Author: Ophelia Benson

The problem with soothing official boilerplate is that it tends to ignore incompatibilities – it tends to say ‘Yes yes of course we can do everything, of course we can fly through the air and creep along the ground and dive beneath the sea, all at the same time.’ It tends to say everyone can have everything everyone wants, next question please. The Department for Education and Skills reaction to the MCB’s helpful educational guidelines for instance.

The Department for Education and Skills has no involvement with the document produced by the MCB. We have already provided schools with a wealth of official guidance, which makes clear they should take into account, and recognise, the needs and cultural diversity of all their pupils regardless of their background….It is important that education provides the right ethos which encourages high aspirations, good citizenship and mutual understanding, and that schools recognise the cultural and faith needs of all their pupils.

Right, except the only problem is that you can’t do all those things. That’s why all this business about recognizing the putative ‘cultural and faith needs’ of everyone is not a cheery straightforward uncontroversial matter. Shall we spell it out? Yet again? Might as well, I guess. Maybe if we keep on spelling it out, over and over again, eventually spokespeople for departments will realize they can’t get away with soothing boilerplate on this particular subject any more. Okay: to spell it out: some cultural and faith needs include the need to prevent half of humanity from having high aspirations. Does that clear it up at all?

Okay I’ll try to be even blunter. Some cultures and some faiths don’t want women to have high aspirations at all; as a matter of fact there is nothing, literally nothing, that some cultures and traditions hate more than women with high aspirations. Some adherents of cultures and traditions like that shoot women with high aspirations in the head, precisely for the crime of having high aspirations. Other such adherents set fire to such women. So you can’t do both. You can’t do both, you can’t do both. Sad, isn’t it – but you can’t. You have to choose. You can do only one. Either recognize putative cultural and faith needs, or encourage high aspirations. Those two goals are violently, tragically incompatible. Hideously incompatible. Repellently incompatible. You have to choose one, and you have to choose the right one. You have to learn how to say ‘The hell with cultural and faith needs.’

Terry Eagleton says wrong things again.

The basic moral values of the average Muslim dentist who migrates to Britain are much the same as those of a typical English-born plumber. Neither is likely to believe that lying and cheating are the best policy, or that they should beat their children. They may have different customs and beliefs, but what is striking is the vast extent of common ground between them on the issue of what it is for men and women to live well.

Is he joking? No, apparently not, he apparently means it – he means that ‘the average Muslim dentist’ and the ‘typical English-born plumber’ and, presumably, by extension, everyone else in the world is unlikely to believe that they should beat their children. Really?! There’s a universal consensus that people should not beat their children? The inadvisability of beating one’s children is uncontentious? Who knew!

Or to put it another way, what a ridiculous claim. Of course it’s not – it’s not an uncontentious claim even in the US or UK, and it’s certainly not one in places average migratory Muslim dentists are likely to come from. Especially, I would point out, ever so tactfully, if the children in question have the bad judgment to be daughters.

So what does he mean by his very next words? ‘They may have different customs and beliefs’ – right, such as beliefs about whether or not it’s a good idea to beat children, and customs about beating children. Yet all the same, they have the same basic moral values, which just happen to bear an uncanny resemblance to the basic moral values that Terry Eagleton would like them to have, such as the error of beating children. And even happier and pleasanter and more delightful, there is a vast extent of common ground between them on the issue of what it is for men and women to live well. At least according to Eagleton. I would have said he was wrong about precisely that point, but there you go.

David Thompson comments too, and so does Tom Freeman.

Update: Rosie Bell (our friend KB Player) also comments, as does our friend Ed.

Hitchens’s review of Robert Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge starts well. Attentive readers of B&W may be able to answer his opening question.

Of what book and author was the following sentence written, and by whom? “Rarely has an Oriental servant of a white-identified, imperial design managed to pack so many services to imperial hubris abroad and racist elitism at home — all in one act.”

This was the quasi-articulate attack recently leveled, by a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, on Reading Lolita in Tehran…The professor described Nafisi’s work as resembling “the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India,” and its author as the moral equivalent of a sadistic torturer at Abu Ghraib. “To me there is no difference between Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi,” Hamid Dabashi…said.

Remember Dabashi and his way with words (and thoughts)? He’s a piece of work.

I cannot imagine my late friend Edward Said, who was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, either saying or believing anything so vulgar. And I know from experience that he was often dismayed by the views of people claiming to be his acolytes. But if there is a faction in the academy that now regards the acquisition of knowledge about “the East” as an essentially imperialist project, amounting to an “appropriation” and “subordination” of another culture, then it must be conceded that Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism, was highly influential in forming this cast of mind.

Yep. As Ibn Warraq argued in an article right here on B&W nearly four years ago.

[T]hough Irwin does not say so explicitly, the general academic reticence about Islam that he so much deplores may well have something to do with the potentially atheistic consequences of any unfettered inquiry. As he phrases it: “Because of the possible offense to Muslim susceptibilities, Western scholars who specialize in the early history of Islam have to be extremely careful what they say, and some of them have developed subtle forms of double-speak when discussing contentious matters.”

This is to say the very least: “Western scholars” and authors like Karen Armstrong and Bruce Lawrence have adopted the strategy of taking Islam’s claims more or less at face value, while non-Western critics who do not believe in revealed religion at all, such as Ibn Warraq, are now operating on the very margin of what is considered tactful or permissible. Even a relatively generous treatment of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, such as that composed by Rodinson, is considered too controversial on many campuses in the West.

Yep again. Many people consider Ibn Warraq well over the margin of what is considered tactful or permissible. Worries about offense to theistic susceptibilities are not good for free and unimpeded inquiry. You already knew that, but I thought I would remind you.