Author: Ophelia Benson

Ah, Norm took issue with Julian’s piece too.

By his choice of example Julian makes life too easy for himself. Mockery of the weak is an egregious practice of course. But what if someone makes a criticism of Islam – or any religion – in perfectly measured terms and some take offence, perceiving this criticism as mockery? What if the satirical treatment of a sacred figure in a work of fiction arouses anger, pleas for censorship, death threats? What if it is disputed between different parties whether certain images or statements are offensive or not? In such cases, the right to say what you think – within the usual limits concerning incitement to violence and defamation – trumps what any of us might believe is the right way to behave.

That’s the complaint I make about Nussbaum and about other people who claim that we can all agree on certain basic principles: that by their choice of example they make life too easy for themselves. It’s no good using people who don’t want to fight in wars as an example, because that’s easy; you have to pick people who want to murder their daughters for marrying without permission, because that’s not easy. It’s so not easy that it seems to demonstrate that in fact we can’t all agree on certain basic principles. We can all agree that we want justice or peace or an end to violence, but aha aha, it always turns out that other people mean something different by justice or peace or an end to violence from what we meant, and it turns out we can’t agree at all. (If we could, why would Saddam have done what he did for so long? Why would genocides have happened? Why would Jack Abramoff have pocketed so much money for keeping US labour laws out of the Marianas while workers there lived such horrible lives?) It’s tragic that we can’t all agree, but it’s true.

I don’t entirely agree with Julian here. (Maybe all the commenters have said what I’m going to say; I don’t read comments at Comment is Free any more and haven’t read these. If they’ve already said this just go watch Sarah Palin re-runs or something.)

The piece is about religion and mockery and free speech and the predictability of what people say about them.

But isn’t mockery good, and any belief system incapable of putting up with it deficient in some way? That’s true, but you can’t just ignore the background against which lampooning takes place. Christians, for example, are not oppressed, despite what some wannabe martyrs would have us believe. British Muslims, in contrast, are a somewhat beleaguered minority. We should think twice before mocking them because, while comedy speaking truth to power is funny, the powerful laughing at the weak is not.

Of course, but that is to conflate two issues: mockery of Christians and Muslims, and mockery of Christianity and Islam. I don’t think I’ve spent much time and energy, if any, saying we shouldn’t be told not to mock Muslims. I have spent a lot of time and energy saying we shouldn’t be told not to mock Islam, or any other religion or any other set of ideas. I think there’s a big difference. I don’t much want to mock beleaguered minorities, but I also don’t want to extend that to holding the beliefs or the ideas of beleaguered minorities sacrosanct. That’s especially true given the fact that within any beleaguered minority there are of course people with more power and people with less power, and the people with more power may well use beliefs and ideas to justify their own power. That is in many ways true of people in the beleaguered minority known as Muslims.

There can of course be cases in which mockery of a religion or set of ideas is a way to mock the people who hold them. But even so, I think it’s important to make the distinction, and to keep it in mind.

Spare a thought for the unfortunate people of Yemen. They’re getting their very own Saudi-style virtue squad, which they didn’t even ask for and don’t actually very much want.

For many Yemenis, and for women in particular, this was another alarming sign of the growth of Salafi extremism — an unwelcome import from neighbouring Saudi Arabia where the “mutaween” religious police are part of the scenery. “These people scare the hell out of me,” complained Nadia al-Sakkaf, the editor of the Yemen Times.

Yeah they’d scare me too if they turned up where I live.

The first signs appeared a few months ago in the Red Sea port of Hodeida, where young men and women began to be accosted by bearded vigilantes demanding proof that couples were related…Daoud al-Jeni, a self-styled “virtue activist’, described his mission as being to curb “obscenity and prostitution”. Anti-vice teams, some armed with sticks, have also been operating in Aden, the former British colony in the south.

Yes but the problem with people like Daoud al-Jeni and other self-styled virtue activists is that they think everything is obscene, especially everything female. The only non-obscene female is one who’s firmly inside a house which has no windows facing the street.

“This is a step backward for human rights in Yemen,” warned Hurriya Mashour, the deputy head of the state-backed Womens National Committee…Zindani and like-minded ulema, or scholars, have long demanded government action against “moral corruption”…They have also opposed calls for a legally enforceable minimum age for marriage in a country where girls as young as 12, especially in villages, are frequently married off to older men.

Because there’s nothing at all obscene about a 12-year-old girl being married off. No, that’s not obscene, it’s just women’s faces (and the rest of them) that’s obscene.

Aid organisations working in the poorest country in the Arab world are also worried by the virtue committee, and especially about the setback it represents to the cause of empowering women, who are already battling 70% illiteracy and one of the biggest gender gaps on earth. “This is a country with so many serious problems and it has a terrible image,” said one foreign development expert. “They are going to shoot themselves in the foot on this. This is not entirely different from how the Taliban started out and it would be a huge tragedy for the women of Yemen if they get caught in the political crossfire.”

Not good.