The Vancouver Public Library composed a Q and A to explain its decision to invite one Greg Felton to read from his new book at the library’s Freedom to Read week.

Intellectual freedom is a core tenet of public libraries even though some subjects may be considered unconventional, unpopular or unacceptable. Upholding the right to intellectual freedom may put you in the position of appearing to support controversial views. The role of the public library, however, is to provide a forum for an open and public exchange of contradictory views and to make materials available that represent all points of view.

Well, making materials available is one thing, and providing a forum for an exchange of views is another. Is it really the library’s role to provide a forum for an exchange of views? And does the library take that to mean any and all views no matter what? Apparently not, because the memo goes on to say that Felton’s book ‘has not been identified as hate speech,’ apparently implying that if it had been, then things would have been different. Then does the library think its role is to provide a forum for exchange of any and all views provided they are not identified as hate speech? It looks that way – at least it looks as if the library is assuming that being identified as hate speech is the only known or clear or obvious disqualifier. Then does the library think its role is to provide a forum for exchange of any and all views no matter how uninformed, wrong, baseless, distorted, incompetent they are? Does it think its role is to provide a forum for people who have whacked-out ‘views’ on geography, astronomy, engineering, nutrition, epidemiology? Does the library, in short, have any kind of filter to prevent it from wasting its own resources and the public’s time and attention on views that are at best worthless and at worst disinformative?

Who knows. Maybe not. Maybe it thinks ‘upholding the right to intellectual freedom’ entails providing a forum for everyone who has a book to read out of from which. Except it appears that it does actually choose some people; it appears that it gets a lot of offers from writers and their publishers, and accepts only some of them.

But even more urgent is the question whether the library thinks upholding the right to intellectual freedom requires it to give a platform to people because they are wrong and worse than wrong. Does the Vancouver Public Library, in short, really see no difference between upholding the right to intellectual freedom and affirmatively providing a platform for people to purvey, for instance, inaccurate history? If it doesn’t, it ought to.

Ziauddin Sardar sets the archbishop straight.

It is not just in the west, as the archbishop suggests, that the sharia is misunderstood, or where it conjures up instant images of oppression and brutality. It is also misunderstood by most Muslims in countries other than Britain, countries where it is seen as a total system of divine origin, and where it sometimes leads to oppression and brutality…The sharia needs to be reformed totally before it can be implemented anywhere – among the Muslim minorities in liberal democracies or in the Muslim-majority states. Giving the sharia as it stands legal sanction in Britain, even in limited areas, will replicate all the problems of gender inequality that it has produced in Muslim countries.

It would be nice if the archbishop could write that clearly and forthrightly (and succinctly).

I don’t understand this. I must (as so often) be missing something. Roger Scruton says we we owe to ‘the Christian legacy’ the idea that law is and ought to be a secular institution, then he says we owe it to Roman law, but he goes on saying it’s a Christian legacy.

[O]ne of the things that we owe to [the Christian] legacy is the idea that law is and ought to be a secular institution, whose authority is founded in human decisions and is independent of, and in an important respect takes precedence over, divine commands…The privatisation of religious law was clearly a part of Jesus’s mission…His striking pronouncement in the story of the tribute money, that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s, has served for many centuries as authority for the view that, in public matters, it is human and not divine government that should be obeyed. This idea gained credibility through St Paul’s letters, influenced as they were by Roman law and by the knowledge that the early church enjoyed the protection of a developed system of law.

In other words there was an existing system of secular law which influenced Paul, and one catchy phrase is attributed to Jesus – and that makes secular law a Christian legacy? It looks to me much more like a Roman legacy (and an Athenian legacy before that). What am I missing?

More on Tasneem. From the Guardian.

“Rampant illegal detention and torture are clear evidence of Bangladesh’s security forces running amok”, said Brad Adams, [HRW’s] Asia director…Tens of thousands of people were arrested in the weeks that followed the declaration of a state of emergency, and security forces have been accused of flouting standard arrest and detention procedures. Khalil said there was now a culture of “self-censorship” in the country, and people were afraid of the consequences of speaking out. “I am taking a calculated risk in speaking out because I still have family in Bangladesh,” he said. “But I feel it is important that people know what is really going on in my country.”

From CNN (Tasneem has reported for them at times).

Human Rights Watch on Thursday issued a first-person account of the incarceration and torture in Bangladesh of one of its consultants – an outspoken human rights advocate, journalist and blogger…”Tasneem Khalil’s prominence as a critical journalist may have prompted his arrest, but it also may have saved his life. Ordinary Bangladeshis held by the security forces under the emergency rules have no such protections.” Khalil was freed “after tremendous international and national pressure,” the group said.

Tens of thousands of other Bangladeshis aren’t so fortunate. We’ll have to pay attention to Bangladesh. Two, three, many human rights advocates and bloggers – the thing to do is outnumber them. Bastards.

Remember last year when we heard that Tasneem Khalil had been arrested in the middle of the night? Well now we know what happened to him while he was held. He was violently beaten, threatened, and terrorized, that’s what. He’s safe now – but Bangladesh has successfully gotten rid of a reporter who had been investigating human rights abuses of just the kind perpetrated on him. So Bangladesh can presumably do what it likes without any pesky reporters telling the world what Bangladesh likes to do – not unless those pesky reporters are eager to be beaten up and probably killed.

Andrew Anthony zeroes in on the problem.

All the subclauses in the world can’t disguise the intention that underpins these positions. In seeking to incorporate a disputed deity’s authority (which, by the way, it is blasphemous to question) into the common law, and by challenging the principle of equality under the law, Dr Williams launched a strategic attack on secularism.

A disputed deity’s authority. Just so. And it’s not only the deity that is disputed, it is also that deity’s authority, and the content of the resulting commands, and above all how and if anyone knows any of this. This is the theist four-step I talked about last year. We tend to think there’s just one step – believe in God or not – but in fact there are at least four, and it’s the whole package that is both so coercive and so weak as a matter of knowledge. It’s coercive because the package is: there is a God, it is all-good and all-powerful, it has told us how to be good, we know those three things beyond a shadow of a doubt. That’s coercive because (if it’s true, which of course it isn’t) it closes off the exits. It’s weak as a matter of knowledge because we don’t know any one of the four, much less all of them – yet that doesn’t get pointed out all that often. The archbishop can talk about a covenant with the divine and no one says like a rude eight-year-old ‘How do you know?’ But it is a real question. How does he know? The answer of course is that he doesn’t – but because no one says so, he gets to go on pretending he does.

The archbishop says says there is a ‘covenant between the divine and the human’. Well, is there? How does he know? There is no evidence of such a covenant. There is no crumbly old bit of parchment in the British Museum with God’s signature on it. There’s no anything – there’s only a chain of assertions going back many hundreds of years. Well that doesn’t count, especially in such a momentous matter as this. If there were a covenant – would this God make it once, five thousand years ago or thereabouts, and then never again? Leaving no trace? Is this God so thick that it doesn’t know that humans can forge documents and invent stories? If God really wanted to make a covenant with the human, wouldn’t it make some arrangement for succeeding generations to have genuine, valid knowledge of said covenant? God didn’t do that. God apparently expected us all to be as credulous as newborn babies about this one thing – and most of us have obliged, but maybe it’s getting to be just about time to stop being quite such easy marks. When the archbishop talks as if he has reliable knowledge of this covenant between the divine and the human, he is playing a con game.

I had thought I could leave the poor archbishop in peace now…but another item or two has come along to drag me back to his doings. One is the Crooked Timber thread on the subject. Harry B is commenting on a piece by Minette Marin in the Sunday Times.

The comment about wooliness of mind is, presumably, a charge that anyone who recognises complexity is stupid, or something like that.

No, it isn’t. The archbishop’s speech is indeed woolly. I’ve already quoted from it more than enough to illustrate (and demonstrate) that, so I won’t quote any more. Joe Hoffman – who can handle complexity – called the speech badly reasoned mud. The speech is not simply a clever academic recognizing complexity – it’s elegantly but also badly, pompously, tortuously, evasively written.

[T]here is nothing treacherous about the Archbishop’s comments. He is appealing to the long-established British tradition of muddling through, tinkering with institutions as is needed to achieve goals of stability and rough fairness (he’s the one who is “holding fast to that which is good”). The revolutionaries—or to put it far more harshly than I ever would, the traitors—here are, in fact, the Archbishop’s critics.

Oh really – all of us? Not just Minette Marin but all of us? That’s a large claim – but it will doubtless fall of its own weight. More to the point is that bit about ‘rough fairness’. Fair to whom? To the women who would be forced or intimidated or religiously blackmailed into relying on sharia courts for trivial items like marriage and divorce? Fair to the women who have been saying ‘No thank you!’ in no uncertain terms for several days? Or just fair to the men who like sharia courts for divorce because they are arranged by men for men?

Someone points out in the comments that Yasmin Alibhai-Brown doesn’t see it the way Harry B does; Harry replies, ‘So Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, too, didn’t bother to check what he actually said. Oh well.’ Right. A Muslim woman with experience of sharia and of talking to countless Muslim women with (very unhappy) experience of sharia needs to be set straight by a non-Muslim male academic; she has it wrong and he has it right; and he knows by intuition that she hasn’t ‘checked’ what Williams actually said. So low does the multicultural mindset (I almost said left, but that’s not left, it’s reactionary) stoop.

A lot of the commenters are not having it though. Daniel Davies is flinging the abuse around as usual, but it’s not having much effect.

The other item is Johann’s article.

Last month, a plain, unsensationalist documentary called Divorce: Sharia Style looked at the judgements [British sharia courts] hand down…Irum Shazad, a 26-year-old British woman, travels from her battered women’s refuge to a sharia court in East London. She explains that her husband was so abusive she slashed her wrists with a carving knife. The court tells her this was a sin, making her as bad as him. They tell her to go back to her husband…Then we meet Nasirin Iqbal, a 27-year-old Pakistani woman who was shipped to Britain five years ago to marry…”He tells me I’m stuck with him, and under Islam he can treat me however he wants. ‘I am a man, I can treat you how I want’.” We see how Imran torments her, announcing, “You are a reject. I didn’t want to marry you.” He takes a second wife in Pakistan, and texts her all day in front of Nasirin declaring his love. The sharia court issues a fatwa saying the marriage stands. She doesn’t seem to know this isn’t a court of law. “I can’t ignore what they say,” she cries. “You have to go with what they say.” These are the courts that Rowan Williams would give the stamp of British law. In his lecture, he worries that this could harm women – before serving up a theological gloop, saying that sharia could be reinterpreted in a way compatible with the rights of women. But if that happens, why would you need different courts? What would be the point?

Well exactly. The point of them is that they’re different, and that Williams thinks it’s only fair (since Christians get to claim ‘exceptions,’ at least he claims they do) that people should be able to have their different courts. But the way they are different is that they are unequal and, not to put too fine a point on it, unjust. We’ll make it so that they’re not. But then they’re not different any more – so we’re back where we started. What, indeed, is the point?

In other words Williams has recycled Susan Moller Okin’s argument in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, but without realizing he’s done so (and pretty obviously without being aware of Okin’s argument).

The argument that women will only have to enter these courts if they freely choose to shows a near-total disconnection from the reality of Muslim women’s lives. Most of the women who will be drawn into “consenting” are, like Nasirin, recent immigrants with little idea of their legal options. Then there are the threats of excommunication – or violence – from some families. As the Muslim feminist Irshad Manji puts it: “When it comes to contemporary sharia, choice is theory; intimidation is the reality.”

Oh, but surely the good clever non-Muslim males at Crooked Timber know better than Irshad Manji. Why would she know anything about it? Or why would Azar Majedi?

As the European-Iranian feminist Azar Majedi puts it: “By creating different laws and judicial systems for each ethnic group, we are not fighting racism. In fact, we are institutionalising it.”

No, that can’t be right. The guys at Crooked Timber must know better.

The archbishop issued a clarification on Friday. He

sought carefully to explore the limits of a unitary and secular legal system in the presence of an increasingly plural (including religiously plural) society and to see how such a unitary system might be able to accommodate religious claims. Behind this is the underlying principle that Christians cannot claim exceptions from a secular unitary system on religious grounds (for instance in situations where Christian doctors might not be compelled to perform abortions), if they are not willing to consider how a unitary system can accommodate other religious consciences.

Fair enough. So here’s how to deal with that: Christians cannot claim exceptions from a secular unitary system on religious grounds. Problem solved. Nobody can claim exceptions from a secular unitary system on religious grounds. See how simple that is?

You do realize what the archbish means by ‘a secular unitary system,’ right? He means the law. He must not have wanted to say what he said quite that baldly. He must not have wanted to say ‘Christians cannot claim exceptions from the law on religious grounds’ – no, one can see why he wouldn’t want to say that. But that’s what he means, and it’s a brazenly terrible idea. Helpful of him to (apart from the crucial euphemism) spell it out.

It’s kind of the BBC to explain about sharia for us.

Sharia rulings have been developed to help Muslims understand how they should lead every aspect of their lives according to God’s wishes.

Well, not exactly – not according to God’s wishes, because no one knows what those are (or if there are such things); according to what they think are God’s wishes. The BBC tactfully skipped over that rather important difference, but that is what’s at stake here. Not God’s wishes but what believers believe are God’s wishes (and the rest of us don’t).

Apostasy, or leaving the faith, is a very controversial issue in the Muslim world and the majority of scholars believe it is punishable by death…The Koran itself declares there is “no compulsion” in religion.

Uh huh. And Sura 40 says that those who reject the scriptures will have iron collars and chains placed around their necks, be dragged into scalding water and burnt in the fire. The Beeb doesn’t mention that though.

The most amazing item is the last. In reply to the rather gormless question ‘So women have reservations about Sharia?’ Dominic Casciani says:

Some Muslim women in the West would be worried about protection of their rights in Sharia courts where there is discrimination against them because of patriarchal and cultural control in their communities. This does not mean that they are necessarily opposed to Sharia – only there are live concerns about the fairness of its application. It’s fair to say that many leading Muslim women are more concerned about how existing British equality measures and human rights laws can be used to improve their position and voice in society.

You bet; perfectly fair.

I read the whole archepiscopal speech a couple of days ago; that makes two of the archbishop’s speeches I’ve read in their entirety in the last couple of weeks. That’s a lot of waffly Williamsese to get through. I would love to do a really thorough line-by-line fisking, because every line deserves it – but it would take forever, and would be a baroque kind of luxury, because no one is convinced by the archbishop anyway. So I’m not going to do a line-by-line job, but I could give you a few highlights. Would you like that? Okay then.

One item is that it takes him until the bottom of page 3 (of very closely-printed pages) to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

[R]ecognition of ‘supplementary jurisdiction’ in some areas, especially family law, could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women…The problem here is that recognising the authority of a communal religious court to decide finally and authoritatively about such a question would in effect not merely allow an additional layer of legal routes for resolving conflicts and ordering behaviour but would actually deprive members of the minority community of rights and liberties that they were entitled to enjoy as citizens.

How very true! Or to put it another way, no kidding! And what a staggeringly long time it took him to get around to saying so, and what a lot of verbiage he muffles the admission in even when he does manage to get to it.

I mention it partly because of its gravity as an issue in interfaith relations and in discussions of human rights and the treatment of minorities, partly to illustrate how the recognition of what I have been calling membership in different but overlapping sets of social relationship (what others have called ‘multiple affiliations’) can provide a framework for thinking about these neuralgic questions of the status of women and converts.

That – along with the usual verbose opacity – is just one example of an extremely annoying trope he uses throughout, and which he uses again in his self-defense today: he keeps suggesting we need to think about these things, as if no one had been thinking about them until now! Where’s he been? We’ve been thinking about them, for months and years – we don’t need the head of the Church of England to suggest that we do what we’re already doing! And we don’t need his help with the thinking, either.

So the second objection to an increased legal recognition of communal religious identities can be met if we are prepared to think about the basic ground rules that might organise the relationship between jurisdictions, making sure that we do not collude with unexamined systems that have oppressive effect or allow shared public liberties to be decisively taken away by a supplementary jurisdiction.

We are prepared to think, more prepared than the archbishop is, by the looks of it; but the only way to make sure we don’t collude with these unexamined systems (there it is again – what makes him think they’re unexamined? unexamined by whom? him?) is to decline to give them any ‘supplementary jurisdiction.’ All he’s doing is re-inventing the wheel. We know all this, we got here long ago, and that’s exactly why we want no truck with sharia.

And from the final paragraph – where he goes all pomo –

In conclusion, it seems that if we are to think intelligently about the relations between Islam and British law, we need a fair amount of ‘deconstruction’ of crude oppositions and mythologies, whether of the nature of sharia or the nature of the Enlightenment. But as I have hinted, I do not believe this can be done without some thinking also about the very nature of law. It is always easy to take refuge in some form of positivism…

Oh gawd. Has he been reading Tina Beattie? Nadia Urbinati? He should go for more health-giving walks.

He just doesn’t get it.

Part of the “burden and the privilege of being the Church” in the UK meant, Dr Williams said, the clergy needed “some coherent voice on behalf of all the faith communities living here”…The relationship between law and religion was a subject on which “Christians and people of other faiths ought to be doing some reflecting together”, he added.

No it isn’t, because there shouldn’t be any such relationship, for reasons which the Archbish himself mentions in the speech – without, of course, perceiving them as reasons.

[A]s any Muslim commentator will insist, what is in view is the eternal and absolute will of God for the universe and for its human inhabitants in particular…[S]haria depends for its legitimacy not on any human decision, not on votes or preferences, but on the conviction that it represents the mind of God…To recognise sharia is to recognise a method of jurisprudence governed by revealed texts rather than a single system…There is a recognition that our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging – even if one of those sets is regarded as relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level of reality, as established by a ‘covenant’ between the divine and the human.

Religion is about what believers consider the eternal and absolute will of God for the universe and for its human inhabitants, without having any reliable way of knowing that, or testing it, or falsifying it. It’s eternal and absolute, yet humans know nothing whatever about it – yet they claim that they do. This is an abysmal epistemic situation from which to make laws. That is why Arch should shut up about the relationship between law and religion, because there shouldn’t be one. Humans can’t make decent laws by ‘relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level of reality, as established by a ‘covenant’ between the divine and the human’ – because there is no such covenant, or if there is, it’s odd that we have no real evidence of it (no, a very old story does not count as evidence). The archbishop comes right out and admits that his side of the aisle deals in the non-negotiable, and yet he wants the rest of us to let his crowd help shape the law. Forget it. The combination of the unknown-unknowable and the non-negotiable is poisonous. That’s why law should be secular; that’s why theocracies are nightmare places; it’s appalling that Rowan Williams doesn’t get that.

Matthew Parris considers the archbishop dangerous.

It is not useful, it is not even interesting, to begin an argument on whether Sharia should be given some kind of status within British law, unless you think there are otherwise potential conflicts…Unless, therefore, Dr Williams is proposing that elements of Sharia should be tolerated even though they appear to conflict with the general law, he is saying nothing interesting. They do conflict. And what happens when they do? The moment a private law appears to defy the general law, one question, and one alone, becomes central. It is the question of consent…Of group members, of course – and first – we must ask: is consent real, unanimous, complete? Is there duress? Is there undue influence? How about children? Who truly speaks for the group? What opportunities are offered to opt out?

And boy did the archbishop skate gracefully over that.

A religion, properly understood, makes profound claims on an individual and community, quite unlike the demands of a golf club. It involves the…subordination of the individual’s will; and may demand that he subordinate his spouse’s and children’s wills too. Hence our unease about duress, and the completeness of “consent”. Dr Williams, in a welter of words, makes no serious attempt to resolve this. Those who read his speech properly will see that his entire argument turns upon the freedom of the group member to “opt out” of the “supplementary jurisdiction” and choose British law instead. But repressive faith groups make it culturally difficult – sometimes well-nigh impossible – for a member to opt out.

Pre-cisely. He pretended he was taking consent into account without actually doing so. He simply waved at it as he skated past, he didn’t engage with it.

As Parris points out, this is not progressive or pc gone mad, it’s profoundly conservative.

Dr Williams’s ideas really represent the wilder fringes of a bigger idea: communitarianism. Communitarianism can come in a surplice, a yarmulka or from a minaret and is all the more dangerous because armed with a divine rather than a local loyalty. It almost always proves a repressive and reactionary force, fearful of competitors, often anti-science, sometimes sceptical of knowledge itself, and grudging towards the State. There is absolutely nothing “left-wing” or woolly-liberal about empowering it. A Britain in which Muslim communities policed themselves would be more ruthlessly policed, and probably more law-abiding than today. But it would be a Britain in which the individual Muslim – maybe female, maybe ambitious, maybe gay, maybe a religious doubter – would lose their chances of rescue from his or her family or community by the State.

A hell on earth, in short.

Yasmin A-B explains what Archy doesn’t get. Too bad he didn’t ask her before he jotted down the speech.

What Rowan Williams wishes upon us is an abomination…He would not want his own girls and women, I am sure, to “choose” to be governed by these laws he breezily endorses. And he is naive to the point of folly if he imagines it is possible to pick and choose the bits that are relatively nice to the girls…Look around the Islamic world where sharia rules and, in every single country, these ordinances reduce our human value to less than half that is accorded a male; homosexuals are imprisoned or killed, children have no free voice or autonomy, authoritarianism rules and infantilises populations.

Apart from that, it was quite a good idea. Or maybe not.

There is no agreed body of sharia, it is all drafted by males and the most cruel is now claiming absolute authority…The morality police hound women and girls, beat them up, imprison them for showing an ankle, walking too provocatively or singing in the streets. They fight back but are ground down eventually…Go to Afghanistan if you fancy a 12-year-old bride – a practice approved by the mullahs. That’s sharia for you. Many women, gay men and dissidents came to Britain to escape Islamic tyrants and their laws.

Only to encounter Rowan Williams. What an unpleasant surprise.

No women are allowed to be imams or serious jurists, so cannot help make their own fair and free set of female-friendly sharia. All the systems insist on ultimate truths, hard certainties.

Which the Archbishop himself points out several times in his speech (I’ve read the whole thing now) but without being dissuaded from his absurd idea. But then of course he’s part of a system of ultimate truths himself.

Taj Hargey, a historian and Islamic theologian, runs the Muslim Education Centre in Oxford. He, with me, is a trustee of British Muslims For Secular Democracy which is attempting to educate Muslims out of authorised obscurantism…He is incandescent that Dr Williams backs a perilous Islamic conservatism, already too powerful in Britain.

Well the thing about that is that Archy isn’t all that keen on secular democracy. He thinks it ought to ‘overlap’ with the theocratic kind.

Bravo, Rowan, says Jeevan Vasagar breezily. Well, he’s a man; easy for him to say.

In Tanzania, for example, Muslim family law applies to Muslim citizens. When it comes to questions of divorce, custody and inheritance, Muslim families settle their disputes at courts unique to their communities.

Yes we know, and Muslim family law treats women and men unequally. That is the problem.

There’s an interesting clash here – a classic liberal dilemma. Do you promote the rights of a minority community or do you worry more about the rights of Muslim women, who may get treated less generously under sharia than under secular law?

It’s not really a dilemma once you think about it hard enough. Just for one thing, the rights in question are not that starkly opposed, for the blindingly obvious reason that that ‘minority community’ includes women, so if the rights of women are a priority then at least half of that ‘minority community’ will not be losing any rights for the sake of the rights of women, because they will be women themselves. But in fact no one will be losing rights, because the goal is equality and equal justice under the law, not more rights for some and fewer for others. That’s why it’s not really a dilemma; it’s a pseudo-dilemma. That ‘minority community’ is not losing any rights unless you take unequal rights to be a right in themselves. Does a ‘minority community’ have rights to deprive some (half, most) of its members of rights arbitrarily? Well, you can declare that it does, but if you do you’re abandoning a meaningful idea of rights.

And by the way the goal is not to treat women ‘generously’ but to treat them equally. The goal is not to demand extra, it’s just to demand the same. Patronage not required, mere equality is both minimum and maximum – we want neither more nor less.

The problem is that the right, and their fellow-travellers on the Muslim-bashing left, will seize on this. For them, it’s a case of mediaeval misogyny versus western enlightenment. Suddenly, papers that oppose abortion and believe career women will always be unhappy start cross-dressing as feminists. Don’t believe this ruse – they’re just using feminism as a stick to beat Muslims with.

Bullshit. Some papers may do that, but papers don’t exhaust the category of people on the left who dislike Sharia – or as Jeevan Vasagar so elegantly calls us, the right’s fellow-travellers on the Muslim-bashing left. There are lots of us fellow-travellers on the Muslim-bashing left who do not oppose abortion (hello Jimmy Doyle!), and we don’t use feminism as a stick to beat anything. I don’t use feminism, I am a feminist.

Sharia already plays a role in devout Muslim lives, and has to be accepted and understood. But there also has to be a right of appeal. In Muslim countries that practice sharia, it is not a static entity but a living body of rules – just like secular law…

And? There’s a right of appeal, is there? So those Iranian women who get sentenced to being stoned to death for being in the company of men can appeal to be tried under secular law instead? And in any case, what use is a ‘right of appeal’ to women who are dominated, bullied, perhaps beaten? Like religion in general, sharia might be relatively harmless in the case of decent people who don’t bully others; but not all people are like that. Not all husbands would give their wives the chance to ‘appeal,’ and who else would enforce such a right? But as I said – Vasagar is a man, and it’s easy for him.

There’s that report on Honour-based violence in the UK. It starts off by discussing forced marriage – and right away I got snagged by an obstacle.

According to most definitions, a marriage becomes forced if any coercion, physical or psychological, [is] used against either spouses [sic] in order to force them to consent. A forced marriage is not the same as an arranged marriage which occurs with the full consent of both parties.

No the obstacle isn’t how desperately the report needs copy-editing; it’s full of mistakes and typos, but that’s not the obstacle. The obstacle is that item about the full consent. What is full consent? Under what conditions is it possible? How prevalent are such conditions? All that needs spelling out, and it’s a mistake to declare roundly that all arranged marriages by definition occur with the full consent of both. In other words there are arranged marriages, that are considered and called such by all parties, that are not completely freely consented to.

How could it possibly be otherwise? When children are raised with the idea that they will have marriages arranged for them, and that this is the right way to do things, and that to do things otherwise is risky or stupid or defiant or Western or dirty or all those – how freely do they consent when an arranged marriage is offered to them? Or at least, how freely is it safe to assume they consent? It may well be that many people who enter arranged marriages are entirely happy to do so, but is it safe or reasonable to assume that, given the circumstances? I don’t think it is. That’s not to say the police should be called out for every arranged marriage, just that the distinction between forced and arranged should not be seen as clear-cut and dependable.

I transcribed something the Archbishop said just before the ‘bit of a danger’ remark.

A lot of what’s written suggests that the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody. Now, that principle, that there’s one law for everybody, is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy, but I think it’s a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties, which shape and dictate how they behave in society – and that the law needs to take some account of that. An approach to law which simply said ‘There’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said’ – I think that’s a bit of a danger.

Very waffly, that. Of course people have ‘other affiliations, other loyalties, which shape and dictate how they behave in society’ – of course the law does not exhaust what shapes and dictates how people behave in society. Who thinks it does?! But it doesn’t follow from that that there should be one law for one group or ‘community’ and a different law for another. It doesn’t follow that it’s ‘a bit of a danger’ to take an approach to law that says there is one law for everybody, period – it’s much more dangerous to take any other approach!

He has a mellifluous voice, the Archbishop (well he would, wouldn’t he, he’d need it in his line of work), and a nicely timed way with a banality (he pauses thoughtfully and then comes out with the most obvious word possible), which make him sound reflective and reasonable – but it’s all either waffle or nonsense. The window-dressing is deceptive.

I got a record number of email messages alerting me to the Archbishop’s fun new ideas on the subject of law and religion, which seems to hint that they may not be as sound as they are exciting.

Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4’s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.

Quite so. UK murderers, rapists, extortionists, batterers – they do not relate to the British legal system. Good idea to face up to that fact, if one hasn’t already. But is it a good idea to actually adopt ‘certain aspects’ of murderers’, rapists’, extortionists’, batterers’ law? I would say no.

He says Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.

Really? Why not? Everyone has to choose between those alternatives. Why make exceptions? Because the cultural loyalty of Muslims is somehow special? Well, how, then?

Dr Williams said an approach to law which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts – I think that’s a bit of a danger”.

Uh…do you really, Dr Williams? That’s a little scary. You think it’s a danger to say there is one law for everybody? You think it’s safer to say there are multiple laws for different people or you probably mean ‘communities’? Have you thought this through?

Dr Williams added: “What we don’t want either, is I think, a stand-off, where the law squares up to people’s religious consciences.”

Ah yes – so that’s what it’s all about. Religious consciences. The ones that make people want to treat gay people unequally, for instance – those religious consciences. Well my atheist and secular conscience tells me that laws should be universal. So how are you going to resolve that conflict?

Oh well, Doc W is in quite a lot of hot water already, I probably shouldn’t tease a fallen giant, even if he did trip his own self.

Richard Evans’s Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial is a fascinating book. And it’s highly relevant to the question of whether or not it’s a good idea to debate Irving. Holocaust Denial on Trial has Evans’s report for the trial; see for instance his General Conclusion.

Irving is a particularly dangerous spokesperson for Holocaust denial because over the years he has consistently portrayed himself as a scrupulous historian with an unrivalled knowledge of the archival sources and an unerring eye for forgeries and falsifications. As we saw in Part I, he has repeatedly claimed that he is waging a ‘campaign for real history’ against legend and myth, truth against falsehood. ‘Real history’, he says, is based on the archives, not on copying other historians’ work, which is how academic, university-based historians in his opinion proceed. Many reviewers, and still more journalists, have been at least partly taken in by this ceaselessly propagated self-promotion and have paid tribute to Irving’s skill and energy as a researcher.

That’s the thing about all this – people are taken in by what people say. If someone confidently and firmly asserts something, we’re likely to believe it unless we have some existing reason to be suspicious. That’s one very compelling reason not to debate Irving, even apart from all the other reasons.

Reputable and professional historians do not suppress parts of quotations from documents that go against their own case, but take them into account and if necessary amend their own case accordingly. They do not present as genuine documents which they know to be forged just because these forgeries happen to back up what they are saying. They do not invent ingenious but implausible and utterly unsupported reasons for distrusting genuine documents because these documents run counter to their arguments; again, they amend their arguments if this is the case, or indeed abandon them altogether. They do not consciously attribute their own conclusions to books and other sources which in fact, on closer inspection, actually say the opposite…At least, they do not do any of these things if they wish to retain any kind of reputable status as historian. Irving has done all of these things from the very beginning of his career. Not one of his books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about.

Well there you go. How could one debate him when not one of his speeches, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them can be taken on trust? How could one debate him when he cannot be trusted to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about? One couldn’t. It would be like doing a clog dance on thin ice.

[I]f we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian. Those in the know, indeed, are accustomed to avoid the term altogether when referring to him and use some circumlocution such as ‘historical writer’ instead. Irving is essentially an ideologue who uses history for his own political purposes; he is not primarily concerned with discovering and interpreting what happened in the past, he is concerned merely to give a selective and tendentious account of it in order to further his own ideological ends in the present. The true historian’s primary concern, however, is with the past. That is why, in the end, Irving is not a historian.

I quoted that last part in the Talking Philosophy discussion on Saturday. That was one of the points I didn’t want to get lost.

Sometimes you happen on interesting sites by accident and you want to point them out. I want to point out this one, belonging to Nasim Fekrat.

My name is Nasim Fekrat and I’m 25 years old. I born in the land of pain and injustice. Whatever I want for myself, I wish for the others. I write from Kabul. I write what I see and what I hear. I am the winner of the in 2005 Freedom of Expression Blog Awards of RSF (Reporters without Borders) – France among seven Bloggers throughout the world. I am obviously a defender of freedom of expression and independent media free of threats and intimidation. I want to highlight the problems of my society in an independent manner, without fear and in a non-partisan manner in regards any group or political interest in Afghanistan.

Go, Nasim. Best of luck.

Norm’s favourite English-language novels vote is in. I was very pleased to see Austen lead the pack by a wide margin. So she should. There is no one who can touch her for what I can only call perfection – for ruthless avoidance of flab, gas, wind, padding, self-indulgence; of bad writing; of sentimentality; of sententiousness; of overt lecturing; of sloppiness. There’s a power, a muscularity, a cold authority to her writing that makes a lot of male writers look feeble indeed. She’s widely supposed to be a narrow genteel nostalgic peddler of romances; well, Dickens and Thackeray and Hardy should only have been so lucky to have the force and strength of pen that she had. She and Emily Bronte could outdo them all.

Thus I was sorry not to see Emily Bronte until 32. Also not to see Willa Cather at all (meaning she got eight votes or fewer or none). I think Cather is under-rated. Some of her stuff is brilliant, and unlike other novels. The first half of The Song of the Lark is staggeringly good, I think.

I was glad Rohinton Mistry made the near-miss list but I wish he’d done better. I’m surprised to see Orwell there at all – he was a godawful novelist. I suppose he’s there on the strength of the last two, but really, as novels…they’re not very good. And two novels that I recommend strongly: Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-body Problem and J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur.