Author: Ophelia Benson

People don’t pay enough attention. Maybe they don’t pay any attention. Maybe all those octagonal red signs just flash pointlessly in front of their eyes without being taken in. Maybe everyone is entirely made of wood. I have to wonder sometimes.

It’s this BBC item on Rowan Atkinson, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and others joining forces to urge the government to add three amendments to the religious hatred bill – ‘to ensure people can still ridicule and criticise religion.’

Opponents of the bill, which faces detailed scrutiny in the House of Lords next week, say it would outlaw jokes and criticism of beliefs. They argue that people can choose their religion, unlike their race and so should not be protected against offence or criticism. On Thursday, the alliance of writers, comedians, bishops and peers unveiled a series of amendments they want added to the bill.

Good, good. Hope they succeed. Would prefer (as they would) no such bill, but failing that, hope they get the amendments accepted.

Blackadder star Mr Atkinson said campaigners against the law backed the government’s alleged intentions. But he warned: “The prime motivating energy for the bill seemed to come not from communities seeking protection from bullying by the British National Party but more from individuals with a more aggressive, fundamentalist agenda.” He pointed to those who would have liked to use such laws to prevent Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Even if there were no prosecutions under the new law, it would create self-censorship by writers, suggested Mr Atkinson.

A lot of that self-censorship is already on site, I would say – in the form of all the hand-wringers who are always rushing to and fro urging everyone to ‘respect’ religion I do beg your pardon I mean ‘faith’ and not to ‘insult’ or ‘offend’ religious beliefs. But not to worry – according to an authoritative body.

But the Muslim Council of Britain defended the law, disputing claims that it would lead to a loss of free speech. “People like Rowan Atkinson have created a media frenzy by claiming that the proposed law will ban criticism of religious beliefs. It certainly will not,” said Sher Khan, chairman of its public affairs committee.

And apart from a perfunctory ‘Sure, we’ll have a look’ from the Home Office, the MCB comment is the last thing in the article. In other words, they get the last word. Also the only word from that particular ‘community.’ Okay – that’s the not paying attention part. Why is the MCB consulted? Why did the BBC rush to ask the MCB what it thought? Why is the MCB so readily – so downright automatically – treated as the authoritative body to consult on such questions? Why is it treated as some sort of ‘leadership’ or as ‘representative’ when a lot of people – emphatically including Muslims – have pointed out that they’re not leaders and not representative? Not to mention not elected and not even – what they are so often taken to be – particularly ‘moderate’. Especially after that ‘Panorama’ – and Panorama is a BBC show, after all. So…they’re not paying attention. That’s irritating.

I’m not in a mood to be tolerant and accepting. As a matter of fact I’m in a foul savage mood; I’m in a mood to bite the heads off fluffy kittens. Have been ever since yesterday. I’m in the kind of mood where people suddenly rush off to live in the Arctic circle, or quit their jobs, or try to circumnavigate the globe on a bicycle and disappear somewhere in Nebraska. So be careful what you say to me.

So I’m not in an accepting embracing mood. I’m not ready to have secular commercial establishments shoving unrequested religious messages at me. (Like, what? I’m ready for that kind of thing when I’m in a good mood? No. Okay, but I’m even more savage about it today. Humour me.)

Coffee drinkers in the US could soon get Jesus with their morning jolt as Starbucks plans to put a religious message on its cups next spring. The cups will carry a religious quote from the Rev Rick Warren, the author of the blockbuster self-help book The Purpose-Driven Life. Mr Warren said he had had the idea after seeing a quote on one of the store’s cups on evolution by the paleontologist Louise Leakey. [sic – they mean Louis. Duh.] His quote reads: “You are not an accident. Your parents may not have planned you, but God did. He wanted you alive and created you for a purpose. Focusing on yourself will never reveal your real purpose. You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense. Only in God do we discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance and our destiny.”

Well how’s that for stupid? How’s that for a moronic, dribbling, slack-jawed, fatuous, blithering piece of dreck? Pretty good, I’d say. Scores pretty high on the dumbOmeter. Your parents may not have planned you, but Kramer did. He wanted you alive and created you for a purpose. Focusing on yourself will never reveal your real purpose. You were made by Kramer and for Kramer, and until you understand that, life will never make sense. Only in Kramer do we discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance and our destiny. That’s a lot of stuff to discover all in one place, isn’t it – our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance and our destiny. Whoo-ee – that’s quite a package. Unless it’s just a string of big-sounding words thrown in arbitrarily to make it all sound Deep and Meaningful – could that be it?

While the religious inscription may be a first for Starbucks, packaging goods with a message from God has been done before. For the past 30 years Alaska Airlines has put prayer cards on food trays. The California-based fast-food chain In-N-Out Burger has long carried verses from the Bible on its wrappers.

Yeah – I got one of those wretched ‘prayer cards’ from Alaska airlines a few years ago. Boy did that piss me off. It’s not as if you can get up and leave, is it!

When the founder of the clothing chain Forever 21 and XXI saw them he included a quote from John 3:16 on his shopping bags, declaring: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” The quotes were “evidence of faith”, a spokesman, Larry Meyer, told USA Today.

Well obviously. That’s where the slack-jawed bit comes in – because ‘faith’ as a euphemism for religion means believing things without evidence, and ‘faith’ in that sense is not a virtue. The quotes were ‘evidence of credulity,’ the spokesman might as well have said.

So – Oratory School please note.

Government policy on school admissions was in disarray last night in the wake of a ruling from the Education Secretary Ruth Kelly that a church school could carry on interviewing parents to select its pupils. Parents’ leaders and pressure groups claimed that the decision would open the floodgates to schools of all faiths to adopt the practice – thus paving the way for more segregation in schools…Ms Kelly’s decision gave the green light to the London Oratory School, where Tony Blair sends his three children, to carry on the practice. The school says that it uses the interviews to determine parents’ commitment to their faith, whatever it is.

Church schools interview parents to determine their commitment to their credulity – so presumably it’s only if they are (or appear) credulous enough that their children are allowed to attend. Strange criterion.

But maybe no stranger than thinking libraries should get over their stupid backward-looking interest in dreary old books.

In the debate about modernising libraries, for instance, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) advocates that the New Model Library should feature “cafés, lounge areas with sofas, and chill-out zones where young people can watch MTV, read magazines and listen to CDs on listening posts”. CABE accuses traditional libraries of being “caught in the grip of traditional notions of the book-lending centre”. Behind this anti-book approach lies a real contempt for teenagers who are cast as so shallow that they might be enticed into reading by a few gadgets and soft furnishings.

Not to mention cast as so shallow that they can’t possibly have any interest in books in the first place – that they can’t possibly go to libraries because they have an already existing interest in books and desire to read a wider range of them, and that that’s a stuffy boring ‘traditional’ (and of course elitist) interest for anyone to have. Yeah. The hell with books, secularism, rational thought, skepticism, and independent-mindedness, and up with sheeplike ‘faith,’ pious coffee cups and shopping bags, ‘faith’ schools, and libraries converted to sofa-filled tv-watching centres. Okay that’s it – Arctic Circle, I’m on my way.

Kenan Malik remembers the beginning. He was in Bradford to interview Sher Azam, president of the Bradford Council of Mosques and the guy who burned The Satanic Verses at a demonstration, and he encountered an old friend.

“I’ve been up here a few months, helping in the campaign to silence the blasphemer…No need to look so shocked. I’ve had it with the white left. I’d lost my sense of who I was and where I came from. So I came back to Bradford to rediscover it. We need to defend our dignity as Muslims, to defend our values and beliefs, and not allow anyone – ”racist or Rushdie” – to trample over them.” I was astonished. The Hassan I knew in London had been a member of the Socialist Workers party (as had I for a while). Apart from Trotskyism, his indulgences were sex, Southern Comfort and watching Arsenal. We had marched together, chucked bricks at the National Front together, been arrested together. I had never detected a religious bone in his body. But here he was in Bradford, an errand boy to the mullahs, inspired by book-burners.

An errand boy to the mullahs – there it is. Imagine what that would be like. Imagine you’re in Lynchburg or Boulder or Pocatello to interview Fallwell or Dobson about whatever the latest religiofascist move is – blaming feminism for September 11, for instance – and you encounter an old friend, a wine-drinking lefty – who turns out to be there not to mock, not to investigate but as an adherent. As an errand-person to the bible-bashers.

I transpose the terms because it’s obvious how disconcerting that would be to most first world lefties. But when it’s running errands for the mullahs rather than the bible-bashers, somehow the disconcerting quality is less obvious. There’s a tendency to confuse Islamists with freedom fighters instead of with Falwell-types. That is such a mistake…

Today, “radical” in an Islamic context means someone who espouses a fundamentalist theology. Twenty years ago it meant a secularist who challenged the power of the mosques. The expunging of that radical secularist tradition has played an important part in the rise of Islamic militancy in this country. Hassan embodied this mutation from left-wing activist to Islamic militant. He was not alone.

Just so. The expunging of that radical secularist tradition, and the replacement of it with its own opposite. It’s a horrible tragedy, and all the more so because it’s so confusing. There really are a lot of lost-in-the-fog types – including Guardian editors, apparently – who hear the words ‘radical’ and ‘militant’ and ‘activist’ and think they mean exactly what they did thirty and forty years ago – who simply haven’t grasped yet that they mean not exactly what they did, and not even more or less the same kind of thing with some inevitable modifications over time, but rather, the deadly enemy of the original meaning.

The Rushdie affair made me question my own relationship to the left. For the transformation of Hassan mirrored a wider political shift. It was a conversion from a belief in secular universalism to the defence of ethnic particularism and group rights. At one time, the left had been a champion of Enlightenment rationalism, of a common humanity and universal rights. Over the past 20 years, however, many key figures and organisations on the British left have promoted the idea of multiculturalism. “You have to treat people differently to treat them equally,” Lee Jasper, race adviser to Ken Livingstone, says. Or as Labour MP Keith Vaz put it, “Britishness cannot be imposed on people of different races, cultures and religions.” After Rushdie, I came to realise that tackling this “politics of difference” was as important as challenging racism…The roots of the politics of difference can be found in the new forms of radicalism that emerged in the 1960s. Radicalism came to mean the rejection of all that is “western” in the name of marginality or difference.

And the Other – don’t forget the Other, whatever you do.

Multiculturalism did not create militant Islam, but it created a space for it within British Muslim communities that had not existed before. It fostered a more tribal nation, undermined progressive trends within the Muslim communities and strengthened the hand of conservative religious leaders. It is true that since 9/11 and particularly since 7/7 there has been growing questioning of the consequences of multiculturalism. From David Blunkett to CRE chief Trevor Phillips, many have talked of the need to reassert common values. Yet the fundamental tenets of the politics of difference remain largely unquestioned. The idea that society consists of a variety of distinct cultures, that all these cultures should be respected and preserved and that society should be organised to meet the distinct needs of different cultures – these continue to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, anti-racist outlook. The lesson of the past two decades, however, is this: a left that espouses multiculturalism makes itself redundant.

It undermined progressive trends within the Muslim communities and strengthened the hand of conservative religious leaders – didn’t it just. So we hear a great deal from Iqbal Sacranie in the Guardian and on the BBC and nothing from Maryam Namazie and Azam Kamguian. So much for radicalism.