Author: Ophelia Benson

This is worrying.

The challenges I face in the Religious Studies classroom today are unlike any I have encountered in more than three decades of teaching…it seems that the more religious people become, the less willing they are to engage in critical reflection about their faith. For many years, I have begun my classes by telling my students that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they are at the beginning, I will have failed. But now, as rarely in previous years, a growing number of religiously committed students consider such a challenge a direct assault on their faith…Religious correctness has become the latest version of political correctness. For those who are religiously correct, critical reflection breeds doubt and must, therefore, be resisted.

That is where the problem is, you know. That is what it boils down to – the refusal to reflect critically, and the making a virtue of that refusal. That’s the root of all evil – not religion, but dogmatic protected thought-refusing ‘faith’ of any kind, and yes I do include secular faiths in there.

(Okay, okay, not literally all evil. Don’t be so literal.)

A colleague recently told me that one of his best students reported that she did not like the course she is now taking from me, After God, because “it did not make her feel good.” I responded, “That is, of course, precisely the point.” The chilling effect of these attitudes was brought home to me two years ago when a university administrator at another institution where I was teaching called me into his office and asked me to defend myself against the charge of an anonymous student who claimed that I had attacked his faith because I urged him to consider the possibility that Nietzsche’s analysis of religion called the belief in absolutes into question. I was not given the opportunity to present my side of the story. The administrator assumed I was guilty as charged and insisted that I apologize to the student.

That reminds me of this item from last week.

Andrew McLuskey was sacked from Bayliss Court Secondary School in Slough after a Religious Education lesson discussing the pros and cons of religion. Pupils at the predominantly Muslim school claimed Mr McLuskey said most suicide bombers were Muslim. But he rejected the allegation and said the school was too quick to sack him without giving him right of reply…The school authorities denied they were being heavy-handed and said their first priority was pupils’ welfare. “I don’t think it’s important what I think,” said the school’s deputy head teacher Ray Hinds. “It’s what the pupils think that were in the classroom at the time. And they were very upset.”

Uh oh. Wrong. Ding ding. Go back, start over. Being upset is not the same thing as being upset for good reasons. I can vouch for that from my own personal experience. Don’t get dizzy and fall out of your chair, but I have been known to get upset or cross or bad-tempered for insufficient or bad or downright batty reasons. I have known other people to have the same problem. I’m going to go right out on a limb here and surmise that it’s not uncommon. Upsetness is not invariably a good or safe guide to what actually happened, or the malice of the other party, or to the intentions of anyone involved. Emotional blackmail is great fun, but it’s not what you’d call epistemically sound.

More on Buruma. Because after another, slower reading I think the disagreement is not so elusive or subtle after all. There are some things he says that I disagree with quite strongly – though there are other places where it’s the implications of what he says (whether he’s aware of them or not) that I disagree with.

For instance, I wasn’t decided enough about that concluding sentence: ‘A free-spirited citizen does not tolerate different customs or cultures because he thinks they are wonderful, but because he believes in freedom.’ That’s a terrible assertion, because it is so wide open; it could mean anything. ‘Different customs or cultures’ could mean any damn thing, including the most awful tortures and oppressions. Well meaning liberals like Buruma have got to stop saying things like that! Because things like that just provide cover for people who want to go on exploiting or denying rights to or bullying people they always have exploited or bullied – it is their custom. It provides cover to archbishops who want to exclude gays from adoption on no rational grounds, it provides cover to people who want women to self-obliterate.

So let’s get this straight. I don’t in any blanket sense ‘tolerate’ any and all ‘different customs or cultures.’ It depends on which different customs or cultures we’re talking about.

Buruma does proceed to say that in the next paragraph, to be sure, but in doing so he simply contradicts the too wide-open claim he has just made. Why did he make it that way then? I’m seriously curious about that, because it seems so obviously too sweeping. Why would he want to say something obviously too sweeping? To show his heart’s in the right place?

At any rate, after he’s noted that ‘honour killings are murders,’ he goes on to say ‘But these are matters of law enforcement.’

No. I disagree. I disagree utterly. Maybe this is one place where we have a real, substantive disagreement as opposed to one over wording or rhetoric. I completely disagree that honour killings and violence against women and FGM are matters of law enforcement and nothing else (Buruma doesn’t say ‘and nothing else’ but that ‘But’ carries that implication). They are very much also matters of thought, consciousness, awareness; of consciousness raising. It’s much much better (I’d have thought this was obvious) to educate or persuade everyone (yes, everyone) into habits of mind such that they simply don’t think women are supposed to be beaten or genitally mutilated or forcibly married or murdered. The reasons are too many and obvious to enumerate. People who really think they ought not to do those things are less likely to do them than people who merely think they are illegal. And then life in general for women and even for men is a lot happier and more trusting when neither party expects the other to attack it. In short, there is nothing good to say about honour killings or violence against women, so why would it not be part of the agenda to persuade everyone to think so? Saying ‘But these are matters of law enforcement’ seems to deny that.

But if Islamic reform is the goal, then such denunciations are not the best way to achieve it, especially if they come from an avowed atheist. Condemning Islam, without taking the many variations into account, is too indiscriminate. Not every Muslim, not even every orthodox Muslim, is a holy warrior in spe. Isolating the jihadis and fighting their dangerous dogmas is too important to be dealt with by crude polemics.

This may be another substantive disagreement. Buruma there seems to be arguing that it’s only the holy warriors and the jihadis who are the problem. But it’s not. The problem is that Islam does have particular rules or laws relating to women, gays, ‘infidels’ and ‘apostates’ among others. Not just some Islam, but Islam itself. It’s not ‘indiscriminate’ to say that – again, check out the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights.

Bruckner mentions the opening of an Islamic hospital in Rotterdam and reserved beaches for Muslim women in Italy. I fail to see why this is so much more terrible than opening kosher restaurants, Catholic hospitals, or reserved beaches for nudists, but to Bruckner these concessions are akin to segregation in the southern states of America, and even Apartheid in South Africa.

Well, that’s quite a failure. Bruckner is right. These concessions are akin to southern segregation because – yo, Mr Buruma! – segregation is what they’re about. An Islamic hospital is ‘Islamic’ primarily via sexual segregation of doctors, nurses and patients. Reserved beaches for Muslim women are – hello? – segregated beaches. They are, indeed, a form of apartheid, of apartness.

So there it is; I think Buruma is mistaken about some things, and I think he argues his case by avoiding specificity at crucial points; I really dislike that tendency. By all means disagree with me (as plenty of people do in comments), but I think I do spell out what I’m saying. I intend to anyway. Let me know if I’ve obscured anything.

John Carter Wood has a different take on Kelek, Buruma and the rest. He thinks Bruckner did a hatchet job on IB and TGA. Maybe so, but I have more reservations about their replies to Bruckner than John does. They’re somewhat elusive reservations though…a matter of sensing, or thinking I sense, implications, of fitting statements into an existing context where they seem to me to take on a significance they wouldn’t have without the context. See what I mean? Elusive stuff. I wonder if I can pin any of it down…

Try Buruma.

Having turned from devout Islamism to atheism, she tends to see religion, and Islam in particular, as the root of all evils, especially of the abuse of women. Cultural traditions, tribal customs, historical antecedents, all of which are highly diverse, even inside the Muslim world, are flattened into a monolithic threat. Islam, as practised in Java, is not the same as in a Moroccan village, or the Sudan, or Rotterdam.

That’s a good example of what I mean. That first sentence is a familiar kind of thing. Atheists get told that kind of thing a lot at the moment, and there’s usually an agenda behind the telling. And I’m not sure I believe his account. Does AHA see religion and Islam as the root of all evils? I don’t know, I haven’t read enough of her work to know, but I wonder if that isn’t just the same kind of canard that gets tossed at Dawkins a lot. So I’m suspicious, doubly suspicious (of the agenda and the accuracy), but I can’t be sure it’s flat wrong. The third sentence is also a familiar kind of thing, and it’s one that’s very popular with defenders of Islam and not terribly popular with critics of Islam, for the reasons that Kelek indicates: in some important ways Islam is ‘the same’ everywhere; that’s why there is such a thing as the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. There are reasons to think that fact should not be obscured by endless reiteration of the assumption that Islam differs from place to place. To put it another way, it may be true that the practice differs, but if the theory is 1) the same and 2) bad, it is still worth pointing that out. It’s much the same with the pope. Lots of Catholics ignore the pope; very good; that’s not a reason to think the pope is entirely harmless.

In Europe, even the issue of headscarves cannot be treated simply as a symbol of religious bigotry. Some women wear them to ward off male aggression, others because their parents insist on it, and some by their own choice, as a defiant badge of identity, even rebellion. Bruckner admires rebels. Should we only side with rebels whose views and practices we like? Or does living in a free society also imply that people should be able to choose the way they look, or speak, or worship, even if we don’t like it, as long as they don’t harm others? A free-spirited citizen does not tolerate different customs or cultures because he thinks they are wonderful, but because he believes in freedom.

Again – that paragraph seems more reasonable than it is. It’s sly. I’m sorry, but it is. It’s sly because it doesn’t say what ‘the issue of headscarves’ even is. It doesn’t say that the French ban is on headscarves in schools and government jobs, not everywhere, nor that even in a free society people can’t ‘choose the way they look’ in every possible situation and location. The paragraph is incomplete and manipulative and sly in a way that is all too familiar, and I don’t trust it. I don’t trust the intentions. And then in the last few sentences of it it’s all full of questions that desperately need qualification. ‘Should we only side with rebels whose views and practices we like?’ Well, yes, frankly. Depending of course on what is meant by ‘side with’ and ‘rebels’ and ‘like’ – but that’s just it. That’s another familiar ploy – rhetoric about freedom or tolerance or rebels or respect without specification of what is meant. But am I going to ‘side with’ ‘rebels’ who want to beat up women for refusing to move to the back of the bus or put on a niqab? I’m damn well not. Am I going to side with ‘rebels’ who would merely like to persuade women to do those things? No I’m fucking not. I choose my rebels, thanks, I don’t side with all rebels merely as rebels, I side with people I want to side with and I oppose people I don’t want to side with. Why wouldn’t I? Unless by ‘side with’ Buruma simply means something very minimal, but if that’s what he means he should say so. This is why I don’t like his article and why I think he’s being sly. And it’s all like that – full of innuendo and lacking needed specifications. John says it’s ‘carefully argued, well-written and – despite an understandable testiness – thoroughly reasonable.’ But I really don’t think it is. I think it looks that way on the surface, but that it’s terribly underspecified and elusive underneath. I think Buruma is trying to make his case while avoiding spelling out what he means by it – and I really do not trust that kind of thing. Bruckner may have been wrong, but I’m not convinced IB and TGA are right. I’m suspicious.

But then I sometimes overdo the suspicion, so who knows.

Oliver Kamm coments on that interview David Thompson did with your humble windbag the other day. I know, that was a week ago, but I get behind in these things – deadlines, you know. He wonders about that thing I wondered about and probably Johann wondered about and possibly Jerry wondered about and maybe some other people – people who liked Why Truth Matters for instance – wondered about. What’s a liberal neocon? Who is one?

He says something very good, too, in reply to an inanity from good old ‘Islamophobiawatch:

The only editorial amendment I would make to your headline would be to enclose the word “Islamophobia” in inverted commas, as I have just done. The notion that this fabricated, question-begging and illegitimate term bears any comparison to the great progressive causes of civil rights and opposition to racism is a linguistic feint that should not be allowed to pass by default. Criticism of religious doctrine and practice is an essential part of a free society and a vigorous intellectual culture. That is true for religion in general, and for religions in particular…The principles of the separation of religious and civil authority, and that government should protect the free exercise of religion but not the sensibilities of the faithful, used to be axiomatic among progressives. For some of us (I use the term “progressive” without irony in my case, but with plenty concerning the authors of Islamophobia Watch), they remain so.

Yeah!

Those German-Turkish women rock. Necla Kelek tells Ian Buruma what’s what.

Reading his response to Pascal Bruckner’s essay “Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?” one is tempted to say to Ian Buruma, “If only you had kept quiet!” He clearly felt himself caught out, and despite his insistence to the contrary, his reply only leads him further into the swamp of cultural relativism…Ash and Buruma are quite typical in their argumentation, and virtually exemplary in their politically dubious cultural relativism…[Buruma] maintains that one cannot make generalised statements about Islam, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali does. That is a rather astonishing statement from a man who is…a professor of democracy and human rights.

Astonishing but, as Kelek says, all too typical. Think Bunting, think Bunting on sharia. It’s one solution to the recurring problem: how to fend off (or better yet, shame out of existence) criticism of Islam and thus be kind to Muslims, at least to those Muslims who get all torn up inside when Islam is criticized. Say it’s various, or sharia is about spiritual improvement, or both. But…

Let us look at the question of human rights and women’s rights, for example. In those areas, Muslims are very united indeed. On August 5, 1990, 45 foreign ministers of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the highest international secular body in the Muslim world, signed “The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam.” In that document, Muslims from around the world expressed their common attitudes towards human rights.

Human rights in Islam are a little different from human rights not in Islam. Okay more than a little different. Kelek points out several of the ways.

Buruma’s third stereotype goes: Critics of Islam are denunciators. He writes that Hirsi Ali’s “denunciations” are not very “helpful”…In Mr Buruma’s view, she should not have done so because as an “avowed atheist” – next stereotype – she could not contribute to the reform of Islam. Another astonishing position for an academic specialising in human rights and democracy. Cultural relativists prefer not to hear about arranged marriages, honour killings (25 deaths in Istanbul last year alone) and other violations of human rights….If Mr Buruma wants to take a serious look at the disregard of “variations” in the Muslim world, he’s set himself a large task. To cite just one out of many possible examples: What to do with all the women living in the over 60 countries where Sharia law oibtains, who are not allowed to marry without a Wali, that is, without the permission of a parent or guardian?

Yes but the thing is, it’s not helpful for avowed atheists to denounce such things, because – um – well for the same reason it wasn’t helpful for black people to denounce Jim Crow laws, or for women to denounce legal and cultural constraints on women. See?