Author: Ophelia Benson

From Price of Honor by Jan Goodwin, pp 69-70.

“A typical case was related to me by Deputy Police Superintendent Farkander Iqbal…the chief of an all-female police station in Lahore, which was set up to handle only crimes against women.”

Iqbal tells about a sixteen-year-old girl, Rahina Jasnin, who was married to an unemployed laborer and whose in-laws complained that her dowry was too small. They beat her; she screamed; the neighbours heard the screams, but did nothing. Rahina gave birth to a daughter, and was beaten because it wasn’t a son. One night she woke up to find her mother-in-law holding her down.

“Her husband poured kerosene over her and then ignited it…When it was over, Rahina’s in-laws, thinking she was dead, took her to the local hospital and reported she had killed herself. But the young woman, who was burned over ninety percent of her body, lived for two more days. Before she died, she spoke about what had happened to her…’The local police dropped the case,’ Iqbal told me…’You find male police officers siding with the men under suspicion…We see ten to fifteen wife burnings a month at this location alone.’”

“Pakistan is very different today from what it was twenty years ago, according to Iqbal. ‘Before, crimes against women were relatively rare. If a man misbehaved himself toward a woman, he was promptly dealt with legally and society ostracized him. Today, in Pakistan, respect for women no longer exists, and crimes against them have increased dramatically. They claim to have “Islamized” us,’ she says derisively. ‘How can you Islamize people who are already Muslim? Ever since Zia gave power to the mullahs, it seems as though every man feels he can get hold of any female and tear her apart.’”

Tina Beattie in Open Democracy.

If we are to understand [the upsurge in various forms of religious extremism] and its social and political implications, then we must go beyond the headline-grabbing confrontations between religious and atheist extremists.

She says, contributing her own mite to the headline-grabbing confrontations between religious and atheist ‘extremists,’ in particular by using the phrase ‘atheist extremists’ at all. What are atheist extremists? And in what sense of the word are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens – Beattie’s chosen examples – extremists? Do they advocate violence against believers? Suppression of believers? Forcible silencing of believers? No. They disagree with them, that’s all; they think believers are wrong, and they say so. In what sense is that extreme?

The attempt to stage a war between religion and science – whether fuelled by religious or scientific fundamentalists – is part of the problem and not part of the solution with regard to the times we are living in.

She says, attempting to do her bit to stage a war between religion and science by using the phrase ‘scientific fundamentalists,’ as if unaware of how oxymoronic that phrase is, and how tiresomely overused it also is. Really, she’s doing quite a job here of saying tut tut, let’s not do this, and doing exactly what she is saying let’s not do.

If we seek to preserve our liberal western values, then we need to resist the spirit of aggression and confrontation which is becoming increasingly characteristic of public debate – in Britain and the United States especially – concerning the role of religion in society.

Do we? But who says it is a spirit of aggression and confrontation? Why is it not instead a spirit of honest inquiry and forthright criticism? Honest inquiry and forthright criticism are very much part of liberal values (not just western ones – why did she specify that?), aren’t they? And I would say that attempts to shut those activities down by using inflammatory and inaccurate words like ‘extremist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘aggression’ to characterize mere written and spoken analysis and criticism is very illiberal indeed.

Also lurking within the media treatment of religion today is a masked anti-Catholicism, for that too has been a feature of modern societies such as Britain and America whose values have been largely shaped by Protestantism.

Oh, it’s not masked in my case. I hate Catholicism. But that’s allowed – that’s part of liberal values. We can hate libertarianism, we can hate socialism, we can hate Catholicism.

The recent confrontation between religion and science is in this context a smokescreen which is distracting us from much more urgent political and intellectual issues. It allows the secular intelligentsia to hide behind a convenient and inflated – where not fabricated – myth of religious extremism…

So it’s the secular intelligentsia that is fabricating a myth of religious extremism. What about those myths of atheist extremism then? Who is fabricating those?

I see on Tina Beattie’s page at Roehampton that one of her teaching interests is Religion and Human Rights. That’s a strange pairing, I thought – even stranger than those pairings of ‘Religion and Ethics’ that we see everywhere (such as at the BBC). Why religion and human rights? It is so often bishops or priests or mullahs who oppose human rights rather than supporting them – it seems odd to link them. The pairing of religion and ethics gives religion the credit for ideas and views that are often entirely secular; pairing religion with human rights would seem to do the same thing.

Human Rights Watch is aware of the tension.

Is there a schism between the human rights movement and religious communities? Essential disagreements appear increasingly to pit secular human rights activists against individuals and groups acting from religious motives. The list of contentious issues is growing: on issues such as reproductive rights, gay marriage, the fight against HIV/AIDS, and blasphemy laws, human rights activists and religious groups often find themselves on opposing sides.

Yes we do, and on the human rights side we find ourselves dealing with bad or no arguments from the religious groups. ‘We want to block these suggested rights, and we don’t have a real reason, we just know that God wants us to, so we’re more devout than you are, so we have the moral high ground, so you should give in to us.’

The controversy that hit the EU in October 2004 around…conservative Catholic Rocco Buttiglione illustrates some of the issues at stake. Unperturbed by the furor he was arousing, the candidate for Commissioner on Justice, Freedom, and Security—who in that function would have been in charge of fighting discrimination—affirmed in front of bewildered members of the European Parliament that “homosexuality is a sin” and that “the family exists to allow women to have children and be protected by their husbands.”

Well…maybe what we mean is ‘Liberal Religion and Human Rights.’ But that’s not what it says – and the sad fact is that most religion isn’t liberal. It’s a comfortable illusion of the safe middle-class in the safe developed countries that most religion is liberal and getting more so all the time – hence perhaps the bewilderment of the members of the European Parliament – but it is indeed an illusion. One of the perks of religion is being able to be dogmatically and arbitrarily opposed to lots of things you don’t happen to like, and most believers have no interest at all in giving up that perk. If it’s human rights you’re after, religion is generally the wrong place to look. (Yes there are exceptions; yes MLK was religious.)