Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Gentle Jesus

    Why are novels about millions being tortured to death so popular?

  • Cool, They All Melted!

    I can’t resist adding another example – because it seems to me to be so grotesque. It’s from a column by Nicholas Kristof, whom Brian Leiter calls ‘one of the leading “no ideas and the ability to express them” columnists at the New York Times.’ (How convenient to happen on that description just after I read the Kristof column. Doncha just love it when things fall into your lap like that? Serendipity?) The column is a brief look at one of the Rapture books, a phenomenon I’ve talked about here more than once. It starts with a pretty passage:

    Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again.

    Then there’s a bit more:

    In Glorious Appearing, Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid “hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses. The riders not thrown,” the novel says, “leaped from their horses and tried to control them with the reins, but even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated. Seconds later the same plague afflicted the horses, their flesh and eyes and tongues melting away, leaving grotesque skeletons standing, before they too rattled to the pavement.”

    Nice, right? The kind of thing one feels really pleased to know that other people are reading and enjoying. Yes indeed. Kristof is critical, to be sure, but…note what he also says:

    I had reservations about writing this column because I don’t want to mock anyone’s religious beliefs, and millions of Americans think Glorious Appearing describes God’s will.

    Pardon me for a moment while I let fly with a stream of oaths. I mean, really! This is where this kind of thinking gets you. Millions of people think that kind of shit is God’s will – and we don’t want to mock them, or alternatively point out that it’s completely disgusting to believe and relish that? I hasten to point out that he does come down on the right side immediately after saying that – ‘Yet ultimately I think it’s a mistake to treat religion as a taboo, either in this country or in Saudi Arabia.’ – but why say it at all? Maybe the Times told him to say it – in which case my oaths are directed at the paper, not the individual. I don’t care which it is; the point is the deed, the thought and the expression of it, not who did it. Millions of people think the Rapture books describe God’s will. So what? So what, so what, so what? If they think that, and enjoy the thought, there is something hideously wrong with them, and no one should have a fraction of a second’s inhibition about saying so as loudly as possible.

    You know what? I really hate knowing that millions of my fellow Americans read and enjoy that stuff. The god-bothering is bad enough, but then when the god-bothering combines with that kind of slavering lust for other people’s torture and instant elimination – it’s beyond a joke. It’s al Qaeda-ish, and it’s disgusting.

    It’s odd, the Rapture series is one of the very first things I wrote about for N&C. Because there happened to be an interview with one of the ‘authors’ on ‘Fresh Air,’ so I commented on it.

    And speaking of comments, I am going to do the Ten Books list. I haven’t forgotten. Things have been busy.

  • Stand Still, Dobbin

    You don’t mind if I go on thrashing the equine do you? No, of course you don’t, because you’re used to it. I repeat myself a lot. But then arguments are like that – they go on and on, inconclusively, cumulatively, incrementally. Who knows if one is making any progress or not? But if one thinks there is a point worth making or defending, one goes on.

    Marc Mulholland has a new post on all this today. A much politer post than I deserve, too. But I still disagree with much of what he says. For instance:

    Some of the criticisms raised deny the reality of group identities, asserting in classical liberal fashion that there is no such thing as society, only individuals (and their families?). I disagree.

    One, again, there is a mixing of terms going on. ‘Group identities’ are one thing, and society is another. Two, there is a big difference between wanting to know exactly what is meant by ‘group,’ and denying the reality of ‘group identities’. Three, there is also a big difference between pointing out that groups can contain other groups with power differences and conflicting interests, and denying the reality of group identities. Not that he was necessarily referring to what I said – but I think what I said is a closer match with that paragraph than what Norm said.

    Another instance:

    I though it need not be said in so many words, but apparently it does. Respecting a culture does not imply valuing equally its every manifestation. Islam, as a ramified mode of human expression, deserves respect. The stoning of women does not. Liberal democracy is a valuable and honourable tradition. Bombing Dresden was a disgrace.

    But I still don’t agree. I simply don’t think that all ‘ramified mode[s] of human expression’ deserve respect. (I’m also, again, not sure what that means, but never mind that for now.) Some just don’t. The Mafia, for example. Nazism, for another. Talibanism, for a third. The Interahamwe, for a fourth. Apartheid, for a fifth. And so on. I just don’t think there is a category ‘ramified mode of human expression’ that automatically deserves respect simply because it is a member of that category. Humans can be sadistic murderous thugs, and they can also be sheep-like obedient soldiers who do the bidding of sadistic murderous thugs, so I don’t see that human modes of expression get to be ‘respected’ without further ado.

    This part is interesting –

    But I believe that group identification – be it nation, religion, football team, Group Blog or Senior Common Room – is a necessary and constitutive part of human nature.

    I know what he means, and I used to believe that myself, but I’ve gotten a lot more suspicious of it in recent years. Partly because of some of those modes of expression I mentioned above. The ’90s were not good years for group identification. Serbs, Bosnians, Kosovars, Hutus, Tutsis – they taught us to be wary of those group identificactions, it seems to me. I have a lot to say about this, but I’ll save it for another post.

    I do take his point here though:

    It was because one’s life was shaped by the question of identity, sharpened by a conflict. Ethnicity determined where one could safely walk, how one would interact with others (there is an anthropological term for this process of identifying ‘strangers’ – “telling”), how one would interpret rhetoric and so on.

    Sure. But that seems to me to be all the more reason to be wary of identity and identity politics, not all the more reason to embrace it, still less to try to enforce and protect it via demands for a priori ‘respect’.

  • Chris Mooney on ‘Sound Science’

    Conservatives using conflict over fish to gut the science behind Endangered Species Act.

  • Letter to Scientific American

    Peter J. Swales, author of numerous pioneering essays exploring the early history of psychoanalysis, is unimpressed by Mark Solms’s article in the April 2004 issue of Scientific American, “Freud Returns”. Here we reproduce an unpublished letter to Scientific American which questions Mark Solms’s competence in the field of Freud scholarship, together with an addendum and postscript.

    Letters to the Editors
    Scientific American

    May 10, 2004

    In reproducing a diagram from an 1895 manuscript, Mark Solms endeavours to portray Sigmund Freud as both percipient and prescient by drawing special attention to the “contact barriers” between neurons whose action he there supposedly “predicted”. Solms elaborates: “Two years later English physiologist Charles Sherrington discovered such gaps and named them synapses”. In truth, however, the separating surfaces between nerve cells had been recognized by the histologist Ramón y Cajal as early as 1888, then reported on by him in 1892; and the significance of these had, by the year 1895, been much discussed – by, among others, Auguste Forel, Wilhelm His, Wilhelm Waldeyer, and Freud’s former teacher Sigmund Exner.

    In 1897, while Sherrington was at work on a text on the nervous system requested of him by the physiologist Sir Michael Foster (himself a proponent of such gaps between neurons), he felt a need for a convenient term — whereupon Foster obliged him by consulting the Euripidean scholar Arthur W. Verrall, who proposed the word “synapse” (from the Greek for ‘clasp’). Thus, Sherrington made no such discovery, and is to be credited only with having solicited a name; and Freud, in 1895, was being in no way percipient nor prescient but, as a neuropathologist by profession, was simply deferring to the then current understanding of the nervous system.*

    Solms’s tendentiousness in seeking to rehabilitate Freud’s ideas is betrayed not simply by his distortion of the history of neurology but his cavalier disregard of modern Freud scholarship. He asserts that “Freud’s early experiments with cocaine — mainly on himself — convinced him that the libido must have a specific neurochemical foundation” — one that the author now tries to identify with the systemic action of the neurotransmitter, dopamine. But this is precisely what I contended as long ago as 1983 in an essay entitled “Freud, Cocaine, and Sexual Chemistry: The Role of Cocaine in Freud’s Conception of the Libido”, reprinted in 1989 in a 4-volume Routledge anthology of enduring critical assessments of Freud and his work.

    Mine, though, is a thesis routinely maligned by Freud-partisans as lacking any evidence and purely speculative in nature. It is truly ironical, then, that in now espousing such a viewpoint Solms should be controverting the received Freudian wisdom — also that in doing so, both in a 2002 essay and in his recent article, he should eschew any citation of my heretical 1983 essay and proffer his assertion as though its truth were something manifestly self-evident (also, by bibliographic omission, as a novel product of his own intellectual labours). My object in 1983 was to show how Freud’s toxicological libido theory, rather than having been clinically derived, had functioned as an a priori principle in all of his psychological investigations. Would only that, like me, Solms were now to demonstrate some grasp of why it should be that, epistemically, such a prepossession serves to vitiate all of Freud’s subsequent clinical and hermeneutic presentations.

    *[Addendum, June 30, 2004]
    Albeit an understanding still then contested in that some — most prominently, Camillo Golgi — would continue very ardently to advocate a reticular theory of brain structure that was only finally to be overthrown more than a half century later. Evidently Solms went astray because, rather than consulting the authoritative texts, he would seem to have relied instead on the neuromanticist volume of his colleague, Joseph LeDoux: Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (2002). There LeDoux portrays Freud — rashly, many would say — as a champion of the Cajal/Waldeyer neuron doctrine and notes how their cell theory “figured prominently” in his 1895 manuscript, wherein he “introduced the term contact barriers to describe the points where neurons abut…” (pp. 38-39). (Freud’s text, dubbed by his editors Project for a Scientific Psychology, was published only posthumously, in 1950.) Citing the work of G. Shepherd, LeDoux continues: “Two years after Freud wrote his Project, Sir Charles Sherrington proposed a different term for the connections between neurons… He was probably unaware [sic!] of Freud’s contact barriers, and chose to call the gaps synapses, derived from the Greek word meaning to clasp, connect, or join” (p. 39). Thus, it would certainly seem that, in crediting Sherrington with an 1897 “discover[y]”, Solms has simply bastardized what his associate LeDoux had had to say — of course, to Freud’s great advantage.

    Peter J. Swales

    Sources:

    Fielding H. Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine, W.B. Saunders Co., Philadelphia, 1929 (pp. 525-526, 542-543); Garrison’s History of Neurology revised and enlarged by Lawrence C. McHenry, Jr., Charles C. Thomas, Springfield IL, 1969 (p. 205); cf. Malcolm Macmillan, The Completed Arc: Freud Evaluated, MIT Press. Cambridge MA, 1997 (pp. 178-184). Garrison (ibid); McHenry, Jr. (ibid). Sigmund Freud: Critical Assessments, edited by Laurence Spurling, Routledge, NY, 1989 (Vol. I, pp. 273-302). Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, W.W. Norton, NY, 1988 (p. 749); Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Subject to Biography, Harvard University Press. 1998 (pp. 118-119); Nathan G. Hale, Jr., “Freud’s Critics: A Critical Look”, Partisan Review. LXVI, 1999 (p. 239). Mark Solms, “An Introduction to the Neuroscientific Works of Freud”, in: The Pre-Psychoanalytic Writings of Sigmund Freud, edited by Getrudis van der Vijver & Filip Geerardyn, Karnac, London, 2002 (pp. 25-26).

    Postscript [May 20, 2004]

    Cave: asinus ad lyram asinum fricat

    In his article entitled “Freud Returns”, published under the rubric “Neuroscience” in the May 2004 issue of Scientific American (pp. 82-88), author Mark Solms ends a paragraph (p. 88) with the following two sentences:

    In the words of J. Allan Hobson, a renowned sleep researcher and Harvard Medical School psychia­trist, the renewed interest in Freud is lit­tle more than unhelpful “retrofitting” of modern data into an antiquated theoret­ical framework. But as Panksepp said in a 2002 interview with Newsweek magazine, for neuroscientists who are enthusi­astic about the reconciliation of neurology and psychiatry, “it is not a matter of proving Freud right or wrong, but of fin­ishing the job.”

    Earlier in his article (p. 84, cf. pp. 87, 88), Solms has identified Jaak Panksepp as one of a number of “experts in contemporary behavioral neuroscience” and a member of the editorial advisory board of “the successful journal” Neuro­-Psychoanalysis (sic!).

    In a recent article entitled “Reply to Domhoff (2004): Dream Research in the Court of Public Opinion”, published in the journal Dreaming (Vol. 14, No. 1. pp. 18-20) as a rejoinder to G. William Domhoff’s essay, “Why Did Empirical Dream Re­searchers Reject Freud? A Critique of Historical Claims by Mark Solms” (ibid., pp. 3-17), Solms ends by again quoting Panksepp (p. 20):

    I, no less than Domhoff, would like to develop a new theory of dreams, but I do not want to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. As Panksepp put it in a recent interview with Newsweek magazine, “it is not a matter of proving Freud right or wrong, but of finishing the job” (“What Freud Got Right,” 2002, p. 51).

    The cited article in the magazine Newsweek, “What Freud Got Right: His theories, long discredited, are finding support from neurologists using modern brain imaging” (November 11, 2002, pp. 50-51) — an article authored by journalist Fred Guterl, and featured under the rubric “Psychology” — ends with the following paragraph:

    Freud’s psychological map may have been flawed in many ways, but it also hap­pens to be the most coherent and, from the standpoint of individual experience, mean­ingful theory of the mind there is. “Freud should be placed in the same category as Darwin, who lived before the discovery of genes,” says Panksepp. “Freud gave as a vi­sion of a mental apparatus. We need to talk about it, develop it, test it.” Perhaps it’s not a matter of proving Freud wrong or right, but of finishing the job.

    A suitably attentive reader discovers, then, that Solms has twice misattributed his quotation while at the same time garbling it. Besides his transposition of “wrong or right”, he has omitted the qualifier, “Perhaps”, and hence converted a statement hedged by possibility and uncertainty into something apodictic. But. even more significantly, he has misattributed authorship of the sentence and thereby imbued it with some greater authority and greater gravity — after all, a categorical statement from the mouth of a neuroscientist bears a great deal more weight than could ever the all-too-glib punchline of a news-magazine hack.

    Whether or not Dr. Panksepp might mind that a colleague has represented him in print as having, without heed, bought futures is here of no concern — after all, Panksepp is a member of the “Neuroscientific Advisory Board” of the so-called Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuro-Psychoanalysis [sic!] of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, of which Solms is himself Director. Asinus asinum fricat. Far more important is the matter of Solms’s appalling lack of scholarly rigour. Asinus ad lyram.

    In a biographical blurb accompanying Solms’s article in the current issue of Scientific American, he is heralded as “editor and translator of the forthcoming four-volume series The Complete Neuroscientific Works of Sigmund Freud (Karnac Books)” (p. 87). Solms’s mangling and misattribution, twice, of a quoted statement — also, for that matter, his misattrib­ution of a discovery to physiologist Charles Sherrington, in 1897, in such a way as to render Sigmund Freud, in 1895, both percipient and prescient; and his non-attribution of certain radical assertions about Freud, cocaine, and the libido to an heretical 1983 essay by yours truly (vide: the undersigned’s Letter to the Editors of Scientific American dated May 10, 2004) — do not augur well for the field of serious Freud-studies, to say the very least. Are we soon gonna learn that Solms has misattributed to Freud what is in fact the work of another author? Cave asinum.

    Yours very truly,
    Peter J. Swales

  • What Liberals Can and Can’t Say

    Is it unconscionable if we:

    a) Talk about homophobia in the black community?

    b) Think that honour killings may not be entirely a good thing?

    c) Find mutilation rather distasteful?

    d) Don’t much like the idea of Shari’a?

    e) Think that Russians sometimes get things wrong?

    f) Think that maybe there is an argument to be had about the headscarf ban?

    g) Suspect that Islam and women’s rights are not perfect bedfellows?

    Answers on a postcard.

  • More

    People have been pointing out in comments that there were a good many items in Marc Mulholland’s post that I neglected to mention. True enough. I was short on time, for one thing, and I think I have a sort of built-in idea of the maximum desirable length for a comment here. I don’t like article-length blog posts, on the whole. So I didn’t dispute everything I could have disputed.

    And perhaps I didn’t stipulate as much as I could have either. I could have made the same stipulation that Norm does in his post on the subject –

    There’s a central point in what Marc is saying which I would not contest, and this is that in the tense political climate we all now inhabit, it is important to avoid doing anything to feed ethnic or religious prejudices and hatreds. In so far as Muslims are on the receiving end of these, they must be defended – as would go for any other group.

    Sure. Of course. But then it becomes all the more important to get clear about exactly what we’re talking about – about what we mean by ‘groups’ and ‘communities,’ for example. Something Chris Bertram said in comments may illustrate the point:

    Perhaps if Mulholland had made his point using the example of true generalization about African-Americans made by certain types of conservative Republican it would have been clear to you.

    Yes but that’s not a good analogy, because it’s a different kind of thing from what Mulholland is talking about. What kind of true generalization could one make about African-Americans, after all? Seriously. I can’t think of any – apart from the definitional one: that they are Americans who are at least partly descended from Africans. Go beyond that and there just aren’t any true generalizations available. And the same is true of Muslims, especially given the way the term is usually used, so that it includes secular and atheist ‘Muslims’. It would be pretty risky to generalize even about what all Muslims believe, just as it would be risky to generalize about what all Catholics believe. But Mulholland doesn’t talk only about Muslims or Catholics in his post, he also talks about Islam and Catholicism – and that’s a different subject. Note, just for one thing, that there is no equivalent word that one can use in the case of African-Americans. There is no religion, ‘African-Americanism.’ And if there were, people being what they are, not all African-Americans would agree about it; hence the epistemic as well as moral and political riskiness of saying what all Xs believe. But it is possible to talk about the tenets of Catholicism or Hinduism or Islam. There is still room for debate, but at least there is something to say. Mulholland neglected to make this distinction in his post; I think that’s where a lot of the muddle starts. So, of course I agree with Norm’s point, but (as Norm goes on to point out) Mulholland said far more than that.

    The fact that every outlook is an outlook, has a genesis and a social and cultural milieu, no more means that all such outlooks should be taken as equivalently valuable, than does the fact that different explanations of empirical phenomena (like the movement of heavenly bodies or the causes of illnesses) have a genesis and a ‘sociology’ mean that all of these, these would-be explanations, are equivalently valuable. Marc needs to resolve for himself the tension between his seemingly pejorative ‘ahistorical “rights”‘ (with the rights in scare-quotes) and his more favourable ‘generally accords with universal values’. Meanwhile, there are many who will feel that, however the conception of universal rights has made its way in the world historically, it’s a damn sight better as the basis of a political order than are alternative conceptions of things which allow for brutal invasions and oppressions of the human person…Avoiding Islamophobia and every other kind of such phobia has got to be consistent with criticizing various cultural and religious outlooks for the ways in which they victimize or oppress human individuals.

    That’s what I’m saying.

    Jonathan Derbyshire also has a skeptical post on Mulholland, along with the SWP’s Nazi-Soviet Pact with fundamentalist Islam. (And to think that I used to be a sort of wannabe Trot myself. Well, I have a thing for the Old Man, I admit it.) Jonathan also links to a review of a book on relativism which I haven’t read and clearly need to immediately.

    Now, back to the Mulholland piece for a moment. One thing I wanted to comment on yesterday and didn’t, was the question of truth.

    Islamaphobia is often defined as slanderous untruths. I think there is an excessively narrow definition of Islamophobia at play here. It is not right that simply stating ‘the truth’ is sufficient to clear one of Islamophobia…If ‘truth’ about a community is expressed intemperately and one-sidedly, and that community is already under a burden of suspicion and disadvantage, then one must conclude that this is a freedom of speech exercised in such a manner to oppress and marginalize the group. I think its a cop-out to argue that attacks on beliefs are different from attacks on inherited characteristics such as colour etc…

    Well, again – inevitably – we’re back with definition problems. What does he mean by ‘”truth” about a community’? If he means some statement about all Muslims, then is such a truth even possible? Again, I can’t think of any that wouldn’t be just tautologous. All Muslims are Muslims (and even that would depend on a very broad definition of Muslim, to include some sort of ethnic component, which of course is tricky since Muslims come from all over the globe). Or does he mean (as seems more likely) factual statements about what some Muslims do? But then – what? He wants truths like that to be concealed? So that, even if it is true that, say, a given Muslim man murders his daughter, that fact should be hushed up or played down, in order to avoid Islamophobia? Well…just for one thing, what about the daughter? And what about all the other daughters? They’re part of the ‘community’ too. Maybe they would find it ‘daughterophobic’ to play down daughtericide, and maybe they would have a point. And that’s just for one thing. I think the idea that ‘simply stating “the truth” is [not] sufficient to clear one of Islamophobia’ is a pretty risky idea, both epistemically and morally.

  • Motion on Middlebrook on Hughes

    Compromised by lack of proper interest in the poems as such.

  • Which Sixties?

    Hoggart’s? Benn’s? Wesker’s?

  • A Meeting to Discuss Shari’a Court in Ontario

    Update: New material on the campaign against Shari’a Court in Canada

    Report of Meeting with Marion Boyd Regarding Shari’a Court in Canada

    On Thursday July 15, 2004, Homa Arjomand, Co-ordinator of the International Campaign Against Shari’a Court in Canada was called to a meeting with Marion Boyd regarding concerns about Shari’a court in Canada. Marian Boyd has been appointed by Premier Dalton McGuinty to review the 1991 Arbitration Act

    This meeting lasted over three hours and many issues and case studies were presented:

    Homa Arjomand emphasized the fact that The Ontario Arbitration Act 1991 has made it possible for the Islamic movement to make another attempt to attack both secularism and the women’s movement for equality. She stated that this move has proven, historically, to be a major force in creating serious setbacks to the lives of women. Arjomand also stated that the key features of this move include opposition to the freedom of women, opposition to women’s civil liberties and opposition to freedom of expression.

    Ms Arjomand, by presenting some case studies, demonstrated that due to social pressure and the strict adherence to role and obligation imposed on women by Shari’a, battered women coming from so called Islamic countries remain in abusive relationships even in Canada. The government not only has done nothing to help these battered women come out of unbearable situations but now has also created another tool of oppression in Ontario.

    Now, using the Ontario Arbitration Act 1991, which allows family disputes to be resolved by arbitrators who are Imams or elderly scholars of Islam, family matters can be resolved according to Shari’a law. Ms. Arjomand explained the consequences of allowing Shari’a arbitrators to handle family disputes. She listed some of the direct violations of social, political and civil rights that will result from the application of Shari’a law through the Arbitration Act. Once more, she stated that family law must be removed from this Act. The mere suggestion of Islamic cultural or religious tribunals has already generated an atmosphere of fear among Muslim women.

    Ms. Arjomand finally drew attention to the fact that, in Canada, we uphold the separation of church and state, which means that there should be no religious determination in the laws that are applied through the courts. To ensure this, it is essential that all aspects of family law be removal from the Ontario Arbitration act 1991. Our campaign will not settle for less and we will not allow a shallow concept of “religion freedom” to translate into the bondage of thousands of women in Canada.

    Mrs. Boyd stated that she is willing to meet with 35 other members of this campaign on August 3rd, 2004 at 9: 30 AM.

    Re: Islamic Shari’a Arbitration Proposal Submitted by “The Islamic Institute of Civil Justice”

    Dear Mrs. Boyd:

    We wish to state our opposition to the recent move for establishing an “Islamic Institute of Civil Justice” in Canada. This move should be opposed by everyone who believes in women’s civil and individual rights, in freedom of expression and in freedom of religion and belief. We also wish to emphasis that even the mere suggestion of the Shari’a tribunals causes an atmosphere of fear among women who came from “Islamic” countries. If this Institute gains validity, it will increase intimidation and threats against innumerable women and it will open the way for future suppression.

    While, technically, all Muslim women have access to Canadian laws and courts, and while the Canadian legal system would reject the oppressive decisions made under Shari’a as being contrary to Canadian Law, the reality is that most women would be coerced (socially, economically and psychologically) into participating in the Shari’a tribunal. Women are told that the Shari’a Tribunal is a legal tribunal under the Arbitration Act 1991. The women would take that to mean that whatever is decided by the Tribunal would be considered as lawful. Even women who know that Canadian law would not uphold the decisions would not challenge the decisions for fear of physical, emotional, economic and social consequences. Therefore, it is most unlikely that decisions that are contrary to Canadian law would ever come before the courts.

    It is a sad and painful fact that, even in Canada, we still have to talk about the religious oppression of women. Nonetheless, the reality is that millions of women are suffering and being oppressed under Sharia law in many different parts of the world. Some of us managed to flee to a safe country, a country like Canada with no anti-secular backlash. Unfortunately, Canada is the only Western country that has given validity to an “Islamic Institute of Civil Justice” (through Ontario arbitration act 1991) that will allow family and civil matters to be arbitrated according to the Islamic Sharia law. If the government of Ontario and secular forces allow this move to succeed in Ontario, we don’t see how it will be possible to block it from gaining recognition in the rest of Canada and in every other country in the west.

    We strongly believe that Shari’a tribunals will crush women’s civil liberties. It will enforce brutal laws and traditions on abused women who are living under the intensive influence of Islam. These tribunals will be applying Islamic Shari’a law which will compel abused women to stay in abusive relationship and will give them no choice but to be obedient’ or attempt suicide.

    The acceptance of the Shari’a Tribunals as part of the Ontario legal system, is a move against secularism, modernism, egalitarianism and women’s rights. It will only send a massage to women that they are undeserving of human rights protection.

    We believe it is the government’s duty to protect the individual and civil rights and liberties of all citizens living in Canada. There must be no state within a state. The Islamic advocates argue that, as Mr. Momtaz Ali stated in his proposal, it is their duty as good Muslims to work towards their own state. They also emphasize that there should be no separation between religion and the law.

    We need a secular state and secular society that respects human rights and that is founded on the principle that power belongs to the people and not a God. It is crucial to oppose the Islamic Sharia law and to subordinate Islam to secularism and secular states. Under Shari’a family law and its penal code (which has remained unchanged since 1400 years), women are considered inferior to men. Marriage is a contract according to which the husband should perform sexually and provide materially for the wife. He has the legal, moral and religious duty to beat his wife, if she does not obey him. Sharia states that a man can easily divorce his wife, by declaring that fact three times.

    One must bear in mind that Shari’a is not only a religion; it is intrinsically connected with the state. It controls every aspect of an individual’s life from very personal matters such as women’s periods to the very public ones such as how to run the state. It has rules for everything. An individual has no choice but to accept the rule of Sharia or face extreme consequences, as non believers are shown no tolerance.

    Shari’a considers women to be a potential danger by distracting men from their duties and corrupting the community. It therefore suppresses women’s sexuality, whilst men are given the rights to marry up to four wives and the right to temporary marriage as many times as they wish. Young girls are forced to cover themselves from head to foot and are segregated from boys. These law and regulations are now implemented in Canada, but are usually hidden from secular society although, some, such as what happens in Islamic elementary and secondary schools, are visible. According to Shari’a law, a woman’s testimony counts for only half that of a man. So in straight disagreements between husband and wife, the husband’s testimony will normally prevail. In question of inheritance daughters receive only half the portion of sons and in the cases of custody, the man is automatically awarded custody of the children once they have reached the age of seven. Women are not allowed to marry non-Muslim whereas men are allowed to do so.

    The message is clear: men dominate, women obey. A woman does not have the right to choose her husband, her clothing, her place of residence, and cannot travel without husband’s consent. The danger is that once these tribunals are set up, people from Muslim origin will be pressured to use them, thereby being deprived of many of the rights that people in the west managed to gain.

    We, the defenders of secularism, believe that the introduction of Shari’a a tribunal or a “Shari’a court” in Canada would discriminate against the most vulnerable sectors of society: women and children. It would deny them the Canadian values of equality and gender justice.

    In light of the above, and on the grounds of human rights, equality and gender justice we strongly urge the Ontario Government the removal of family law from the Arbitration Act 1991 so that all family disputes be resolved in Canadian secular court system regardless of their race, ethnicity and religion.

    Sincerely

    Homa Arjomand

    Editorial introduction: The possibility of Shari’a courts in Ontario has raised concern among Muslim women, as reported in the Toronto Star recently. Homa Armojand is the campaign co-ordinator for the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada.

    Once more I’d like to emphasize the presence of two forces operating within the Canadian Muslim community. One tries to implement Shari’a law with its repressive measures against women, while the other relies on modernism and secularism to resist such attempts.

    The question I am asked time and time again by the media is: Since it was possible for Shari’a to be used from 1991 when the Ontario Arbitration Act was enacted, why do we care now?

    The reality is that in 1991, political Islam did not show its flag. There was no overt political message because there was no apparent legal validation. The public was not aware of its hidden message.

    But on October 23, 2003, the flag of political Islam was raised.

    We, as activists for women’s rights in the Middle East, have experienced the oppression of political Islam and knew the danger if it gained legal credibility in Canada. We immediately called for an urgent international campaign. We believed that an attack on women’s rights in Canada would soon be followed by an attack on women’s rights across the oceans. Political Islam is global.

    Historically, political Islam has proven to be a major force that imposed serious setbacks on women’s lives. Political Islam is a political movement that came into force against secular and progressive movements for liberation, and against cultural and intellectual advances. In the 1970’s the political Islamic movement grew stronger and became more widespread. In the 1980’s political Islam was supported and nurtured by western governments to be used in the conflicts and tensions of the cold war.

    The key features of political Islam include opposition to the freedom of women, to women’s civil liberties and to freedom of expression. The enforcement of brutal laws and untouchable traditions made women’s homes into prisons. Women were excluded from many fields of work and from education. Their brutal treatment became the norm. Under political Islam women are second-class citizen who are denied their full legal rights.

    We strongly believe that only the secular movement which is already present in our society can effectively counter political Islam.

    We must repeal the Ontario Arbitration Act 1991. Only then we will be able to prevent Shari’a arbitration in Canada.

    Homa Armojand is co-ordinator of The International Campaign Against Sharia Court In Canada. She can be emailed here: homawpi@rogers.com

    Visit No Sharia.

  • Which Community?

    I’ve just been chatting with my colleague on the phone, and along with other things we discussed, we agreed that this post is a lot of nonsense – and nonsense of a kind that leaves us shaking our heads (yes, both of them) in baffled amazement.

    Islamaphobia is often defined as slanderous untruths. I think there is an excessively narrow definition of Islamophobia at play here. It is not right that simply stating ‘the truth’ is sufficient to clear one of Islamophobia…One must take the content in the whole. If the overall impact is intemperate and insinuating, the overall conclusion is that it is oppressively anti-pluralistic. One must also take into account the context. If ‘truth’ about a community is expressed intemperately and one-sidedly, and that community is already under a burden of suspicion and disadvantage, then one must conclude that this is a freedom of speech exercised in such a manner to oppress and marginalize the group.

    Um – really? Always? Is that a good general rule? I suppose it depends (as it so often does) what you mean by ‘community’ – and that’s probably exactly why the word was used. Because of course we all know that communities are good things, warm fuzzy kind loving things, so obviously any community that is under ‘a burden of suspicion and disadvantage’ is being unfairly persecuted in some way. Stands to reason, doesn’t it. So even if one tells the truth about a community, if one does it the wrong way, then one is oppressing and marginalizing the group. ‘The group’ – that’s another one of those words. Kind of dodges the question, doesn’t it. Suppose the truth that is being told about this community/group is that it treats some of its members like dirt, that it not only oppresses and marginalizes them, it beats them and when angry enough, kills them. Then is one really oppressing and marginalizing the whole group by telling the truth even in an intemperate way? Or is one in fact ‘oppressing’ or rather exposing and with any luck stopping part of the group, to wit, the perpetrators?

    Yes. The problem (one problem) with that whole absurd quotation is that not all communities are in fact good or benign or harmless, even to all of their own members. Is that really a big news flash? If they are engaged in oppressing and marginalizing, battering and murdering, coercing and depriving, people within that very community (or outside it) then the truth should be told about that. Yes, intemperately. And there are communities and groups like that in the world. So as a generalization that paragraph just won’t wash. (The rhetoric of ‘community’ and ‘group’ is yet another example of what Julian was talking about in that Bad Moves I commented on last week – language that is ‘the means by which question begging occurs.’)

    But cultures must be respected as rounded expressions of full humanity, just as we expect our cultures to be treated so. By all means, condemn what one wishes in whatever culture, but liberals must remember that we are a world not of human atoms accorded rights defined by ahistorical reason, but organic and evolving communities deserving of respect by virtue of their framing of human existance. To serve liberalism by highlighting all that is wrong with Islam is to whip up prejudice and is thus unconscionable.

    Well, again – what does ‘respected’ mean? And what on earth does ’rounded expressions of full humanity’ mean? Nothing, would be my guess – just a formula to elicit some kind of right-on emotion. But if it does mean anything – again, the question arises: what if these ‘cultures’ deprive some of their members – as some cultures certainly do – of the ability to develop their own expressions of full humanity? Must such cultures then be ‘respected’? If so, why?

    Mullholland has a lot to say about the silly assumptions of ‘liberals’ but he makes some silly assumptions himself, such as the assumption that communities and groups are single entities that all feel and think alike, that all have the same interests, that all feel oppressed and marginalized as one by the truth-telling of outsiders. But communities aren’t like that. Even ‘groups’ of two people aren’t like that, not all the time, and whole communities certainly are not. Susan Moller Okin put it this way in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?:

    Most cultures are suffused with practices and ideologies concerning gender. Suppose, then, that a culture endorses and facilitates the control of men over women in various ways (even if informally, in the private sphere of domestic life). Suppose, too, that there are fairly clear disparities of power between the sexes, such that the more powerful, male members are those who are generally in a position to determine and articulate the group’s beliefs, practices, and interests. Under such conditions, group rights are potentially, and in many cases actually, antifeminist. They substantially limit the capacities of women and girls of that culture to live with human dignity equal to that of men and boys, and to live as freely chosen lives as they can. Advocates of group rights for minorities within liberal states have not adequately addressed this simple critique of group rights, for at least two reasons. First, they tend to treat cultural groups as monoliths–to pay more attention to differences between and among groups than to differences within them.

    You could say that.

  • Multiculti for the Old South

    So this is where blather about identity and diversity gets you.

  • Carlin Romano on Literary Reading

    Could newspapers and their cultural coverage have an influence?

  • Martha Nussbaum Interview

    Communitarianism is rooted in idea of homogeneous groups defined as ‘normal’ – shame for the others.

  • Kennewick Man Case May be Over

    Tribes have decided not to appeal to Supreme Court, so KM will not be reburied.

  • Funniest Book Review Ever

    Since OB was talking about books below, I thought I’d just quickly flag-up the funniest book review I’ve ever come across.

    It’s here.

    I vow that if I ever get a review like this, I’ll frame it and stick it by my bedside table. Along with the letter from the guy from Australia who wrote to tell me that one of my books was “A disgrace to publishing”!*

    *I should say I haven’t actually framed the letter because I lost it, but otherwise I would have done…

  • Oh That Old Thing

    This again. Will it never go away? (No, of course not, because it serves a purpose, however wrong-headedly.) The old ‘atheism is a belief just as theism is’ number. This time it’s in a thread on secularism at Harry’s Place, in which Harry points out how indispensable active secularism has become.

    Once was a time when the National Secular Society gave the impression of being one of those curious leftovers from the 19th century, membership of which was the preserve of eccentrics who enjoyed rehashing their Oxbridge debates about theology. Sadly, given the times in which we live, it is now a much-needed organisation and one which I intend to join and urge others to do so. The weekly round-up of articles, Newsline has become essential reading for any secularist who is concerned with issues such as the Blunkett proposal, faith schools and other examples of creeping clericalism.

    Very good, but in the comments Peter Cuthbertson of Conservative Commentary insists that secularism itself is a belief system. But it isn’t. It’s not about beliefs, it’s about what to do. There are plenty of believers in various religions who are also secularists. I know several myself. Then farther down, the claim becomes one about atheism as a belief – partly in order to separate that from the claim about secularism. But atheism is not a belief either, it’s the absence of one, as I tried to argue in terms you’ve all heard a million times already, so I won’t bother repeating them here. I’m just noting the oddity of the fact that people can so easily accept that not believing in X amounts to a belief as opposed to, precisely, a non-belief. Not believing in X doesn’t entail believing in something else to take its place. I don’t believe in gremlins. That doesn’t mean I’m committed to a belief in, say, rmlniges instead.

    I think part of what’s going on is some kind of fancy footwork about what kind of ‘belief’ is meant. Some kind of secret elision of the difference between warranted belief and just plain belief; between believing something because there is evidence for it, and belief that’s independent of evidence.

  • Ten Books That Shook the World

    Now that’s an idea. There are all these lists all the time – Prospect’s list of the top intellectuals, the BBC’s list of Favourite Reads or whatever it was called, Norm’s lists of everyone’s favourite movies, three novels (was it?), rock groups (that last one actually incited my colleague to vote, though he usually thinks he’s too good for such frivolities) (that’s a tease, obviously), and so on. Now Norm has a new list, just his own this time, of

    10 great books of my life (sort of). Though I’ve been thinking about the list for some time, I protect myself against assault by saying that these are not necessarily what I judge to be the 10 most important of the works that I’ve read in my life (on whatever criterion, or set of criteria, or scale). But they’re all ones which have had a marked and lasting influence on the way I think about the world.

    What a good idea. I want to do that. Let’s do that. I’ll do one, or perhaps I’ll do several (on account of how I’m terrible at making up my mind, I’m mushy and vacillating and unstable and fickle and undiscriminating, I like everything, or not everything but a lot of things), and if you feel like it you can do yours in comments or by email.

    And while you’re at it, check out a new blog by Jonathan Derbyshire. He’s a colleague of my colleague’s and his colleague (if you see what I mean) – that is to say, he’s Reviews Editor of TPM. There’s a delightfully eclectic note to the blog, with a post on Jeeves and Wooster cheek by jowl with one on secularism. I love eclecticism (see above about fickleness and mushiness which is actually eclecticism, breadth, wideness of views, love of variety and multiplicity, etc.).

  • Hansard Report on Blogging

    New research shows that blogging can increase transparency and accessibility of parliamentarians.

  • Robert Owen Discovered the Moa

    Reconstructed iguanadon & archaeopteryx, and disagreed with Darwin.