Author: Ophelia Benson

Let’s see Fish and Eagleton – or should I adopt the latter’s sophisticated witticism and call them Eaglefish? – sneer at progress, liberalism and enlightenment in the context of Delara Derabi’s last minutes, and her parents’ experience of her last minutes. First some Eaglefish sneering –

Progress, liberalism and enlightenment — these are the watchwords of those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has nothing to offer us…[W]e are where we always were, confronted with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny.

And then a few minutes in a world where contempt for progress, liberalism and enlightenment is not just a selfish smug I’m all right Jack trope among male literary critics in Florida and Lancashire but the real thing. Let’s see how funny the joke seems in Tehran.

It was 7am when Delara Darabi phoned home. “Oh mother, I see the hangman’s noose in front of me,” she garbled. “They are going to execute me. Please save me.” Moments later a prison official snatched the handset away. “We will easily execute your daughter and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he barked at the parents. Then, with a chilling click, the line went dead. The desperate couple rushed to the Central Prison in Rasht, Iran, wailing at the guards to let them see their 22-year-old. As they prostrated themselves, an ambulance emerged, most probably with Delara’s corpse inside.

There you are – will that do? Is that sufficiently without progress, liberalism and enlightenment? Is that what Feagleton wants? Is that their idea of an excitingly post-enlightenment world rich with ‘flawed but aspiring religious faith’? Is it part of their bill of indictment against atheism that there’s not enough of that kind of thing?

Yes, pretty much. Eagleton at least is pretty explicit about it.

For Eagleton the choice is obvious, although he does not have complete faith in the faith he prefers. “There are no guarantees,” he concedes that a “transfigured future will ever be born.” But we can be sure that it will never be born, he says in his last sentence, “if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals . . . continue to stand in its way.”

But Tel, your transfigured future has already been born; it’s in Tehran, it’s in Kandahar, it’s in Mingora. All those pesky liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals haven’t been able to stop it. What are you complaining about?

Stanley Fish is moved to let us know that he is just as woolly and assertive and bad-mannered and rhetorical as Terry Eagleton and Mark Vernon and Madeleine Bunting and the rest of the ‘new atheists are bad‘ crowd.

[T]he British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed.

Eh? ‘Other candidates’ than what? Other than Eagleton? Those are our choices – Eagleton on the one hand and science, reason, liberalism, capitalism on the other? Why? How? Who says?

Perhaps Fish means ‘other candidates’ than literary criticism, and we’re supposed to be able to figure that out via the word ‘critic’ in front of ‘Terry Eagleton’ – but ‘critic’ could mean restaurant critic, movie critic, dance critic – it could mean a lot of things, and in any case, it’s far from obvious that we’re supposed to understand Terry Eagleton as standing for the entire genre of literary critics. In short, that’s a bit of remarkably slovenly careless lazy writing, and it’s the opener for an attack on – you’ll never guess – the ‘new’ atheists. An opener as sloppy as that doesn’t bode well for the care and intelligence of the rest – and the rest is indeed surprisingly crappy stuff.

Fish goes on to say that Eagleton admits religion is flawed but ‘at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself…”

The other projects, he concedes, provide various comforts and pleasures, but they are finally superficial and tend to the perpetuation of the status quo rather than to meaningful change: “A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth where theological questions can ever be properly raised.”

Again, already, the sloppiness makes it hard to tell exactly what is being claimed, but it seems to be that religion alone is trying for something more than local satisfactions and that religion alone takes the nature of humanity for its subject, and all other projects are finally superficial and are merely about consumerism. That suggestion is so obviously stupid I can’t be bothered to say why it’s stupid – I don’t think anyone who reads this needs to be told.

By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?” The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.

So that is what he’s claiming – on the one hand there are theological questions, which are alone able to ask ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ and related questions, and then there are ‘science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation’ which are all much of a muchness and which can’t ask ‘ ‘why is there something rather than nothing.’ Further, the interpolated ‘never mind answer’ implies that ‘theological questions’ can answer – without of course offering any actual examples of such ‘answers.’

This is lamentable stuff.

On and on it goes – sneers at progress, liberalism and enlightenment, sneers at cures for diseases, sneers at technology, much use of the word ‘Ditchkins,’ and finishing up with a triumphant blast at ‘the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins.’

It is so hard not to wish both of them suddenly transported to a place bereft of progress, liberalism and enlightenment – the Swat valley would be just the ticket – and see how they like it.

That’s not a nice thing to say, it’s even a bit schoolyardy, but I am so sick of smug prosperous safe comfortable pale men urinating all over progress, liberalism and enlightenment while desperate threatened terrified women would weep scalding tears of joy and deliverance to get just a taste of some. I am so sick of safe prosperous men who are never, ever going to be grabbed on the street and whipped, or shot in the back, or locked up in their houses, or married off to some abusive bully, going on and on and on and on about how much they hate progress, liberalism and enlightenment.

Another woman is reminded that she is not allowed to do anything, and so are all the other women in her part of the world.

The murder of Ayman Udas, who was in her early thirties and newly married, has shocked the city’s artistic community because it symbolises a backlash against women and cultural freedom in an area that is increasingly dominated by Islamic fundamentalists. As a singer and song writer in her native Pashto, the language of the tribal areas and the NorthWest Frontier province, Udas frequently performed on PTV, the state-run channel. She won considerable acclaim for her songs but had become a musician in the face of bitter opposition from her family, who believed it was sinful for a woman to perform on television. Ashamed of her growing popularity her two brothers are reported to have entered her flat last week while her husband was out and fired three bullets into her chest.

She’s not popular any more, so they’re not ashamed any more, and that’s what counts.

Fellow performers, many of whom have received death threats from hardline Islamist groups, were stunned by the killing. In recent months several popular artists have been forced to stop performing as singers and comedians. Others have fled the country or moved to other cities.

As some people try to hang onto a somewhat normal happy life with some room for art and pleasure, and others try to grind such a life into powder.

A senior Shia cleric in Kabul stands up for democracy.

Supporters of the Afghan law which critics claim legalises marital rape and restricts the rights of women say they will oppose amending the legislation significantly. “A change in this law will be illegal and against democracy,” said Sayed Abdul Latif Sajadi, a senior Shia cleric in Kabul who played a leading role in drawing up the legislation and pushing it through parliament. “Any change will be against the wishes of four million people.”

Men. Against the wishes of four million men. He means any change will be against the wishes of four million men – women of course were not asked and not given any way to voice an opinion. Women, on the contrary, were presented with multiple examples of women being murdered for sticking their heads over the parapet, so we know they had every incentive to shut up and pretty much no incentive to protest a law that makes their enslavement more official than ever.

The Shia Family Law, which has been denounced inside and outside Afghanistan, applies only to the four million Afghans who are Shia. It is the first time in predominantly Sunni Muslim Afghanistan that the Shia, mostly members of the long-oppressed Hazara ethnic group, have had their rights legally defined and recognised.

No; there again, that’s not right, and this time it’s the reporter who gets things backwards. It’s not the case that ‘the Shia’ ‘have had their rights legally defined and recognised’ because what this law does is take rights away from Shia women. What this bill legally defined and recognized was the ‘right’ of men to subordinate women, which is quite different from defining and recognizing the rights of the Shia in general.

“Those Afghans who protest against the law just want to make the West happy,” says Mohammed Sarwar Jahadi, a former prisoner of the Taliban and an MP for the Hazara heartland of Bamyan province in central Afghanistan. He said the law was discussed in parliament over a two-and-a-half-year period and was whittled down from 750 to 249 articles. “During that time we didn’t hear a single protest.”

Gee I wonder why – it surely couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Afghan women live under a constant threat of death. Could it?

Mr Sayed Sajadi, a Hazara, said the strength of protests against the law surprised him. “It was unexpected because already 99 per cent of Afghan women only leave the house with their husband’s permission.”

Ah! Ah yes! There we have it – that’s the real puzzle. 99 per cent of Afghan women are already completely ground into the mud so where the hell would protests come from? Nowhere! They wouldn’t! Thus all these protests are simply astonishing. All the men are looking at each other in baffled amazement, at a stand to figure out how anyone could have the nerve or the energy or the muscle power to make a protest.

Many Afghans say that in any case the relationship between men and women in their country is none of the business of foreign non-Muslim politicians and Nato commanders. Women protesting against the law were denounced by counter-demonstrators chanting: “Death to the enemies of Islam! We want Islamic law!”

Yeah! The relationship between men and women in Afghanistan is none of the business of foreign non-Muslim politicians and it’s also none of the business of the women of Afghanistan, so they’d better shut the fuck up before somebody does it for them, if you get my drift.

Simon Blackburn has fun teasing John Gray. John Gray strikes me as a great dogmatic repetitive bore, so I enjoy seeing people teasing him.

The habit of abstraction enables Gray to position himself as a lone voice against a world of fantastical optimists: “All prevailing philosoph­ies embody the fiction that ­human life can be changed at will,” he tells us sweepingly, naming no names. What? I suppose many ­philosophers do think that if you need to have a drink, you can change your life, a ­little, by doing so. Other things can be harder to do. But I challenge Gray to name a single philosopher who thinks we can change everything about our lives at will.

Oh, naming people is for pedants, it’s so much more fun to declare that they all do it. It’s the Mark Vernon school of argumentation.

In reality, Gray’s abstractions have overwhelmed his analytic faculties. Nearly all human action, including political action, goes on without paying even lip service to any gospel of Progress in the abstract…For someone so contemptuous of reason and its constructions, it must have been horrid to spend a life looking at political theories, all of which Gray despises. He does however admire some of the myths of religion. He revels in the idea of original sin, but blames Christianity for inventing the idea of salvation, or, in other words, Progress. Gray could be comfortable only in a religion with no faith, no hope, and no charity.

There, that’s Gray well teased.

Department of Strange Ideas.

[W]hile the Constitution requires an offence of blasphemy it also, like the position in many other countries, expressly protects freedom of expression. …No innocent conduct will be captured. The revised provision in regard to blasphemy requires at least three elements to be present: that the material be grossly abusive or insulting in matters held sacred by a religion; that it must actually cause outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion; and, crucially, that there be an intent to cause such outrage.

Okay, that does clear things up: it will be a crime to produce ‘material’ that is grossly abusive or insulting in matters held sacred by a religion, if it causes outrage among more than a few adherents of that religion and the outrage is intentional – all this in spite (not to say in defiance) of the fact that the Constitution ‘expressly protects freedom of expression.’ But Dermot Ahern assures us that no innocent conduct will be captured, presumably because of that crucial third stipulation that there must be an intent to cause such outrage. How Irish courts may decide to identify intent, of course, is a difficult question, so the best idea is probably just to…produce no material at all. Better be safe than sorry.