Author: Ophelia Benson

Excellent article on sharia in Ontario in the Toronto Star. Lynda Hurst corrects one widespread misapprehension (I certainly shared it):

The decision means there will be no domestic tribunals in this province based on Orthodox Jewish, or Islamic sharia, laws. No other faiths come into it. None ever did. Contrary to government comments in past media reports and current statements by Jewish and Muslim activists, no known Christian church has made use of Ontario’s 1991 Arbitration Act to settle marital breakdown or child custody disputes. “I’ve consulted fairly widely and no one is aware of any such thing,” says lawyer Janet Buckingham of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. “Of course, churches mediate and counsel if people request it, but arbitrating legal matters? No.”

It was all smoke and mirrors. How about that.

But that was just one of the many distortions and red herrings that flourished in this rancorous controversy. Time and again, in letters and columns, sharia advocates accused opponents of spreading propaganda, of claiming sharia courts would see women in Ontario stoned to death for conjugal infractions: How paranoid of these bigots, right? In fact, no one involved on the anti side ever said that, or anything close. Time and again, and with breathtaking arrogance, advocates dismissed the Muslim women who led the no-sharia fight as a Westernized elite, an educated minority who demeaned other, more recently arrived women in the guise of protecting them.

They should have sent Madeleine Bunting an invitation, she would have come over and helped with that last line of ‘argument’.

Most unsettling of all was the ease with which sharia advocates played the religion card, accusing Muslim opponents – and thousands of other objectors across Canada and a nervous world – of Islamophobia.

That’s a popular card. What a good thing that tactic failed.

When the consultations turned to sharia, dozens of Muslim women and men told Boyd that sharia, in all its myriad forms, is inherently and uniformly biased against women. They explained that it is not religious doctrine, but a cultural “code for living,” a man-made series of laws written after the death of Muhammad in 632 that’s now been politicized in many countries…Escaping sharia’s pervasive presence is the very reason many Muslims have immigrated to Canada. They assumed that, if not officially secular, Canada did, at least, keep religion and the state separate and apart. Many, such as the tireless no-sharia campaign leader Homa Arjomand, an Iranian refugee, were stunned to learn sharia had followed them.

Good on her for crediting Homa. Tireless indeed. She led this whole campaign, and what a lot she accomplished. I know I said it before, but – well done, Homa.

Boyd, however, green-lighted the continued use of “faith-based” arbitration, including sharia, albeit with costly and impractical safeguards in place. Her report, ironically, was subtitled Protecting Choice, Promoting Inclusion. It would have done neither. Had the province allowed its female Muslim citizens to be pressured into accepting the dictates of sharia tribunals or face community ostracism, or worse, their exclusion from the Canadian mainstream would have been sealed. Since when was that the aim of multiculturalism? It took months of relentless speeches, petitions, panels and protests to counter Boyd’s naïve recommendations and stop the province from setting a dangerous precedent. After unanimous objections by female Liberal MPs and ultimately all three parties*, McGuinty finally overcame his fear of acting.

*And international demonstrations three days before McGuinty acted, and an open letter from Margaret Atwood, Maud Barlow and a long list of journalists, writers and the like, a few hours before McGuinty acted.

There’s a party to celebrate this evening – in fact it must be going on right now, since it started at 7 and it’s either 9 or 10 there now. (What zone is Toronto in? Eastern, or central? Central, probably – but I’m not sure. How ignorant.) Have fun, all!

Galloway tried to rebuke Toronto over the sharia matter yesterday, a Harry’s Place reader reports. But it didn’t win him many friends. Bastard!

Galloway only lost the crowd at one point, when he criticized the NDP’s stand against Sharia law in Ontario. He told the audience that this was catering to the right-wing and risked dividing the anti-war movement.

Catering to the right wing is it. Unlike fawning on tyrants. Gah.

I have to listen to the debate one of these days. I’m dreading it. I heard excerpts on Today, and listening to Galloway bellow and shout and rant is not my idea of a good time.

Just a few items. They’re hard to find now, so I feel like stashing two or three.

Thinking Makes It So. Actually, my colleague published this one on B&W when B&W was brand-new – but after awhile I deleted it. But just putting up a link to it back here off the front page isn’t so bad.

Gustave and Dawn

Other Minds

Mutability

Do I Wake or Sleep

Okay five. Not two or three, five. So sue me.

There’s this article by Timothy Garton-Ash in yesterday’s Guardian, titled ‘What we call Islam is a mirror in which we see ourselves’. Well, yes, no doubt – but one could say that of anything. What we call anything is a mirror in which we see ourselves, but what of that? Does that get us much of anywhere? It could, but it could also not. In other words, calling something [whatever we do call it] could indicate that we are [rational/irrational/misanthropic/empathetic] and be true or untrue all the same. The two can be quite independent. A person can be malevolent or loony and still get things right, and a person can be caring and understanding and still get things wrong.

Garton-Ash offers six examples of possible things to say about Islam. First:

The fundamental problem is not just Islam but religion itself, which is superstition, false consciousness, the abrogation of reason. In principle, Christianity or Judaism are little better, particularly in the versions embraced by the American right. The world would be a much better place if everyone understood the truths revealed by science, had confidence in human reason and embraced secular humanism. If we must have a framed image of a bearded old man on the wall, let it be a photograph of Charles Darwin. What we need is not just a secular state but a secular society.

Then he comments on it.

This is a view held by many highly educated people in the post-Christian west, especially in western Europe, including some of my closest friends. If translated directly into a political prescription, it has the minor drawback of requiring that some 3 billion to 5 billion men and women abandon their fundamental beliefs.

But what is the point of saying that? What’s he talking about, ‘If translated directly into a political prescription’? What does he mean? Apparently something like people saying: ‘”The world would be a much better place” should be translated to “Let us enact laws that would force people (how?) to have confidence in human reason and embrace secular humanism.”‘ That seems to be the political prescription he has in mind. But who does suggest political prescriptions like that? Who does make the leap from saying religion is superstition to saying that people should be forced to abjure it? No one. Damn well no one. So why do people insist on saying or implying that the first entails the second? It’s a form of moral blackmail, it’s a way of ring-fencing (as Rushdie calls it) religion and making critical discussion of it more difficult, and it’s not based on reality.

This kind of thing is especially irritating coming from professional intellectuals and opinion-purveyors. I might as well tell Timothy Garton-Ash that he shouldn’t write for the Guardian because that equates to ‘requiring’ me to agree to whatever it is that he says. It’s ridiculous! People criticising religion does not equate to summoning an army to force people to ‘abandon their fundamental beliefs’! Can we for once get clear on that so that we can discuss the subject honestly?

The second example:

The fundamental problem is not religion itself, but the particular religion of Islam. Islam, unlike western Christianity, does not allow the separation of church and state, religion and politics. The fact that my Iranian newspaper gives the year as 1384 points to a larger truth. With its systematic discrimination against women, its barbaric punishments for homosexuality and its militant intolerance, Islam is stuck in the middle ages. What it needs is its Reformation.

And the comment.

A very widespread view. Two objections are that such a view encourages a monolithic, essentialist understanding of Islam, and tries to understand its history too much in western terms (middle ages, Reformation). If we mean by Islam “what people calling themselves Muslim actually think, say and do”, there is a huge spectrum of different realities.

But monolithic, essentialist understandings of systems of ideas are not necessarily unreasonable or silly or wrong in the way that monolithic, essentialist understandings of groups of people are, because systems of ideas can be and often are monolithic and essentialist. That’s rather the point of them. Systems of ideas have particular content, which is different from other systems of ideas. It’s not even coherent to criticise an account of a system of ideas for being monolithic and essentialist. And the primary meaning of Islam (as it is with Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism) is not ‘what people calling themselves Muslim actually think, say and do’ but the doctrines of the religion itself. There are interpretations and schools, yes, but that’s not the same as no core doctrine at all.

Irfan Khawaja talked about this subject in an article a year or two ago.

“Belief in an Islamic essence that supercedes [sic] the behavior of actual Muslims,” we are blithely told, “leads people to making sloppy generalizations about Islam.” So the criterion of “the Islamic” is “the behavior of actual Muslims.” The absurdity of this claim is almost mind-boggling. For one thing, it ignores the fact that Muslims themselves believe that Islam has an essence that supersedes the behavior of actual Muslims. It ignores the fact that the Qur’an states that Islam is a “perfect” religion whose essence is contained within the Qur’an itself. It ignores the fact that according to Islam, the Sunnah takes precedence over and regulates “the behavior of actual Muslims.”…What Staerk is telling us is that it’s easier to generalize rigorously about the behavior of 1.25 billion existing Muslims plus all the Muslims who have ever existed in the 1400 years of the existence of Islam – than it is to generalize about the claims of a handful of Islamic texts!

And so on. Garton-Ash’s argument isn’t a very good one.

All righty, now let’s all pull up our chairs to our desks and place our pens and pencils neatly at the top and get ready to pay attention. Remember the other day we had a little disagreement about whether or not Feng Shui is woo-woo or, in the technical language, nonsense? It started because I linked to an article by Nick Cohen who referred to Feng Shui (as I did in the headline) as fashionable nonsense – a phrase that has a certain resonance for the proprietors of B&W. But a reader took exception to that headline, and to Nick’s article, on the grounds that Feng Shui isn’t nonsense at all, but just sensible environmental design. Well, I don’t think so. It does include sensible environmental design, but it also includes real nonsense. I’ve been investigating, and I have yet to find any nonsense-free Feng Shui. Now, granted, it’s possible that like the black swan, nonsense-free Feng Shui just hasn’t turned up on the radar yet…But so far, it seems safe (and fair) to say that Feng Shui is well over in the woo-woo camp.

Here’s something from the first Google hit. It’s about kitchens.

The kitchen represents the manifestation of the family’s well-being and wealth. It is useful for pressing down bad luck caused by bad flying star number or personalized directions of bad fortune. According to the Eight Mansions and Flying Star formulas, certain sectors of the house are deemed to be unlucky. If your kitchen is located in an unlucky sector this is a good thing…The mouth of the stove should face one of the best directions of the father of the family. This energises the stove, making the food cooked in it auspicious for the family…Good feng shui kitchens should take the orientation of the stove, oven and rice cooker into account. When auspiciously oriented, the stove can bring enormous good fortune to a family. The kitchen stove should not be in the northwest sector. This is called “Fire at Heaven’s Gate” and brings bad luck to the breadwinner, causing the head of the household to lose their job and money.

Here is a basic course in the principles of FS from a UK site:

Four evenings of giving a good basic foundation in Feng Shui principles for the absolute beginner and basic knowledge to go on to further training. The course will cover: Form School, Chi Energy, the five elements, ying and yang, I Ching and the trigrams, Geopathic Stress, Electro magnetic fields, Feng Shui cures, artwork and symbolism, Clutter and space clearing.

And finally there is this from yet another site.

In Chinese philosophy, the concept of “Wu Xing” has a prominent standing. In Chinese Medicine, Astrology and Fengshui, the idea of Wu Xing is used extensively. This term has been conveniently translated as “five elements” or “five phases”. The word “Wu” means “five”. To single out the word “Xing” and try to explain what it means is futile effort…Water dominates in winter, wood in spring, fire in summer, metal in autumn. At the intersection between two seasons, the transitional period is dominated by earth…The names “water”, “wood”, “fire”, “metal” and “earth” are only substances whose properties resemble the respective chi in the closest possible way. They do help us understand the properties of the five types of chi but they also mislead us if we take everything in the literal sense.

Right.

So is there any completely nonsense-free Feng Shui anywhere? If so, it’s pretty hard to find!

There was some discussion yesterday of what to call the ‘argument’ that goes along the lines ‘Galileo was ignored/suppressed/censored, I’m ignored/suppressed/censored, therefore my ideas are on a par with Galileo’s ideas.’ I said I simply thought of it as the Galileo fallacy. (Chris Williams on the other hand offered an alternative in the Bozo the clown fallacy. ‘They laughed at Newton, they laughed at Einstein…’ ‘Yes and they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.’ That works.) Once I’d said that, I thought I might as well google it – and behold, a few citations of the Galileo fallacy.

At Bad Logic for instance.

Just about every logical fallacy ever imagined turns up in pseudoscience, including: “Galileo Fallacy” “They laughed at Galileo, and he was right. They laugh at me, therefore I must be right.” Variation common in education: “Einstein didn’t do well in school, therefore any kid who does poorly in school is like Einstein.”

And in this list of fallacious arguments, under Appeal to Pity (Appeal to Sympathy, The Galileo Argument):

Some authors want you to know they’re suffering for their beliefs. For example, “Scientists scoffed at Copernicus and Galileo; they laughed at Edison, Tesla and Marconi; they won’t give my ideas a fair hearing either. But time will be the judge. I can wait; I am patient; sooner or later science will be forced to admit that all matter is built, not of atoms, but of tiny capsules of TIME.”

Apparently people who edit philosophy magazines see a lot of that kind of thing. ‘Please read my complete theory of everything, available at www.randomnutter.com.’

And there’s a variation at Evowiki: Galileo Wannabe:

You commit this fallacy if you compare yourself to Galileo Galilei or another scientist suppressed by authorities or disbelieved by your peers. This is very popular among pseudoscientists…A popular answer is, “they laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Columbus, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown”. Indeed, being “suppressed” is not correlated to being right.

No, it’s not, but it’s such fun to imply that it is!

Update: I missed one. At Orac Knows, we have Galileo’s Gambit, enriched with a lot of parallel examples.

I’ve just been re-reading Judith Shklar’s 1989 essay ‘The Liberalism of Fear.’ It’s good stuff.

Skepticism is inclined toward toleration, since in its doubts it cannot choose among the competing beliefs that swirl around it, so often in murderous rage. Whether the skeptic seeks personal tranquility in retreat or tries to calm the warring factions around her, she must prefer a government that does nothing to increase the prevailing levels of fanaticism and dogmatism.

I read it the first time several years ago. I liked it – but certain resonances are even more resonant now than they were then (let alone than when she wrote the article, which was for instance before Yugoslavia fell apart).

To call the liberalism of fear a lowering of one’s sights implies that emotions are inferior to ideas and especially to political causes. It may be noble to pursue ideological ambitions or to risk one’s life for a ’cause,’ but it is not at all noble to kill another human being in pursuit of one’s own ’causes.’ ‘Causes,’ however spiritual they may be, are not self-justifying, and they are not all equally edifying.

No, they’re not.

The consequences of political spirituality are, moreover, far less elevating than it might seem. Politically it has usually served as an excuse for orgies of destruction. Need one remind anyone of that truly ennobling cry: ‘Viva la muerte!’ – and the regime it ushered in?

Viva la muerte – it’s back.

Unless and until we can offer the injured and insulted victims of most of the world’s traditional as well as revolutionary governments a genuine and practicable alternative to their present condtion, we have no way of knowing whether they really enjoy their chains. There is very little evidence that they do…The absolute relativism, not merely cultural but psychological, that rejects the liberalism of fear as both too ‘Western’ and too abstract is too complacent and too ready to forget the horrors of our world to be credible. It is deeply illiberal, not only in its submission to tradition as an ideal, but in its dogmatic identification of every local practice with deeply chared local human aspirations.

Madeleine Bunting, please note.

Too great a part of past and present political experience is neglected when we ignore the annual reports of Amnesty International and of contemporary warfare. It used to be the mark of liberalism that it was cosmopolitan and that an insult to the life and liberty of a member of any race or group in any part of the world was of genuine concern.

As above.

Since I keep picking fights with Michael Ruse’s recent arguments, it’s only fair that I should point out this item I’ve just read on Philosophy of Biology. It’s a letter Ruse sent to the dean, which he posted by way of encouraging others.

As the disaster unfolds in New Orleans, I am sure I am not alone in wondering what I can do. So far, the FSU response seems to be that we must go on with the football game. Is it at all possible to offer something to the students of Louisiana? For instance, could we take some of them in for a semester or two and wave fees? It is surely not too late in the term to think about this. I am sure that I am not alone in saying that my family would consider it a privilege to house and board for free a couple of students for the year. I am an Englishman born in 1940. I owe so much to America that for me it would be paying a very small part of the debt.

No comment necessary.