Author: Ophelia Benson

The arrogance of Tariq Ramadan is truly breathtaking.

What we expect from the new president is effective and necessary action as well as a change in attitude. Humility is a key factor…Islam is a great civilisation and Barack Obama should bring a message of true and deep respect by announcing that we all have to learn from each other and that he will commit himself to spreading knowledge of cultural and religious diversity in the United States itself. Humility means we all have to learn from one another and America should be ready to learn from Islam and Muslims as well as from the Hindus or the Buddhists.

Islam is not a civilization at all, just as Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism are not civilizations; they are all religions, not civilizations. Treating the two as interchangeable is a typically Ramadanesque bullying tactic. The peremptory demands for humility and true and deep respect are…pathetic, if you think about the kind of true and deep respect for other religions (and civilizations) that is on offer in, say, Saudi Arabia. I would urge Tariq Ramadan to learn a little humility himself and stop barking out orders in the name of ‘Muslims’ as if he spoke for all Muslims everywhere.

Religion has nothing to offer to morality, because religion as such adds nothing to moral reasoning. Religion as such is an obstacle to moral reasoning, because it injects elements that are irrelevant and false – irrelevant because they are false. Randall Terry on abortion for instance.

George Tiller was a mass-murderer…Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name: murder. Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the law of God.

Randall Terry has no idea what ‘the law of God’ might be, and neither does anyone else. Billions of people think they do, but in fact no one does. No one has any reliable knowledge of what the law of God might be, or if it is something human beings could and should endorse or not. For all Randall Terry knows God is a vicious sadist who loves watching animals torn apart screaming and people swept away in floods. But Terry thinks he does know, and he thinks God thinks what Terry thinks, and so Terry approves the murder of a doctor.

This is why religion is so inimical to women and to anyone else who is not born to one of the top spots in the hierarchy. Once people become convinced that they know what the holy law is, then that law becomes difficult or impossible (depending on the numbers and the ferocity) to change. If enough people are firmly enough convinced that God wants women to be the property of men and shut up and do what they’re told, then women are essentially slaves, and that’s that. If enough people are convinced that the foetus is far more important than the woman carrying it, then women of child-bearing age can never really own their own lives. That’s the law of God for you.

Clerics will say anything, and they’re allowed to; that’s their job. In some jobs you have to try to get things right and then report them truthfully; in others you’re allowed and indeed encouraged to just make things up. Archbishops are firmly in the second camp.

Many Catholics see in the dismay over MPs’ expenses and the behaviour of the financial markets, a growing public conviction that all is not well in the moral life of the nation. They believe it presents a rare opportunity for the Church to make its voice heard, and see in the archbishop a forceful and articulate spokesman…[The archbish] said the revelations about expenses and the activities of the markets showed rules alone could not make a society work. He insisted they showed that some sense of “virtue” – such as that offered by Christianity – was also needed.

From an obvious truism to a ridiculous non sequitur. Of course ‘rules alone’ can’t make a society work, but who ever said they could? What’s that got to do with anything? Nothing, apart from the automatic slandering of all things secular. ‘Those pesky unbelievers – they think rules alone can make a society work – how shallow and uninformed and clueless can you get? Typical godless.’ Nobody said rules alone can make a society work, and in any case, why is the only other option ‘some some sense of “virtue” such as that offered by Christianity’? It isn’t, of course, the archbishop just felt like saying it is, and his job description says he’s totally allowed to do that.

So – what would this ‘sense of virtue’ be? Especially this ‘sense of virtue’ offered by Christianity? Think hard now. Hmmm. Is it anything like the virtue of
the religious congregations in Ireland? No, probably not. What then? Oh…humility, turning the other cheek, loving your enemy, that kind of thing. Unless you’re in charge of an industrial school, of course, in which case humility and turning the other cheek and loving your enemy is quite the wrong kind of thing. So that must not be what’s meant by a sense of virtue then? So what is? Hmmm. Not getting hitched to someone of the same sex? Yes, perfect! But then – that’s just a rule, right?

Well, the archbishop probably did have something in mind, but I’ll be damned if I can guess what it might be.

The truth is that religion has nothing to offer to morality. It may have some utility as a morality-assistant, but it’s worthless at moral reasoning. That’s not to say that no religious people can engage in moral reasoning, it’s just to say that the religious part doesn’t add anything to the reasoning. Well it doesn’t. Moral reasoning is secular, and religion either gets it dead wrong, or muddies the issues, or simply applauds what everyone knows anyway.

This is why I won’t be applying for any archbishop jobs soon.

Finally, people who can’t think for themselves have an easy way to get instructions.

A telephone help-line offering advice about the true teaching of Islam is being launched in the UK today. Callers to the Islamic Hotline will get answers to their questions within 48 hours, from scholars trained at one of the world’s principal Islamic universities…The Islamic Hotline believes it has good news for British Muslims – keeping the laws of Islam is not as difficult as you thought.

How nice – submitting to the authority of reactionary outdated self-serving androcentric laws dating from fourteen centuries ago is not as difficult as you thought. It’s still a ridiculous pathetic slavish way to live and to make others live, but it’s not as difficult as you thought.

Prof Aboshady provides callers with a sense of the varying interpretations of Islamic law and then recommends one in their particular case. “We are not sticking to one view, or one school of law,” he says. “What we present is what we believe is suitable to people in different times and places and let them choose which is suitable to them. This gives Islamic law some flexibility, so we are not changing the religion or creating new religion, but simply give people the chance to choose which is suitable to them.”

So there’s a kind of gloss of flexibility, an appearance of being sensible and reasonable, but in an eviscerated form. You get a choice of a few views or schools of law, but all of them are imprisoned within the one religion, so there is ‘some flexibility,’ but no actual freedom. It’s like a bigger, airier prison with more privileges and better facilities – but it’s still a prison. It’s nothing to boast of.

Hanaa Ismail called the line about what she calls “issues in the family, about the relations between a man and his wife, what a wife’s duties are…She might be abused by a man for a long while and yet she could get embarrassed to talk about it. This has been… an Arab tradition. With this helpline she can ask for help without any embarrassment, and [the scholar] won’t know who she is, and she can ask about all the details.”

Right – but what she can’t do is say ‘the hell with this, I’m leaving.’ She can’t decide for herself that she has no duty to be beaten by her husband and no desire to tie her life to someone who wants to beat her – she has to ask a ‘scholar’ what the rules are. If he says the rules are that she has to stay with the guy who beats her, that’s that.

She should look elsewhere for advice.

This is one reason I think the Times article is very odd and in fact unfair.

There is no Muslim outrage about this book yet, but the fear of it is palpable enough for the Sunday Times to write an article about it. And if that outrage does indeed materialize, this will be yet another case, as here and here and here, of Muslims becoming outraged over accurate representations of Islamic texts and teachings.

Yes, it will, but on the other hand, in this case as well as the Jewel of Medina/Denise Spellberg case, it will also be a case of ‘Muslims’ (which is to say, some Muslims) being nudged into becoming outraged. I’m really not sure it’s fair to start with nudging people into being outraged and then rebuking them for their hypothetical future state of being outraged. How about waiting until someone actually does get outraged before rebuking anyone for getting outraged? That would be an idea, don’t you think?

Robert Spencer did say there is no Muslim outrage yet, which was alert and fair of him. One could be forgiven for getting the impression from the Times article that there was some such outrage, or at least rumours of outrage. That’s the problem. Spencer had no way of knowing and no reason to think that Toomey was in fact reporting on her own ‘concerns’ and ‘suggestions’ and no one else’s, and that’s why such an article is so dubious. It gives an impression that is just plain false. The idea that ‘the fear of [“Muslim outrage”] is palpable enough for the Sunday Times to write an article about it’ is simply wrong. It’s not a matter of palpable fear that the Sunday Times picked up on, it’s a matter of Toomey predicting something and then reporting on her prediction as if it were reality.

Of course, it’s true that people can always refuse to get outraged even if people try to nudge them into it; and they ought to; but all the same, if people do try to nudge them into it…that’s a kind of entrapment. I thought that when Spellberg did it, and I think it about this.