Author: Ophelia Benson

Rahila Gupta points out the horrible ironies and tensions:

The fallout from the Rushdie affair was the widespread growth of religious identities at the expense of racial and gender identities. Secular anti-racists began to declaim, even reclaim, their Muslim identity. Muslim women increasingly adopted the hijab as a symbol of pride in their religious identity, not recognising or even accepting the fact that it set women back by placing the onus on women’s safety on their modest dress and behaviour rather than male aggression. The left displayed a reluctance to challenge reactionary forces within our communities because it might be seen as racist.

And goes on displaying – so we get people defending the archbishop of Canterbury’s reactionary embrace of sharia as something with great (if elusive) potential for…liberalizing sharia. In some other universe.

The state’s response has been divided to say the least: the “fighting extremism” agenda after 7/7 has seen the active wooing of so-called “moderates” (often linked to extremist organisations overseas) who may be moderate on the question of public order but certainly not on the question of women. This has led, for instance, to an explosion of religious schools and the growing acceptance that some form of sharia law should be accommodated within the legal system.

Exactly. It’s a dismayingly common trope to identify extremism with terrorism and moderation with non-terrorism, completely ignoring the ‘extremism’ of reactionary rules and punishments for women, gays, ‘apostates’ and unbelievers. Ian Buruma does this regularly. It’s a bad mistake. Just ask the women of Swat.

Volunteers no longer needed; volunteers can pack up blankets and canteens and waterproof hats and go home; cache is made; many thanks.

And don’t forget to take care of yourselves, and stay alive. Seriously now. I’m not kidding.

Here’s some horrible news. Elliott Grasett died of a heart attack on Tuesday. I was in his address book so a relative very kindly let me know.

I checked, and – he commented here that day. On Indulge me for a moment. There’s always something so poignant about that – you know – ‘Why I was just talking to him yesterday…’

Very sad. I always enjoyed his comments; they seemed to bespeak a sterling guy.

Christian Jago died more than a year ago. And I suspect that something major – death or disability or kidnapping or something – happened to Karl, who used to comment regularly and often (and amusingly) and who also emailed me a lot, and then stopped abruptly – and then his email address stopped working.

So take care of yourselves. Button up your overcoats. Stay alive.

You know how you’re always wondering how you can help B&W? I have a way. I need volunteers. I have a big job, and doing it all myself is 1) massively tedious and 2) an impediment to doing anything else, like updating B&W and going for long health-giving walks and eating chocolate.

The job is just backing up B&W. I need to archive it, and there are a lot of pages. Nearly 400 articles, about 75 months of Notes and Comment, lots of In Focus, In the Library, Bad Moves, Quotations, the Guide to Rhetoric – and so on. If we divide it up it won’t be so bad. If lots and lots of you step forward it will be hardly anything at all. Email me, and I’ll give you an assignment. Love ya, mean it.

What’s the problem with theocratic law? Why shouldn’t we clap our hands and dance around the room when archbishops and imams suggest or insist that we should or must make our pesky secular system of law conform to God’s will or a Holy Book or ‘divine justice’? Why would we not want to do that and why is it illegitimate to try to force us to?

Because, whatever they may tell you, nobody knows what God’s will is, nobody knows that there is such a thing as a Holy Book, nobody knows what the divine will is. There is no reason to think there is a ‘God’ – even if there is a ‘God’ there still is no reason to think so, and no way to know what it thinks is justice, or if its idea of justice bears any resemblance to ours or rather looks much more like injustice, or wanton cruelty for the sake of it. We don’t know, we have no way to know, there is no reason to think we do know, there are only claims, which are indistinguishable from claims that could be made by any con artist. If there is no way to tell such claims apart, then there is no reason to believe any of them, and certainly no reason to demand that anyone else believe them, much less to mix them up with the law. Law has to be transparent and on the record, not hidden and mysterious and attributed to a supernatural realm that we can’t get at, or to allegedly divine or prophetic or holy people who died many centuries ago.

Lee Smolin made a helpful point in his Edge comment on Jerry Coyne’s ‘Seeing and Believing’:

The basic ethics of an open and free society are to be prepared to defend what you believe with reasoned argument from public evidence, be prepared to change your mind, and be tolerant of diverse views on questions the evidence does not suffice to decide. Religious faith that promises great gifts in a mythical hereafter as the reward for adherence to unverifiable claims contradicts these ethics.

Law belongs in the realm where we defend our claims with reasoned argument from public evidence and are prepared to change our minds, not the realm where we are bribed and threatened by means of unverifiable claims.