Bunting lays another egg
Bunting produces another lead balloon. For once it’s worth reading the comments (well not all two million of them, but some) because they’re so uniformly, shall we say unconvinced. Of what? Of Bunting’s sweet suggestion that, good heavens, people, sharia isn’t as bad as all that.
Sharia’s basic meaning is “path to God”; it is a set of spiritual disciplines, which any serious Muslim abides by. The basics are such things as prayer, fasting and the Haj. But it also covers such instructions as no gambling, no backbiting, no alcohol and no cheating. Any devout Muslim is attempting to follow sharia. But that doesn’t mean they want to impose sharia on anyone who is not a Muslim, nor does it mean they agree with the most extreme interpretations of sharia law. Every faith has its laws – churches have canon law, Orthodox Jews have rabbinical courts – and no one argues that this represents separatism as Cameron did of Muslims this week.
No one? No one? Man, Bunting has a short attention span. The fight with the archbishops was only last week, Mads! Keep up!
Don’t get me wrong, there are some exceptionally horrible elements of how sharia has been interpreted – and still is, in some parts of the world – but reducing this vast body of thought to the barbaric practices of the Taliban is a gross simplification, which will do nothing to assist our understanding of the attitudes of Muslims in this country.
It might do something to assist your determination not to be subject to sharia though.
I think it isn’t going to be long before the NICE MEN IN WHITE COATS come for Bunty – she is plainly oof what remains of her head…..
I normally feel slightly suspicious of my initial reaction to what Bunting says (i.e. that she is talking plain nonsense). I suppose I find it difficult to accept that someone who is seemingly so hideously wrong about everything can be an associate editor of the Guardian, and have the academic credentials she has. I assume I must have missed something – she simply can’t be THAT wrong.
I know this has already been said at length, but I suppose with her it has to be monumental self-delusion – she doesn’t want to believe that the people in the survey are religious in a nasty way (after all she spends half of her time defending them), so she ignores the obvious evidence that they are in fact talking about Sharia in the way it is commonly understood (cf. the results of the rest of the survey). This seems like a classic target of Butterflies and Wheels. She is just refusing to acknowledge reality because it is inconvenient. I wonder what motivates her?
The above doesn’t really add anything which wasn’t already obvious, but it’s kind of an open question to people who might know more about her. I do find her fascinating in that I don’t understand her. She doesn’t seem to be intellectually compromised in the way that you would expect of an old-school marxist or a religious believer, in that she doesn’t seem to subscribe to a recognisable dogma (or am I just ignorant in this respect?), but still seems able to ignore the massive amounts of obvious evidence contradicting her. So I am curious if anyone knows why she might argue in the way that she does. I get dispirited when I see people who on paper should be able to accept that they are being bizarre, but don’t for some reason.
Sounds about right to me. I think Madeleine Bunting is trying so hard to understand foreign cultures, traditions, other belief systems, “the other”, etc. that she has developed some kind of blind spot to universal human rights issues. It may well be that the Sharia is a set of spiritual disciplines with admirable injunctions against cheating, etc. But that misses the point – which is that such spiritual disciplines ought not to be imposed on unwilling individuals.
The opening line of the Mad Bun’s latest contribution to the nation’s intellectual life:- “The very best debates are those in which you learn and which help clarify your understanding of an issue.” Well, don’t tell us, show us – though we won’t hold our breaths. But I would urge readers of MB not to comment on her articles – it only encourages her.
I suppose the Mad Bun is a slightlier crazier version of the Daft Bun.
Yeah, I loved that opening line.
snort, snuffle, wheeze
The mystery to me is not the contents of the Mad Mind but why the Guardian pays her to spill its miscellaneous mess onto its pages and website. I mean, if she had a blog would anyone visit it?
I hate to say it, Ophelia, but you said, about Bunty: “It’s not really a dogma, just a set of woolly ideas, ….”
IDEAS?
Bunty?
Really?
Don’t you mean gushing emotions, with no trace of rational thought whatsoever?
“The mystery to me is…why the Guardian pays her to spill its miscellaneous mess onto its pages and website.”
Well yeah, that’s what makes me a bit nervous about dismissing it as sheer unbridled idiocy (although I still do believe that).
I take the point about her trying to “rationalise barbarism”, I think it is probably right, but I still struggle with it given that there seems to be no real rationality involved – to me it seems perfectly obvious that she is spouting nonsense continuously, yet she doesn’t seem to be stupid and the doubtlessly intelligent people at the Guardian seem to have faith enough in her to keep her working (although they didn’t at Demos, apparently, so that’s encouraging I guess).
Another barnstormer from the Madelaine Council of Britain.
KBPlayer – I just spent nearly 15 second seeing if she actually had a blog, and in the course of my ‘research’ I found a short biog on Wikipedia – I’ve posted this bit this largely because I thought GTingey might like it:
“Born in North Yorkshire, Bunting was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where she read History, and won a Knox postgraduate fellowship to study Politics and teach at Harvard.”
So she HAD a brain, once upon a time …
The obvious question is: What happened, and where did it ( her brain, that is ) go?
I doubt it.
Her stuff on social policy (housing etc), if she ever gets around to writing it these days, can actually be quite good, which makes it even stranger when she writes this stuff. I really do think she’s after some kind of inter-faith ‘building bridges’ award.