nasreen is an Honorary Associate of Rationalist International.

MIM activists, led by three state Legislative Council members (MLAs), raised slogans against Taslima and flung bouquets and chairs at her and others attending the function. However, no injuries have been reported so far.

MIM leader Akhtar Khan, an MLA, said: “She is enemy of Islam, she is a black spot on Muslims.. We cannot bear anyone talking against Islam. She has written books against Islam. We will not tolerate her in Hyderabad.”

Taslima was rescued by the police and journalists present at the press club and was escorted to the air port. Three radicals have been detained by the police for questioning.

Taslima is living in exile for the last twelve years after death threats forced her to flee Bangladesh. She is an outspoken champion of equal rights for women and a fearless fighter against religion.

Taslima has faced numerous death threats from Islamic radicals. Recently, in March 2007, an Indian Muslim group offered a bounty of 500,000 rupees for her beheading.

The Islamic Republic of Iranian’s execution wave has reached the media in Iran. On 16 July 2007, two Kurdish journalists, Mr. Adnan Hassanpour and Mr.Hiva Boutimar were sentenced to death by an Islamic tribunal in Marivan, a Kurdish city in the north-west Iran. They are supposed to be brought to the scaffold in the coming days. Judiciary spokesman, Mr. Ali Reza Jamshidi, confirmed that these two journalists have been sentenced to death, state media reported Tuesday, 31 0f July.

At a trial behind closed doors, the journalists were found guilty of “activities subverting national security, spying, and interviews for foreign news media including Voice of America”. These “accusations” were cited by the prosecution and, amazingly, confirmed by the journalists’ lawyer, Sirvan Hosmandi– who seems to be more of a public prosecutor than their lawyer!

The journalists were transferred to Sanandaj, the capital of the western Iranian province of Kurdistan, where they wait for their eventual death penalty.

The two journalists were sentenced on the charge of “mohareb,” (fighter against Islam). The term, which describes a major crime against Islam and the God’s state of the IRI, is a routine term used to justify execution of political activists.

Death sentence for “profane” writers and journalists is reminiscent of Khomeini’s death fatwa on Salman Rushdie. The first time the term “Mohareb” was used for a foreign writer was to justify Khomeini’s death fatwa on the British citizen Salman Rushdie.

Last year, another IRI senior official, Sheikh Fazel Lankarani, issued a death fatwa on an Azeri journalist, Rafig Tagi, because of his “profane“ article “humiliating Prophet Muhammad”. The two Kurdish journalists are in fact the first Iranian journalists being accused of “Mohareb”.

Despite constant repression on media and journalists, such a sentence proves a deterioration of general repression on the media.

Three other Kurdish journalists are currently in prison in Iran. Ejlal Ghavani of Payam-e Mardom-e Kurdestan, a local weekly that was suspended in 2004, was detained on 9 July of this year after being convicted by a court in Sanandaj of “inciting the population to revolt” and “activities against national security.”

Mohammad Sadegh Kabovand, Payam-e Mardom-e Kurdestan’s editor and the founder of a human rights organisation, was arrested on 1 July and transferred to Evin prison. He has not been officially charged.

Another journalist, Kaveh Javanmard, of the weekly Karfto is condemned to two years in prison. He was not allowed access to a lawyer during his trial, which took place behind closed doors.

With a total of eight journalists currently detained, Iran continues to be the Middle East’s biggest prison for the press and one of the world’s ten most repressive countries as regards freedom of expression in the media.

Execution of the twelve executed “thugs” of July 22 was the starting point of the new execution wave. On that day alone, all of them were hanged, accused of theft, rape, and violation of Islamic norms.

According to opposition sources, at least three of them were political activists. The “accused” were detained by security forces during the ongoing crackdown on “hooliganism”. Their death verdict was pronounced in the absence of any bill of indictment and power of attorney.

The chain of executions now reaches the media, a vital source of flow of news under any totalitarian regime. Reporters Without Borders writes: “We appeal to the international community to ask Iran to reverse this decision and to refrain from executing two journalists who did nothing but exercise their right to inform their fellow citizens”. The source continues, “Iran is in the process of becoming one of the world’s biggest prisons for journalists.”

The IRI favours stoning and public hangings in order to intimidate the angry people of Iran. According to the Iranian state, the IRI newly hanged, on August 1st, seven “thugs” in the city of Mashhad, north-east Iran. All seven were accused of routine charges like rape, kidnapping and robbery. The IRI routinely executes dissidents on bogus charges such as armed robbery and drug smuggling.

Under such circumstances, the “civilised” world is seriously expected to prove its civilisation by intensifying its pressure on the IRI to prevent this chain of barbaric executions.

In July I had one of those good news/bad news days. First the good news. In response to the detailed complaint I had submitted in February 2007 to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about their promotion of the film “Einstein’s Wife”,[1] I received the following from Simon Melkman, ABC Audience & Consumer Affairs:

“Due to the breaches of the ABC’s Code of Practice which you have identified, the ABC will not broadcast ‘Einstein’s Wife’ again. In addition, the ATOM ‘Einstein’s Wife’ study guide has been removed from the ABC website.”

Now the bad news. On that same day I received from one of the Einstein specialists whose tendentiously edited interviews were included in the film the information that the US Public Broadcasting Services (PBS) has commissioned Andrea Gabor to re-write the “Einstein’s Wife” web pages (which would seem to imply that PBS intends to retain the film in their schedules). I’ll briefly outline the background to this decision.

In March 2006 I submitted a detailed complaint to the PBS Ombudsman concerning the gross errors and misconceptions on the PBS “Einstein’s Wife” web pages and the associated school Lesson Plans.[2] After much delay, David Davis, VP National Production, Oregon Public Broadcasting, informed me in December 2006: “We are looking for additional scholarly review to help us know how to proceed in making sure that the web site content is as accurate as possible.” In the meantime, against the advice of the PBS Ombudsman,[3] PBS has been continuing to schedule the film and to maintain the website, the latter now having an editorial note stating that the contents are under review and that PBS is conducting “a thorough review…before determining what, if any,[sic] changes should to be made to the site content”.

Note that David Davis informed me that their intention was to look for “additional scholarly review” of the website material. In fact they have already had the views of the three Einstein specialists who had been misled into appearing in the film. For instance the historian of physics, Gerald Holton, wrote concerning the criticisms I had forwarded to PBS:

I was glad to read of your interest in correcting the blatant perversion of the role of Mileva Marić in the Australian film, ‘Einstein’s Wife’. The essays on your websites should be required reading by all who have been taken in by this film – the NPR officials, the unsuspecting readers of the story on the PBS website, the viewers of this pseudo-‘documentary’, the helpless teachers who might fall for this lie.[…] The film’s falsification of Marić’s role in the work of Einstein, well explained in your postings and in other sources by knowledgeable historians of science, brings to mind two points: One is that if such a false product were published by a scientist, he or she would be deprived of eligibility of further funding, and (in the USA) punished by the Office of Research Integrity… […]

And from John Stachel, founding editor of the Albert Einstein Collected Papers:

Thanks for sending your articles. I admire you for having the guts to go through the whole series of entangled falsehoods… I particularly appreciate your account of how I was “set up” to be used as a foil for the ‘Joffe proof.’ What you may not know is that I was constantly reassured, in spite of my misgivings, by the Aussies who produced the show that it was not going to be tendentious in any way!

Finally, from Robert Schulmann, historian, associate editor Albert Einstein Collected Papers:

Soon after ‘Einstein’s Wife” was aired on PBS and after scrutinizing the PBS website dealing with the film, I wrote an email to the writer/producer, Ms. Geraldine Hilton, and her company, Melsa Productions. In it I expressed my anger at the distasteful manipulation of facts in which she had engaged. I never heard a word in response. Whatever her intentions, Ms. Hilton chose to misrepresent my comments in her film, adding insult to injury by crowing later that she had put one over on the Einstein scholars. Aside from the pettiness of this remark, I deeply resent how by misrepresentation and stripping of context Ms. Hilton’s film skewed statements made by Holton, Stachel, and myself, as well as twisted facts, most egregiously in the case of the so-called Joffe evidence. This goes well beyond personal insult. It is unconscionable that PBS be a party to distributing this dishonest presentation as classroom material to teachers and students, whose task it is to instruct and learn the proper use of evidence and respect for historical sources. At the very least, I think PBS should withdraw its recommendation of the Hilton film – and the film itself – as the basis for school curricula…

(These personal communications were all forwarded to PBS with permission from the three academics.)

One might have thought that these views from knowledgeable Einstein specialists would have been a sufficiently damning “scholarly review” to persuade PBS to ditch the whole project and admit that they had made a mistake in promoting the film. Not a bit of it. They have now commissioned a writer to maintain the project who is almost totally lacking in the scholarly credentials essential for the purpose for which she has been engaged.

Andrea Gabor is a journalist and author without any background in science.[4] She appeared in the “Einstein’s Wife” film, presumably on the basis of the fact that she has a chapter on Mileva Marić in her book Einstein’s Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth Century Women (1995). As I have demonstrated elsewhere,[5] the chapter in question reveals a generally poor standard of scholarly research, and a tendentiousness that is all too accurately depicted by one of the ‘definitions’ to be found in Benson and Stangroom’s Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense:

Evidence: Something that can be tailored to the requirements of my arguments.[6]

So let’s sample some of what Gabor reveals about her scholarly standards in that chapter. Possibly the most egregious example occurs early in the chapter, where she writes:

Marić told Einstein early in their relationship that she doubted she would ever marry, because although she insisted that ‘a woman can make a career just like a man,’ she apparently also believed the two enterprises to be mutually exclusive. (p. 7)

Gabor obtained this snippet of information from a biography of Mileva Marić by the Serbian author Desanka Trbuhović-Gjurić.[7] In that book can be found not only a more extended account, complete with dialogue, of the alleged conversation between Einstein and Marić when they were students together at Zurich Polytechnic, but also three other scenarios from the same period, two of which contain several sentences of dialogue. One would have thought that Gabor’s critical faculties (or just plain commonsense) would have been alerted by the unlikelihood that such verbatim conversations from their student days could have been recorded in this fashion. And, of course, they weren’t. Trbuhović-Gjurić provides no reference for the scenarios, but they can be found virtually word for word, in the same chronological order, in a book on Einstein written for children by Aylesa Forsee.[8] A glance through Forsee’s book suffices to show that it is filled with such scenarios, replete with dialogue, that are manifestly invented to provide an imaginative story that the author has woven around events in the life of Einstein. Yet, such were her shoddy scholarly standards, Trbuhović-Gjurić not only recorded four of the fake scenarios in her biography of Marić, she added her own imaginative gloss on the fictitious dialogue: “In all these discussions, Albert, in his uncertainty, always deferred to Mileva’s judgements, which he considered incorruptible and infallible.”[9]

Quite possibly it is this sentence that led Gabor to suggest that when they started the Zurich Polytechnic course in 1896 for a diploma to teach physics and mathematics in secondary school, Einstein “must have been somewhat in awe of his unusual female classmate, who was three and a half years his senior”,(p. 7) apparently ignorant of the fact that Einstein was remarkably self-assured from a relatively early age and not inclined to be in awe of anyone, not even his teachers at the Gymnasium in Munich which he left at the age of fifteen. The Einstein biographer Albrecht Fölsing recognized that the “fictitious dialogues” and the “combination of fictional invention and pseudo-documentation”[10] contained in Trbuhović-Gjurić’s book disqualifies it as a source of reliable information, but this insight evaded Gabor and she cites it on some twenty occasions as if it were a serious work of scholarship.

The above example is important for what it reveals about Gabor’s deficiencies as an historian, but the subject matter is relatively trivial. Far more important are other serious errors that occur in the chapter in question, such as in the following passage:

Much of the debate revolves around fragmentary evidence suggesting that the original version of Einstein’s three most famous articles, on the photoelectric effect, on Brownian motion, and on the theory of relativity, were signed Einstein-Marity, the latter name being a Hungarianized version of Marić… Abraham F. Joffe, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, claimed that he saw the original papers when he was an assistant to Wilhelm Röntgen, who belonged to the editorial board of Annalen der Physik, which published the articles. (p. 20)

Gabor again references Trbuhović-Gjurić’s book for this information.[11] However, in the article alluded to by Trbuhović-Gjurić as the source of her report, Joffe did not claim that he saw the original papers, nor that the papers were signed Einstein-Marity. As John Stachel has meticulously demonstrated, the account presented as fact by Trbuhović-Gjurić and recycled by Gabor is nothing but tendentious inference based on a false premise.[12] Gabor’s reliance on Trbuhović-Gjurić’s deeply flawed book has again led her astray.

The early correspondence between Einstein and Marić, uncovered in 1985 by Robert Schulmann, generated considerable interest and sensational press stories after it was first published. In a passage (p. xii) in which she refers to “Mileva Marić’s contribution to Einstein’s early work”, Gabor quotes from one of these letters in a context that creates a completely false impression as to its import: “How happy and proud I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on the relative motion to a victorious conclusion.”[13]

This sentence in a letter to Marić in 1901 does not, as the uninitiated are likely to assume, directly relate to Einstein’s development of his special relativity theory some four years later. And, as Stachel points out, against this one use of “our” here there are a dozen occasions in the letters to Marić when Einstein uses “I” and “my” when referring to his ideas on this same topic, the electrodynamics of moving bodies.[14] Holton observes in this connection: “But careful analysis of the matter by established scholars in the history of physics, including John Stachel, Jürgen Renn, Robert Schulmann, and Abraham Pais, has shown that scientific collaboration between the couple was minimal and one-sided. Einstein’s occasional use of the word our was chiefly meant to serve the emotional needs of the moment.”[15] Those who have been influenced by the erroneous claim that the sentence quoted by Gabor reveals that Marić collaborated with Einstein on the special theory of relativity should read Stachel’s comprehensive analysis of Einstein’s use of personal pronouns in the letters in question.[16]

There are numerous other errors and misconceptions in Gabor’s chapter, as can be seen from my more detailed critique. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the fact that PBS have commissioned to re-write their “Einstein’s Wife” web pages someone so lacking in the scholarly credentials that should be a requisite for such an undertaking indicates that they are intent on preserving the essentials of their deeply flawed website, with its Lesson Plans that come close to being a brainwashing exercise.[17] In the words of Robert Schulmann, who has knowledge in depth of the relevant material, it is unconscionable that PBS be a party to distributing dubious historical claims as classroom material to teachers and students, whose task it is to instruct and learn the proper use of evidence and respect for historical sources. Moreover, it is difficult to see how the website could be maintained unless PBS is intending to continue to promote the “Einstein’s Wife” film (including to school teachers and students), the gross deficiencies of which are apparent from the above comments by Einstein specialists, who deplore its “blatant perversion of the role of Mileva Marić”, its “distasteful manipulation of facts”, and the “whole series of tangled falsehoods” that it contains.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which co-produced the film, has demonstrated that it wishes to maintain respect for accuracy in the documentaries that it promotes and intellectual honesty in their production by withdrawing it from its schedules. For PBS to continue with its current plan can only bring it into disrepute. The PBS executives responsible for the decision to continue to promote “Einstein’s Wife” should think again.

NOTES

1. Einstein’s Wife: Mileva Marić 1
2. Einstein’s Wife: Mileva Marić 2
3. Einstein’s Wife: The Relative Motion of ‘Facts’
4. Andrea Gabor CV
Andrea Gabor books
5. Critique of Gabor (1995)
6. Benson & Stangroom (2004), p. 38.
7. Trbuhović-Gjurić (1983), p. 41; (1991), p. 47.
8. Forsee (1963), pp. 11-12.
9. Trbuhović-Gjurić (1983), p. 41; (1991), p. 46 (my translation – A. E.).
10. Fölsing (1990)
11. Trbuhović-Gjurić (1983), p. 79; (1991), pp. 111-12.
12. Stachel (2005), pp. liv-lxxii.
13. Renn & Schulmann (1992), p. 39.
14. Stachel (2002), p. 36.
15. Holton (1996), pp. 190-91.
16. Stachel (2002), pp. 33-36.
17. Einstein’s Wife: Mileva Marić 2

Bibliography

Benson, O. & Stangroom, J. (2004). The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense: A Guide for Edgy People. London: Souvenir Press.

Einstein, A. (1987-2006). The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Princeton University Press.

Esterson, A. (2006a). Einstein’s Wife: Mileva Marić 1

Esterson, A. (2006b). Einstein’s Wife: Mileva Marić 2

Esterson, A. (2006c). Mileva Marić: Einstein’s Wife

Esterson, A. (2006d). Who Did Einstein’s Mathematics?: A Response to Troemel-Ploetz

Esterson, A. (2007). Critique of Gabor (1995)

Fölsing, A. (1990). Keine ‘Mutter der Relativitätstheorie’. Die Zeit, Nr. 47, 16 November 1990. English translation

Forsee, A. (1963). Albert Einstein: Theoretical Physicist. New York and London: Macmillan.

Gabor, A. (1995). Einstein’s Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth Century Women. New York: Viking-Penguin.

Holton, G. (1996). Einstein, History and Other Passions. Harvard University Press.

Martínez, A. A. (2005). Handling Evidence in History: The Case of Einstein’s Wife.
School Science Review, March 2005, 86 (316), pp. 49-56.

Renn, J. and Schulmann, R. (eds.) (1992). Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić: The Love Letters. Trans. by S. Smith. Princeton University Press.

Stachel, J. (1996). Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric: A Collaboration that
Failed to Develop.

Stachel, J. (2002). Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’. Boston/Basel/ Berlin:
Birkhäuser.

Stachel, J. (ed.) (2005). Appendix. In J. Stachel, “Introduction”, in Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers
That Changed the Face of Physics. Princeton University Press, pp.
liv-lxxii.

Trbuhović-Gjurić, D. (1983). Im Schatten Albert Einsteins: Das tragische Leben der Mileva Einstein-Marić. Bern: Paul Haupt. (The German language edition is an edited version of the book by Trbuhović-Gjurić originally published in Serbo-Croat in Yugoslavia in 1969.)

Trbuhović-Gjurić, D. (1991), Mileva Einstein: Une Vie (French translation of Im Schatten Albert Einsteins: Das tragische Leben der Mileva Einstein-Marić). Paris: Antoinette Fouque.

Amherst, New York—The Center for Inquiry (CFI), a secular humanist think tank located in Amherst, New York, has announced that it is offering a unique educational experience this summer called “Beyond Belief.” Taking a cue from the recent flood of highly popular books on atheism and unbelief, CFI hopes to bring something new to the cultural conversation by contributing in a positive and constructive way. Running July 5 through July 22, the three-week session will explore topics such as the future of unbelief, does one need God to be good, and the constructive role of doubt and science in everyday life.

“Atheism and doubt have become popular fare in the marketplace of ideas,” said R. Joseph Hoffmann, the vice president of academic affairs at CFI. “Time was when one had to search deep within the philosophy section of your local bookstore to find material on humanism and unbelief; now one can go shopping for atheism right in the religion aisle.”

Hoffmann isn’t just whistling in the dark. Recent books by respected authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett, and, most recently, the irascible man of letters, Christopher Hitchens, have placed the topic of atheism squarely in the pages of Newsweek, US News & World Report, Wired, The New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post, National Review, and countless book reviews and newspaper columns. Hitchens new book, God Is Not Great has recently moved to number one on the New York Times best-seller list.

While some see in this new trend the beginnings of an open season on religious faith, atheists and secular humanists see these new books as an opportunity to peel back the veil on an alternative approach to humanity’s greatest questions, an approach that has been around as long as Confucian China and the ancient Greeks. Continued Hoffmann, “Certain issues inevitably arise whenever the topic of unbelief is tackled head on, but unfortunately in our sound-bite culture these issues rarely ever get adequately addressed, let alone examined at length.” What are some of those questions? What about notions of meaning, goodness, truth, and beauty, for starters? And what happens to these ideals if God is removed from the equation? Hoffmann says that the recent spate of books on atheism, although certainly interesting as a social phenomena, basically serve as a critique of religion and do nothing to explore the different varieties of unbelief or explain the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of science and humanism. “This is the distinction we hope to show this summer, between mere atheism, and a comprehensive affirmative worldview which looks to doubt and unbelief as only a beginning, or clearing of the chaff.”

Instructors from around the country will be addressing these issues in an open and friendly learning environment. Hoffmann has assembled an impressive line-up including the well-known secular-humanist advocate and CFI founder, philosopher Paul Kurtz, famous skeptic Joe Nickell, Ophelia Benson, editor of the Web site Butterflies and Wheels, British writer and philosopher Jeremy Stangroom, and others. Students from around the country, both young and old, will be in attendance and scholarships are being granted to exchange students from as far away as Russia, China, and Africa. The classes this summer are part of a larger educational initiative in humanist learning headed up by the CFI Institute.

The Center for Inquiry/Transnational, a nonprofit educational, advocacy, and scientific-research think tank based in Amherst, New York, is also home to the Council for Secular Humanism, founded in 1980, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (formerly CSICOP), founded in 1976, and the recently formed Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health. Its research and educational projects focus on three broad areas: religion, ethics, and society; paranormal and fringe-scientific claims; and medicine and health. The Center’s Web site is here.

Nathan Bupp is director of communications of the Center for Inquiry.

Picking up this tiny book from a little-known university press, I am reminded of Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, and their fellow pamphleteers of revolution. Even the cover, with its pale blue and declarative font, looks like samizdat. Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore would like to think of themselves as dissident writers in a totalitarian state, but their polemics are widely available and sell by the bucketload. Moore, in particular, has added considerably to Rupert Murdoch’s fortune. But Danny Postel is the real deal.

The first half of Postel’s little book comprises a series of essays in which he attempts to answer the question: why is the Left of the rich world ignoring comrades in the poor world?

Iraq tore the Western left in two. Everyone agreed that the invasion might be catastrophic and that its motives were not the finest. Far-left sects organised massive demonstrations against it. But a large part of the Iraqi left felt that the war was a good idea for the sole reason that, whatever happened, Saddam would go. Their viewpoint was ignored by the antiwar parties but given a voice in the West by a disparate group of writers, journalists, academics, bloggers and trade unionists, who chose to stick by their comrades and, after the war, and unlike much of the antiwar movement, chose to stick by them against the fundamentalist ‘resistance’. This caused a monstrous schism that reverberates to this day.

As Postel makes clear, Iranians tend to be in favour of basic liberal values rather than radical anti-imperialist projects. There are two reasons for this. One is that, under faith-based totalitarianism, the urgent need is to get the rights of free speech, free elections and gender equality before you can embark on any ambitious economic schemes. Another is the example of the Tudeh Party, a Communist organisation that allied with Khomeini to organise the revolution only to be murdered along with thousands of their friends when they had outlived their usefulness to the theocrats. The Tudeh Party have a British equivalent in the Socialist Workers’ Party, recently allied with a reactionary Islamic organisation.

In effect, the Tudeh Party sold itself and its comrades down the river. Postel quotes the journalist Afshin Molavi:

Iranian youth largely dismiss the radical ideas of their parents’ generation, full of half-baked leftism, Marxist economics, Third World anti-imperalism, Islamist radicalism and varying shades of utopian totalitarianism. ‘We just want to be normal,’ is typical of what hundreds of students have told me. ‘We’re tired of radicalism.’

Yet hardly anyone on the planet, aside from a few crazed neoconservatives, is in favour of an attack on Iran. Surely we can agree on that? And Postel gives some fairly convincing reasons it probably won’t happen:

The rhetoric of looming showdowns and enemies at the gate is pumped up by and serves the interest of both regimes. Posturing aside, Bush and Ahmadinejad are in fact involved in a symbiotic dance, a game of Schmittian shadowboxing, if you will, in which each needs the other as an enemy and feeds on the other’s rhetoric.

I’d go with that, and would add another reason: liberal internationalism is dead. Derided by both the right and the left (in my country, the conservative press takes the same line as its liberal counterpart: that Iraq is a waste of our time and money) no leader will be able to get elected by advocating war. Already the tide is turning. Kissinger has been visiting the White House, and Bush’s recent talks (read ‘deals’) with the Iranian regime signifies that we are back to the old Cold War routine of selling weapons to dictators rather than overthrowing them. And this is a sad thing, I think.

Yet most of the Western left still sees the world through what Postel calls ‘the prism of American imperialism, which is no less an American prism for being critical, as opposed to uncritical, of US foreign policy’. Whatever America is against, it will defend. Throw in a puritan instinct to defend faith-based regimes, and a creepy servility towards foreign tyrants, and that is the majority Left position in a nutshell: and one that doesn’t seem to realise its parochialism in putting its own domestic political preferences over the lives of the oppressed.

In a way this book is like an easy introduction to where the Left has gone wrong over the past few years. Postel discusses the great betrayal of Michel Foucault, who went to Iran after the revolution and praised its ‘different regime of truth,’; the pernicious idea that freedom of speech and separation of church and state and the right to vote comprise some kind of imperialist conspiracy; the silence from Western leftists at the regime’s executions, torture, imprisonment and beatings of Iranian feminists and trade unionists and its crackdown on student demonstrations. Antiwar activists claim to speak for the Iranian people, but cannot name a single Iranian dissident – let alone the philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, a former political prisoner who gives an interview to Postel in the latter half of this book.

All this can be summed up in a single anecdote, which is worth extensive quotation:

[Shirin Ebadi, Nobel laureate and human rights lawyer] went on a speaking tour in the spring of 2006 to discuss her recently-published autobiography, Iran Awakening. As someone who every day of every week defends the victims of the regime’s brutal abuses – indeed as someone who has done jail time for engaging in that work – the issue of the Islamic Republic’s human rights practices tends to figure centrally in her scheme of things. Which is not to say that it’s the only issue on her agenda, or that it in any way blunts her criticisms of the United States and its foreign policy – quite the contrary. She has spoken out in no uncertain terms against the Iraq War, the detainee base at Guantánamo, and the torture inflicted by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib – and has made it utterly clear that she opposes any US intervention in Iran. And yet, at a public event for her book in London, an antiwar activist instructed her that she should not denounce Iran’s human rights record – indeed not discuss it at all – explaining that doing so only plays into the hands of the warmongers, and fuels the fires of imperialism.

Emphasis is of course mine. This was Ebadi’s reply:

Leaning over the lectern and waving her finger at the activist, she made plain that any antiwar movement that advocates silence in the face of tyranny, for whatever reason, can count her out.

We should be able to unite on opposition to war with Iran. But, as Postel explains, opposition is not enough. We know what we’re against: what exactly are we for? If you can’t answer that, you can count yourself out of any serious debate about the future of the Iranian people.

Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran, Danny Postel, Prickly Paradigm 2006

Photos and news published in Iranian media describe continuous crackdowns in Iran. To “increase public security”, the regime’s Security Forces have now started clamping down on “thugs” in Tehran. The drive is a follow-up to the commonplace plan that traditionally starts in the springtime with nationwide morality crackdowns on women labelled “bad hijab” (badly veiled).

Authorities in Iran speak of a steadily increasing number of arrests and claim that “Our decisive confrontation will continue in Tehran down to the very last thug,” said the head of the capital’s metropolitan police force, Ahmad Reza Radan, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

According to different sources, pictures taken by the Fars news agency and reproduced by several moderate dailies showed a man barefoot and stripped to the waist, with two plastic watering cans round his neck, being grabbed by a police officer, while other images showed black balaclava-clad police officers beating their captives. A number of captives were forced to ride a donkey as a “warning to others”.

Some scenes of humiliation were so repulsive that IRI’s police chief had to admit that some officers had overstepped the mark, but he emphasised that the parading of suspects around neighbourhoods had been carried out with prior approval.

Since the beginning of the morality crackdowns, it is believed that thousands of people have been arbitrarily arrested mostly on a range of “phoney charges” from non-conformity to the Islamic standard dress to alleged drug trafficking. Many thousands of women and young men have been warned or forced to make a written pledge to respect Islamic standard dress. Furthermore, a number of the “culprits” have been turned over to the judicial authorities for the alleged offence of improper dressing.

The worldwide published atrocities of crackdowns against women show women harassed and surrounded by screaming female morality police draped in shroud-like black chadors. A woman with stains of blood in the face is dragged in a police car. Crackdowns on women and newly on “thugs” triggered reactions in the international community by accusing the IRI of harassing thousands of men and women in recent weeks for their allegedly immoral behaviour.

In its statement, Human Rights Watch reports that IRI’s police detained more than 80 people in a raid on a birthday party in the city of Isfahan in May. Police accused some attendees of the private gathering of wearing the clothes of the opposite sex.

Human Rights Watch said the arbitrary arrests threaten basic rights to privacy and urged the IRI to halt what it calls a nationwide crackdown on what Iranian authorities view as deviant dress and behaviour.

Following the sporadic reactions of victims in Iran and international pressure, a number of Islamic factions of the regime, in order to play down the IRI’s constitutional violence, especially against women, simply accused the government of undermining the IRI’s laws by beating and parading the suspects. The parade in the neighbourhood is however permitted with prosecutors’ approval. These suspects, not yet accused, are punished because the punishment indeed serves as a warning and intimidation to other people.

Most people in Iran believe that such accusations are mainly being used as justification for the arrest and repression of political activists and those perceived to be potential threats to the security of the IRI.

Who are these “thugs”?

It is important to mention that the word “thug” in Iran is not completely synonymous to what in the West refers to people with a schizoid relationship with violence. Thugs in Iran are not soccer hooligans, rednecks, skinheads or any similar western group of violent, furiously nationalistic, xenophobic and racist young men who enjoy destroying property and hurting people, finding “absolute completeness” in the havoc they wreak. Thugs in the West may even be employed in high-paying blue-collar jobs.

By contrast, the word “thug” in Iran refers to a group of people who are socially and economically marginalised. They are derived from poor milieus and confront all unfair aspects of their society. Because of the high rate of unemployment, poverty, widespread illiteracy, and a lack of welfare and a social protect system, they are direct victims of such a society and spontaneously revolt against the socio-economic pressures.

Bully thugs with a religious identity can be recruited in IRI’s Security Forces or are systematically used in the organised pro-regime militias called plainclothes (lebas shakhsi) to intimidate IRI’s opponents or beat anti-regime’s demonstrators up. Therefore, a number of IRI’s Security Forces, who now arrest thugs, are in fact the recruited ex-thugs. They now accuse the non-recruited thugs of violence, robbery, drugs, whereas these could be indeed applied to them too, if they were not recruited by the regime.

As seen on some published photos and footages of the crackdowns, a number of these “thugs” do not look like thugs. Some of them wear T-shirts with Latin words written on them; they are shaved and seem to be frustrated young men. Since it is easier for a man to wear the part of the rebellious teenager dress than for a woman in Iran, these urban male youth, labelled “Thugs”, are now new victims of the regime.

Some Iranian young men have been flogged for taking drugs, drinking alcohol or simply for listening to a personal walkman while walking down the street. They react in their manner to the lack of personal freedoms. The regime calls these people “thugs”.

Urban youth in particular calls for social and political freedom. Youth is always the sector of the population which reacts most fiercely and most violently to their aspirations not being fulfilled.

Young Iranians make up an estimated 70 percent of their country’s population. More than half of the country’s population is under the age of 20. The generation born under the IRI’s reign is increasingly showing frustration with Iran’s lack of social freedoms and ongoing troubled economy. Iran’s unemployment rate is now 15 percent (11.20 percent in 2006). Youth makes up a large proportion of the unemployed.

Official figures say youth aged 15 to 19 account for 39 percent of the country’s active work force and the unemployment rate stands at about 34 percent among the age groups of 15 to 19 years old and at about 16 percent among the 25 to 29 years age group.

According to some statistics of 2003, about 20,000 teenagers live on the streets of Iran’s larger cities, but most of them reside in Tehran. The problem has been fuelled by poverty and aggravated by the economic crisis.

A report by the United Nations has found that Iran has the highest drug addiction rate in the world. “According to the U.N. World Drug Report for 2005, Iran has the highest proportion of opiate addicts in the world — 2.8 percent of the population over age 15”, the report said. “With a population of about 70 million and some government agencies putting the number of regular users close to 4 million, Iran has no real competition as world leader in per capita addiction to opiates, including heroin.”

The report added that a government poll had shown that almost 80 percent of Iranians believed that there was a direct link between unemployment and drug addiction. According to Iranian National Centre for Addiction Studies, 20 percent of Iran’s adult population was “somehow involved in drug abuse”.

Many Iranians describe high drug availability as evidence of a plot by the regime. “If they could create enough jobs, enough entertainment, why would people turn to drugs?” It is not only the lack of policy and management, but the interests of corrupt state mafia whose sales in Iran made up a 10 billion dollar market last year, nearly three quarters of the total revenue from Iran’s oil market during the same period.

This new repression proves that hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadi Nezhad’s promises of economic reform in Iran have failed to materialise into raising the standard of living for most ordinary Iranians in the 21 months since he came to power in August 2005.

The Iranian population, far behind Sri Lanka, remains below the poverty line. A member of Iran’s Majlis (parliament) confessed in Jan. 2005 that “90 percent of the population are living under the poverty line and only ten percent of the people have access to social services provided by the government”, Mohammad Abbaspour said in an interview with a hardline state-run news agency. The situation has since worsened and continues pushing an increasing number of young people below the poverty line.

In the past 27 years, we have witnessed immense pressures on different segments of Iranian society. The IRI dreams of rendering it into a total Islamic society, but people (especially youth) do not bow to an Islamic way of life in any standard. Furthermore, social poverty, homeless tramps, higher unemployment rates, and the lack of social and private freedom, lead to the rise of unsolvable ills for Iranian youth. The incompetent regime treats a majority of this frustrated youth as “thugs”.

According to Article 35 of the Chinese Constitution, Chinese citizens have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In reality this is utterly false. Consistently, China has shown total contempt for the concept of freedom of speech, and, most worryingly, it is being aided in this by major Western corporations. Throwing aside the pretence of responsible and ethical business, well known corporations including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Cisco Systems are actively assisting the Chinese government’s campaign against human rights, motivated by the promise of potentially huge financial returns.

In contemporary China, journalists, bloggers, academics, and political opponents of the Government routinely face harassment and imprisonment. A brief summary of recent developments makes for sobering reading.

2000:
Academic historian Xu Zerong was detained on spurious charges of ‘illegally providing state secrets’ (in reality, sending historical material dating from the 1950s about the Korean War to researchers outside China) and publishing banned material. This earned him a combined prison sentence of 13 years.

2001:
On July 10, China announced it will put Chinese-American academic Li Shaomin on trial for spying. On July 14, one day after China’s successful bid for the 2008 Olympics, Li Shaomin, an American academic, was tried for ‘espionage’. Then on July 24, Sociologist Dr. Gao Zhan was sentenced to ten years in prison on charges of ‘collecting intelligence for Taiwan’. Routinely, China imprisons academics on trumped up charges of ‘espionage’ in order to silence criticism of the regime.

2002:
Wired News reported that the Chinese government ‘continues to maintain a nearly rock-solid cyberwall’, blocking access to information on the Internet and employing 30,000 ‘Internet police’ to monitor its citizens. Most worryingly, it was revealed that the Internet blocking software was sold to the Chinese government by US companies.

2004:
Journalist Shi Tao warned journalists of the dangers associated with dissidents returning to mark the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was arrested and later imprisoned for 10 years, for revealing a ‘State secret’. Court papers revealed that Yahoo Holdings in Hong Kong had provided details regarding Tao’s e-mail correspondence and IP address tracking, leading to his conviction.

2005:
It was revealed that Microsoft was censoring Chinese weblogs that used words such as ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, and ‘demonstration’. Microsoft’s justification for this blatant assistance with censorship was that it ‘abides by the laws, regulations and norms of each country in which it operates’. This same year, the Chinese government imprisoned three journalists, dismissed editors of a number of newspapers, banned dozens of newspapers, and confiscated almost one million ‘illegal’ publications. Also in 2005, a court froze the assets of two journalists who had criticised work conditions at factories run by Foxconn, a company which makes the Apple iPod.

2006:
Google agreed to censor search results in China, and set up a special government authorised search engine for China. All other Google search engines are blocked from being used. Google’s motto ‘Don’t be evil’ here looks to be little more than words.

2007:
This February, U.S. Congressman Chris Smith stated in a letter to the Wall Street Journal that Western corporations are failing to prevent censorship and other human rights abuses in China, and are in fact assisting them. ‘There is enormous profit potential, but entering the Chinese market means challenging a repressive regime on basic human rights tenets. Sadly, some of America’s largest tech firms are currently failing this new test of corporate responsibility’, he wrote.

While President George W. Bush continues to mouth platitudes about freedom and democracy, he has failed to apply these standards to China, thereby revealing the power of the economic motive in determining who is eligible for human rights and who apparently isn’t. The outrageous human rights abuses and restrictions on freedom of speech in China continue apace, aided and abetted by quiescent Western governments and Western companies willing to actively assist government censorship in return for a ‘fast buck’.

This article originally appeared in Blurb magazine and is reproduced here with permission.

I have often complained of the shallowness, triviality, and anaemia of current theism/atheism discussions. In the following contribution (hopefully to be followed by others) I mean to infuse some lifeblood into the discussion. If, on whichever side of the discussion you may be, you still find much in what I say with which you strongly disagree, which indeed irritates you, that will be all the better. I mean to stir stagnant waters, inject turbulence into placid intellectual positions.

The idea of a creator or of creation is metaphysically bankrupt. It is a silly notion that breeds more riddles than it solves. In fact it solves nothing. If we ask: Why should there be anything rather than nothing?, we see immediately that there can be no answer. To advance the idea of a creator to resolve the mystery of being does nothing but confound and complicate the issue. In the first place, the ultimate mystery remains where it was. For why should there be that creator or first being rather than not? There is no answer. Moreover we have the riddle of why the creator took it into its head to produce something where there was nothing. Being is the ultimate mystery and there is no way to make it yield to our questioning. We have to accept it on its own terms.

It would be easy to see the idea of a creator producing the world as the understandably crude attempt by human beings in the infancy of humanity to resolve the riddle. The answer would easily suggest itself to them on the analogy of their own production of things.

Why do so many humans today accept that answer and believe it to be reasonable and obvious? The answer again is simple. Traditional cultures inculcate it in them. If you ask, Why should we accept those traditions as true?, the traditional answer is that that answer was revealed by that creator itself. Who says that? That same tradition. We have to believe the traditional doctrine because the tradition tells us it was revealed by the creator and we have to believe that it was revealed by the creator because the tradition tells us that.

I say it would be easy to see the fatuity of all that, if only we could bring ourselves to think for ourselves. Unfortunately, most of us do not think for ourselves. It is so much more comfortable to have others think for us and to receive our mass-produced thought finely packaged, home delivered, user-friendly, and with promises of alluring rewards thrown into the bargain.

Let us ask again: Why should we believe our traditional teachings? Because they come from God. Well, let us close our eyes to the circularity of the answer. Let us look at the credentials of that God as that tradition itself presents him. Let us try for a while to put aside the reverence and awe instilled in us by our traditional upbringing and look at the God of the Pentateuch, the God of Paul, the God of the Book of Revelation, the God of the Koran. Let us judge him by the common moral standards that we now accept in decent, civilized society. We find him a liar, a despot, a capricious, vengeful, cruel creature. True, we will find in the Torah, in the Gospels, and in the Koran, many fine sentiments and ideals. But we find similar and even finer ones in cultures either with no gods or with gods we no longer take seriously, which should show us that those sentiments and ideals which we rightly value are independent of belief in our monotheistic God.

So much for the cosmological argument for the existence of God. Let us move on to ontology.

The question Does God exist? is inane. The existence of the existent does not need proof. You go to a primitive tribesman and ask him: ‘Does God exist?’ He answers: ‘Of course. Come, I’ll show you.’ He takes you into his cave or his hut and shows you the effigy he worships saying, ‘Here is God.’ What proof better than that can you ask for? On the other hand, how would you go about proving the non-existence of God? To try to prove logically the non-existence of an unknown nothing is the height of absurdity, the worst kind of eristic juggling.

The sensible thing then is not to ask: ‘Does God exist?’ but to ask: ‘What do we mean by God?’ Throughout the history of humankind, humans have had many differing ideas of God. Many of the old conceptions are no longer taken seriously by present-day members of the human race, so we can leave those to anthropologists. What about extant ideas within the established religions? Then, you may argue that the Yahweh of the Old Testament is revolting, the God of the New Testament is replete with contradictions equally with the Allah of the Koran. So what? There is no logical impossibility in the idea of a being mighty and clever enough to make the universe and run it in accordance with its whims and who may yet be as imperfect and as unaccountable as Yahweh or God or Allah.

A. N. Whitehead’s final answer to the question, What is God? is summed up in the final paragraph of chapter III of his Religion in the Making (1926). I will quote this beautiful paragraph in full:

“The order of the world is no accident. There is nothing actual which could be actual without some measure of order. The religious insight is the grasp of this truth: That the order of the world, the depth of reality of the world, the value of the world in its whole and in its parts, the beauty of the world, the zest of life, the peace of life, and the mastery of evil, are all bound together—not accidentally, but by reason of this truth: that the universe exhibits a creativity with infinite freedom, and a realm of forms with infinite possibilities; but that this creativity and these forms are together impotent to achieve actuality apart from the completed ideal harmony, which is God.”(1)

Does this prove the existence of God? The question is, strictly speaking, meaningless. What Whitehead gives us is a way of looking at the world, a vision of the world, in which the world exhibits meaningfulness and value. And the gist of that outlook is that, if we are to find meaning and value in the universe, we must see order, coherence, intelligence, and goodness as ultimate characters of reality. This is what I mean when I say that to be is to be good, when I maintain that ultimate reality must be intelligent and good, when I describe ultimate reality as Creative Eternity and say that Creative Eternity is Love.(2)

If we replace ‘the soul’ by ‘God’ in the famous proof of the immortality of the soul in Plato’s Phaedrus (3), we have an exquisite ‘proof’ of the eternity of God. But what would the ‘proof’ prove after all? Nothing. It would neither prove the existence of God nor tell us anything about what God is. What it does is to establish the ideal reality of our idea of eternity, in the same way as Plato’s ‘proof’ both in the Phaedrus and the Laws and his arguments in the Phaedo establish the reality of the ideals of autonomy and integrity embedded in the Socratic-Platonic concept of the soul.(4)

But while some of the philosophers I admire most speak of God and though I could without qualm declare that I believe in God in a very real and profound sense, yet I think it advisable to avoid using the term ‘God’ in philosophical discussion, since a philosopher using the term will find it necessary to spend as much time explaining what s/he does not mean as expressing what s/he does mean. The same holds for the term ‘faith’. I could readily affirm that without a core of faith philosophy would be vacuous and valueless. But this word ‘faith’ is laden with untoward associations with the ideas of revelation and dogma. While therefore I maintain that reason is not only compatible with, but is in fact meaningless without, a certain something that could be called faith, yet in general I try to keep clear of this suspect word.

Because this sounds so complicated, let me put it in a different way. Faith as commonly understood is, in my view, a mockery of reason and an insult to human intelligence, and the usual attempts to reconcile faith and reason turn out to be no more than word jugglery or self-deception. But on the other hand, through mere reason we cannot find our way to any reality or any value. Kant had to support and supplement pure reason with practical reason. Kant’s followers restored Reason to the Whole to rescue it from its sterile purity. Whitehead put reality and value back into the world by insisting on the integrity of experience. These were all insightful moves. To preserve our dignity and our worth as human beings, we must have unfettered Reason, but it must be Reason with a throbbing heart. I hold that the one way to achieve that object is to find all reality and all value within ourselves. The self-evidence of the reality and value within us is the Faith we need, is the God the believers craved and the unbelievers sacrificed.

William Ernest Hocking expresses this elusive idea well in the following words: “The birth of the idea of God in the mind – the judgment ‘Reality is living, divine, a God exists’ – is so subtle, like the faintest breath of the spirit upon the face of the waters, that no look within can tell whether God is here revealing himself to man, or man creating God.”(5)

If I have not irritated you enough already, dear Reader, let me tease you with some mystic-mongering:

god is real
therefore god does not exist
for reality is opposed to existence
the circumference of a circle is not in the circle
the circumference is not outside the circle
the circumference does not exist
it is an idea
it is a reality
it does not exist
but without it no circle exists
there may be round things in the world
but without that reality that does not exist
no round thing is a circle
nor is it even round
god is an idea
god is real
god does not exist
but without that real god that does not exist
no thing in the world has meaning
no thing in the world has value
no thing in the world has reality
no thing in the world has existence
the idea that constitutes my world is my idea
it springs from my mind
my idea encompasses my world
whose idea constitutes the world encompassing me?
what mind gives it birth?
that is a question no one can answer
neither science nor pure reason can tell
that is a question about which we can only mythologize
and mythologize we must
without mythologizing our world rots
but when we forget that our myths are myths
the mind that created the myths
rots
rots and dies and petrifies
with the death of the mind
god dies
god then exists
but is no longer real
that dead existing god is the god of religion

Maximus of Tyre in the second century of the Christian era wrote winged words in his beautiful “defence of idols” with which I like to close this essay: “Let men know what is divine (to theion genos), let them know: that is all. If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Pheidias, an Egyptian by paying worship to animals, another man by a river, another by fire — I have no anger for their divergences; only let them know, let them love, let them remember.”(6)

Footnotes:

(1)Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 1926, pp.119-20.

(2)See my Let Us Philosophize, 1998, Book Two “Reality”.

(3)Plato, Phaedrus, 245c-246a.

(4)See my Plato: An Interpretation, 2005, especially chapters 5, 7, and 12.

(5)William Ernest Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 1912, “The Will as a Maker of Truth”, reproduced in Approaches to the Philosophy of Religion, 1954, ed. Daniel J. Bronstein and Harold M. Schulweis, p.20.

(6)Maximus of Tyre, quoted by Gilbert Murray in Five Stages of Greek Religion, 1935, p.77, n.1.

D. R. Khashaba is an independent philosopher. His books include Socrates’ Prison Journal and Hypatia’s Lover. He lives in his home country, Egypt, and has a website at Back to Socrates as well as a blog.

Democratic politics is essentially the politics of rational dialogue in which language, thought and persuasion play key roles. At least that is what we have over the decades learnt to believe. But recent electoral battles in India appear to have fundamentally shifted the ground on which our democratic beliefs have stood so far.

It is not being argued here that the theatre of politics has moved unprecedentedly and dangerously away from reason and towards emotion. Emotion has always been an indispensable appendage of democratic politics, whether for good or for bad. What is new is something else. It is the rise to predominance of affect vis-à-vis reason and emotion. This has shifted politics on to an entirely different ground. What is most disturbing is that on this ground the rules of democratic politics as a rational discourse do not seem to apply.

When reason employs or contends with emotion, it has a support or a rival. That is why it not only survives but even flourishes. Affect, on the contrary, preempts reason. Its appeal is sub-rational. In the prevailing culture of the spectacle, it finds a particularly conducive environment to flourish because the images can bypass reason to speak directly to the senses. In our culture of the spectacle, we are everywhere surrounded by images which solicit our attention ceaselessly. Even words get pared down to mere letters and numbers to reduce communication to a transmission of images and symbols: look at the practice of using SMSs and instant messaging. The space of reading, listening and reflection gets usurped by images. You do not say but show. Not that the images are anything new. What is new is that there are too many of them, moving in too quick a succession, and the succession can be rather baffling. In the good old days the image was an extension of speech; now it is becoming a substitute.

It is the rational foundations of democratic exchange that carry in them the promise of freedom, justice and a better world for everyone. And reason survives on reflection. Images, on the contrary, derive their force from immediacy. In a media-saturated culture, they wield tremendous power to seduce people with their raw, sensory urgency. This explains the transformation of politics in our times, which has come to resemble cinematic fantasy. Indeed the distinction between politics and entertainment can be no longer sustained on the other side of the line either, as films like Lage Raho Munna Bhai and Rang De Basanti exemplify. Politics minus memory and context is the best current recipe for instant entertainment. Ideologically drained and historically evacuated, such compromised cinematic narratives perhaps announce the arrival of an ironic postmodern nationalism.

It is not a mere coincidence that both politics and cinema should have discovered the force of the visual impact only at this particular historical juncture when India is staking its claim to the status of an emerging global superpower while seeking, ironically, a frictionless integration into the global order. From the viewpoint of global capital however, real histories and people are the most stubborn impediments in the way of integration. Since democracy forbids overriding them, technology would help in finding ways to make them effectively disappear.

And people and histories do effectively disappear in a culture of the spectacle, even though the superficial impression may be to the contrary. Images as stereotyped representations increasingly replace real people and real histories. The process involves what can only be called a high-tech primitivism: a mix of high technology and primitivist appeal to affects. But it also means the destruction of the whole legacy of rational dialogue on which democracies have grown.

It is not often noticed that the recent empowerment of the visual in Indian cinema has come at the cost of the narrative, which suffers a proportional disenfranchisement. This illustrates the direction and motivation of the change that is sweeping through the world. The tendency of the change, clearly, is to marginalize reflection and memory in favour of pre-reflective, affective impact. This is as true of politics as it is of cinema. When the interests of democracy as a rationally engaged community conflict with those of global capital, affective impact can short-circuit democratic reason and carry the day. The short-circuiting is a high-speed operation and relies, appropriately, on powerful media technologies. These technologies include real-time communication, extreme close-up, assembled ‘reality’ and invisible spatio-temporal disjunction. Repetitive and artificially abrupt use of the affective impact delivered through images preempts a fair exercise of reason. The insidious triumph passes off silently and uncelebrated. And expectedly so.

The current obsession of political parties with images needs to be understood in the wider context of the history of the global present. This obsession seems to have reached pathological proportions in the acts of computer-aided simulation and morphing of which various political parties accuse their opponents from time to time. But it is more than pathological, being also the displaced symptom of a grave threat that emerges unsuspected and looms over democracy.

We can try to locate this threat with the help of a typical photograph that most Indian newspapers and websites carry when reporting on the daily movement of the electoral juggernaut. It is the photograph of a political rally. The politicians are sitting on a high podium, their heads turned back, their eyes looking into the camera, and the audience looking at the politicians posing for the picture. The audience is all eyes, a strange audience of pure spectators, with hearing and speech suspended. Between the audience (which is far off and below) and the high podium, there are still more cameras. The politicians are thus, essentially, perched between cameras on either side, with the audience providing only the background, whether visible or not. Anyone who looked at the photograph with a sense of wonder (like someone from another world) would only conclude that the whole show is by the politicians and for the cameras. The people are there just as a prop or nuisance, a crowd that has rallied to see a movie being shot. The real scene of action is the taking of the picture. In other words, the real transaction is between the politicians and the media.

The truth, however, lies somewhere between the utter absurdity of the situation described above and our knowledge of the real demographics of political rallies these days. We would be fooling ourselves if we compared these rallies with those organized by people around the world against America’s attack on Iraq, or with those which took place before and after the imposition of Emergency in India. The rallies today are manufactured shows, consisting mostly of party workers and paid crowds. It is doubtful if anyone goes to them to really hear the politicians and to choose the right candidate and party to vote for.

The truth probably is that these rallies are no more than dead relics of a bygone politics in which public exchange of opinions and judgements used to matter. Instead they have become photo-ops for feeding the media, which then will prepare its pre-electoral verdict with the help of media-savvy psephologists (who will inevitably go wrong). It is as if democracy has left the polis and settled down in the studio, to be touched now and then with Photoshop. At its heart there is a hole, indicating the exit of real, flesh-and-blood people, of the kind who, like thousands of debt-ridden farmers in India, drink a pesticide and die. They are the people who have ironically understood their dehumanization, their transformation into pests. But democracy, strangely, does not understand what they have understood.

This being the situation, we are not heading towards better democracy but towards simulated democracy. In this scenario the only way to protect a politics of the people might be to take politics back to those sites where sustained rational discussion can still take place among people themselves, and not merely among their self-styled media representatives. These would be the micro-sites of mohallas and bazaars, of dhabas and tea-shops, of nukkads and chaupals, of tubewells, and of shops, offices and factories.

Rajesh K. Sharma teaches literature and theory in the Department of English, Punjabi University, Patiala (India). His interests include technology, philosophy and education. Email: sharajesh@gmail.com

A British branch of a new Europe-wide phenomenon is to be launched on Thursday 21 June in London. The Council of ex-Muslims of Britain is building on the stunning success of other branches already operating in Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The British Humanist Association and National Secular Society are sponsoring the launch and support the new organisation.

The Council will provide a voice for those labelled Muslim but who have renounced religion and do not want to be identified by religion.

Rights activist Maryam Namazie will be the voice of the organisation in this country. She said: “We are establishing the alternative to the likes of the Muslim Council of Britain because we don’t think people should be pigeonholed as Muslims or deemed to be represented by regressive organisations like the MCB. Those of us who have come forward with our names and photographs represent countless others who are unable or unwilling to do so because of the threats faced by those considered ‘apostates’ – punishable by death in countries under Islamic law. By doing so, we are breaking the taboo that comes with renouncing Islam but also taking a stand for reason, universal rights and values, and secularism. We are quite certain we represent a majority in Europe and a vast secular and humanist protest movement in countries like Iran.”

Mina Ahadi who initiated the original Central Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany will be attending the launch. She spoke about the aims of the organisation in an interview with Der Spiegel.

Mina Ahadi, Mahin Alipour (spokesperson of the Scandinavian organisation), Maryam Namazie and others will be available for interviews at the launch.

The launch will be at 11am (until midday), Thursday 21 June
Wilson Room
Portcullis House
Westminster SW1A 2LW

A manifesto explaining the aims of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain follows.

For more information please contact:
Maryam Namazie
Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain
BM Box 1919
London WC1N 3XX, UK
e-mail: ex-muslimcouncil@ukonline.co.uk
telephone: 07719166731
website (under construction)

Manifesto of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain

We, non-believers, atheists, and ex-Muslims, are establishing or joining the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain to insist that no one be pigeonholed as Muslims with culturally relative rights nor deemed to be represented by regressive Islamic organisations and ‘Muslim community leaders’.

Those of us who have come forward with our names and photographs represent countless others who are unable or unwilling to do so because of the threats faced by those considered ‘apostates’ – punishable by death in countries under Islamic law.

By doing so, we are breaking the taboo that comes with renouncing Islam but also taking a stand for reason, universal rights and values, and secularism.

Whilst religion or the lack thereof is a private affair, the increasing intervention of and devastation caused by religion and particularly Islam in contemporary society has necessitated our public renunciation and declaration. We represent a majority in Europe and a vast secular and humanist protest movement in countries like Iran.

Taking the lead from the Central Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany, we demand:

1. Universal rights and equal citizenship for all. We are opposed to cultural relativism and the tolerance of inhuman beliefs, discrimination and abuse in the name of respecting religion or culture.
2. Freedom to criticise religion. Prohibition of restrictions on unconditional freedom of criticism and expression using so-called religious ‘sanctities’.
3. Freedom of religion and atheism.
4. Separation of religion from the state and legal and educational system.
5. Prohibition of religious customs, rules, ceremonies or activities that are incompatible with or infringe people’s rights and freedoms.
6. Abolition of all restrictive and repressive cultural and religious customs which hinder and contradict woman’s independence, free will and equality. Prohibition of segregation of sexes.
7. Prohibition of interference by any authority, family members or relatives, or official authorities in the private lives of women and men and their personal, emotional and sexual relationships and sexuality.
8. Protection of children from manipulation and abuse by religion and religious institutions.
9. Prohibition of any kind of financial, material or moral support by the state or state institutions to religion and religious activities and institutions.
10. Prohibition of all forms of religious intimidation and threats.

Despite the fact that Voltaire thought him ‘the most singular [of] the meteors fatal to the Christian religion’, Jean Meslier has been almost completely forgotten for most of the last two hundred years, even in France where he was born in 1664. Yet his name should be familiar to anyone who is interested in the history of religion and of European atheism, especially if they have a sense of humour. Meslier’s achievement, unique for its period, was to put his name to a long, lacerating, well-referenced and unambiguously atheist document at a time when to do so was to invite almost certain and messy execution. He may not have known that even in our own comparatively tolerant islands, we were hanging people for atheism as late as 1697 but he certainly knew that only a few decades before he was born, the witty and articulate philosopher Vanini had been sent to the pyre after first having his tongue torn out as a little amuse ghoul. Just being the wrong sort of Christian – or even the wrong sort of Catholic – could get you into serious trouble in the France of Louis XIV.

Given this lethally discouraging atmosphere, what should an articulate and passionate man do if, despite a conventional religious upbringing – indeed, despite training for the Catholic priesthood and becoming a priest – you come to the conclusion that there is no god; that this life is the only one we have; that the bible is a farrago of superstitious, contradictory and often sadistic nonsense; and – for good measure – that religion and monarchy between them conspire to enrich the elites at the expense of the mass of the people and to keep them oppressed? You certainly don’t go around telling people (unless, as with poor Thomas Aikenhead in the Edinburgh of 1697, you are young and careless and perhaps too fond of a drink or even hypomanic). You can’t interest a publisher – probably not even in Holland and definitely not in France. In any case, you are the priest of the tiny village of Etrépigny, with a population of barely 150 souls up near the north-eastern border of France, across which the armies of Europe have been slogging it out for much of your priestly life. You were born in the area, in another tiny village, and apart from your studies at the seminary down the road at Reims, you have probably never left it.

You can put your thoughts down on paper, of course. That lets off a bit of steam but absolutely nobody else can be allowed to read them. It helps that as a priest, you have no wife or inquisitive teenage children who might come across them and talk, and that your housekeeper (or possibly ‘housekeeper’) is probably illiterate; but it’s still risky and anyway, what’s the point? And if you become ill, one of your clerical neighbours might read it while helping you out and then have you dragged from your sick-bed to face some very hard-faced men with voices like French versions of Dr Ian Paisley. You could recant if that happened but it’s not good for your self-esteem or your reputation and it still might not save you from the flames or the scaffold. It’s too late and too difficult to choose another profession and you don’t want to go back to the family farm and weaving-shed. In any case, you quite like your parishioners and you like helping them, which is just as well, since the welfare state hasn’t been invented yet. They certainly like you, especially after your proto-leftie ideas led you to criticise that absolute yahoo of a local squire in one of your sermons. Then you did it again! You were lucky to get away with a month’s ‘re-education’ back in Reims.

Yet Jean Meslier did write it all down – several hundred pages of mordant, ruthless and often quite amusing demolition of the bible; of anger at the contrast between the poverty of his flock and the affluence of ‘les grands’ – the nobility, the senior clergy, the landowners like squire de Toully; and most particularly, of the way in which religions in general and theistic beliefs in particular keep people in fear and superstition so that they regard the assorted disasters of both war and peace as either God’s will or a just punishment for their sins, original and otherwise. For good measure, these views were integrated into a materialist philosophy which, like his political views and his biblical criticism, was way ahead of his time. His arguments were supported by impressive references – especially for a village priest with no regular access to libraries.. Presumably he did much of his writing by candle-light while the parish slept. It must have taken him months or years and he made three copies. All were found by his death-bed, together with a couple of letters to his completely unsuspecting fellow-priests in the neighbouring parishes. There are suggestions that he hastened his death by refusing food and drink, perhaps to minimise the risk that someone would discover and read his heresies before he was actually dead.

It is really rather surprising that any of it survived but all three copies of his Mémoire (or Testament, as it is also known) are in the Bibliotheque Nationale. (The full title and subtitle – pretty clear even if your French is minimal – reads: Mémoire des pensées et des sentiments de Jean Meslier, prêtre curé d’Étrépigny…sur une partie des Erreurs et des Abus de la Conduite et du Gouvernement des Hommes, ou l’on voit des Démonstrations claires et évidentes de la Vanité et de la Fausseté de toutes les Divinités et de toutes les Religions du Monde. He marked it: ‘To be addressed to his parishioners after his death to serve as a witness to Truth’. It’s much less surprising that he was buried in an unmarked grave and that the archbishop of Reims may have sent his goons to exhume the body. It is said that he changed his mind in case it drew even more attention to this troublesome priest, apparently the first person actually to put his name to an unquestionably atheist document since Roman times. We do know that Meslier couldn’t have cared less because he wrote that when he was dead, ‘They can do what they like with my body. They can roast it, or fricassée it, and then eat it – with whichever sauce they prefer’.

We also know that soon after Meslier died, the manuscripts got into the hands of a senior judicial officer and we might have expected that he would quickly burn them, or at least make sure that they weren’t seen by the wrong sort of people. In the event, they soon entered the world of illicit samizdat copies and were selling briskly at what were, for the time, very high prices. Before long, one of these – or perhaps an abridged version – arrived at the Voltaire household. He thought it was dynamite and encouraged all his friends to read it but even for Voltaire, it was too hot to publish. When he did eventually take the risk, in 1762, the Meslier who emerged in Voltaire’s Extrait was a much-shortened, milk-and-water deist version of the unambiguous and uncompromising atheist of the Mémoire. No sign, either, of the sharing-and-caring, pre-industrial agrarian socialist that made Meslier so popular with Soviet propagandists 200 years after his death. Voltaire even made Meslier’s denunciation of his church and his religion seem like a death-bed conversion, when he had evidently been harbouring and refining these dangerous heresies for much of his adult life.

Voltaire’s literary betrayal helped to ensure that the real Jean Meslier remained largely unread and unknown but further historical falsification soon occurred, ironically in the form of a work by Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach. This laid-back, immensely learned and well-heeled aristocrat was nicknamed (presumably by historians) ‘the maître d’hotel of the Enlightenment’ for his regular dinner-parties attended by the Encyclopédistes a|nd all the other movers and shakers – French and foreign – who wanted to join in the satisfying business of ridiculing the clergy, as well as discussing and propagating exciting new ideas.. D’Holbach was just as much an atheist and materialist as Meslier but also just as concerned to avoid a 5am knock on his door by the Bourbon thought-police. In 1772, he published his own attack on religion, superstition and theism, Le bon-sens, [ie Common Sense] but as with all his polemical works, he published it anonymously. After he died (with perfect timing, in 1789, just before le déluge) it was republished as Le bon sens du curé Meslier, or sometimes as Superstition in all ages. To this day, people think they are reading the words of an obscure country vicar when they are actually reading the more elegant phrases of a leisured Franco-German aristo with no socialist aspirations at all. The writer of a recent ‘Faith Column’ in the New Statesman said: ‘I sympathise with Denis Diderot, who wrote in the eighteenth century that “man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”’, but it wasn’t Diderot at all. It was Meslier and it’s typical of the fire and passion of his writing, as well as of his earthy and robust vocabulary, though he didn’t claim to have originated the phrase. Although some Revolutionaries proposed to erect a statue to Meslier in the 1790s, it was never made and his complete Mémoire wasn’t published openly until a Dutch humanist printed a few hundred copies in 1860. The first annotated French edition (Anthropos) only appeared in 1970. Apart from a few fragments, no English translations exist and there are very few academic articles about Meslier in English either.

It was partly the way in which Meslier has been both forgotten and misrepresented that made me keen to persuade someone to write a play or a film script about him, though the main reason was that I thought his Mémoire was a text for our own times as well as for his. The Enlightenment upset a lot of people in all classes in the 18th century and their successors are still both numerous and influential, as Butterflies and Wheels records every day. I’m used to writing scientific medical papers and I’ve done quite a bit of medical journalism but I’ve not written fiction since I left school and I never even contemplated trying my hand at its dramatic forms. After several years of trying to interest any of my acquaintances with theatrical experience or ambitions who would listen, I finally hooked Julian Bird, an old friend and former fellow-trainee in psychiatry. Julian’s mother was a famous actress and he trod the boards a bit himself as a student. In his retirement, he has started treading them again with some success. Still, even Julian didn’t feel competent to write a play, as opposed to acting in it, so we simply advertised for someone who could. This is easier than it sounds and before long, we were cooperating with David Walter Hall, a philosophy graduate fresh out of Cambridge and writer-producer of a sell-out success at the 2005 Edinburgh Fringe. A cheerfully uncomplicated atheist himself and product of an atypically godless upbringing in Northern Ireland, he turned our thoughts into a preliminary text (entitled simply ‘Meslier’) that got good reviews at the 2006 Fringe. (Dressed in a rather fetching red cassock and black biretta, I myself walked the streets of the Athens of the North to sell tickets.)

The arts correspondent from one of the religious newspapers said that he liked it but it needed more atheism. We all agreed and the latest version, twice as long and now called The Last Priest (see above) is playing until July 1st at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington. Naturally, David has included the usual sex and a soupçon of rather clinical violence and there are a few obvious fantasy scenes but our main instructions to him were to avoid further Voltairean misrepresentations of the basic Meslier story. I particularly wanted none of the kind of Shafferian conceits that made Amadeus good theatre but disgraceful history. Even so, Benedict Nightingale, theatre critic of The Times has rated it one of the top five theatrical experiences in Britain (or at least, in England). Nobody expects to make money out of these things but if you come and see it, you will at least limit our losses as well as perhaps enjoying a little historical Enlightenment yourselves.

More information at The Last Priest

(New York, June 14, 2007) – A new surge of violent attacks on teachers and schools by separatist militants has seriously disrupted education in Thailand’s southern border provinces, Human Rights Watch said today.

Officials in Narathiwat province have been forced to close more than 300 government schools in all 13 districts this week after insurgents killed three teachers on June 11. Two gunmen walked into the library of Ban Sakoh school in Si Sakhon district around noon and shot two female teachers, Thippaporn Thassanopas, 42, and Yupha Sengwas, 26, in the head, abdomen and legs. They died instantly in front of some 100 children, who were playing in front of the library after lunch. Both teachers received warnings before they were killed.

Approximately an hour later, a male teacher was shot dead in a grocery store in Ra Ngae district. Sommai Laocharoensuk, 55, a teacher at Ban Jehke School, was hit six times by AK-47 fire in the head and body. An eyewitness said six gunmen walked into the shop and opened fire on Sommai, who was registering the names of children to be enrolled in his school.

Human Rights Watch said it believed those responsible were separatist militants because of a long pattern of similar attacks on government schools and teachers, along with continuing public threats.

“Insurgents are terrorizing teachers and schools, which they consider symbols of the Thai state,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “These attacks are grave crimes and cannot be justified by any cause.”

On June 13, militants burned down 11 schools in Yala province’s Raman district, apparently in retaliation for the June 12 murder of Abdulraman Sama, 60, a respected Muslim religious teacher. More than 500 Muslim women and children blocked a highway in front of a mosque in Raman district in protest of his killing, accusing government security forces of responsibility. Fears of further reprisal attacks on schools have led to the closure of 60 other schools today.

The military-backed government of General Surayud Chulanont has promised to give special attention to measures that would make schools safe and teachers secure in their work. Human Rights Watch urged the government to take appropriate steps to ensure the security of schools, but expressed concern about vigilantism inspired by authorities who encourage the local Buddhist Thai population to defend itself against insurgents. Since the military coup in September 2006, there have been reported assassinations of Muslim religious teachers (ustadz) and attacks on Muslim schools (ponoh) in revenge for insurgent attacks on government teachers and schools.

“Insurgents might claim that abuses by the security forces justify their attacks, but the Thai government must not allow its troops to adopt the same logic,” Adams said. “Any attempt to cover up the misconduct of security forces, or to protect them from criminal responsibility, will further escalate a cycle of reprisal violence.”

According to Human Rights Watch’s research, the new generation of separatist militants – calling themselves Patani Freedom Fighters (pejuang kemerdekaan Patani, or pejuang) – has been responsible for 75 deaths and 91 injuries of teachers since January 2004, when the insurgency escalated. They have also burned 194 schools in the same period.

Human Rights Watch examined leaflets distributed by pejuang militants in the southern border provinces explicitly warning ethnic Malay Muslims not to send children to government schools and not to cooperate with Thai authorities. The leaflets say that doing so is considered to be a forbidden sin (haram) and can be subject to severe punishment – including death.

“Insurgents are attempting to close down all government schools,” Adams said. “Their campaign of terror strikes a serious blow to public education in the southern border provinces, which already retain the lowest test scores in Thailand.”

Copyright Human Rights Watch

“I have been writing this book all my life,” Hitchens says, “and intend to keep on writing it.” Indeed, from his critical biography of Mother Theresa onwards the case against religion is always an underlying theme in Hitchens’s work, and I’m surprised that it has taken him so long to devote a whole book to this subject. It’s worth the wait, though.

This is partly because of Hitchens’s style: erudite but never pretentious, furious without hysteria, serious and laugh-out-loud funny. The breadth of scholarship and learning, and the ease and wit with which he communicates it to the reader, means that you could read Hitchens on any subject regardless of whether you agree with him. To use a cliché in a true sense, he is a joy to read.

Many of his arguments will be familiar. Hitchens demolishes creationism and the argument from design, and shows by close reading that pretty much every act of violence and repression carried out by religious believers can be justified by holy writ. A frequent retort is the truth that atheists can kill people as well, but as Hitchens says, “the chance that a person committing the crimes was ‘faith-based’ was almost 100 percent, while the chances that a person of faith was on the side of humanity and decency were about as good as the odds of a coin flip.” My own view is that this is explained by religion’s devaluation of life to merely a waiting room for the afterlife. Franco’s fascists and bin Laden’s Islamists shout “We love death” for a reason. If you think of mortal life as meaningless except as a preparation for death, you aren’t going to care too much about ending your own life or anyone else’s.

What is new is Hitchens’s demonstration that all religions are essentially the same faith. The story of Abraham appears in Christian, Jewish and Islamic scripture, and immaculate conceptions appear everywhere from the Old Testament to Ancient Egyptian myths, prompting Hitchens to comment that, for religion, the birth canal is a one-way street. These competing faiths are different interpretations of the same totalitarian ideal. No government can know what you dream about, not even North Korea’s, but religion promises “constant surveillance, from cradle to grave – and beyond”. Personally, I can’t imagine a more terrifying prospect.

Also recommended is his study of the tortured relationship between religion and sex. This has rarely been admitted, perhaps because it is so personal to us, but religion has promoted a morbid, perverse attitude to the sexual act that haunts even the most enlightened civilisations to this day. It mutilates its children’s genitals and represses their most natural instinct while promising everlasting orgies in the afterlife. As Hitchens says, “The homicidal lunatics – rehearsing to be genocidal maniacs – of 9/11 were perhaps tempted by virgins, but it is far more revolting to contemplate that, like so many of their fellow jihadists, they were virgins.” Innocence is great up to a certain point in life: after that, it becomes corruption. The Catholic Church is so well known for child abuse scandals that the paedophile priest is now a sitcom joke. And for good reason: Hitchens tells us that there was a time in Ireland when children who went to church schools and weren’t raped were actually in the minority.

I know a lot of people who would nod along at this stuff but still be inclined to seek out spiritual answers. For the secular, Buddhism is a temptation because wisdom always looks better from far off and because it is seen as a nice, cuddly alternative to Western fire and brimstone. Hitchens punctures yet another illusion by exploring Buddhist leaders’ collaboration with Nazis, Buddhism’s pogroms of Hindu Tamils, and its array of charlatans who rip off the naïve seekers of the West. He gives a warning to those seeking wisdom from far away: “Those who become bored by conventional ‘Bible’ religions, and seek ‘enlightenment’ by way of the dissolution of the critical faculties into nirvana in any form… may think they are leaving the realm of despised materialism, but they are still being asked to put their reason to sleep, and to discard their minds along with their sandals.”

Of course, many will not agree. There’s a growing critique of outright secularist thought, often from other atheists and liberals. Dawkins and Harris may have a point, they say, but they are too combative, too forceful, too ready to lose their tempers in public.

There is even a disgusting moral equivalence that has fast become cliché: the idea that, because they hold strong views, some antitheists are basically the same as religious fundamentalists. Cristina Odone describes Richard Dawkins as “a world-famous apologist for secularist extremism”; Prospect referred to The God Delusion as “Dawkins’ dogma” in the earliest of many patronising reviews. In February this year the British Guardian ran a long thinkpiece on faith and secularism, which portrayed the debate as between two parallel fundamentalisms. It interviewed Azzam Tamimi, director of London’s Institute of Islamic Political Thought:

I refer to secular fundamentalism. The problem is that these people believe that they have the absolute truth. That means you have no room to talk to others so you end up having a physical fight. They want to close the door and ignore religion, but this will provoke a violent religiosity. If someone seeks to deny my existence, I will fight to assert it.

The Guardian failed to point out that Tamimi is a Special Envoy of Hamas who has spoken in favour of suicide bombing and the eradication of the state of Israel.

Hitchens deals with the equivalence straight away:

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning “punctuated evolution” and the unfulfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication… We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books…. We are reconciled to living only once, except through out children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion.

Another criticism of strongly expressed atheism is that it seeks to cruelly puncture the comforting illusions that do no harm. Passionate atheists are seen as akin to someone kicking apart a doll’s house. Hitchens acknowledges this and puts Marx’s famous description of religion as “opium for the people” in context: for Marx religion was not a brainwashing tool but a genuine comfort to people who had nothing.

There’s nothing morally wrong with deluding yourself to be happy, we all do it from time to time. But a big theme in God is Not Great is that faith belongs to the “sinister, spoiled, selfish childhood of our species”. Of course, a five-year-old with an imaginary friend is cute. A twenty-five year old with an imaginary friend is just disturbing. Put simply, it’s time to grow up, and put away these childish things.

Organised religion is declining, despite the best efforts of our governments and of isolated fundamentalist groups. We may be seeing new attempts at censorship and repression, but I agree with A C Grayling that this is faith’s last death-rattle rather than a sign of its resurgence. Religion has had thousands of years to put its ideas into practice, and it’s time to give something else a chance.

Life is there to be lived, and for all its imperfections, it is the only life we are sure of. Slowly, we are packing away our toys and games and walking hand in hand into the mortal sunset. When faith ends, life begins.

God is Not Great: The Case Against Religion, Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic 2007

One midnight in July 1992, a twenty-two year old Somalian Muslim known as Ayaan Hirsi Magan arrived in Holland fleeing an arranged marriage. Fourteen years later, Hirsi Ali was known as an outspoken Dutch MP and writer with strong views on religion and the role of women under Islamic law. With the director Theo Van Gogh she made a film, Submission, which took the form of a series of dialogues between Allah and female Muslims.

There is the woman who is flogged for committing adultery; another who is given in marriage to a man she loathes; another who is beaten by her husband on a regular basis; and another who is shunned by her father when he learns that his brother raped her. Each abuse is justified by the perpetrators in the name of God, citing the Quran verses now written on the bodies of the women.

In November 2004, Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic extremist. His last words were, ‘Can’t we talk about this?’

Theo Van Gogh never got that chance, but the argument continues. Through her book, her film and her parliamentary work Hirsi Ali aimed to put the oppression of Muslim women on the agenda, and in this she has succeeded. To her detractors she is an Uncle Tom, a sellout, a traitor to her faith who is wheeled out by the neocons to justify attacks on Islamic countries and a racist war on Islam. This is the same treatment given to Maryam Namazie, Azar Nafasi, and just about anyone from the Muslim world who dares speak out against their government.

But the greater part of this book is the story of Hirsi Ali’s childhood in Somalia, her escape to Holland, and her gradual awakening. If The Caged Virgin was Hirsi Ali’s manifesto, Infidel is one woman’s personal journey.

Hirsi Ali draws her clan and family in a tender, low-key style that doesn’t at all negate the horrors of her childhood. Unlucky enough to remember her excision, Hirsi Ali describes this process so well that one reads the section at arm’s length: ‘Then came the sewing; the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia, my loud and anguished protests, Grandma’s words of comfort and encouragement.’ Gentlemen, please take a moment to reflect that this process is the equivalent of removing the scrotum and shaft of the penis, then sewing it to the empty sac.

She brings them all to life: the political dissident father Abeh, the devout, abused sister Haweya, the first fumbling boyfriends. What’s more compelling, though, is the development of her own independent mind. At first a practising Muslim, Hirsi Ali is inclined to think that the Quran is a text of peace and love, and that the crimes committed in its name are just perversions of the true faith. She becomes interested in the Quran and Islamic scholarship, but the more scripture she reads the more disillusioned she becomes. Having read the Quran, she comes to believe that the abuses committed in its name are not carried out in spite of the original text but because of it. When she stands in front of the mirror and says, ‘I don’t believe in God,’ you feel like cheering and crying; it is a rebirth, a secular revelation.

All religions are based to some extent on the hatred of and the fear of women. But Hirsi Ali shows us how much time and effort and morbid fascination have gone into clerics’ studies of the evils of femininity and sexuality. Debates raged for centuries about the correct mode of female dress. Sheik Taj Din al-Halali, an Islamic scholar based in Australia, recently said that rape is essentially the fault of the woman because

If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it … whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?… If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.

Australian Muslims spoke out against this nonsense, but the problem remains. Conversely, other clerics have argued that allowing only a part of the woman’s body to be shown (ankles, lips, eyes) means that the uncovered feature will become magnified by its isolation, causing greater outbreaks of chaotic sexual desire. As a young immigrant in Holland, Hirsi Ali is told by a friend that it’s not a big deal if men see her in revealing clothes. Hirsi Ali exclaims: ‘But they won’t be able to work, and the buses will crash, and there will be a state of total fitna!’

These memories of integrating into Holland are charming and poignant. She writes of being confused at the sun going down at nine o’clock; of negotiating public transport (‘How could anyone predict a bus would arrive at exactly 2:37? Did they also control the rules of time?’) For someone so routinely denounced as an atheist fundamentalist, Hirsi Ali has a great humility about her experiences and beliefs.

Not that you will agree with everything she says. Her critique of immigration is more intelligent than most, but if the policies her Liberal Party advocates had been in place in 1992, we might never have heard of Hirsi Ali. For every Ayaan that makes it, there are thousands of Haweyas that don’t, and you should never kick the ladder away.

But her analysis of the current situation – that religious fundamentalists are motivated by religion, not poverty or alienation; that faith schools act as benign segregation; that politicians do Muslims a disservice by ingratiating themselves with ‘community leaders’ who are about as representative of the world’s Muslims as the BNP are of Christians – is bang on.

I can’t end this review without some harsh words. The Iranian feminist and socialist Maryam Namazie has described the Islamic world as a ‘sexual apartheid’. The comparison is apt in all respects except one: Africans under racial apartheid could count on legions of intelligent Western liberals to fight and demonstrate on their behalf. Muslim women enjoy no such solidarity. Perhaps it’s for the usual ‘anti-imperialist’ reasons, and perhaps it’s something else: I get the impression, while arguing this point with Western leftists, that they quite like the idea of a more spiritual system where women speak only when spoken to, and do as they are told. Faith is the last refuge of the sexual inadequate.

At a debate in Amsterdam, Hirsi Ali said: ‘Look at how many Voltaires the West has. Don’t deny us the right to have a Voltaire, too. Look at our women, and look at our countries. Look at how we are all fleeing and asking for refuge here, and how people are now flying planes into buildings in their madness. Allow us a Voltaire.’ In Ayaan Hirsi Ali, they already have one.

Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Free Press, 2007

With the arrival of spring, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s police have launched this year their traditional crackdown on women’s dress. Such crackdowns have become a regular feature of life for Iranian women. The crackdown is to force women to respect the strict Islamic dress code.

Under Iran’s Islamic laws (Sharia) women are obliged to cover their body from head- to-toe with a black chador or at least long, loose-fitting clothes to disguise their whole figures. The Islamic dress code is severely imposed at this time. Violators can receive lashes, fines or imprisonment.

Since the existence of the IRI, not a day has passed without attack, physical assault, arrest, acid-throwing, harassment and psychological pressure on women in Iran. The IRI has clearly specified that for women no other sort of dress is permitted except the Islamic hijab.

The first question is: why does the IRI since 1979 stubbornly impose Islamic hijab on women of different social backgrounds, ethnic groups, and religious minorities?

The reason why Islam lays great emphasis on hijab is to avoid contacts between women with “non-mahram” men.

“Non-mahram” describes the men or women with whom an Islamic adult person can marry: it means “marriageable”. Considering this definition, for a Muslim person, there are two groups of people in the society: mahram and non-mahram. This principle is the pivotal cause of Islamic hijab.

The first group called “mahrams” are a little group of non-marriageable men or women – parents, grand-parents, children, brothers/sisters, uncles/aunts, grand-children, stepchildren, parents-in-law and stepparents. A Muslim adult woman is not obliged to wear hijab in front of their eyes and a Muslim man is not obliged to lower his gaze.

The second group, called non-mahram, is the rest of society. A Muslim woman should wear hijab in front of all adult males of this group. Any sort of contact between them or being alone together (“Khalwah”), except in extreme cases such as a medical emergency, is banned.

Non-mahram is the most determinant factor of social character formation in an Islamic society. It has created a culture which influenced not only dress code, but also a range of social behaviour. It is cumbersomely present in any Islamic society. For example, we can retrace its footsteps in Islamic architecture:

A typical Muslim house is built around a central, mostly rectangular, courtyard. To respect the dogma, the interior space is important, not the outside. Therefore, a part of the house is separated for females. The men’s reception (or guest) room tends to be located next to the entrance lobby of the house so that non-mahram visitors do not see the females. The windows are inside not outside of the house so that eye contact between non-mahrams does not occur. In the big house, where several generations can dwell together, measures are imposed so that the contact between non-mahrams like cousins or brother/sister-in-law of opposite sex dwellers does not lead to an eventual sexual temptation.

Stricter than a traditional Islamic house, we see marks of the non-mahram culture in the imposition of gender segregation in Islamic palaces; no access to the harem area of palace, except for castrated servants, was possible.

Such palaces had to conform to the rules separating non-mahrams from each other. Woman’s body is the red line of visual and acoustic fields. Therefore, not only the interrelationship between the dwellers but any activity in these places is influenced by the norm of non-mahram. Paintings, frescos, music, theatre, ceremonies…, are all male domains. From these palaces an official, normative style was generated and then extended into the whole society.

Moral words describing red lines of non-mahram were created; words like Namus, Hormat, Khairat, referring to the culture of non-mahram, shaped character development in the popular culture, such that a “good” Muslim man would not permit a female member of his mahram circle (daughter/sister/wife) to be met or seen by non-mahram men.

“Madrassas” (traditional schools) were built mostly for male Muslim children. Such a school had to respect the dogma of non-mahram by imposing gender segregation as a moral requirement. It taught the phobia of sexual temptation to little children.

All of those measures which allegedly lead to the sex segregation are reflected from the dogma of non-mahram, a deep established belief system affecting and colouring many aspects of social life. As a dogma, it is a social phenomenon with stereotyped resonances.

Since in the Islamic view of morality, touching women may lead to temptation and immorality, a Muslim woman should not show her beauty, adornment and dress to a non-mahram. Therefore the form of head-to-foot hijab with a black cloth, which is not transparent, is recommended for Islamic hijab.

Islamic hijab is a red line around a Muslim woman’s body to stop a possible temptation between non-mahrams; therefore it is considered a duty for any Muslim woman to avoid the circumstances that lead to fornication and adultery.

The second question is: what is the origin and reason of Islamic hijab?

One of the main components of Islamic hijab’s dogma is misogyny, which is older than hijab itself. It is a primitive tradition of social hierarchy, when the strong sex had the upper hand.

Woman’s hair has been since considered a source of vitality, and special magic powers have been attributed to it. Long before Islamic interpretation of “Dr” Abol-Hassan Banisadr’s famous confirmation — “the female hair radiates something which acts on the male brain” — the idea was inspired from mythological stories.

King Solomon is said to have had 700 wives and 300 concubines. David had 99. Many early societies had no restrictions on the number of wives or rules for how they were to be treated.

Early Christianity invented the idea that not only Eve herself but also all daughters of Eve were full of sin. Therefore, man was better off not to marry. Since this would be the end of mankind, the same people found apparently a compromise and concluded that only the impious men marry. The myth of malicious Eve, guilty of the First Sin for seducing Adam to eat the apple, is a symbolic inspiration of misogyny in religions.

Gender segregation was never in Christianity as restrictive as in Islam. Wearing a headdress was a long tradition of European women, a status symbol from the upper classes that attracted the envy of those less privileged than themselves. This is however not comparable with Islamic hijab which is derived from the dogma of non-mahram, with no social privilege or aesthetic reasons for women.

The dominant idea in Islam — not completely different from other religions — considers that women, by nature, desire to be looked at, adored and cherished, while the man is inclined towards non-mahram women. Therefore, Allah warns women about their nature, which may lead men astray if women do not exercise caution and take necessary safeguards.

The rule of hijab in Islam is not unrelated to the Prophet’s bothers with his harem. As described by Ali Dashti in his book “Bisto-Seh Saal” (23 Years), the Prophet used many verses of the Koran (Surah Ahzaab) to consolidate his position against his much younger wives to force them into absolute obedience and chastity. In his demand for chastity no standard of Islamic dress was mentioned. Muhammad’s preoccupations seem to be his personal obsession, especially when forbidding his wives to remarry after his death; the idea of segregation between his own harem and non-mahrams seems to be Muhammad’s human reaction. Although Muhammad banned female infanticide in early Arabia, he kept a part of existing misogynous traditions and institutionalised it through Islam.

Hijab comes from an old Arabic word “hajba” meaning to hide from view. The two sources of Islam, namely Koran and the “Hadith,” could not fix a style of dress as an Islamic standard of clothing for women. However some verses of the Koran quote Muhammad requiring his wives to cover their faces so that men, non-mahrams, would not think of them in sexual terms.

There are speculations about the origin and motive of hijab. The origin could go back to Iranians, its main present victims, to the 6th Century BC under Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenian Empire in Persia. Together with the idea of female seclusion, it persisted under Alexander and the Byzantine Empire, and was adopted by the Arab conquerors of the Byzantines. Its use was revived and finally adjusted to Islam.

It has been believed that Muslim women throughout history had to cover themselves with a variety of Islamic hijabs such as lachak. chador, russari, rubandeh, chaqchur, maghnaeh, burqa, etc. All of them were of clan, ethnic, or other folkloristic origin. They differ from region to region and from social class to social class, with no Islamic standard for a single form. However, they all draw the red line between non-mahrams” with reference to the interpretations of the Koran and the “Hadith” (sayings).

Hijab in its different forms began to disappear with the adoption of Western culture, but the Islamic regime in Iran gave it new life in recent decades. IRI’s propaganda says, “Beneath Islamic hijab, entire woman’s values and respect is upheld”. It is alleged to be the only safe guarantee for the women’s protection against the danger of brazen indecency, which can stifle the Muslim women in decadence; Islamists allege that “the Islamic society becomes subjugated to the non-believing and decadent cultures”. To IRI’s mass media, Islamic hijab represents a contemporary rebirth of an invulnerable Islamic identity.

The third question is: what are the effects of non-mahram?

Effects of sex segregation have left crucial results in social backwardness. Psychological experiments show that a group of mixed-sex performs better than a group of the same sex. Considering the factor of mixture, the first group is more motivated and more efficient than the second one. This finding extrapolated to society as a whole explains one source of backwardness in the Islamic world.

Under the strict conditions of Islamic hijab, work conditions, education, sport, and entertainment are particularly difficult for women. Women’s non-participation in the economy and production of social needs is another reason for backwardness.

Morally, the secluded Muslim mother would not be a symbol of social justice, democracy, and modernity for her children.

The IRI has politicised Islamic hijab in recent decades. While it represents a powerful symbol of dominant Islam in Iran, in the West it symbolises a rejection of integration or assimilation with the modern world. Furthermore in some controversial cases, it provokes racism and xenophobia.

Compared with the population of Iranian cities, the low rate of sexual crimes in Iran’s rural population is an obvious reason to reject non-mahram’s dogma as a factor of sexual temptation. In fact, despite being governed by the IRI, peasant and bedouin women neither wear hijab nor are locked away in the house.

The long-term effects of apathy and ignoring of the secular Iranian opposition to the misogynist nature of the IRI prevented Iranian women from gaining support against the increasing imposition of the Islamic hijab at the beginning of the IRI. Furthermore, apart from some reactions of human rights organisations, the international community has never condemned IRI’s constant violation of the dignity of Iranian women. The systematic violation of women’s rights, along with the brutal suppression of women’s rights movements, have not been strongly protested by the “civilized” world.

Today, Iranian society seems to be so amalgamated with the Islamic hijab that this vision represents an obvious norm for the international community.

Islamic hijab is today an important blockade to woman’s freedom. This outdated, self appointed and obsessive model cannot be applied to today’s Iranian women. Islamic hijab is a blindfold forcing women to remain indoors, reducing them to half the status of a man, pushing them to be footnotes of social life, and condemning them to be alien non-mahram in their own environment.

Jahanshah Rashidian is an Iranian-born German writer in several languages.

Continuing what, improbably, could turn out to be a series, in which philosophical classics are reduced to their elements as a service to students and scholars.

Descartes’ Meditations

Monday

Realised that I’ve never examined the foundations of my beliefs and so I could be wrong about everything. To be honest, I don’t seriously believe I am wrong about anything, but I thought it might be fun to prove it. So, I asked myself, how might I be really, really wrong? Only if something totally far-fetched has happened, such as that I’m actually dreaming, mad or deceived by an evil demon. Still, that’s technically possible so I went to bed feeling progress had been made.

Tuesday

Woke up and realised one thing was certain after all: I am, I exist. (Note to self: catchier slogan needed.) Got carried away and convinced myself I was therefore non-physical and indivisible. Another productive day!

Wednesday

Having my own existence as the only certainty is proving to be rather limiting. Need to find some reason to think other things exist too. A benevolent God would do the job, but can’t come up with proof for his existence. Borrow argument from Aquinas instead. Hope no one notices.

Thursday

I’m not exactly sure I remember what I’ve been doing all day. Probably no one else will either.

Friday

Looking back, Aquinas’s God argument seems a bit lame. Try to think of another. Fail. Steal one more proof from Aquinas instead.

Saturday

Really need to wrap this thing up today. The hypothesis that God’s existence makes everything trustworthy seems a bit hard to swallow since he seems to let us make so many mistakes. Conclude that he must be doing the best he can. Also, decide that Monday’s doubt that I could be dreaming is silly. Of course I’m not! Dreams are incoherent whereas my arguments make perfect sense.

So, since I exist, God exists, and he wouldn’t trick us, it seems safe to conclude that all is more or less as it appears to be. What a relief!

Sunday

[with thanks to johnt]
Phew, I deserve a break after all that! Packed bags for holiday with the
royals in Sweden. Hope the Queen doesn’t like to get up too early.

This piece was first published at Talking Philosophy and is republished here by permission.

The ongoing debate between atheists and theists has become ludicrous, banal, and unprofitable. I have long thought that the more vociferous atheists were following a wrong strategy and wrong tactics, leaving the religionists free to pose as unrivalled defenders of moral values and the realities of the life of the spirit (the expression ‘spiritual life’ has become suspect among rationalists and been ceded to religion, which is a pity). The propagandist and frenzied approach of the fashionable atheists is reducing us to the sorry choice between dogmatic religion and stark materialism. So it was a pleasure to come across a sane and balanced review article by Anthony Gottlieb.

Gottlieb reminds us that in the second century of the Christian era “it was Christians who were called ‘atheists,’ because they failed to worship the accepted gods.” We may also recall that in fifth century BC Athens Anaxagoras was accused of atheism because he taught that the sun was not a god but a flaming piece of matter. Socrates was accused of atheism because he did not revere the gods that the city revered, even though he could pray not only to Zeus and Pan but also to the sun.

Anaxagoras, Socrates, and early Christians, along with rejecting the beliefs commonly accepted by those around them, had their positive beliefs. Today proselytizing atheists are all energetically engaged in the task of breaking down dogmatic beliefs, but they do not show as much energy in advancing the positive aspect of their thought.

The task of emancipating humanity from the clutches of superstition, fanaticism, and bigotry, is needed and is urgent. But neither the enthusiasm of the all-out atheists nor the desperate but tepid efforts of the religious moderates show any signs of success in that direction. The outspoken atheists are read and applauded by those who are already convinced of the harm done by religions. The moderate religionists cannot make headway with their fundamentalist co-religionists, because in each of the major established religions (I speak chiefly of the monotheisms that I know at first hand) there is as much authoritative textual support for the extremists as for the moderates; and all talk about inter-faith conciliation and understanding is deception or self-deception because each religion in its heart of hearts denounces the others as worthy of damnation. The best they can achieve among themselves is a truce necessitated by the inability of any one of them to eradicate the others.

The human situation is sickening. If there are gods up there they must be debating not if but how to put an end to the whole bad project. If we give up on the gods and decide that we have to rely on our own devices, then the way forward as I see it is a two-pronged drive.

The human world is in very bad shape. There is abject poverty, disease, ignorance, misery, side by side with abundance, waste, astounding technology — I need not go on. Our politicians and economists play games in their artificial, closed systems of unquestioned fictions of expediency, power, market values, economic forces — all of which are worshipped more blindly than any supernatural god has ever been. The world of human beings must be re-formed on a wiser and more just basis. This is the first prong of the combined drive. In the short term we may have to fight terrorism and all sorts of conflict by various means but in the long term a united world based on justice, equal opportunity for all humans, and dignity for all humans, is the prerequisite for withering the roots of terrorism and conflict.

Secondly, we have to work towards a new age of enlightenment, to spread understanding and fellow-feeling among all humans. No amount of bare, disjointed facts, can infuse sense into life. The positive, empirical knowledge obtained by the methodology of the sciences, can be useful (or harmful) but cannot nourish the human spirit. Humans need a ‘likely tale’ (to borrow a phrase from Plato) to hold on to, to give the chaotic mass of their experiential content some coherence. To the naïve and simple masses of humankind their received religions satisfies that need but – as we should by now have discovered – it does so at a heavy cost. We need a culture that fosters moral and spiritual values unlinked to dogma and superstition. This is the task of art, literature, and philosophy. That will be our alternative to religion, but we should take great care not to turn it into a new religion: we need an alternative to religion, not an alternative religion.

The way forward I have indicated, with its two branches, will be slow, full of hardship, and not at all certain. But there is no other way.

In Let Us Philosophize (1998) I concluded the chapter on Religion as follows:

The one perfect religion that has ever been given to mankind has been grossly misunderstood, neglected and almost completely forgotten; the religion whose prophet claimed no knowledge, no wisdom, no power, no authority — whose name was Socrates. Socrates may have had the temperament of a mystic. Yet we acclaim him as a philosopher precisely because he went beyond mysticism. He demanded that whatever we hold valuable be fully intelligible. He was deeply religious; he sought the fullness of the inner life. But he was not content with a mystical richness of life, and there lay his glory.

No specific knowledge, no body of doctrine, can secure our salvation: Only a free, ever-creative mind will give us salvation. Not any body of knowledge, but the creative pursuit of understanding, makes us into what we crave to be — whole human beings. That should be the ideal of education.

D. R. Khashaba is an independent philosopher. His books include Socrates’ Prison Journal and Hypatia’s Lover. He lives in his home country, Egypt, and has a website at Back to Socrates as well as a blog.

(London, May 11, 2007) – Bangladesh’s military-backed care-taker government should immediately release Tasneem Khalil, an investigative journalist and part-time Human Rights Watch consultant, who was detained by security forces late last night, Human Rights Watch said today.

Khalil, 26, is a journalist for the Dhaka-based Daily Star newspaper who conducts research for Human Rights Watch. According to his wife, four men in plainclothes who identified themselves as from the “joint task force”came to the door after midnight on May 11 in Dhaka, demanding to take Khalil away. They said they were placing Khalil “under arrest” and taking him to the Sangsad Bhavan army camp, outside the parliament building in Dhaka.

“We are extremely concerned about Tasneem Khalil’s safety,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “He has been a prominent voice in Bangladesh for human rights and the rule of law, and has been threatened because of that.”

The men did not offer a warrant or any charges, Khalil’s wife said. Using threatening language, they searched the house and confiscated Khalil’s passport, two computers, documents, and two mobile phones.

“It is an emergency; we can arrest anyone,” one of the men said. Another asked if Khalil suffered from any particular physical ailments. They drove Khalil off in a Pajero jeep.

Khalil is a noted investigative journalist who has published several controversial exposes of official corruption and abuse, particularly by security forces. He assisted Human Rights Watch in research for a 2006 report about torture and extrajudicial killings by Bangladesh security forces.

According to Bangladeshi human rights groups, the army has detained tens of thousands of people since a state of emergency was declared on January 11, 2007. A number of those detained are picked up in the middle of the night, as Khalil was, and then tortured.

In Bangladesh, security forces have long been implicated in torture and extrajudicial killings. The killings have been attributed to members of the army, the police, and the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite anti-crime and anti-terrorism force. The Human Rights Watch report Khalil worked on, “Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Torture and Extrajudicial Killings by Bangladesh’s Elite Security Force,” focused on abuses by the RAB.

Killings in custody remain a persistent problem in Bangladesh. To date, no military personnel are known to have been held criminally responsible for any of the deaths.

Khalil was called in for questioning by military intelligence last week, apparently as part of the military’s campaign to intimidate independent journalists ahead of May 10, 2007, when the army’s three-month legal mandate for ruling under a state of emergency came to an end.

“The Bangladeshi military should be on notice that its actions are being closely watched by the outside world,” Adams said. “Any harm to Tasneem Khalil will seriously undermine the army’s claims to legitimacy and upholding the rule of law.”

Pressed to apologize for a silly comment he’d made about the full-frontal atheism of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, the humanist chaplain at Harvard replied to Brian Fleming (The God who Wasn’t There, etc.) – the slightly offended party – as follows:

I think apologizing is really a wonderful, necessary thing to do often. We human beings are so imperfect, we hurt each other and fail to live up to our own standards so often that learning to properly apologize is practically a survival tool. At least in my life it has been – I fail often to be as loving, or as smart, or just plain as right as I’d like to be. And I have seen how liberating, how humanistic, it can be to simply apologize, admit I was wrong, and ask for forgiveness. The value of a good apology is one of those things that both religious people and secular people have done well to recognize the power of.

The hell you say? I remember reading something about wrongdoing and forgiveness eerily like this statement recently. Here it is: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” The author is the unmistakable St Paul writing to the Christians at Rome in the mid-first-century. He is explaining how love is always having to say you’re sorry, not merely for individual acts of malice and thoughtlessness, but for the human condition itself which makes you naturally corrupt, or to use his favorite word, “sinful.” Human nature is purulent; what it produces is pus. Human nature causes us to “fail to be as loving or as smart or just plain as right” as we should be: “I can will what is right,” the clever apostle says, “but I cannot do it…What I do is the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7.1415ff.).

This isn’t humanism, of course. It’s Christianity. In fact it’s the central doctrine of Christianity. It begins with an overwhelming feeling of worthlessness and lack of self control, and ends with the happy recognition that since you can’t change your nature anyway, you’re just happy there’s someone out there who can: God (through Jesus) who takes away your sins. You only have to apologize for your worthlessness to the perfectly good God who made you the imperfect, worthless, purulent creature you are. The chaplain seems to have learned a lot from the saint: We are so imperfect, that we ought to apologize often “for failing to live up to our own standards.”

I don’t know what living up to imperfect standards means in that opaque sentence, but I personally endorse imperfect standards, on the off-chance I might attain them without effort. I do know that as a humanist I can completely reject the disguised theology behind the statement. Religion (not humanism) postulates a gap between God and man (and women, of course) as wide as the gap between the natural world and the supernatural order. It’s what sent Adam into hiding, Isaac to his near-death experience, Job to the dung heap, and Saul into insanity and retirement. You don’t screw around with this God because, as he reminds Job, little you can’t save the world, put the stars in the skies, subdue Leviathan, or send lightning down from the heavens. Given the total stupidity and blind wickedness of the race he created, about all his creatures can hope for is forgiveness and “salvation” from the humanity that ties us to this world. The school chaplain in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life had the Christian view right:

Chaplain: Let us praise God. Oh Lord…

Congregation: Oh Lord…

Chaplain: Oooh you are so big…

Congregation: Oooh you are so big…

Chaplain: So absolutely huge.

Congregation: So ab – solutely huge.

Chaplain: Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here I can tell you.

Congregation: Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here I can tell you.

Chaplain: Forgive Us, O Lord, for this dreadful toadying.

Congregation: And barefaced flattery.

Chaplain: But you are so strong and, well, just so super.

Congregation: Fan – tastic.

All: Amen.

True, the New Humanism will say that it doesn’t advocate frequent apology for “religious reasons” It’s not about striking your breast for God or laying your faults on Jesus. It’s about saying “Sorry” to each other—building community, making things right, hugging. Having lost all metaphysical pretenses and infinite gradations between this world and the next, we just need to be kind. If we disagree, we respectfully disagree. Better yet, we learn not to disagree, because, after all, isn’t disagreement unpleasant? Shouldn’t we apologize for needing to disagree? In the New Humanism, where Oprah! and Dr Wayne Dyer replace Socrates, the answer is Yes, as long as the apology doesn’t limit our ability to make self-affirming choices. Whatever that means.

What the New Humanism isn’t about is the intellectual self-confidence that calls a spade a spade and faulty judgment faulty. Intellectualism is unkind. Smart is mean. Spirited debate may incur feelings of low self-esteem, especially among the losers. But then, dumb is dangerous – in life, art, and politics. Never mind that it’s religion that encourages blind agreement and intellectual submission, or that what we look back on as “the enlightenment” was forged in the fires of the bitterest scholarly debates the West had ever seen, or that thousands of very, very bright men and women learned what being sorry meant because their apologies were extracted from them through violence to reason and conscience. Never mind the robust intellectualism of old humanists – a Huxley, a Dewey, a Santayana, a Lippmann, What would a New Humanist make of Lippmann’s comparison of an average voter to a theater-goer walking into a play in the middle of the third act and leaving before the last curtain? Should he apologize to hoi polloi? Or Russell on the same theme: “Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.” Elitism. Pure elitism. We should apologize for that.

The legacy of great minds and bold ideas crashing like cymbals in the orchestra of human progress has become a sad reminder of the aristocracy of intellect that American democracy – for reasons unclear to me – has moved beyond. The New Humanism wants to move beyond it, beyond the cruelty of intellect to where truth is what you feel it is and where confession is good for the soul. But strangely enough, it preserves the Pauline model of the human person as imperfect. That’s why we apologize, after all: because we’re “wrong.” In the new humanist order we have returned to the religious evaluation of human nature as sullied, wanton, abandoning the gains that humanism has achieved since Pico della Mirandola first sniffed the spring-time air of human freedom and the essential givenness of human nature as a gift limited by years, but not by evil.

Oh, Chaplain, I do not believe apology is a survival tool. I do not believe I hurt people because I am “imperfect.” And I refuse to acknowledge that humanism has anything to do with the liberating power of forgiveness, or that this X marks the spot where religious and secular people can meet. Humanism, old and newer, as far as I know, consists ethically in the recognition that we are free to choose our actions and responsible for evaluating the consequences of our actions – as human agents. In that process, apology is very low down on my list of virtues and owning up to my imperfection is not there at all.

R. Joseph Hoffmann
Chair
Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion
Center for Inquiry
Amherst, New York

Nigel Warburton is senior lecturer in philosophy at The Open University. He is one of the world’s foremost popularizers of philosophy, and has a particular gift for explaing things clearly. His books include Thinking from A to Z (about to come out in its 3rd edition this summer), Philosophy: The Essential Study Guide and The Basics of Essay Writing.

As the issue of clarity came up in the comments on a recent blog of mine, I asked Nigel five questions about clarity (questions in bold).

At the top of your website the Virtual Philosopher you quote John Searle: “If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself”. What is clarity, and why is it important in philosophy?

Clarity is expressing yourself in a way that allows readers to follow what you are saying. It minimizes the risk of misinterpretation. Clarity contrasts with obscurity. Obscurity leaves at least some readers in the dark about your meaning. I like the quotation from Searle. I like another quotation from the author Robert Heinlein too: ‘Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence’. Obviously in some sorts of writing obscurity doesn’t matter so much: some writers want to be interpreted in a variety of possibly contradictory ways. But Philosophy shouldn’t be like this.

Clarity is important in Philosophy because life is short. Another reason why it is important is that many lightweight thinkers are attracted to Philosophy because it seems to promise them power through looking clever. Hiding behind a veil of obscurity is one way in which such people have traditionally duped their readership. Philosophy thrives on debate: if you can’t understand what someone is saying the collaborative aspect of philosophy is likely to wither and much ink will be spent on the vexed question of what a particular philosopher could possibly mean by his or her oracular pronouncements. All that before we ever get on to the important question of whether what that philosopher said was true or worth saying. Philosophy thrives on debate and discussion, but if you don’t really know what someone is trying to say, how can you discuss it?

Clarity in Philosophy involves clarity at the level of 1) words, 2) sentences, 3)paragraphs, 4) arguments, 5) illustrations, and 6) underlying thought. This list is not exhaustive, but these six features are all important.

1 ) At the level of words, there is no excuse for obfuscation through polysyllabic abstraction (i.e. hiding behind long words). Some writers write Philosophy as if they were paid by the syllable with bonus payments for including untranslated Latin. They also use jargon which may or may not clarify meaning. For a spectacular example of obscurity through excessive use of jargon, see Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (almost any page).

2) Then at the sentence level, passive constructions or convoluted syntax can obscure meaning.

3) Poor use of paragraphs often indicates poor argument structure.

4) Philosophy involves building a case for a conclusion. The reader needs to be able to see how evidence, argument support the conclusion which purportedly follows from them. For examples of this kind of clarity, take a look at René Descartes’ first ‘Meditation’ or John Stuart Mill’s chapter on Free Expression in On Liberty.

5) Illustrative examples help most readers, even the highly sophisticated ones, to understand generalizations. When philosophers omit examples or applications of their ideas they sometimes float off into realms of imprecision – not all their readers will be happy to float off with them.

6) Some philosophers have a nose for the subject and what matters. Others don’t. Those who don’t can be particularly difficult to understand because it is very hard to see why they are bothering to think or write about a particular topic at all.

If I find something is said very unclearly, can I really be confident the author doesn’t understand it him or herself?

No. It is possible that the person saying it is just not a very good writer or speaker. But, on the other hand, obscurity cannot be good evidence that someone does understand something. My own experience has been that I’ve understood philosophical ideas far better once I tried to explain them to someone else. Teaching bright students, preferably students who aren’t afraid to ask difficult (or obvious) questions is one of the best ways to get straight about an idea.

Might the lack of clarity in the writing of some philosophers be due to the fact that what they are are dealing with is so deep? As we peer further into the depths, so the shadows inevitably grow deeper?

The history of philosophy includes many examples of beautiful clarity about deep subjects. Think of the writings of David Hume, for example. More recently, Thomas Nagel and Daniel Dennett have demonstrated that it is possible to write clearly about some of the most difficult philosophical problems about the mind; Jonathan Glover and Peter Singer have done the same in the area of ethics. Sometimes philosophers have to say very clearly ‘we are in the dark about this’. They might choose to communicate this indirectly rather than stating it directly. But that need not involve obscurity of language, nor even of meaning.

Philosophers in the analytic tradition sometimes accuse those in the continental tradition of a lack of clarity. Why is that? Is there any justice to the accusation?

One reason is that some so-called continental philosophers have inherited a style of writing from Hegel that leaves readers floundering, confused or pretending that they understand when they don’t. I think that some post-structuralist writers were charlatans who conned a generation (though this has been more of a problem in literature and fine art courses than in philosophy). If you don’t believe me, read Sokal and Bricmont’s brilliant exposé. But obviously not all continental philosophers fall into this category. Besides, it isn’t always obvious who is to count as a philosopher in the continental tradition: Descartes, Kant,, Schopenhauer, Frege, and Wittgenstein were all born on the European continent…each in their own way was capable of a high degree of clarity.

Even among the more poetic philosophers, though, such as Soren Kierkegaard, there are ways of showing things rather than saying them which can be clear. The different voices within Either/Or explore contrasting positions from within and we are not meant to read what is said as literally Kierkegaard’s view: I take it that Kierkegaard’s meaning lies in what is shown rather than what is straightforwardly said in this book. But he is not perversely obscure in the way that some philosophers are, despite dealing with ‘deep’ topics. Or, to take another example, Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness adopted the obscurity of phenomenological jargon, but through his brilliant use of extended examples and thought experiments manages great and memorable clarity in places in that book. We can forgive a philosophical writer who is sometimes obscure if he or she provides us with insight and occasional clarity; but obscurity can never be a virtue in Philosophy.

What would be your five key tips for thinking and writing clearly?

1) Care about being understood.
2) Read George Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946). It has excellent practical advice about writing to be understood.
3) Use examples. These can be highly imaginative and creative. This will force you to think through what you mean by generalisations and will also help your readers to understand what you mean. If you want your writing to be impressively obscure, don’t descend from abstraction and use as much jargon as you can.
4) Know what your conclusion is, how your reasons and examples support it and your response to obvious counterarguments and counterexamples. If you don’t know that, how can you expect your readers to work out what you are saying?
5) Don’t bullshit. Most people know when they are doing it. If you don’t, you are probably in the wrong subject.

This interview was first published on the website/blog of Stephen Law and is republished here by permission.