Author: Ophelia Benson

This is a piece of really very good news. The author says it hasn’t had much attention in the West – or elsewhere either. So let’s pay attention.

In a bold but little-noticed step toward reforming Islamic tradition, Turkey’s religious authorities recently declared that they will remove these statements [such as “If a husband’s body is covered with pus and his wife licks it clean, she still wouldn’t have paid her dues.” – OB] , and more like them, from the hadiths – the non-Koranic commentary on the words and deeds of the prophet Muhammad…Hadiths are serious stuff. More than 90 percent of the sharia (Islamic law) is based on them rather than the Koran, and the most infamous measures of the sharia – the killing of apostates, the seclusion of women, the ban on fine arts, the stoning of adulterers and many other violent punishments for sinful behavior – come from the hadiths and the commentaries built upon them. Eliminating these misogynistic statements from the hadiths is a direct challenge to some of the most controversial aspects of Islamic tradition.

The most controversial and the most life-ruining and misery-producing. What a tremendous step toward the improvement of the lives of millions of people, especially women, it would be if all religious authorities removed such hadiths. Let’s earnestly wish them every success.

The media and intellectuals of Ankara and Istanbul largely welcomed last month’s decision, which the Turkish government supported…Yet, despite the rhetoric about the need to make alliances with progressive Islam in the midst of the fight against terrorism, Turkey’s move toward reform has been widely overlooked in the West, and there has been little acknowledgment of it in other Muslim countries.

I wonder if the BBC has asked the MCB what it thinks about it yet.

“I can’t imagine a prophet who bullies women,” said Hidayet Tuksal, a feminist theologian in Ankara. “The hadiths that portray him so should be abandoned.” Similarly, in proposing to create its new standard collection, the Turkish Diyanet intends to look beyond the chain of transmitters to logic, consistency and common sense. In many ways, this is a revival of an early debate in Islamic jurisprudence between rival camps known as the adherents of the hadiths and the adherents of reason – a debate that ended with the triumph of the former.

Go, adherents of reason. Sayings from the 9th century that can’t be second-guessed in the light of reason are not the kind of thing that ought to triumph.

Here’s something I don’t get. Or maybe I do get it and just think it’s silly. One of those. It’s from an article by Michael Ruse in Robert Pennock’s collection Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics, “Methodological Naturalism under Attack,” page 365. Ruse is making the distinction (which featured heavily in the Kitzmiller trial) between metaphysical naturalism and methodological naturalism; he’s making the distinction and explaining it and arguing for it.

This is not to say that God did not have a role in the creation, but simply that, qua science, that is qua an enterprise formed through the practice of methodological naturalism, science has no place for talk of God. Just as, for instance, if one were to go to the doctor one would not expect any advice on political matters, so if one goes to a scientist one does not expect any advice on or reference to theological matters.

Just as? Just as? I think not. Not just as at all, I would say. Because claims about God are claims that God is real and really exists. They may (or may not) be metaphysical claims, but they are pretty much always truth-claims about God; the claims may include the stipulation that God is supernatural, outside time and space, but since they mostly also include claims about the way God creates or acts on this world, that stipulation seems a tad half-hearted. Especially when it comes to fans of ID, which is Ruse’s subject matter. The whole point of the ID God is that it designed the universe and the earth and wonderful us. So – that means the doctor analogy is an absurd analogy. It is not the case that science is to theology as medicine is to politics. Theology is about is, politics is about ought. You can always define God (and hence theology) as supernatural and metaphysical but in that case no one has anything to say about it, including theologians – it is by definition out of reach and unknowable. But if it is within reach and knowable, then it’s accessible to anyone who looks. Theologians don’t get special technical training that enables them to find God (how to use a special kind of microscope perhaps, or a special microtelescope), they don’t learn research methods and equipment-use that no one else knows, nor do they learn magic tricks. So it’s just bizarre to say that scientists have nothing to say about God while at the same time pretending that other people do have something to say about God. That involves pretending there is some kind of expertise or special knowledge that scientists don’t have. There is no such expertise or knowledge. That box is empty.

The physician may indeed have very strong political views, which one may or may not share. But the politics are irrelevant to the medicine. Similarly, the scientist may or may not have very strong theological views, which one may or may not share. But inasmuch as one is going to the scientist for science, theology can and must be ruled out as irrelevant.

But how can it be irrelevant unless the theology in question concerns something that is wholly outside the natural world and thus inaccessible to human investigation altogether? How? They want to have it both ways; that’s the problem. They want to say that God and theology are in this special magical category that is completely different from science and that science therefore has nothing to say about, while at the same time saying that they are perfectly entitled to lay down the law about God and theology. Well I do not see how it can be both! And I think the idea that it can be both rests on some kind of weird hocus-pocus about what theology is. Either that or it just rests on plain old rhetoric. Or, the original suggestion, that I just don’t get it. Okay let’s assume that I just don’t get it. Somebody explain it to me.

Sometimes I think I should keep a suitcase packed at all times, ready to grab when I hear the sirens approaching.

Penny Edgell, Doug Hartmann and I published a paper in the American Sociological Review called “Atheists As ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society.” In a national survey, part of a broader project on multiculturalism and solidarity in American life that we call the American Mosaic Project, we found that one group stood out from all others in terms of the level of rejection they received from the general public. That was atheists. And not by a small margin, either.

That’s not in the least a surprise, but it’s a useful sharpening.

How does such a small group pose such a threat to a large majority? The more we explored this finding, the more we came back to a simple answer for it. Like it or not, many (possibly most) Americans see religion as a marker of morality. To many Americans, “Atheists” are people who lack any basis for moral commitment.

I’m not sure that is the main answer though – although it’s presumptuous to say that since they did the research and I didn’t. But still…I don’t think that accounts for the gut hostility as well as other reasons do. One, people who think god is real and really exists take atheism as personally wounding, hurtful, insulting, to god even more to themselves. I think – it’s a hunch, but it’s also based on conversations and what theists say – it’s a feeling rooted in loyalty, and love. An admirable feeling, actually, but unfortunate because directed at an imagined being; unfortunate because the source of hostility towards existing people for the sake of an imagined one. Two, atheism is threatening to theism, because of course theists suspect that their reasons for believing in the god they believe in are vulnerable. Three, given this threat, this suspicion and vulnerability, theists suspect that atheists think theists are deluded. This suspicion opens the door for all sorts of class, hierarchical, populist, anti-‘elitist’ tensions and worries. In short, theists think atheists think theists are stupid, and (naturally) it pisses them off. I think all those bite deeper than the idea that atheists have no reason to be moral. I don’t have the research; that’s just a sort of hermeneutic or interpretive guess. Why do I think it? I suppose because I think the morality explanation doesn’t have the kind of emotional kick that the others do. I certainly think it matters, but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that makes the lower lip tremble or the blood boil, whereas the others are.

Okay, what’s the deal here? I thought Ana Marie Cox was supposed to be so clever, or witty or interesting or something – ? Isn’t she? I thought she was. I’ve never read or even glanced at Wonkette, because life is short and time is scarce and blogs are many and the subject matter – beltway gossip? Urrgghh – is so very unappealing; but I’ve gathered (how? I don’t know – as one does) that she’s good in some way. But clearly there has been some mistake. That “book review” is a piece of crap; it’s stupid and smug and truly staggeringly predictable. So if that’s Wonkette, I’m glad I’ve never wasted so much as a nanosecond on it.

Strident feminism can seem out of place – even tacky – in a world where women have come so demonstrably far. With Katie Couric at the anchor desk, Condoleezza Rice leading the State Department and Hillary Clinton aiming for the top of the ticket, many of the young, educated and otherwise liberal women who might, in another era, have found themselves burning bras and raising their consciousness would rather be fitted for the right bra (like on “Oprah”) and raising their credit limit.

Oh right. Of course. How stupid of us not to think of it. Because Hillary Clinton married the right guy and there’s – gasp! – one woman reading the news on tv, therefore feminism has nothing further to say, and if it says it it’s (oh christalmighty) “strident”. That’s the kind of thing that makes grizzled old feminists like me (and Pollitt, I daresay) want to send smug smirking young postfeminists off to – where, exactly? Let’s see. How about northern Nigeria. Or southern Afghanistan. Or Iran. Or Egypt. Or rural India, or China, or Congo. Sound good, Wonkette? Sound like a fun way to find out how far women have come? Hmmm?

Her new collection of essays, “Virginity or Death!,” culled from her columns for The Nation over the past five years, shows her to be stubbornly unapologetic in championing access to abortion and fixated on the depressingly slow evolution of women’s rights in the Middle East. In the midst of our celebration of Katie’s last day, Pollitt is the one who would drown out the clinking of cosmo glasses with a loud condemnation of the surgery available to those women who would sacrifice their little toes the better to fit their Jimmy Choos.

Fuck. I can’t even read any more. That’s only the first paragraph, and it’s some of the stupidest shit I’ve seen in a long time. And it’s in the New York Times, which still keeps insisting it’s a good newspaper! What is their problem? Why do they publish insulting garbage like that? Are they trying to show that they’re “hip” or not some bunch of latte-swigging elitists or what?

Okay, sorry, beg pardon. It’s the feminist in me – do excuse me, I mean the “strident” feminist – again. I’m sure I’ve told you, probably more than once, about seeing a panel of feminists – Pollitt was one – at the Los Angeles Book Fair a few years ago, on C-Span, and seeing a glam young French woman stand up and ask the panel why they were all so angry. They were all, to a woman, absolutely dumbfounded, and I was scarred for life. Seriously – Wonkette needs to learn about something beyond D.C. gossip. She also needs to learn to write better. A lot better.

Martha Nussbaum’s review of Catherine MacKinnon’s Are Women Human? ties in well with Danny Postel’s interview of Fred Halliday. Both put rights at the center – and in fact, as I noted in ‘Fred Halliday Rocks,’ Halliday cites Nussbaum (and Sen) on the subject. I would so much rather read Sen or Nussbaum or Appiah than Andrew Murray or Faisal Bodi or Inayat Bunglawala.

Inequality on the basis of sex is a pervasive reality of women’s lives all over the world. So is sex-related violence…Despite the prevalence of these crimes, they have not been well addressed under international human rights law…Until recently, abuses like rape and sexual torture lacked good human rights standards because human rights norms were typically devised by men thinking about men’s lives. In other words, “If men don’t need it, women don’t get it.” What this lack of recognition has meant is that women have not yet become fully human in the legal and political sense, bearers of equal, enforceable human rights…”Women’s resistance to their status and treatment” is now “the cutting edge of change in international human rights.”

Good. Let us know if we can help in some way.

MacKinnon’s central theme, repeatedly and convincingly mined, is the hypocrisy of the international system when it faces up to some crimes against humanity but fails to confront similar harms when they happen to women, often on a daily basis.

Violence in prison cells in Chile (or Guantanamo, as Nussbaum doesn’t say) is recognized as torture, but violence in kitchens in Nebraska is not.

As in her prior work, MacKinnon is caustic about the damage done by the traditional liberal distinction between a “public sphere” and a “private sphere,” a distinction that insulates marital rape and domestic violence from public view and makes people think it isn’t political. “Why isn’t this political?… The fact that you may know your assailant does not mean that your membership in a group chosen for violation is irrelevant to your abuse. It is still systematic and group-based.

Domestic violence including forced marriage, systematic subordination of females, systematically asymmetrical allocation of resources between males and females, genital mutilation.

Throughout the book MacKinnon reasserts the conception of equality that has been, so far, her most influential contribution to legal thought. Similarity of treatment, she has argued throughout her work, is not sufficient for the true “equal protection” of the laws. Mere formal equality often masks, or even reinforces, underlying inequalities. We need to think, instead, of the idea of freedom from hierarchy, from domination and subordination.

I’ve become somewhat obsessed with domination and subordination in recent years, as you may have noticed. Maybe it’s partly from reading Nussbaum, I don’t know. But I think it’s mostly from learning about women and girls who are indeed very thoroughly and systematically dominated and subordinated. I take it personally.

And there’s even a bonus:

Because feminist theory, in her understanding, is committed to reality, MacKinnon is deeply troubled by some of the excesses of academic postmodernism. One of the gems in the collection is an essay called “Postmodernism and Human Rights,” which ought to be required reading for all undergraduates and graduate students in the humanities.

Along with – oh you know.

This is a stirring piece.

Fred Halliday: My view is that the kind of position which the New Left Review and Tariq have adopted in terms of the conflict in the Middle East is an extremely reactionary, right-wing one. It starts with Afghanistan. To my mind, Afghanistan is central to the history of the Left, and to the history of the world, since the 1980s. It is to the early 21st century, to the years we’re now living through, what the Spanish Civil War was to Europe in the mid and late 20th century…The issue of rights is absolutely central. We have to hold the line at the defense, however one conceptualizes things, however de-hegemonized, of universal principles of rights. This is how I locate my own political and historical vision—it is my starting point.

And it is emphatically not the starting point of all too many people on the left now, and that’s the problem. But…that ice-jam seems to be breaking up a little now. Check out the comments on this absurd piece at Comment is Free for example. A cheering sign, I think.

I feel much happier with a copy of the U.N.D.P. Human Development Report than with the New Left Review. Or with the very courageous three annual editions of the Arab Human Development Report, which itemize in a statistical, perhaps over-quantified way, things like women’s access to education, women’s access to politics, treatment of minorities, freedom of speech, fair elections, and the like.

Danny Postel: “Bourgeois” liberties.

Fred Halliday: No, I don’t accept that category.

Danny Postel: I mean that in scare quotes: the crude, ultra-left way of dismissing such rights.

Fred Halliday: Exactly. And Marx himself had too much disparaging language of this kind as well…But I will barricade myself in my bunker with copies of the U.N.D.P. Report and with Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s attempts to define new forms of universal human needs, with feminists who are concretely engaged in social policy…

Yeah.