Author: Ophelia Benson

So how does this work?

There are also those who think that Romney’s disowning of past Mormon polygamy is too opportunistic, since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does still offer the consolation prize of multiple wives in heaven (just like the sick dream of Mohamed Atta).

Who are all those women? Where do they come from? Are there lots of extra women in heaven who never spent any time as mortals down here? If so mightn’t they be just a little creepy? Do men really want bizarro ‘wives’ who have no idea what life is like on an actual earthy planet? What would they be like to talk to? Of course the idea is that they’re a consolation prize because they provide sexual variety – but the word is ‘wives,’ not concubines or mistresses or sexual partners, so one has to assume they’ll be underfoot all the time. And then if there are all these extra women in heaven, one has to wonder if men would really regard it as a consolation prize to be vastly outnumbered. Especially by a lot of weird clueless from-another-planet women who don’t know from Seinfeld or Dr Strangelove or Jon Stewart or The Onion or The Office.

And that’s before we even get to the question of what the consolation prize for women is. Having lots of female roommates? But how does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints know that all women want lots of female roommates? Or are women who don’t want that allowed to make their own arrangements, while the complement of multiple wives for each man is made up from the magical warehouse-full of heaven-born women? But if that’s the case why not just issue each man a set of really high-quality inflatable dolls, so as to avoid the creepiness problem and the outnumbered problem?

I wonder if the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has really thought things through.

Sometimes the disgust surges like bile.

Amid continued protests, the pressure on the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin is continuing to mount, as a prominent Muslim cleric today called for her to apologise for her “anti-Islamic” writings.

He didn’t call for her to, he ordered her to, in no uncertain terms.

[T]he offer to remove the paragraphs from new printings of the bestseller was not enough for Syed Ahmed Bukhari, the chief cleric of New Delhi’s Jama Masjid mosque, who suggested earlier today that Indian Muslims should “not tolerate the infamous authoress Taslima Nasrin on the Indian soil” unless she offered a written apology for what he called her “anti-Islamic publications”.

“The apology must bear her assurance that in future she will desist from repeating such venomous writing that may have any inkling of blasphemy,” he said in a statement. “India is a democratic nation and the constitution here neither does permit any citizen nor allow any foreign national to be irreverent to the tenets of any religion,” the cleric continued. “The entire responsibility of the consequences shall rest upon the government of India,” Bukhari warned.

That’s good, isn’t it – India is a democratic nation and thus it follows as the night the day that it forbids citizens and foreigners alike to be irreverent to the tenets of any religion. India is a democratic nation and therefore it has no truck with any pesky notions about people’s freedom to say what they think. But in case his audience doesn’t get the message, he finishes up with a nice flourish of threats. What a despicable man.

Things are humming in the Maghreb. Excellent.

Human rights activists from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania attending a Tunisian seminar last week stressed the need to separate religion from state as “an essential approach to realizing gender equality.” The “Maghreb Women’s March towards Realizing Equality” seminar on November 24th and 25th addressed the marginalisation of the Maghreb woman and the gender gap in each country…Activist Malika Remaoun from Algeria complained about the concessions given to Islamists at the expense of women…Tunisian Balkis Mechri agreed, saying “the battle to realize equality is not only legal, but social as well.” Ourida Chouaki of Algeria, however, warned that secularism in Maghreb societies is mistakenly being perceived as a call to apostasy.

And doubtless also painted and framed and presented as a call to ‘apostasy’ which of course is not just disapproved but forbidden. That’s one hell of an obstacle to get around. Good luck Maghrebians.

Razi pointed out that family law still gives men the right to polygamy, compels the return of women to the matrimonial home and governs child custody…Rejectionists, she maintained, “are using religion as a means to swallow up women’s rights”.

It’s a good wheeze, isn’t it. It’s a capital crime to leave the religion, and the religion is used to forbid women’s rights. Heads I win tails you lose.

Good luck Maghrebians.

Ho hum – a woman says women are equal, male clerics pitch fits.

Zeinab Radwan…announced during a conference on “Citizenship” that “the testimony of a woman is legally equal in weight with a man’s testimony.”…Clerics were swift to condemn Radwan’s statement, as expected. Gamal Qutb, former head of the Fatwa council in Al-Azhar, impugned Radwan’s credibility on Islamic Jurisprudence and warned against tampering with the Shari’a. In his view, it would be insane to continuously alter interpretations of the Quran every time conditions in society human behavior changed.

Oh well quite. Exactly so. It would be stark staring insane to keep on and on and on forever changing interpretations of the Koran simply because conditions changed – what could possibly be madder than that? Because conditions change all the time, society changes, human behavior changes, all those things are fickle as windmills, they’re always whirling up and down and round about, first one thing then another; one minute it’s slavery and hierarchy and violence and the next minute it’s equality and freedom and peace, up down, up down, skirts long, skirts short; it’s all so arbitrary and whimsical and meaningless, there’s no way to choose among them, of course the only thing to do is have one interpretation of one book written fourteen centuries ago and then stick to it like death forever after no matter what. Because who cares if people grow and learn and change, who cares if we gradually collect data and explanations and experience that indicate that some ways of life are better for more people than other ways of life are? A pox on all that; what we want is stability and continuity and certainty and above all predictability – we want to know that women were inferior yesterday and they’re inferior today and they’ll be inferior tomorrow. We want to know where we are. We want to be able to find our way around with our eyes shut because it’s too god damn much trouble to open them.

While being interviewed by Al-Jazeera yesterday, Qutb lashed out at the Western world for “having molded such speakers to serve their interests and who are being guided by the West. Those who live in our midst while representing another culture and regardless of their elevated worldly status are unqualified to speak on religious matters.”

Those who live in our midst while representing another culture – interesting touch – reminiscent of Leon Kass’s ‘All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the atheists among us’ combined with the convenient genuflection to ‘culture’. Note the contradiction, too – we mustn’t change interpretations of the Koran every time conditions in society change, yet ‘culture’ is a valor-word. On the one hand the timeless and eternal, on the other hand the contingent and situated and mutable. Well that’s clerics for you, any port in a storm.

A comment or attempted explanation on BBC jokes got my curiosity awake.

This still seems to need spelling out for some. In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam. Gibbons was convicted of this crime. Should it be a crime? No. Given that it is a crime, was Gibbons guilty? Again, no: she didn’t insult Islam. Nevertheless, she was convicted of insulting Islam. In saying so I quote no-one, but simply state a fact. Tim Evans was wrongly convicted of murder, not “murder”.

Which is to say that the BBC wasn’t doing anything risible or marked or noteworthy by reporting that

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, had spent eight days in custody for insulting Islam before eventually being pardoned by President Omar al-Bashir.

The claim seems to be that news organizations don’t use scare quotes on crimes if they are in fact crimes in the state that is in question. ‘In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam’ so it is not normal practice to put scare quotes on ‘insult Islam’ with reference to Sudan. I thought about that, and it seemed to me that it wasn’t true; so I did a little looking and found something. Then I wished I hadn’t wasted any time looking, because I remembered Turkey’s Article 301 which outlaws ‘insulting Turkishness’ – I know the BBC uses scare quotes on that ‘crime,’ I knew that even before looking it up. ‘Insulting Turkishness’ is decidedly a real crime in Turkey: prosecutions for it are not rare, and the existence of the crime has been a major stumbling block for Turkey’s membership of the EU.

So – behold the Beeb putting scare quotes on a crime even though it is a crime to insult Turkishness in Turkey.

Turkey’s most internationally-acclaimed novelist will go on trial here charged with “insulting Turkishness”.

The fact that Article 301 exists does not prevent the BBC from putting scare quotes on the crime that Article 301 forbids. Therefore there is nothing automatically or necessarily or ethically or journalistically preventing the BBC from putting the same scare quotes on ‘insulting Islam’ when reporting on Gillian Gibbons. It chose not to; I chose to point that out; I fail to see that there’s anything obviously unreasonable about that. Why would it not be of interest to notice what an influential news medium chooses to hold at arm’s length and what it doesn’t? Why would it not be of interest to notice the ways the BBC frames various issues? It’s supposed to be a good thing to be media literate, isn’t it? Isn’t noticing things like subtle cues and unobtrusively coded language and careful wording part of the whole project of figuring out how media outlets shape the way we think?

Sure it is. It could still be the case that I did a crap job of it, of course, but I don’t think the ‘In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam’ argument shows that.