Author: Ophelia Benson

A couple of days ago I asked what if there had been (quoting Bunglawala) ‘apparent intention to offend Islamic sensibilities or defame the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad’ – would that make the arrest of Gibbons okay?

Should ‘defaming the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad’ or ‘offending Islamic sensibilities’ be a criminal offense under the law? It’s good that Bunglawala said Gibbons shouldn’t have been arrested, but his reason for saying so is not so good, and the fact that the BBC is still automatically phoning the MCB for the obligatory comment is also not good. The BBC still needs to expand its Rolodex.

Bunglawala obliged us by answering the question*, and what do you know, he answered it as I thought he would; he answered it as a theocrat would answer it.

Muslim majority countries have their own laws and customs. If you set out to deliberately insult the Prophet Muhammad in a country where such behaviour is regarded as unacceptable and against the law then I would have little sympathy for you.

And that’s the man the BBC still thinks is the first person they should phone for a comment on these issues – that’s the man who is still often the only Muslim quoted in its Muslim-relevant reporting – that’s the man who is still considered and treated as some kind of establishment, obvious, central, representative, sane, reasonable, non-extremist non-wacky spokesperson for all British Muslims. It’s astonishing.

*Thanks to mirax for alerting me.

Ed Husain takes Ayaan Hirsi Ali to task.

Just as Wahhabites and Islamists bypass scholarship, context, and history in the name of “returning to the book”, Hirsi Ali and others such as Robert Spencer and Ibn Warraq commit exactly the same error…Let’s take the question of apostasy. At an Evening Standard debate the other night, Rod Liddle had no qualms in declaring Islam, with a barrage of other baseless abuse, “a fascistic ideology”. Why? Because the Qur’an commands the killing of those who abandon it…[T]here is no verse in the Qur’an that calls for the killing of apostates…There is no stronger argument against religious fanatics than to illustrate the scriptural weaknesses of their case.

Well, maybe so, when you’re dealing with religious fanatics, but that still leaves you with the problem of having to argue over what’s in a 1400-year-old book – it still leaves you with the problem of worrying about what ‘scripture’ says instead of about what is best for human beings in the light of current knowledge and accumulated understanding and moral insight.

When ex-Muslims such as Hirsi Ali ignore the nuances, complexities, and plurality inherent within Islam…then she plays into the hands of extremists and allows their discourse to dominate one of the great faiths of our world. Worse, it creates a public space in which attacking all Muslims and Islam becomes acceptable, even fashionable.

Attacking Islam is and should be acceptable, and even fashionable. Attacking all Muslims of course should not, but attacking Islam (and any other religion) should. Attacking people is bad, attacking ideas and beliefs is not.

Timothy Garton Ash is also pondering the issue.

When a Muslim letter-writer in yesterday’s Guardian tells us, with the aid of Qur’anic references, that Islam, properly understood, supports “the vital principle of freedom of speech”, what possible interest have we non-Muslim liberals in arguing against him?

None in arguing against his support of free speech, certainly…but there are risks in basing that support on claims that the Koran is really liberal after all, because there are always going to be plenty of people who will offer up different Koranic references to support the claim that it’s not.

Nick Cohen disputes Garton Ash’s view.

Garton Ash met Hirsi Ali at an electric meeting in London on Wednesday. Unlike Buruma he had the good sense and good grace to think again and he gave her a public apology. Nevertheless, he stuck to the argument that there was no point in liberals treating her as a heroine because her abandonment of Islam and embrace of atheism meant her arguments carried no weight with Muslims. Instead he told us to encourage those Muslims who reject the stoning of women because they dispute its scriptural authority. Religious debates about whether the Prophet Muhammad really approved of stoning may be ‘gobbledegook’, but, he cried, ‘We must support gobbledegook that is compatible with liberal democracy.’

Well there’s a stirring call. There are risks either way, so I’m not attracted to the ‘support bullshit’ version.

I’m not sure how he can be certain that Hirsi Ali has no influence. How does he know what seeds she is planting in the minds of Muslim women? I know one former jihadi who thought again after reading Salman Rushdie…Ayaan Hirsi listened to Garton Ash and had two questions. If liberal secularists, like my heckler, didn’t have pride and confidence in their principles, why should they expect anyone else to take them seriously? And if, like Garton Ash, they turned away from democrats and insisted on treating European Muslims as children who can only be spoken to in the baby language of gobbledegook, what right did they have to be surprised if European Muslims reacted with childish petulance rather than the broad-mindedness of full adult citizens?

Two damn good questions, if you ask me.

Just a little more.

First of all, I mostly agree with Norm here.

One thing we are saying is that the human worth of those prisoners in the camps was being denied. Making them stand naked and vulnerable in the circumstances I have described was a way of announcing that anything – anything at all – could be done to them…To put the same thing differently, the respect or status we normally hold to be due to people simply in virtue of their humanity has here been removed.

But then that is putting it differently, and that’s what I’m saying. I don’t really literally think ‘dignity’ is meaningless – but I do think it means too many things and that some of them are suspect or tricky, and that’s one reason I don’t like it for these purposes, although there isn’t really any substitute word that I do like. I do agree that degradation of this kind is special; I don’t mean to minimize that; but I don’t think humans have only two states: dignity or degradation. I think something is removed from people when they are degraded, but I don’t think dignity is exactly what that something is. Respect is closer. It perhaps doesn’t matter much…I think one reason I keep worrying it is that I’m curious about exactly what it is that’s removed. I keep coming back to the thought that it’s a feeling of normality – not dignity, not really even respect or status or worth (although those are all relevant), but just normality, just feeling ordinary, like everyone else, all right. And the other thing I keep coming back to when I think that is that that’s enough, and that it sort of matters that it’s enough. We don’t have to aspire to anything elevated, we just want to be all right, we don’t want to be treated like garbage. I prefer the minimalism of that. Why…?

Because it seems more reasonable, more like something we all get to expect; it seems…humble, human, everyday, commonplace, like bread, or air, or sleep, or peace. Not something inflated and puffed up, not something grand, not on stilts. Maybe that’s all it is: I just don’t want the stilts. We all, all, all have every right to expect to be left in peace and allowed to walk around without being bullied or stripped naked or bought and sold, and to me dignity doesn’t feel like the right word to describe that ordinary state of being. We love our lives and our ordinary state of being even if they have no great truck with dignity.

And just a little more. I’m like a dog with a bone, you know. There’s a rather Kassian argument in comments on an older post (combined with some vituperation to make it go down more smoothly). It’s interesting.

One doesn’t need to be a Christian, or even a theist, to be extremely alarmed at some of the directions that secular ethical thinking seems naturally inclined to go in – especially in its common utilitarian and more generally consequentialist forms…The concept of human dignity is central to any attempt to articulate the strong feeling shared by many (including many atheists) that something has gone badly wrong with this sort of ethical thinking….It’s difficult to say what’s wrong with necrophilia (if anything is wrong with it), or with leaving one’s mother’s corpse out for the garbage collector, without appealing to this concept or something very like it.

Maybe so – but then I don’t think anything is wrong with those two things, given certain stipulations (no one else harmed, etc). These two items would fit perfectly well in ‘Taboo,’ which used to be on B&W as well as TPM (and for which I wrote an essay) but got taken down when the hacker struck, and which is now in the briskly-selling Do You Think What You Think You Think? which I see in good bookstores everywhere. I think necrophilia is obviously disgusting, but that doesn’t make it wrong, and I don’t think it is necessarily wrong. Mother’s corpse is interesting, because if you think about it, corpses are basically taken away by garbage collectors, just in a cleaner and more polite manner. Don’t get me wrong, I find the idea repellent and painful, but again, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. (Leaving aside the law, and sanitation concerns.) Suppose a situation of total isolation, suppose the mother doesn’t know and neither does anyone else, suppose the offspring is untroubled by this arrangement and never regrets is; why would it be wrong? Wouldn’t it be Yuk rather than wrong? Taboo? It’s okay to heed taboos like that (some of them – others are about, say, untouchables, or people of Other Races), because the feelings matter, but if they’re not there and no one else is harmed…?

Dignity. We got an interesting discussion in the comments, and I suddenly realized (belatedly) that I could think of contexts in which the word ‘dignity’ wouldn’t repel me: contexts and situations in which people have managed to hang onto their dignity despite the assaults of other people or of nature. I probably still wouldn’t use it myself, but I would see the point of it.

But where this started was with Leon Kass; that’s why potentilla asked the question that prompted my series of them. I left Kass out of the dignity post, because I wanted to talk about the idea more generally and also (partly) more loosely. I wanted to free associate, partly. But now let’s look at Kass some more.

He uses the word no fewer than eight times in that speech, and it’s fundamental to his whole strawman indictment of ‘scientism’. He uses it to give force and weight and a kind of prestige to his alarmist fantasies about ‘soul-less’ scientism.

Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity…All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the atheists among us—must understand that their own humanity is on the line…Instead, bioprophets of scientism…issue bold challenges to traditional understandings of human nature and human dignity…In order to justify ongoing research, these “humanists” are willing to shed not only traditional religious views but any view of human distinctiveness and special dignity, their own included…Here, in consequence, would be the most pernicious result of the new biology…the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike, and its replacement with a view of man, no less than of nature, as mere raw material for manipulation and homogenization.

The whole long speech is a textbook example of the attempted argument ‘this would be bad therefore it is false,’ and it also relies repeatedly and consistently on absurd false dilemmas. Every few paragraphs we’re given a choice between two alternatives as if two exhausted the possibilities when in fact there are myriad other possibilities. The whole ‘freedom and dignity or scientistic reductionism’ binary is the overarching false dilemma, of course, and the one between ‘ the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike’ and ‘mere raw material’ is one of the many supporting false dilemmas. And that string of adjectives hints at why I basically dislike the word. I don’t and don’t want to think of humans as noble, dignified, or godlike. Valuable (rather than precious), yes, but the other items, no. And that doesn’t force me to choose ‘mere raw material’ instead – why the hell would it? Leon Kass just says it would, he never explains why it would.

And that makes me suspicious of the word and its uses. I suspect that it’s the kind of word that people like Kass reach for when they want to snow credulous audiences with grand verbiage. People like Kass meaning people making fundamentally bad, sloppy, emotive arguments; people relying on rhetoric and tingly words to make their case for them because nothing else will do it.

Norm doesn’t agree.

One oddity of Ophelia’s argument, as it strikes me, is that it holds to the meaninglessness of ‘human dignity’ while at the same time insisting that humans shouldn’t be degraded or humiliated. But ‘degrade’ carries on its face that there is a standard in light of which some person is being reduced…But if we believe – as Ophelia does believe – that there are general standards valid for the treatment of all human beings and just because of their humanity, then it seems logical to say that there are general forms of human degradation and humiliation and that human dignity is the thing they assault.

I don’t think so. I think the standard in light of which some person is being reduced is that of the ordinary average ‘normal’ state of affairs – I don’t even think it necessarily has a name. It’s just how things ought to be, how we feel all right; degradation and humiliation are intrusions on that. I don’t think when we are humiliated or degraded we normally think of our ‘dignity’. I still think dignity is in a way asking too much – I think we can claim a right not to be degraded but I’m not sure we can claim a right to dignity. But it’s also true that I don’t object to that usage, whereas I do object to Kass’s. I think Kass’s really is meaningless, because I think humans don’t have dignity in the sense that he means it – dignity such that it’s a violation of it for a cognitive scientist to research emotions or morality. His idea of it depends, as he says all too frankly in the closing pages, on our being ‘in the image of God.’ I’m leery of the word because it seems to be all tangled up with nonsense on stilts of that kind.

Joan Smith nails the problem.

In the past, Catholics and Protestants took turns to slaughter each other as Sunni and Shia are doing now, but Christianity has to a large extent been secularised…At the heart of this process is an alteration in the status of religious texts…The idea that a single book written centuries ago has unique authority – in effect, a veto over all other ideas – makes no sense in societies where intellectual curiosity is valued and encouraged. Yesterday Inayat Bunglawala, assistant general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, criticised the arrest of Ms Gibbons in Sudan and described it as a “quite horrible misunderstanding”. But during a public debate in London two weeks ago, he refused my invitation to condemn unequivocally the practice of stoning women to death for adultery. It had happened during the lifetime of the Prophet, he said, “so you are asking me to condemn my Prophet”.

If that’s what it takes, certainly. If ‘your Prophet’ commands or condones stoning women to death for adultery (or anything else for that matter) then yes.

Bunglawala is not the guy to turn to for reasonable views.

Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, also said it appeared to have been a “quite horrible misunderstanding” and Ms Gibbons should never have been arrested. There was no apparent intention to offend Islamic sensibilities or defame the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad, he said.

What if there had been? If there had been, should she then have been arrested? Should ‘defaming the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad’ or ‘offending Islamic sensibilities’ be a criminal offense under the law? It’s good that Bunglawala said Gibbons shouldn’t have been arrested, but his reason for saying so is not so good, and the fact that the BBC is still automatically phoning the MCB for the obligatory comment is also not good. The BBC still needs to expand its Rolodex.

Notice that the government still feels obliged (understandably under the circumstances) to keep saying with nervous urgency that it respects respects respects.

After the meeting with Ambassador Omer Siddig, Mr Miliband said he emphasised Britain’s respect of Islam and the “close relations” between the two countries. “The Sudanese Ambassador undertook to ensure our concerns were relayed to Khartoum at the highest level. He also said he would reflect back to Khartoum the real respect for the Islamic religion in this country.”

Uh huh. That’s not respect, it’s fear.