Priorities
Mehdi Hasan is annoyed with Roshonara Choudhry. She doesn’t get it – she doesn’t understand that Islam doesn’t approve of her going to her MP’s surgery for the purpose of stabbing him to death, nor of her actually sticking a knife in his stomach.
She is, for example, ignorant of the specific Quranic verses that she claims inspired her horrific and cowardly attack on Timms – “the main chapters about it are chapter . . . chapter eight and chapter nine, I think,” she says, pathetically. In fact, there are no verses in the Quran which justify such brutal, vigilante attacks on innocent civilians. Suicide bombings for example, are un-Islamic.
Oh tut – isn’t that awful. But if there were such verses in the Quran, would that justify such brutal, vigilante attacks on innocent civilians? If suicide bombings were Islamic, would that make them a good thing?
Mehdi Hasan doesn’t address that question; it doesn’t seem to occur to him. It ought to. It doesn’t matter whether stabbing civilians is in the Quran or not; it matters whether it’s bad or not. Focus.
Those who claim that our mosques are breeding grounds for terrorists and extremists should note the two names Choudhry cites as her influencers: Anwar al-Awlaki and Abdullah Azzam. She discovered both on the internet (on YouTube!), not at her local Islamic centre. Both, I hasten to add, lack the credentials and qualifications of mainstream Islamic scholarship; al-Awlaki has a PhD in human resource development (!) from George Washington University. Why on earth did she think such a person had the “Islamic” or moral authority to instruct her to carry out a murder, one of the greatest sins in Islam?
But why on earth is Hasan so concerned about who has the “Islamic” authority to instruct people to murder? Why is he so worried about credentials and qualifications and mainstream Islamic scholarship? Is he shocked by what Choudhry did, or is he shocked by the association of Islam with brainless brutal violence?
This whole piece has a ring of desperation to it, sort of like the little boy with his finger in the dike telling himself it is all OK now, just as the whole edifice bursts asunder and sweeps him away in a wall of water and stone. “Look at that terrorist right there, the one who got her instructions from the internet. Pay no attention to the crowd of other ones over there who were indoctrinated at their local mosque.”
He would very much like to resolve the whole matter with an appeal to authority, ignoring the fact that there is no reason for anyone to take the word of authorities on fairy tales. I’m not sure why religious apologists always try to end a debate by declaring so-and-so to be an emperor whose word is law, without caring one whit whether the emperor has no clothes. It reminds me of the creationists who try to sneak through PhD programs undetected, then say, “See? A biology PhD from Harvard who doesn’t believe in evolution — therefore, Jesus is Lord QED.”
Of course not. Foreign occupation is the indisputable factor even when Muslims in Iraq kill Muslims in Iraq. And when someone throws acid to a girl’s face, how can you possibly think that they’re not protesting against Western imperialism? No one can brainwash anyone if it ain’t for Iraq. Just wait till they get to Max Hastings too.
What about her equally morbid obsession with Quranic injunctions?
Don’t you see? We should totally pretend… er … well, actually we shouldn’t, we must honestly infer that she is mistaken in her interpretation of the holy book. It’s all about context, nuance and subjectivity. Literalists be damned.
And lastly, never ever forget this
Next time you want to point fingers at Islam for crimes committed in its name, you better make sure that a non-Muslim cop arrested the perpetrator.
Muslims need to confront their own scriptures much like Christians need to confront theirs. If they actually bothered to read them (Lauren Booth for example), they may distinguish how desperately immoral such teachings are compared to contemporary liberal society. That is another incentive for them to realise their religion is a dangerous falsehood.
There are plenty of koranic verses justifying the slaughter of innocents, as there are plenty of verses in the bible. It is because believers suffer from the psychological phenomenon known as ‘compartmentalisation’ where their liberal morality sits in one part of the brain when they’re functioning in society and then their religious morality sits in the other part of their brain. That is why religion is dangerous. All it takes is a majority in a society for the religious morality to kick in.
This is not only a silly article (Mehdi Hasan’s, that is), but it’s more than silly. It’s downright dishonest. When are the religious going to own up to the shadowy world of scriptural exegesis and hermeneutic? I watched the debate between Ramadan and Hitchens at the 92nd St. Y the other day, and there it became painfully obvious how hermeneutic can be used to escape the plain facts about religious reality. “She found this on You Tube, therefore not in our mosques. Besides one of the cops was a Muslim. We’re not all crazy fanatics.” Of course you’re not, but it doesn’t take many crazy fanatics with knives and bombs to make a religion a very dangerously repressive thing.
And the problem lies within ‘holy’ books. This is what the religious seem not prepared to acknowledge. In response to Hitchens’ remark, “And don’t tell me that people who act like this are not true Muslims,” Ramadan countered with, “They are not only not true Muslims, they are anti-Islam,” as though cranking up the rhetoric would make the point. When will people acknowledge that, as containing the very words of a god, the Qu’ran or the Bible or the Tanach or the Baghavad Gita or the Granth Sahib, will continue to be mined for their own purposes, and anything anyone may take out of the book, in their own minds they will think that a god put it in? That is the nature of ‘sacred’ texts. Once you have established a holy, canonical text, there is nothing that anyone can do to constrain its interpretation. That is the very nature of texts.
Humility in the presence of The Lord means that you have to give up thinking for yourself. Not just the right to think for yourself: you have to give up claims to rights as well. You’re just the servant of The Lord, and your purpose in life is to do what he says. So “what is right” means “what The Lord tells you to do – whatever it is”.
So it seems to me unlikely that Mehdi Hassan has the faintest idea of what we’re going on about.
Hasan, beg his pardon. I suspect that he is shocked to the very core of his soul that a Muslim should do anything unislamic.
Interpretation – beyond referential or explicit meaning – is largely an artifact of the heuristics you bring to the text. A sophisticated reader knows this, and that their interpretation is one among many. Nobody commits violent acts based on what they know is a product of their own minds.
The problem with the Holy Books is that they claim to represent something real – as history – so even ‘smart’ people confuse their interpretation with the ‘real’ meaning.
Also the prohibition on portraying prophets in other contexts means that the Koran, in particular, can’t be read intertextually: that further restricts interpretation. Readers can’t just sit there giggling at po-faced scenes that remind them of The Life of Brian.
It doesn’t help that appeals to the authority of the author are appeals to god.
Insightful comment! I had not thought of it this way before.
As belief comes out of the brain, and as one of the beliefs is “thou shalt not question thy beliefs”, it is impossible to know whether a belief is “true” (orthodox) except by checking in the scriptures or asking some “authority”. And not even the “authorities” can easily distinguish between the “true” word of God and their personal prejudices or assumptions or preferences. Endless quarrels over what is and is not in the scriptures and whether it matters and what it means anyway. Critical thinking can only function, if at all, within the very narrow limits of the permissible, and believers must necessarily differ even over that.
Choudhry thought her actions were Islamic, Hasan is shocked at how unislamic they were. Both are right. And both are more deeply wrong than they seem able to understand.
I actually agree with Hasan’s third point:
Obviously a confused religious ideology was the main driver and the moral justifier here, but it’s silly to ignore the fact that the sociopolitical situation exacerbates the problem tremendously.
It is probably a bigger factor in this case than Hasan even makes it out to be. He tries to paint her as “not the sharpest tool in the box”, but she was recognized as a gifted student before the attack. Her difficulty recalling what chapter of the Quran she used as a moral justifier betrays it as just that: a moral justifier. It seems she was angry about Iraq, angry enough to want to lash out violently — and religion gave her the reassurance that she was acting morally by stabbing a random MP.
There is a complete picture here that can easily be lost. Religion does at times inspire people to do violent acts for religion’s sake itself (I’m thinking Eric Rudolph), but when you have a political beef combined with religion’s ability to rationalize and justify the most extreme actions, violence flows much more easily.
But the political beef is itself confused, because it rests on reading it as part of “the war on Muslims” and that rests on reading Iraq as equaling “Muslims,” which of course is idiotic. She was angry about Iraq, but what exactly about “Iraq” was she angry about? Apparently that it was one front of “the war on Muslims” – which is a fantasy.
I wonder how angry she is about the bomb in a mosque in Pakistan that killed 50 people today.
Iraq’s arguably more of a ‘Muslim’ state post-invasion than it was under Saddam. Describing the invasion as a ‘war on Muslims’ is like calling the Bay of Pigs a ‘war on Catholics’.
I’m not saying that Iraq wasn’t a hellhole, but it was a different kind of hellhole than, say, Iran, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia: Saddam was a more ‘classical’ fascist.
And you don’t need to regard the invasion as a war on Muslims to believe it was fought for reasons other than the liberation of Iraqis.
@Shatterface. You wrote:
I disagree. This is not the problem. The problem with holy books is that they claim to contain the words of a god. Whether historical or not doesn’t matter. Most of the Qu’ran and a good half of the Jewish scriptures are not historical. Prophecy, wisdom, liturgical prayer, moral guidance, etc., not history.
The problem lies in the god claim. The god claim implies that there is a message, but texts have complex meanings. You need to interpret them. So there is hermeutical competition. Everyone thinks, of course, that his interpretation is the right one. Otherwise, he wouldn’t offer it. (And this is the right pronoun. It’s almost always ‘his’ interpretation.) But there is no way, apart from the text, to settle the question, so the text actually licenses every interpretation (pretty nearly). And it becomes a matter of urgency to get it right, because, from the religious point of view, if a god says it, you’d better believe it!
That’s why Hitchens keeps repeating: “And don’t tell me that they’re not true Muslims (or Christians, Jews, etc.).” Because there is no way of settling the issue. Ramadan, in his debate with Hitchens recently, claimed that they were anti-Muslim. But that is just nonsense. According to whom? According to Ramadan, of course — who, we are to suppose, knows! But that’s just silly.
Religions have to face up to the fact that holy books are a menace. They’re a menace to the peace of the world. And the sooner this is acknowledged the better. It’s getting a bit ridiculous for people even to suggest that there is a meaningful relationship between religion and science. Religion according to whom? Science stands or falls on the reliability of its conclusions. Religion is based solely on getting people to believe one interpretation or another. There are no standards, and no way of sifting the true from the false. It’s time religion gave up its epistemic claims, because they can’t be made good.
Wouldn’t it be good! But they can’t. They believe their claims. That’s what the religions are about.
Are you sure it wasn’t the handiwork of the CIA or the Mossad aimed at maligning the great religion of peace? Don’t you know that acts of terrorism that overwhelmingly kill non-Muslims are ‘inside jobs’ while those that kill Muslims and only Muslims are almost always ‘outside jobs’?
Someone has written “The Complete Book of Allah”, which is basically a fisking of the Koran and Hadeeth. It’s a free e-book and looks like a useful reference.
http://mukto-mona.com/wordpress/?p=542
Eric, I’m not arguing that holy books aren’t a menace or that they are being ‘misinterpreted’ by people who are not true followers: there’s enough evidence on the referential and explicit levels of reading to show these books licence abominable behaviour. And I mentioned that appeals to the intentions of the author are appeals to god. But most Muslims, Christians, Jews, etc. arent homicidal loons so there’s more going on than responding to surface-level meaning like religious automatons. Religious belief is a necessary condition for the violence we are seeing but not sufficient in itself.
The hermeneutic competition (I like that phrase) isn’t happening in a social vacuum as we saw in the Rushdie affair and the Motoons. Particular groups read ‘offence’ into those texts – sometimes months after they’d seen the offending article, sometimes before – because particular schemata were cued by community leaders who had political as well as religious agendas.
And thats political as much as religious. You see this with certain groups on the ‘left’ where they also express ‘offence’ – on behalf of others. Clearly that ‘offence’ is not religiously motivated here as many of these would profess to being secular. It’s not a stretch to see that even deeply religious people might have political reasons for expressing ‘outrage’ too.
I think it’s a mistake to concentrate on the Koran or whatever as if the book is the main problem. That’s placing the written word on a pedestal. It’s not that powerful in itself.
Of course he won’t address the question. You have to keep the blinders on, and your head rigidly fixed downward, if you hope to pass safely between the horns of Euthyphro’s dilemma.
“If suicide bombings were Islamic, would that make them a good thing?”
Much to my embarrassment I missed this point originally. Thank you for spelling it out.