Author: Ophelia Benson

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury. He goes on trial on Thursday. He could get the death penalty. For what? ‘His crime is to have tried to attend a writers’ conference in Tel Aviv on how the media can foster world peace.’ Ah yes – that’s a good reason to kill someone.

But few stories better illustrate the Islamist tinderbox that Bangladesh has become than Mr. Choudhury’s. “When I began my newspaper [the Weekly Blitz] in 2003 I decided to make an end to the well-orchestrated propaganda campaign against Jews and Christians and especially against Israel,” he says in the first of several telephone interviews in recent days. “In Bangladesh and especially during Friday prayers, the clerics propagate jihad and encourage the killing of Jews and Christians. When I was a child my father told me not to believe those words but to look at the world’s realities.”

So he was beaten up for ten days, then spent 16 months in solitary confinement, until he was released on bail.

In July, the offices of the Weekly Blitz were bombed by Islamic militants. In September, a judge with Islamist ties ordered the case continued, despite the government’s reluctance to prosecute, on the grounds that Mr. Choudhury had hurt the sentiments of Muslims by praising Christians and Jews and spoiling the image of Bangladesh world-wide. Last week, the police detail that had been posted to the Blitz’s offices since the July bombing mysteriously vanished. The next day the offices were ransacked and Mr. Choudhury was badly beaten by a mob of 40 or so people. Over the weekend he lodged a formal complaint with the police, who responded by issuing an arrest warrant for him. Now he’s on the run, fearing torture or worse if he’s taken into custody.

So it’s time to turn the glare of public attention on Choudhury and his fate. Jeff Weintraub alerted me (and a slew of other people) to the matter, and particularly urged Juan Cole to make a statement about it on Informed Comment. Norm already has a post (Jeff noted that Norm beat him to the punch). Pass it on.

The Wall Street Journal is not letting the Bush admin off the hook on this one.

The U.S. Embassy in Dhaka has kept track of Mr. Choudhury and plans to send an observer to his trial. But mainly America’s diplomats seem to have treated him as a nuisance. “Their thinking,” says a source familiar with the case, “is that this is the story of one man, and why should the U.S. base its entire relationship with Bangladesh on this one man?”…The Bush administration, which every year spends some $64 million on Bangladesh, has made a priority of identifying moderate Muslims and giving them the space and cover they need to spread their ideas. Mr. Choudhury has identified himself, at huge personal risk, as one such Muslim. Now that he is on the run, somewhere in the darkness of Dhaka, will someone in the administration pick up the phone and explain to the Bangladeshis just what America expects of its “moderate and tolerant” friends?

Good luck, Mr. Choudhury. Be well. Solidarity.

More on that Eagleton review. I have my doubts about other parts of it.

For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief.

Well, for one thing, that depends how you define mainstream Christianity (and I’m not too sure about that ‘always,’ either, in fact I think it’s wrong – for most of mainstream Christianity’s history, honest doubt has damn well not played an integral role, but led straight to the nice hot bonfire). For another thing, it could be seen as a contradiction to say that doubt plays an integral role in belief. For another thing, Eagleton doesn’t do a great job of modelling honest doubt himself.

He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning…The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end. Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom.

How does he know? Where is the honest doubt in all this?

And what does he mean? There’s a lot of it that I can’t make head or tail of. It scans, it makes grammatical sense, but I cannot figure out what it’s saying. Maybe I’m thick. Or maybe there’s no head or tail to be made.

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster.

What does all that mean? Why is believing in God not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist? Why is God not a celestial super-object? And what on earth does it mean to say that theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe? And the bit about transcendence and invisibility? I’m lost. It all seems like pure blather – grand words that fail to refer to anything.

He asks how this chap [meaning God] can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.

Eh?

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing.

Except that ‘he’ (who is not a person, remember – yet ‘he’ does have a gender) is not the answer, because that’s not an answer. It’s just a lot of declaration, most of it incomprehensible.

After that he gets onto Jesus, and that part is much better. Jesus is compelling, and Eagleton puts the rhetoric to better use there. There’s one thing though –

On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.

No, what’s really far more likely is that it will be both. It will be Islamists offing Musharref and taking over Pakistan – and bye bye misbelievers.

Still…

Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s. In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago.

But he overplayed his hand, Eagleton ends up. He’s clear enough once he leaves God behind.

I was stopped cold by a paragraph in Terry Eagleton’s review of Dawkins’s book in the LRB (it’s subscription, so I can’t link to it; a kind reader sent me a copy). I’ll show you why.

Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature.

Staggering, isn’t it? One suspects – one suspects – that very few of ‘those’ ‘right-wing’ dons had read much Derrida; one suspects, but one doesn’t know, and one certainly doesn’t offer the reader a shred of reason to share one’s suspicion, or evidence that would back it up, but, nothing perturbed, one immediately proceeds to spring off from one’s own unexplained and unargued suspicion to point out that the ‘right-wing’ dons would doubtless be cross with students who hadn’t done the reading. But one has forgotten – how very quickly, in the space of one sentence – that one doesn’t know (or one would have said so) that the ‘right-wing’ dons hadn’t read much Derrida, one merely suspects it. One has forgotten that one doesn’t know, and one blithely proceeds to use the suspicion to bludgeon someone else, as if a suspicion were the same thing as an established fact.

Then he has the brass to call Dawkins bumptious. One suspects that it is not altogether unfair to think Eagleton is a little bumptious himself, and one directs a bumptious and suspicious raspberry in his direction.

Catherine Bennett notes that the Rational Dress Society protested against dress fashion that ‘impedes the movements of the body’ with the result that after three or four decades, women were able to ride bicycles. Well, yes. Clothes and dress codes seem like a comparatively trivial matter, but they’re not. They’re immensely important. I’ve felt that literally all my life – from earliest earliest childhood. I always wore jeans when I could, I always fought wearing a skirt whether for school or for social occasions, I always fought binding or uncomfortable clothes. I remember fussing (okay probably whining) about a dress that was too tight or pinchy somewhere when I was a child; my mother said something to the effect that a little discomfort was the price of looking elegant; I rejected the principle absolutely. And it’s gone on that way ever since. I loathe the dress code for women, and that includes the secular dress code as well as religious ones – I loathe all the things women are expected to wear that impede the movements of the body. Did you know the streets of lower Manhattan were littered with high heeled shoes on September 11? Women are expected (and expect themselves) to dress for work in such a way that they can’t even run. They even, ‘Wonkette’ tells us, amputate ‘their little toes the better to fit their Jimmy Choos’ – and it’s been little more than a century that we’ve been able – and allowed – to ride bicycles, run, play sports, swim freely. Imagine not having that option. Imagine always having to wear a long dress, a corset, little flimsy shoes; imagine never ever being able to run, breathe freely, lounge, jump around – never being able to use your own body in an unconfined untrammeled way. Imagine life imprisonment.

Over a century on, this is just one of the many freedoms that young, enthusiastic female proponents of the jilbab and veil are content, apparently, to deny themselves. Yes, they freely choose not to be able to see properly nor to be able to communicate directly, nor move freely, nor play sports, swim in a public place and willingly embrace all the attendant limitations on their professional and social lives. Meanwhile, they are happy to watch their menfolk caper about, bareheaded, in western trainers and jeans.

Imprisonment for me, freedom for you – ‘freely’ chosen.

All this free choosing, according to Straw’s critics, we should accept, uncritically, at face value, because – here’s their trumping argument – what does freedom mean, if it doesn’t mean being free to oppress yourself? What does freedom mean if you can’t feel comfy in a niqab? Or happy to shave off your hair and wear a wig instead? Or comfortable – if you so choose – with footbinding? Or keen – if that’s what you want – to have a clitoridectomy?

The irony is beautifully stark in this item on a teacher suspended for wearing the niqab in class (the students, not surprisingly, couldn’t understand what she said).

She said: “The veil is really important to all Muslim women who choose to wear it. Our religion compels us to wear it because it’s in the Koran.”

As Edmund Standing pointed out when he sent me the link, note the juxtaposition of the liberal language of choice with the anti-liberal language of religious compulsion. She chooses to be compelled to wear it – and presumably not to fret too much about the women in Iran and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and many other places who are unable to choose not to be compelled to wear it.