Author: Ophelia Benson

Ziauddin Sardar sets the archbishop straight.

It is not just in the west, as the archbishop suggests, that the sharia is misunderstood, or where it conjures up instant images of oppression and brutality. It is also misunderstood by most Muslims in countries other than Britain, countries where it is seen as a total system of divine origin, and where it sometimes leads to oppression and brutality…The sharia needs to be reformed totally before it can be implemented anywhere – among the Muslim minorities in liberal democracies or in the Muslim-majority states. Giving the sharia as it stands legal sanction in Britain, even in limited areas, will replicate all the problems of gender inequality that it has produced in Muslim countries.

It would be nice if the archbishop could write that clearly and forthrightly (and succinctly).

I don’t understand this. I must (as so often) be missing something. Roger Scruton says we we owe to ‘the Christian legacy’ the idea that law is and ought to be a secular institution, then he says we owe it to Roman law, but he goes on saying it’s a Christian legacy.

[O]ne of the things that we owe to [the Christian] legacy is the idea that law is and ought to be a secular institution, whose authority is founded in human decisions and is independent of, and in an important respect takes precedence over, divine commands…The privatisation of religious law was clearly a part of Jesus’s mission…His striking pronouncement in the story of the tribute money, that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s, has served for many centuries as authority for the view that, in public matters, it is human and not divine government that should be obeyed. This idea gained credibility through St Paul’s letters, influenced as they were by Roman law and by the knowledge that the early church enjoyed the protection of a developed system of law.

In other words there was an existing system of secular law which influenced Paul, and one catchy phrase is attributed to Jesus – and that makes secular law a Christian legacy? It looks to me much more like a Roman legacy (and an Athenian legacy before that). What am I missing?

More on Tasneem. From the Guardian.

“Rampant illegal detention and torture are clear evidence of Bangladesh’s security forces running amok”, said Brad Adams, [HRW’s] Asia director…Tens of thousands of people were arrested in the weeks that followed the declaration of a state of emergency, and security forces have been accused of flouting standard arrest and detention procedures. Khalil said there was now a culture of “self-censorship” in the country, and people were afraid of the consequences of speaking out. “I am taking a calculated risk in speaking out because I still have family in Bangladesh,” he said. “But I feel it is important that people know what is really going on in my country.”

From CNN (Tasneem has reported for them at times).

Human Rights Watch on Thursday issued a first-person account of the incarceration and torture in Bangladesh of one of its consultants – an outspoken human rights advocate, journalist and blogger…”Tasneem Khalil’s prominence as a critical journalist may have prompted his arrest, but it also may have saved his life. Ordinary Bangladeshis held by the security forces under the emergency rules have no such protections.” Khalil was freed “after tremendous international and national pressure,” the group said.

Tens of thousands of other Bangladeshis aren’t so fortunate. We’ll have to pay attention to Bangladesh. Two, three, many human rights advocates and bloggers – the thing to do is outnumber them. Bastards.

Remember last year when we heard that Tasneem Khalil had been arrested in the middle of the night? Well now we know what happened to him while he was held. He was violently beaten, threatened, and terrorized, that’s what. He’s safe now – but Bangladesh has successfully gotten rid of a reporter who had been investigating human rights abuses of just the kind perpetrated on him. So Bangladesh can presumably do what it likes without any pesky reporters telling the world what Bangladesh likes to do – not unless those pesky reporters are eager to be beaten up and probably killed.

Andrew Anthony zeroes in on the problem.

All the subclauses in the world can’t disguise the intention that underpins these positions. In seeking to incorporate a disputed deity’s authority (which, by the way, it is blasphemous to question) into the common law, and by challenging the principle of equality under the law, Dr Williams launched a strategic attack on secularism.

A disputed deity’s authority. Just so. And it’s not only the deity that is disputed, it is also that deity’s authority, and the content of the resulting commands, and above all how and if anyone knows any of this. This is the theist four-step I talked about last year. We tend to think there’s just one step – believe in God or not – but in fact there are at least four, and it’s the whole package that is both so coercive and so weak as a matter of knowledge. It’s coercive because the package is: there is a God, it is all-good and all-powerful, it has told us how to be good, we know those three things beyond a shadow of a doubt. That’s coercive because (if it’s true, which of course it isn’t) it closes off the exits. It’s weak as a matter of knowledge because we don’t know any one of the four, much less all of them – yet that doesn’t get pointed out all that often. The archbishop can talk about a covenant with the divine and no one says like a rude eight-year-old ‘How do you know?’ But it is a real question. How does he know? The answer of course is that he doesn’t – but because no one says so, he gets to go on pretending he does.

The archbishop says says there is a ‘covenant between the divine and the human’. Well, is there? How does he know? There is no evidence of such a covenant. There is no crumbly old bit of parchment in the British Museum with God’s signature on it. There’s no anything – there’s only a chain of assertions going back many hundreds of years. Well that doesn’t count, especially in such a momentous matter as this. If there were a covenant – would this God make it once, five thousand years ago or thereabouts, and then never again? Leaving no trace? Is this God so thick that it doesn’t know that humans can forge documents and invent stories? If God really wanted to make a covenant with the human, wouldn’t it make some arrangement for succeeding generations to have genuine, valid knowledge of said covenant? God didn’t do that. God apparently expected us all to be as credulous as newborn babies about this one thing – and most of us have obliged, but maybe it’s getting to be just about time to stop being quite such easy marks. When the archbishop talks as if he has reliable knowledge of this covenant between the divine and the human, he is playing a con game.