For 31 years the women’s movement has resided in every Iranian household that cares about human rights.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Religion’s regressive hold on animal rights issues
Religions tend to preserve attitudes that have become obsolete and often are positively harmful.
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Sholto Byrnes is “rethinking Islamism”
Oh jeezis – the New Statesman is telling us to love sharia now – at least Sholto Byrnes is on the NS blog, and he wouldn’t be doing that if the NS didn’t approve. If you see an article in the Nation telling us to love Nazism you’re entitled to conclude that the Nation has lost its mind and is endorsing Nazism. Same with sharia – and yes they are pretty similar. They at least share a ballpark.
But the very concept of sharia has been so oversimplified by scaremongers that in the popular imagination it is inextricably linked with the punishments of beheading, flogging and amputation for crimes such as theft and adultery, and for which Saudi Arabia has long been notorious.
Yes, that’s right, along with stoning to death, and rules of evidence that mean men accused of rape can just say “I didn’t do it” and get off while the women who make the accusation are then automatically convicted of adultery because after all they have admitted to fornication by accusing the man of rape and the man said he didn’t do it (and the woman forgot to bring along the requisite four men of good character to watch, without whom she has no case), so she must be flogged or perhaps stoned to death. And similar items of limpid justice and fairness.
Then Byrnes quotes Tariq Ramadan saying it’s all a misunderstanding, then Byrnes says it’s all a misunderstanding some more, without ever actually managing to offer a particular example of sharia being a good thing. He says in Malaysia it’s not so bad because it applies only to Muslims (which is dubious itself), but he still doesn’t say why it’s actually good. Then he concludes with a great burst of powerful argument:
Of course, there are plenty who will object to any legal system or way of life that has a religious basis, regardless of how it operates. But the one word that is, above all, associated with sharia, stressed by Ramadan in his writings, Mahathir in his interview with me, by Bernard Lewis in his latest book and by countless others, is “justice”. I think we can agree that it is not just Islamists who are in favour of that.
Lots of people say sharia has something to do with “justice,” therefore…
Oh, god. It’s too depressing.
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LA Times reviews Stephen Prothero on religion
And of course ends with the obligatory swipe at “New” atheists.
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Street censorship
Imagine being a writer, or a reader, in Egypt.
More recently, the literary magazine Ibdaa (“Creativity”) had its license revoked over the publication, in 2007, of a poem by the renowned poet Helmy Salem, deemed blasphemous because it personified God with lines such as: “The Lord isn’t a policeman/who catches criminals by the scruff of their necks”…Before Ibdaa was shut down, Salem had already been forced to return a State Award for Achievement in the Arts, honoring his entire body of work. The court that rescinded the award found that “The sin that he committed … against God and against society, challenging its traditions and religious beliefs should fail the sum total of his work, rendering him ineligible for any state honor or prize.”
We need Nicholas Kristof about now, to tell us that yes Islam does crush women and hate gays and forbid people to leave and fuck up literature and art and thought but hey the calligraphy is pretty.
Salem was the victim of a hisba case — what has become the legal weapon of choice in the arsenal of would-be censors. These are cases — based on a principle in Islamic law — in which an individual may sue another on behalf of society, alleging some grave harm has been done it. Several Islamist lawyers specialize in hisba lawsuits and use them with alarming frequency against writers, intellectuals, and professors whose opinions they deem to have denigrated Islam. Egypt’s minority Christian Coptic population also has its self-appointed moral guardians, eager to take novelists to court. And while charges against a book, author, or publisher are being investigated, the book is usually confiscated from the market.
Can you imagine anything more nightmarish? A situation in which any ignorant benighted mindless godbothering fool can take you to court for writing something it doesn’t like, and win? There are a lot of ignorant benighted mindless fools out there, godbotherers and non-godbotherers. Imagine knowing they could shut you down any time they felt like it.
[A]ny one book or film may find itself the center of a public scandal, singled out on the basis of a few lines. The arbitrariness of censorship in Egypt makes publishers (especially the government-run ones) afraid to take risks and leads writers to second-guess themselves. “In Egypt we’re born and we live in a state of constant self-censorship,” the writer Khaled Al Khamissi, whose book Taxi has been an international hit, once told me.
That’s what I mean. Nightmare.
Update: On the other hand – a bit of good news for a change – the last comment on the article linked to a news flash: the prosecutor threw out the case.
Prosecutor Abdel Megid Mahmud threw out the case, saying the epic tales had been published for centuries without problems, and had been an inspiration to countless artists.
Yessss!
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Jesus and Mo tell the barmaid about NOMA
Science and religion are totally different, so religion has to keep science on a short leash.
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Egypt: Islamist lawyers go after 1001 Nights
Books are subject to “street censorship” when the media and religious groups rouse public indignation and the authorities intervene.
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Respect is being redefined as agreement
Salman Rushdie knows a thing or two about free speech and the other thing.
“We are in danger of losing the battle for freedom of speech,” Mr. Rushdie said. It is being recast as a Western imposition, not a universal human right. Respect is being redefined as agreement, and censorship disguised as a virtuous defence of diversity…Freedom of expression and imagination “is now very much back in question, and is strongly under attack by religious authorities and religious armies of different sorts, and not only Islam,” Mr. Rushdie said.
And religious newspaper columnists are doing their bit, too.
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Salman Rushdie on the threat to free speech
Respect is being redefined as agreement, and censorship disguised as a virtuous defence of diversity.
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Islam is not homophobic
Or maybe it is but so are we, or maybe we’re not but we were a few minutes ago, and besides, Islamophobia.
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Mohammed the fan of women’s rights
UK campaign to make everyone love Islam via posters saying Mo was lovely.
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Telegraph reports its own hatred and parochialism
Media reporter informs us of fury of Odone at C4 documentary on pope.
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Jesus and Mo find the common thread in religions
We all hate atheists. And compassion. We all hate atheists and compassion.
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The Odone file
Want some more Cristina Odone? Why not – she repays attention. She does a nice job of modeling the religious mind for us.
As I read Nomad, the tone of this feverish, self-justifying tome reminded me of a Dutch social worker I met once. Hirsi Ali (who indeed worked for years as a translator for the Dutch social services) shares that same intolerant world view and politically correct instincts.
This is Odone, complaining about someone else being feverish and self-justifying, and intolerant and politically correct. Does Odone think her writing comes across as placid and generous, tolerant and autonomous? Seriously?
In her autobiographical accounts, Infidel (a worldwide bestseller) and now Nomad, Hirsi Ali blames everything that goes wrong in her own and her family life on Islam.
Odone goes Kristof one better – she not only knows more than Hirsi Ali about Islam, she knows more about the cause of everything that went wrong in her life. Hirsi Ali thinks Islam was behind a lot of it, but Odone knows better. How? Well…because, that’s how. Because Islam is a religion, so it couldn’t have been a religion that was the cause, so that’s how. Odone is all-knowing and all-seeing. And humble.
Hirsi Ali’s attack on the faith she has renounced would gain credibility if she could acknowledge its virtues as well as its flaws. But no, Islam is without merit in her eyes, a religion without poetry, charity, or wisdom. Its fanatics are not extremists; they are the norm.
Now, pesky secularists might think that Hirsi Ali would know what she was talking about because she was there at the time and Odone was not, but sensible people can see through that kind of thing with no trouble, thank you very much. Hirsi Ali was there and being there was bad so it made her all like twisted and biased, while Odone was not there, Odone was in the UK where people like her don’t so much get their genitalia chopped off when they’re five or forced into marriage with some stranger a few years later, so she is in a position to second-guess Hirsi Ali about Hirsi Ali’s own experience because Odone is mellow and calm and reasonable and she loves the pope like a father.
After that powerful insight, Odone complains about Hirsi Ali’s success (though she forgets to mention the death threats, and the dead Theo Van Gogh, and the having to live as a fugitive, and the being kicked out of her apartment and then out of the Netherlands), and then she gets down to business.
A Muslim-basher, in our secular culture, is welcome everywhere. Even when they are capable only of the kind of obsessive, one-track thinking that gives social workers a bad name.
A “Muslim-basher.”
I cannot remain civil when commenting on Cristina Odone, so I had best stop. She makes me angry.
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Jesus and Mo find the common thread in religions
We all hate atheists. And compassion. We all hate atheists and compassion.