Author: Ophelia Benson

Ya think?

The driving force behind the devastating 7/7 suicide bomb attacks in London last year was not Islam but a desire by the terrorists to prove their masculinity, academics have claimed. In a controversial paper presented to the British Society of Criminology’s international conference in Glasgow last week, UK researchers argued that a major factor that led four Muslims to bomb the capital was that they thought themselves to be deficient as men…Dr Antony Whitehead, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Huddersfield, said: “The bombers have said that they are motivated by loyalty to Allah, which they may entirely believe. But if you are going to start to unpick their motivation, you need to consider their experience as young men as much as their adherence to Islam.”

Oh surely not. Surely it was all purely religious and a concern for ‘justice’. Surely masculinity-fretting had nothing to do with it. That’s just silly – isn’t it?

The audience laughs as Omar Brooks, a British Muslim convert who also uses the name Abu Izzadeen, makes fun of non-Muslims as “animals” and “cowards”…He contrasts the supposed bravery of Khan’s suicide to the “kuffar” (non-Muslims) who are characterised as debauched binge-drinkers who vomit and urinate in the street…The Sunday Times last July tape-recorded him imploring Muslims to “instil terror into the hearts of the kuffar”. On that occasion he told an audience of teenagers and young families that he did not want to go to Allah while sleeping in his bed “like an old woman”. Instead, he said: “I want to be blown into pieces with my hands in one place and my feet in another.”

Yes but that’s not about masculinity, that’s a concern for justice; can’t you tell?

Another thing about that Karen Armstrong piece. I touched on it in passing yesterday, but it occurred to me this morning that I needed to make much more of it. She said something really quite disgusting.

…the chief problem for most Muslims is not “the west” per se, but the suffering of Muslims in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Palestine. Many Britons share this dismay, but the strong emphasis placed by Islam upon justice and community solidarity makes this a religious issue for Muslims. When they see their brothers and sisters systematically oppressed and humiliated, some feel as wounded as a Christian who sees the Bible spat upon or the eucharistic host violated.

Wait. What? The strong emphasis on justice in Islam makes the suffering of Muslims a special concern, a special source of wounding? What? What does that have to do with justice? What kind of blinkered, narrow, parochial, groupy conception of justice is that? What – the suffering of Muslims is terrible while the suffering of non-Muslims is no biggy? Is that justice? Any more than it’s justice to think the suffering of Americans is unendurable while the suffering of Indonesians or Rwandans or Iraqis is nothing to get in a fret about? Justice is universal or its nothing; that’s part of the meaning of justice; that’s why we think special rules or privileges for one group at the expense of other groups is, precisely, unjust. A concern for suffering that is actually only a concern for the suffering of One’s Own Group is not a real concern for suffering, it’s a concern for One’s Own Group and ultimately oneself.

What on earth was Armstrong thinking when she wrote that?

Update: Norm also has a comment on this. The story of Derek and Elaine is relevant, too.

Colin McGinn talks to Bill Moyers [link fixed!]:

BILL MOYERS: What do you think is missing in our conversation between faith and reason? You’ve been at this festival of writers for several days now. What’s missing in our conversation between faith and reason?

COLIN MCGINN: Well, I think there’s too much tolerance of faith, and there’s not enough respect for reason. I think there are two sides to what’s happening in contemporary culture. Let’s talk about the reason side first. For the last 30-50 years, reason has been under attack. Subjectivism, relativism, multi-culturalism have been brought in to undermine the enlightenment values of the disinterested search for truth, the belief in objective justification, the belief in objective reality, the belief in science, the belief in history. And so intellectuals and academics have told the world that these are all illusions, these ideas of truth and objectivity and justification, and we ought to accept that people just have different systems and they have their different cultures with different views. So you get an attack on reason. So reason isn’t taken very seriously.

At the same time, faith is flourishing because if there’s no such thing as reason, how will faith ever be criticized. So we get the idea, well, people have different faiths, and since everything’s relative anyway, there’s no point in trying to criticize other people’s faith and point out there’s no evidence for it. It’s internally incoherent. So, you’ve got a sort of resurgence of faith after what seemed to be a gradual wearing away of faith. And then you’ve got this way in which reason seems to be sinking in people’s estimation. So I think those two things are going on. I think we need to reaffirm the values of reason.

OB (in the distance): So do I.

This piece by Karen Armstrong has a big gaping hole in the middle of it.

[Blair’s rebuke of ‘moderate Muslims’] ignores the fact that the chief problem for most Muslims is not “the west” per se, but the suffering of Muslims in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Palestine. Many Britons share this dismay, but the strong emphasis placed by Islam upon justice and community solidarity makes this a religious issue for Muslims. When they see their brothers and sisters systematically oppressed and humiliated, some feel as wounded as a Christian who sees the Bible spat upon or the eucharistic host violated.

Speaking of ignoring facts – why is the chief problem for most Muslims the suffering of Muslims in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Palestine to the exclusion of the suffering of Muslims in Afghanistan, Saudia Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia and indeed Iraq as well as many other places, that is caused not by ‘the west’ but by other Muslims? Why do ‘most Muslims’ not have a problem (or if they do, why does Armstrong not think they do, or if she does think they do, why does she not mention it?) with suffering that is caused to Muslims by other Muslims who beat them up, kill them or their friends or relatives, tell them what to do, impose sharia on them against their will, lock them up in their houses for life, tell them what to wear, stone them to death in front of their children, explode them in markets and hotels and buses and other crowded places, frighten them, tyrannize over them, set off civil wars around them, and generally make their lives hell? If most Muslims feel wounded when they see their brothers and sisters systematically oppressed and humiliated, as indeed they might, as might all of us, whether they are our ‘brothers and sisters’ in religion or not, as we all might simply because they are fellow human beings – then why is that feeling supposed to explain the connection between Tony Blair’s foreign policy and the rise of Islamism? Why couldn’t the people who feel wounded at the suffering of their ‘brothers and sisters’ feel justifiable rage at the Islamists instead of feeling inspired to join them in blowing people up? And why does Karen Armstrong, who is no fool, appear not to have asked herself that question?

Here it is again. Yet again. The BBC declaring the head of the MCB a ‘leading Muslim’. But what makes him a leading Muslim, who says he’s a leading Muslim? The MCB is a self-appointed, very reactionary ‘council’ that gets treated and deferred to as if it represented all UK Muslims in some way, but it doesn’t. It’s very annoying and unhelpful and lazy and obscurantist that the BBC keeps pretending it does, keeps handing it a giant megaphone by rushing to ask its opinion every ten minutes and by refraining from asking non-MCB Muslims and people of Muslim background for their opinion at the same rate. Why does the BBC do that? Why doesn’t it stop doing that? People keep complaining about it, so why doesn’t the BBC pay attention and do better? Surely it’s not that difficult to figure out! The MCB is not elected, not representative, and not the only possible strand of opinion that could be consulted, so why does the BBC treat it as if it were some sort of official body? Just because it’s too much trouble to spin the Rolodex, or what?

Munira Mirza says some good things.

‘I have forsaken everything for what I believe in. Your democratically elected governments continue to perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world.’ So spoke Mohammad Siddique Khan, the 30-year old ringleader of the London bombings, in a video message he recorded before his death…the audacity of Khan’s homemade video diary is breathtaking. First he whines to the viewer that he has sacrificed a lot for his cause, and then he claims to speak on behalf of all Muslims everywhere.

That’s the work all this community-speak does, I think: it hammers home the idea that there is such a thing as ‘the Muslim community’ and that it thinks and feels as one. It’s a small step to decide that that one is best represented by grievance-frotting narcissistic young men, that their worked-up rage about ‘their people’ is the truly authentic One that the ‘Muslim community’ thinks as.

What we see in these videos are not soldiers in a war, but self-righteous young men who believe that their own moral certainty absolves them of the need to explain themselves properly. Nobody elected Khan or Tanweer…Obviously, Khan or Tanweer did not show much interest in trying to win people over to their worldview – they thought that ‘democratically elected governments’ had less claim to act on behalf of people than they did. Khan and Tanweer took a remarkably narcissistic approach to politics, which short-circuited the need actually to engage with the people they claimed to speak for. Yet since 7/7, and straight away following the release of Tanweer’s video yesterday, journalists, politicians and so-called Muslim community leaders have all been duped into taking seriously these loners’ claims to be the voice of ‘the ummah’ and angry Muslims all around the world.

In much the way many journalists and politicians last fall took the rioters in the banlieues weirdly seriously as ardently political revolutionaries with rational grievances, blithely ignoring the obvious possibility that they were just testosterone-addled young males tearing things up.

Khan and Tanweer had no legitimate claim to speak on behalf of Muslims. Their connection to victims abroad was in their minds, created out of a desire to be part of something global. But in a world where any old hack can be called a ‘community leader’, it is hardly surprising that they also thought they were qualified to speak as one. What Khan and Tanweer’s terrible action shows is the price of endless, meaningless community consultation, where some people are rewarded political power for merely being the right skin colour or religion.

And it’s not just a Muslim thing, as Munir points out.

Animal rights extremists in Oxford have felt no inhibitions about using violent tactics against local scientists, feeling that their moral outrage against the building of a new laboratory is sufficient justification…We need to challenge the anti-democratic nature of contemporary politics and stop flattering individuals who have no claim to speak for anyone but themselves.

Listen up, Beeb. Seriously. Cut it out.