A couple of days ago I asked what if there had been (quoting Bunglawala) ‘apparent intention to offend Islamic sensibilities or defame the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad’ – would that make the arrest of Gibbons okay?

Should ‘defaming the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad’ or ‘offending Islamic sensibilities’ be a criminal offense under the law? It’s good that Bunglawala said Gibbons shouldn’t have been arrested, but his reason for saying so is not so good, and the fact that the BBC is still automatically phoning the MCB for the obligatory comment is also not good. The BBC still needs to expand its Rolodex.

Bunglawala obliged us by answering the question*, and what do you … Read the rest

Ed Husain takes Ayaan Hirsi Ali to task.

Just as Wahhabites and Islamists bypass scholarship, context, and history in the name of “returning to the book”, Hirsi Ali and others such as Robert Spencer and Ibn Warraq commit exactly the same error…Let’s take the question of apostasy. At an Evening Standard debate the other night, Rod Liddle had no qualms in declaring Islam, with a barrage of other baseless abuse, “a fascistic ideology”. Why? Because the Qur’an commands the killing of those who abandon it…[T]here is no verse in the Qur’an that calls for the killing of apostates…There is no stronger argument against religious fanatics than to illustrate the scriptural weaknesses of their case.

Well, maybe so, when you’re … Read the rest

Just a little more.

First of all, I mostly agree with Norm here.

One thing we are saying is that the human worth of those prisoners in the camps was being denied. Making them stand naked and vulnerable in the circumstances I have described was a way of announcing that anything – anything at all – could be done to them…To put the same thing differently, the respect or status we normally hold to be due to people simply in virtue of their humanity has here been removed.

But then that is putting it differently, and that’s what I’m saying. I don’t really literally think ‘dignity’ is meaningless – but I do think it means too many things and that … Read the rest

And just a little more. I’m like a dog with a bone, you know. There’s a rather Kassian argument in comments on an older post (combined with some vituperation to make it go down more smoothly). It’s interesting.

One doesn’t need to be a Christian, or even a theist, to be extremely alarmed at some of the directions that secular ethical thinking seems naturally inclined to go in – especially in its common utilitarian and more generally consequentialist forms…The concept of human dignity is central to any attempt to articulate the strong feeling shared by many (including many atheists) that something has gone badly wrong with this sort of ethical thinking….It’s difficult to say what’s wrong with necrophilia (if anything

Dignity. We got an interesting discussion in the comments, and I suddenly realized (belatedly) that I could think of contexts in which the word ‘dignity’ wouldn’t repel me: contexts and situations in which people have managed to hang onto their dignity despite the assaults of other people or of nature. I probably still wouldn’t use it myself, but I would see the point of it.

But where this started was with Leon Kass; that’s why potentilla asked the question that prompted my series of them. I left Kass out of the dignity post, because I wanted to talk about the idea more generally and also (partly) more loosely. I wanted to free associate, partly. But now let’s look at … Read the rest

Joan Smith nails the problem.

In the past, Catholics and Protestants took turns to slaughter each other as Sunni and Shia are doing now, but Christianity has to a large extent been secularised…At the heart of this process is an alteration in the status of religious texts…The idea that a single book written centuries ago has unique authority – in effect, a veto over all other ideas – makes no sense in societies where intellectual curiosity is valued and encouraged. Yesterday Inayat Bunglawala, assistant general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, criticised the arrest of Ms Gibbons in Sudan and described it as a “quite horrible misunderstanding”. But during a public debate in London two weeks ago, he