Author: Ophelia Benson

Polly Toynbee is not a fan of ‘faith’ schools.

Years of Labour handwringing over community cohesion hardly squares with dividing children by religion. Ask why and here’s the doublethink answer: religious academies now have a “duty to promote community cohesion”.

Is that what the faith school cheering section says? So…they just don’t have a clue? No idea that religion does promote ‘community cohesion’ but at the price of promoting ‘community hostility’ at the same time? They haven’t read the report on Saudi textbooks perhaps – the one that teaches children that ‘A Muslim is forbidden to love and aid the unbelieving enemies of God…They are the people of the Sabbath, whose young people God turned into apes, and whose old people God turned into swine to punish them.’ That’s ‘faith’ school for you.

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.