I don’t see eye to eye with Ali Eteraz here.

[T]he fact that Muslims around the world insist “Islam means peace” is evidence that a vast number of Muslims do not think that Islam means violence.

No…the fact that (many) Muslims insist that Islam means peace is evidence that many Muslims want to think that Islam means peace, and therefore they 1) simply insist that it does and 2) explain away anything that would cast doubt on that thought, either by saying that violence is extremist and aberrant or by saying that what looks to the uncomprehending like violence is actually peace. In short, they rationalize, as people often do about their chosen religion. It’s a mistake to take people’s defensive, often desperate rationalizations as evidence that they actually think what we want them to think. Really: big mistake. If a Christian tells you that Christianity means love, it would be a mistake to assume that that Christian means what you mean by ‘love.’ Christians will insist that Jesus was all about love then when you cite chapter and verse of Jesus getting quite hostile, they will say ‘Oh that was because he was angry with the Pharisees’ and go right on believing that Jesus was all about love.

Further, when a Muslim does commit something nasty against fellow human beings, and other Muslims decry this person as an “extremist”, this is evidence that a vast number of Muslims find brutish behaviour worth distancing themselves from. This too is a good thing. At the least, it shows that most Muslims share in the universal definitions of good and bad.

How does Eteraz know that ‘other Muslims’ are ‘a vast number of Muslims’ and how do the ‘a vast number of Muslims’ suddenly become ‘most Muslims’? How did we get from other to vast number of to most? Since the numbers are all left vague, we have no clue.

[W]hat is honesty to a secular humanist is psychological devastation to a believer. If a woman-respecting, non-violent, cool-headed Muslim says that he is a good person despite Islam, he would essentially be saying that Islam is irrelevant to his existence. A believer would never say that. He will chalk up his successes to his faith. He will insist that his faith galvanised every good thing in his life.

Some Muslims, in fact half of them, are women themselves as opposed to ‘woman-respecting’ men, but leave that aside for the moment. We know all that (we ‘secular humanists,’ though I’d rather be called an atheist, please), but that’s the problem. Defending the religion comes first, and truth or reality or unpleasant facts come second; the latter have to be made to fit the former, not the other way around. ‘A believer’ has to be able to credit his ‘faith’ for every good thing, therefore the believer will simply insist that the religion is the source of goodness no matter what evidence there might be that it’s not; the result is that whatever belongs to the religion is by definition good, necessarily; thus the believer is unable to judge what is good and what isn’t, and thus bad things are labeled good while remaining bad. That’s the danger of that way of thinking; that’s the danger of having sacrosanct protected ideas or beliefs that can’t be thought about without psychological devastation.

At the end of the piece Eteraz tells us of the contortions believers resort to in order to explain away a Koranic verse on flogging. But the verse remains – and people who like flogging remain, and people who want divine sanction for flogging remain, so what good is it twisting oneself into a pretzel to pretend that flogging is really a kind of massage? Not much.

Kuwaiti tv sounds like fun – like Oprah but more intense.

Kuwait TV Host Sheikh Tareq Al-Sweidan: “We have a question for the viewers at home, not in the studio, and they can respond with a text message. What is the best way to deal with apostates who converted from Islam? You have three possible responses. The first is through dialogue only. The second option is killing them, and the third option is to leave it up to the legal system.

Don’t you wish you could watch tv shows like that? We have a question for the viewers: What is the best way to deal with apostates who converted from Southern Baptism? You have three options. You can chat, you can kill them, or you can call the cops.

That would be even more fun when most of the audience went for door number two. Kill them, Bob, definitely.

Fatima: “He should be declared an infidel. The Koran divided people into Muslims, infidels, and the People of the Book. So there is a group of people who should be declared infidels.”

Just so. Because otherwise the Koran would have divided people into three groups for nothing. The Koran divided people into three groups, one of which was infidels, therefore there is a group of people who should be declared infidels. Naturally.

Gamal ‘Allam: “If he believes that his law is equal to the law of Allah, he is comparing Allah to human beings, and thus, he is an infidel. If he believes his law to be better than the law of Allah, then he prefers the creature over its Creator, and thus, he is an infidel.”

Humans are forbidden to use their own judgement about the law because they are required to defer to the judgment of someone who doesn’t exist, doesn’t answer when called, doesn’t apologize, doesn’t explain, can’t be demoted or fired or thrown out of office, doesn’t care, isn’t there. Otherwise they are infidels. End of story.

Young man in audience: “Sir, if you become an apostate, your punishment is death. There is a great problem that most of us, 70% of us, are Muslims because they were born to Muslim fathers and mothers. Before a person converts to Islam, he has the liberty to choose, but remember that if you want to convert from Islam, you will be punished by death. So you have the liberty to choose, but on the condition…”

Oh, okay, thanks – I have the liberty to choose, but on the condition that I’ll be killed if I do. Fine, that’s fair.

Prince Charles tried to improve things once, but had no luck.

“In 2004, Prince Charles called a meeting of leading Muslims to discuss the issue,” adds Dr Sookhdeo. “I was there. All the Muslim leaders at that meeting agreed that the penalty in sharia is death. The hope was that they would issue a public declaration repudiating that doctrine, but not one of them did.”

Oh. Well, maybe PC could try again in a few years. Meanwhile…um…well I guess nobody convert from Islam, okay?

Damian Lanigan notices this is not such a great arrangement but then fumbles over another arrangement.

If Muslim religious leaders in Britain are unwilling to speak out on this issue then we really are in trouble. [Well yes. ed]…And credit should be given to secular Muslim leaders. Ibrahim Mogra, of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), says that it is “absolutely disgraceful behaviour… In Britain, no Muslim has the right to harm one hair of someone who decides to leave Islam.” Let’s hope that behind closed doors, at the community centres and mosques people like Mr Mogra are winning the argument.

No let’s not. (And what makes Lanigan think anyone in the MCB is secular?) Let’s not hope people who stipulate that ‘in Britain’ killing apostasy is not okayare winning the argument; the not okay has to apply to everyone everywhere, not just to the locals. No Muslim anywhere has the right to harm someone who decides to leave Islam.

I’ve just read Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper. I first heard of it and realized I wanted to read it a month or so ago when reading a piece by Simon Blackburn for the next issue (the tenth anniversary issue, number 40) of The Philosophers’ Magazine. In answer to a question about ‘the most under-appreciated philosopher of the last ten years’ he said ‘Inevitably, it is probably someone of whom I have not heard. But a little known and now dead philosopher called Bernard Suits wrote an absolutely wonderful book on the notion of games and play, called The Grasshopper, published by Broadview Press. I do not think I have ever met more than one person who has heard of it.’ Really, thought I, making a note of it. Then just a few weeks later Nigel Warburton wrote a review at ‘Virtual Philosopher’ of a new edition, and then Tom Hurka who wrote an introduction to the new edition commented, and then Bernard Suits’s widow Cheryl commented. The Grasshopper is being hauled out of obscurity, and a good thing too. It’s a terrific book.

Nigel has a later post about it here.

I had one very interesting, what to call it, there’s no word for this – thought-linkup, while reading. Page 39 in the University of Toronto 1978 edition:

…in anything but a game the gratuitous introduction of unnecessary obstacles to the achievement of an end is regarded as a decidedly irrational thing to do, whereas in game it appears to be an absolutely essential thing to do.

Not quite, I thought; there’s something else, I thought; what is it…oh, poetry. That description works beautifully for poetry – and I couldn’t think of anything else that fit as well. So poetry turns out to be closely related to golf and squash and chess and bridge. Who knew? Poetry that has unnecessary obstacles, that is, not free verse. I no sooner had that thought than I remembered – with a considerable feeling of delight, I must say – that Robert Frost disliked free verse: he said it was like playing tennis with the net down. Well there you go. Good eh?

Howard Jacobson is a bit harsh but he’s right.

[I]t is irresponsible, so many years after Don Quixote messed up everything he touched, and when there is no shortage of international report, to be quite so determinedly unaware of where you are and what you’re doing and what the consequences might be. And that irresponsibility is compounded when you come home having narrowly escaped a lashing or worse, tell everyone what a great time you had and how lovely the people are, and express the hope that what happened to you won’t put anybody else off going.

I had the same thought, and I don’t suppose I’m the only one. No, thanks, I don’t think I will rush off for an adventure holiday in Sudan just now.

As for her refusal to be judgemental about it: at best it is a worthless show of magnanimity if she hasn’t a clue what the furore was about or how it relates to the treatment of other women or dissenters in that country, at worst it smacks of Stockholm Syndrome – that masochistic compulsion (especially incident to lovers of the simplicities of the Third World) to fall in love with your captors and torturers. It behoves you if you insist on travelling – against my advice that you stay resolutely at home – at least to notice where you are. And to bring back a better report from what…must be an ideological hell to live in, than how nice everybody was to you…With her release it’s business as before: half the world can go on thinking it has a right to imprison and execute whenever it considers its feelings hurt. So tell me what, now the dust has settled, is cultural “understanding”. Accepting the inhumanity of whatever society one finds oneself in? Acknowledging the primacy of local sensibilities, however closed-minded, however uneducated and raw, however severe the penalties for outraging them?…No Danish cartoon affair, this. Even the most vehemently touchy parties could agree it was an innocent mistake. No harm done because no hurt intended. But where does that leave us if we believe we should be able to give a teddy bear any name we like?

Just so; hence the interest of the fact that Bunglawala was obliging enough to say explicitly that if it is intentional then…he has no sympathy for the criminal. That’s where that leaves us.

Mitt Romney – not surprisingly – says lots and lots of irritating things in that collection of platitudes and errors he offered up in Texas yesterday – at the George Bush I ‘library.’ It would be silly and otiose to analyze them in much detail – it’s not as if there’s any reason to expect the speech to be sensible or well-argued or grown-up or coherent. But there are some remarks that are so outrageous I just…

When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God.

It would be nice if it became his highest promise to his fellow-citizens instead.

I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church’s beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance. Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree.

‘Tolerance’ of course is only relevant when we’re talking about opinion. It’s silly to talk about tolerance when you actually want to get at the truth of something – tolerance comes in handy when the subject is a human invented story that people want to believe is literally true but realize they can’t actually demonstrate is literally true. It becomes a matter of ‘I’ll tolerate your myth if you’ll tolerate my myth and that way neither of us will have to confront the likelihood that both myths are just myths and not literally true.’ The last sentence is a terrific summing-up of that – religious tolerance is deep because it will tolerate anything – which doesn’t mean actually believing the anything is true. Except of course one’s own anything. Which is true. But the others aren’t. But it doesn’t do to say so when running for President. Twirl, repeat, twirl.

Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government…[W]e can be deeply thankful that we live in a land where reason and religion are friends and allies in the cause of liberty…Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion – rather, we welcome our nation’s symphony of faith.

Well here’s one American who doesn’t ‘acknowledge’ that liberty is a gift of God, and I’m reliably informed that there are others. And as for reason and religion being friends and allies – well the whole speech demonstrates why they’re not: it’s nonsense throughout, and blithely ignores (when it should ‘acknowledge’) its own nonsenicality.

So how does this work?

There are also those who think that Romney’s disowning of past Mormon polygamy is too opportunistic, since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does still offer the consolation prize of multiple wives in heaven (just like the sick dream of Mohamed Atta).

Who are all those women? Where do they come from? Are there lots of extra women in heaven who never spent any time as mortals down here? If so mightn’t they be just a little creepy? Do men really want bizarro ‘wives’ who have no idea what life is like on an actual earthy planet? What would they be like to talk to? Of course the idea is that they’re a consolation prize because they provide sexual variety – but the word is ‘wives,’ not concubines or mistresses or sexual partners, so one has to assume they’ll be underfoot all the time. And then if there are all these extra women in heaven, one has to wonder if men would really regard it as a consolation prize to be vastly outnumbered. Especially by a lot of weird clueless from-another-planet women who don’t know from Seinfeld or Dr Strangelove or Jon Stewart or The Onion or The Office.

And that’s before we even get to the question of what the consolation prize for women is. Having lots of female roommates? But how does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints know that all women want lots of female roommates? Or are women who don’t want that allowed to make their own arrangements, while the complement of multiple wives for each man is made up from the magical warehouse-full of heaven-born women? But if that’s the case why not just issue each man a set of really high-quality inflatable dolls, so as to avoid the creepiness problem and the outnumbered problem?

I wonder if the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has really thought things through.

Sometimes the disgust surges like bile.

Amid continued protests, the pressure on the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin is continuing to mount, as a prominent Muslim cleric today called for her to apologise for her “anti-Islamic” writings.

He didn’t call for her to, he ordered her to, in no uncertain terms.

[T]he offer to remove the paragraphs from new printings of the bestseller was not enough for Syed Ahmed Bukhari, the chief cleric of New Delhi’s Jama Masjid mosque, who suggested earlier today that Indian Muslims should “not tolerate the infamous authoress Taslima Nasrin on the Indian soil” unless she offered a written apology for what he called her “anti-Islamic publications”.

“The apology must bear her assurance that in future she will desist from repeating such venomous writing that may have any inkling of blasphemy,” he said in a statement. “India is a democratic nation and the constitution here neither does permit any citizen nor allow any foreign national to be irreverent to the tenets of any religion,” the cleric continued. “The entire responsibility of the consequences shall rest upon the government of India,” Bukhari warned.

That’s good, isn’t it – India is a democratic nation and thus it follows as the night the day that it forbids citizens and foreigners alike to be irreverent to the tenets of any religion. India is a democratic nation and therefore it has no truck with any pesky notions about people’s freedom to say what they think. But in case his audience doesn’t get the message, he finishes up with a nice flourish of threats. What a despicable man.

Things are humming in the Maghreb. Excellent.

Human rights activists from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania attending a Tunisian seminar last week stressed the need to separate religion from state as “an essential approach to realizing gender equality.” The “Maghreb Women’s March towards Realizing Equality” seminar on November 24th and 25th addressed the marginalisation of the Maghreb woman and the gender gap in each country…Activist Malika Remaoun from Algeria complained about the concessions given to Islamists at the expense of women…Tunisian Balkis Mechri agreed, saying “the battle to realize equality is not only legal, but social as well.” Ourida Chouaki of Algeria, however, warned that secularism in Maghreb societies is mistakenly being perceived as a call to apostasy.

And doubtless also painted and framed and presented as a call to ‘apostasy’ which of course is not just disapproved but forbidden. That’s one hell of an obstacle to get around. Good luck Maghrebians.

Razi pointed out that family law still gives men the right to polygamy, compels the return of women to the matrimonial home and governs child custody…Rejectionists, she maintained, “are using religion as a means to swallow up women’s rights”.

It’s a good wheeze, isn’t it. It’s a capital crime to leave the religion, and the religion is used to forbid women’s rights. Heads I win tails you lose.

Good luck Maghrebians.

Ho hum – a woman says women are equal, male clerics pitch fits.

Zeinab Radwan…announced during a conference on “Citizenship” that “the testimony of a woman is legally equal in weight with a man’s testimony.”…Clerics were swift to condemn Radwan’s statement, as expected. Gamal Qutb, former head of the Fatwa council in Al-Azhar, impugned Radwan’s credibility on Islamic Jurisprudence and warned against tampering with the Shari’a. In his view, it would be insane to continuously alter interpretations of the Quran every time conditions in society human behavior changed.

Oh well quite. Exactly so. It would be stark staring insane to keep on and on and on forever changing interpretations of the Koran simply because conditions changed – what could possibly be madder than that? Because conditions change all the time, society changes, human behavior changes, all those things are fickle as windmills, they’re always whirling up and down and round about, first one thing then another; one minute it’s slavery and hierarchy and violence and the next minute it’s equality and freedom and peace, up down, up down, skirts long, skirts short; it’s all so arbitrary and whimsical and meaningless, there’s no way to choose among them, of course the only thing to do is have one interpretation of one book written fourteen centuries ago and then stick to it like death forever after no matter what. Because who cares if people grow and learn and change, who cares if we gradually collect data and explanations and experience that indicate that some ways of life are better for more people than other ways of life are? A pox on all that; what we want is stability and continuity and certainty and above all predictability – we want to know that women were inferior yesterday and they’re inferior today and they’ll be inferior tomorrow. We want to know where we are. We want to be able to find our way around with our eyes shut because it’s too god damn much trouble to open them.

While being interviewed by Al-Jazeera yesterday, Qutb lashed out at the Western world for “having molded such speakers to serve their interests and who are being guided by the West. Those who live in our midst while representing another culture and regardless of their elevated worldly status are unqualified to speak on religious matters.”

Those who live in our midst while representing another culture – interesting touch – reminiscent of Leon Kass’s ‘All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the atheists among us’ combined with the convenient genuflection to ‘culture’. Note the contradiction, too – we mustn’t change interpretations of the Koran every time conditions in society change, yet ‘culture’ is a valor-word. On the one hand the timeless and eternal, on the other hand the contingent and situated and mutable. Well that’s clerics for you, any port in a storm.

A comment or attempted explanation on BBC jokes got my curiosity awake.

This still seems to need spelling out for some. In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam. Gibbons was convicted of this crime. Should it be a crime? No. Given that it is a crime, was Gibbons guilty? Again, no: she didn’t insult Islam. Nevertheless, she was convicted of insulting Islam. In saying so I quote no-one, but simply state a fact. Tim Evans was wrongly convicted of murder, not “murder”.

Which is to say that the BBC wasn’t doing anything risible or marked or noteworthy by reporting that

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, had spent eight days in custody for insulting Islam before eventually being pardoned by President Omar al-Bashir.

The claim seems to be that news organizations don’t use scare quotes on crimes if they are in fact crimes in the state that is in question. ‘In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam’ so it is not normal practice to put scare quotes on ‘insult Islam’ with reference to Sudan. I thought about that, and it seemed to me that it wasn’t true; so I did a little looking and found something. Then I wished I hadn’t wasted any time looking, because I remembered Turkey’s Article 301 which outlaws ‘insulting Turkishness’ – I know the BBC uses scare quotes on that ‘crime,’ I knew that even before looking it up. ‘Insulting Turkishness’ is decidedly a real crime in Turkey: prosecutions for it are not rare, and the existence of the crime has been a major stumbling block for Turkey’s membership of the EU.

So – behold the Beeb putting scare quotes on a crime even though it is a crime to insult Turkishness in Turkey.

Turkey’s most internationally-acclaimed novelist will go on trial here charged with “insulting Turkishness”.

The fact that Article 301 exists does not prevent the BBC from putting scare quotes on the crime that Article 301 forbids. Therefore there is nothing automatically or necessarily or ethically or journalistically preventing the BBC from putting the same scare quotes on ‘insulting Islam’ when reporting on Gillian Gibbons. It chose not to; I chose to point that out; I fail to see that there’s anything obviously unreasonable about that. Why would it not be of interest to notice what an influential news medium chooses to hold at arm’s length and what it doesn’t? Why would it not be of interest to notice the ways the BBC frames various issues? It’s supposed to be a good thing to be media literate, isn’t it? Isn’t noticing things like subtle cues and unobtrusively coded language and careful wording part of the whole project of figuring out how media outlets shape the way we think?

Sure it is. It could still be the case that I did a crap job of it, of course, but I don’t think the ‘In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam’ argument shows that.

The Beeb really is hilarious sometimes. In its report on Gillian Gibbons’s story it puts ‘ordeal’ in quotation marks but leaves ‘insulting Islam’ free of them. So we get

A British teacher jailed in Sudan for letting her class name a teddy bear Muhammad has spoken of her “ordeal”, after returning to the UK. Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, had spent eight days in custody for insulting Islam before eventually being pardoned by President Omar al-Bashir.

You have to admit – that really is funny.

I trust you read that piece by John Tierney on the need to be more respectful of female genital mutilation – or rather, of what he carefully decides to call ‘female circumcision’ because it’s critics who call it female genital mutilation. Well we call it that because chopping off the clitoris and most of the labia and sewing up the whole hatchet-job does seem like mutilation – we critics are funny that way.

Tierney’s piece on Leon Kass’s speech last week was terrific, but this one is…not so good. I do not like it. It makes me cross.

But the one by Richard Shweder puts Tierney’s in the shade. It’s jaw-dropping.

He’s very angry with feminists who don’t like FGM.

The article is one of a series of sensational, lurid and horrifying pieces that the Times has printed over the past decade or so covering the topic, all giving one-sided and uncritical expression to a representation of the practice that has been constructed and widely circulated by feminist and First World human rights activist groups.

Horrors. Feminists and human rights activist groups have ‘constructed’ a representation of FGM that portrays it as a drastic mutilation imposed on female children as a way to control women by chopping off most of their genitalia. How imperialist, how colonialist, how elitist, how cosmopolitan, how wicked. Of course mutilation of girl children is a fine thing as long as it’s done six thousand miles away.

If you read and believe those statements or most of the other things you find written about “FGM” in the popular press (which, for the most part, are recapitulations of the advocacy literature) then you must conclude that Africa is indeed a “Dark Continent”, where for hundreds, if not thousands of years, African parents have been murdering and maiming their daughters and depriving them of the capacity for a sexual response. You must believe that African parents (mothers and fathers) are either (a) monsters (“mutilators” of their children) or (b) fools (who are incredibly ignorant of the health consequences of their own child rearing practices and the best interests of their children); or (c) prisoners of a insufferably dangerous tradition that they themselves would like to escape, if only they could find a way out, or else (d) that African women are weak and passive and live under the patriarchal thumb of cruel, loathsome or barbaric African men.

In short, you must be a racist. Is that clear? Do you understand? Is the implied threat unmistakable enough? If you think FGM is mutilation then you think Africans are monsters, stupid, trapped, and passive. In order not to think that you have to understand and accept and believe that FGM is PERFECTLY ALL RIGHT for the people who already think it is perfectly all right, just as footbinding was perfectly all right for the people who thought that was perfectly all right.

[A]t least two things have changed since the 1920s and 1930s in Africa: anesthesia is more available, and the “civilizing” missionary efforts of militant Protestants have been supplemented and even supported by the evangelical interventions of global feminists and human rights activists…[I]t is time for a new more tolerant neo-liberal global discourse to be developed concerning unfamiliar or “alien'” body modification practices around the world. One of the central human rights claims of this new “tolerance promoting” (or at least “sufferance promoting”) neo-liberal discourse might be the following: that an offense to the culturally shaped tastes and sensibilities of cosmopolitan elites or the citizens of rich and powerful societies (whether they are Christian missionaries or secular humanist human rights activists) is not sufficient reason to eradicate someone else’s valued way of life.

‘Cosmopolitan elites’ is interesting – I wonder if Shweder is aware of how Nazi that particular formula is. If he is aware, it seems incredibly bizarre that he uses it as a weapon. But more to the point: it’s interesting that he thinks having or not having sheared off external genitalia is a mere matter of culturally shaped tastes and sensibilities – rather as if non-fans of FGM were campaigning for the people of Somalia and Egypt to eat more sushi.

I am going to argue that the emerging rules of the cultural correctness game have been fixed by the “First World” and deserve to be critiqued…I am going to suggest that these “First World” governments and activist organizations (who, ironically, often frame their campaigns in a discourse of human rights) have actually acted in violation of several human rights, including rights to self-determination and rights to family privacy…

Family privacy – yes – that is indeed where things get tricky. Let’s look at ‘rights to family privacy’ for a second. Do they include rights for male members to beat or whip or lash female members? Do they include rights of sexual access for all males to all females? Do they include rights to deny medical treatment? Rights to force children to marry people of the parents’ choosing no matter how repugnant? Rights to give young daughters to much older men to pay a gambling debt? Rights to give daughters to other tribes to settle disputes or compensate for a crime? Rights to kill daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, aunts who disobey male relatives?

He goes on to say more reasonable things about rights and the difficulty of grounding them, but the first half of the piece is riddled with unpleasant innuendo.

I heard Robin Fox explaining that democracy is not ‘natural’ on NPR this morning. He said we think that what we’re used to is human nature, but it’s not, it’s just what we’re used to. Most people in the world are used to tribalism, he went on, and that’s what they want. They don’t care about nation or categories like ‘Arab,’ they care about family and tribe and what brings honour to them.

It’s interesting, and persuasive up to a point, but only up to a point. For one thing, there are objective benefits that tend to go with democracy and don’t tend to go with tribalism. And for a perhaps more significant and more far-reaching thing, what does Fox mean by ‘they’? He means what people always mean by ‘they’ in such contexts: he means the people who determine what ‘the tribe’ wants, and in tribes and all other hierarchical patriarchal arrangements, that means the people who have the power to do that, and that means (some of) the men. In other words Fox doesn’t actually know what everyone wants, because he can’t, because the people without power are silenced. They don’t get to sit around with the visiting anthropologist and tell him what’s what.

Natasha Walter could perhaps fill in the picture a little. She went back to Afghanistan last year, and was shocked and depressed at what she found. On her previous visit, soon after the Taliban was kicked out, she went to a ‘dirt-poor village’ and met women involved in a literacy project after years of no education and house arrest under the Taliban.

When I asked the students, who ranged from 13-year-old girls to 50-year-old widows, if they thought all women in Afghanistan wanted more freedom and equality, my translator struggled to keep up with the clamour: “Of course we do,” said one widow furiously. “Even women who are not allowed to come to this class want that. But our husbands and brothers and fathers don’t want it. The mullahs keep saying freedom is not good for us.”

On her second visit, the room was empty.

“They were threatening us, telling us not to do it any more, and we were scared. For a while we continued, but we were afraid that they might do something worse. This place is a place of Taliban. Neighbours may work for the government in the morning but at night they are the same Taliban with the same thoughts.”

All very tribal or familial – but ‘they’ are not happy about it. The women are miserable. Let’s not be too sure they don’t want those funny foreign things but would much prefer to stick with their good old families and tribes.

Human Rights Watch says that a third of districts in Afghanistan are now without girls’ schools, due to attacks on teachers and students by the Taliban and other anti-government elements; and traditional practices such as child marriage and baad, in which women are exchanged like objects in tribal disputes, still continue unchallenged. “Every day women are sacrificed for their family or tribe,” Nilab Mobarez, a 45-year-old doctor who stood recently as a vice-presidential candidate, tells me angrily. “We still do not have the judicial system to resolve this.” Women who stand up against oppressive traditions are vulnerable; the number of assassinations and threats against women working for the government and international organisations is rising.

Let’s not be too sure all those women are delighted to be sacrificed for their family or tribe. It doesn’t sound as if they are.

Walter talks to Malalai Joya.

“I have only just moved here,” Joya says. “I have to keep changing my house. I hate guns, but I have to have men with guns guarding me all the time. One day they will kill me. They kill women who struggle against them.”…”Here there is no democracy, no security, no women’s rights,” she says. “When I speak in parliament they threaten me. In May they beat me by throwing bottles of water at me and they shouted, ‘Take her and rape her.’ These men who are in power, never have they apologised for their crimes that they committed in the wars, and now, with the support of the US, they continue with their crimes in a different way. That is why there is no fundamental change in the situation of women.”

Then she makes a crucial point.

Joya talks like this to me, furiously, for more than an hour, almost weeping as she catalogues the crimes against women that still keep them in a state of fear: from Safia Ama Jan, the leading women’s rights campaigner assassinated in Kandahar earlier this year, to Nadia Anjuman, a poet murdered in Herat last year; from Amina, a married woman who was stoned to death in Badakhshan in 2005, to Sanobar, an 11-year-old girl who was raped and exchanged for a dog in a reported dispute among warlords in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan last month. She is desperate for people to take account of the silent women whose voices we never hear.

That’s just it you see – we never hear their voices because they’re not allowed to use them. They’re not quiet because they’re content, they are silenced. It’s very very important to keep that always in mind when trying to think clearly about these subjects. Fox is of course right that it’s silly to take it for granted that our way of doing things is the natural and best way, but it’s mistaken to assume that the way group or tribe X does things is the way all members of group or tribe X wants to do them – it’s mistaken to forget that whole swathes of people may be systematically prevented from ever saying or acting on what they want, and that powerful people don’t invariably treat powerless people kindly and generously.

Are you shy? Introverted? Reserved? Hostile? Easily bored? Hypercritical? Tightly wound? Quarrelsome? High maintenance? Have you considered medication? It could be that KlineGlasgowSmith has just the pill for you. Do you have restless legs? A limp dick? Flat hair? Do you get hungry several times a day? Do you scratch a lot? You could have a treatable syndrome: please turn on your tv, and the right ad for your condition will appear sooner than you expect.

Frederick Crews looks at the wonderful interplay between Big Pharma and middle-class hypochondria.

Most of us naively regard mental disturbances, like physical ones, as timeless realities that our doctors address according to up-to-date research, employing medicines whose appropriateness and safety have been tested and approved by a benignly vigilant government. Here, however, we catch a glimpse of a different world in which convictions, perceived needs, and choices regarding health care are manufactured along with the products that will match them…Clearly, the drug companies’ publicists couldn’t exercise their consciousness-shaping wiles so fruitfully without a prior disposition among the populace to strive for self-improvement through every legal means…Americans have required little prodding to believe that a medication can neutralize their social handicaps and supply them with a better personality than the one they were dealt by an inconsiderate fate.

See, that’s where I elude their clutches; I’ve never wanted a better personality, even though I would never describe my personality as the ideal personality for everyone to aspire to. I just happen to like mine, that’s all. I like being grouchy and surly and difficult; it suits me; I’m used to it. I’m bemused by people who want to be warmer and more gregarious. What an odd thing to want, I always think, pounding another nail into the board over the window.

I didn’t know about this though – drug companies concealed the side effects of SSRIs and argued in court that there was insufficient evidence for them – until –

Eli Lilly bought the marketing rights to a near relative of its own patent-lapsed Prozac. According to the new drug’s damning patent application, it was less likely than Prozac to induce “headaches, nervousness, anxiety, insomnia, inner restlessness…, suicidal thoughts and self mutilation”.

Fascinating, isn’t it? Deny the side effects until the patent lapses and it’s time to sell a new one, and then mention the side effects. Don’t I feel clever and vindicated for having no urge to take pills to make me Nicer.

Then there’s the way the DSM is geared to validating ‘disorders’ so that psychiatrists can treat them and insurance companies will treat them. (This is US of course, not relevant to other places.)

As for psychiatry’s inability to settle on a discrete list of disorders that can remain impervious to fads and fashions, that is an embarrassment only to clear academic thinkers like these two authors. For bureaucratized psychological treatment, and for the pharmaceutical industry that is now deeply enmeshed in it, confusion has its uses and is likely to persist.

Great phrase, that: confusion has its uses. It does indeed.

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 know, he answered it as I thought he would; he answered it as a theocrat would answer it.

Muslim majority countries have their own laws and customs. If you set out to deliberately insult the Prophet Muhammad in a country where such behaviour is regarded as unacceptable and against the law then I would have little sympathy for you.

And that’s the man the BBC still thinks is the first person they should phone for a comment on these issues – that’s the man who is still often the only Muslim quoted in its Muslim-relevant reporting – that’s the man who is still considered and treated as some kind of establishment, obvious, central, representative, sane, reasonable, non-extremist non-wacky spokesperson for all British Muslims. It’s astonishing.

*Thanks to mirax for alerting me.

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 dealing with religious fanatics, but that still leaves you with the problem of having to argue over what’s in a 1400-year-old book – it still leaves you with the problem of worrying about what ‘scripture’ says instead of about what is best for human beings in the light of current knowledge and accumulated understanding and moral insight.

When ex-Muslims such as Hirsi Ali ignore the nuances, complexities, and plurality inherent within Islam…then she plays into the hands of extremists and allows their discourse to dominate one of the great faiths of our world. Worse, it creates a public space in which attacking all Muslims and Islam becomes acceptable, even fashionable.

Attacking Islam is and should be acceptable, and even fashionable. Attacking all Muslims of course should not, but attacking Islam (and any other religion) should. Attacking people is bad, attacking ideas and beliefs is not.

Timothy Garton Ash is also pondering the issue.

When a Muslim letter-writer in yesterday’s Guardian tells us, with the aid of Qur’anic references, that Islam, properly understood, supports “the vital principle of freedom of speech”, what possible interest have we non-Muslim liberals in arguing against him?

None in arguing against his support of free speech, certainly…but there are risks in basing that support on claims that the Koran is really liberal after all, because there are always going to be plenty of people who will offer up different Koranic references to support the claim that it’s not.

Nick Cohen disputes Garton Ash’s view.

Garton Ash met Hirsi Ali at an electric meeting in London on Wednesday. Unlike Buruma he had the good sense and good grace to think again and he gave her a public apology. Nevertheless, he stuck to the argument that there was no point in liberals treating her as a heroine because her abandonment of Islam and embrace of atheism meant her arguments carried no weight with Muslims. Instead he told us to encourage those Muslims who reject the stoning of women because they dispute its scriptural authority. Religious debates about whether the Prophet Muhammad really approved of stoning may be ‘gobbledegook’, but, he cried, ‘We must support gobbledegook that is compatible with liberal democracy.’

Well there’s a stirring call. There are risks either way, so I’m not attracted to the ‘support bullshit’ version.

I’m not sure how he can be certain that Hirsi Ali has no influence. How does he know what seeds she is planting in the minds of Muslim women? I know one former jihadi who thought again after reading Salman Rushdie…Ayaan Hirsi listened to Garton Ash and had two questions. If liberal secularists, like my heckler, didn’t have pride and confidence in their principles, why should they expect anyone else to take them seriously? And if, like Garton Ash, they turned away from democrats and insisted on treating European Muslims as children who can only be spoken to in the baby language of gobbledegook, what right did they have to be surprised if European Muslims reacted with childish petulance rather than the broad-mindedness of full adult citizens?

Two damn good questions, if you ask me.

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 some of them are suspect or tricky, and that’s one reason I don’t like it for these purposes, although there isn’t really any substitute word that I do like. I do agree that degradation of this kind is special; I don’t mean to minimize that; but I don’t think humans have only two states: dignity or degradation. I think something is removed from people when they are degraded, but I don’t think dignity is exactly what that something is. Respect is closer. It perhaps doesn’t matter much…I think one reason I keep worrying it is that I’m curious about exactly what it is that’s removed. I keep coming back to the thought that it’s a feeling of normality – not dignity, not really even respect or status or worth (although those are all relevant), but just normality, just feeling ordinary, like everyone else, all right. And the other thing I keep coming back to when I think that is that that’s enough, and that it sort of matters that it’s enough. We don’t have to aspire to anything elevated, we just want to be all right, we don’t want to be treated like garbage. I prefer the minimalism of that. Why…?

Because it seems more reasonable, more like something we all get to expect; it seems…humble, human, everyday, commonplace, like bread, or air, or sleep, or peace. Not something inflated and puffed up, not something grand, not on stilts. Maybe that’s all it is: I just don’t want the stilts. We all, all, all have every right to expect to be left in peace and allowed to walk around without being bullied or stripped naked or bought and sold, and to me dignity doesn’t feel like the right word to describe that ordinary state of being. We love our lives and our ordinary state of being even if they have no great truck with dignity.

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 is wrong with it), or with leaving one’s mother’s corpse out for the garbage collector, without appealing to this concept or something very like it.

Maybe so – but then I don’t think anything is wrong with those two things, given certain stipulations (no one else harmed, etc). These two items would fit perfectly well in ‘Taboo,’ which used to be on B&W as well as TPM (and for which I wrote an essay) but got taken down when the hacker struck, and which is now in the briskly-selling Do You Think What You Think You Think? which I see in good bookstores everywhere. I think necrophilia is obviously disgusting, but that doesn’t make it wrong, and I don’t think it is necessarily wrong. Mother’s corpse is interesting, because if you think about it, corpses are basically taken away by garbage collectors, just in a cleaner and more polite manner. Don’t get me wrong, I find the idea repellent and painful, but again, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. (Leaving aside the law, and sanitation concerns.) Suppose a situation of total isolation, suppose the mother doesn’t know and neither does anyone else, suppose the offspring is untroubled by this arrangement and never regrets is; why would it be wrong? Wouldn’t it be Yuk rather than wrong? Taboo? It’s okay to heed taboos like that (some of them – others are about, say, untouchables, or people of Other Races), because the feelings matter, but if they’re not there and no one else is harmed…?

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 Kass some more.

He uses the word no fewer than eight times in that speech, and it’s fundamental to his whole strawman indictment of ‘scientism’. He uses it to give force and weight and a kind of prestige to his alarmist fantasies about ‘soul-less’ scientism.

Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity…All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the atheists among us—must understand that their own humanity is on the line…Instead, bioprophets of scientism…issue bold challenges to traditional understandings of human nature and human dignity…In order to justify ongoing research, these “humanists” are willing to shed not only traditional religious views but any view of human distinctiveness and special dignity, their own included…Here, in consequence, would be the most pernicious result of the new biology…the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike, and its replacement with a view of man, no less than of nature, as mere raw material for manipulation and homogenization.

The whole long speech is a textbook example of the attempted argument ‘this would be bad therefore it is false,’ and it also relies repeatedly and consistently on absurd false dilemmas. Every few paragraphs we’re given a choice between two alternatives as if two exhausted the possibilities when in fact there are myriad other possibilities. The whole ‘freedom and dignity or scientistic reductionism’ binary is the overarching false dilemma, of course, and the one between ‘ the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike’ and ‘mere raw material’ is one of the many supporting false dilemmas. And that string of adjectives hints at why I basically dislike the word. I don’t and don’t want to think of humans as noble, dignified, or godlike. Valuable (rather than precious), yes, but the other items, no. And that doesn’t force me to choose ‘mere raw material’ instead – why the hell would it? Leon Kass just says it would, he never explains why it would.

And that makes me suspicious of the word and its uses. I suspect that it’s the kind of word that people like Kass reach for when they want to snow credulous audiences with grand verbiage. People like Kass meaning people making fundamentally bad, sloppy, emotive arguments; people relying on rhetoric and tingly words to make their case for them because nothing else will do it.

Norm doesn’t agree.

One oddity of Ophelia’s argument, as it strikes me, is that it holds to the meaninglessness of ‘human dignity’ while at the same time insisting that humans shouldn’t be degraded or humiliated. But ‘degrade’ carries on its face that there is a standard in light of which some person is being reduced…But if we believe – as Ophelia does believe – that there are general standards valid for the treatment of all human beings and just because of their humanity, then it seems logical to say that there are general forms of human degradation and humiliation and that human dignity is the thing they assault.

I don’t think so. I think the standard in light of which some person is being reduced is that of the ordinary average ‘normal’ state of affairs – I don’t even think it necessarily has a name. It’s just how things ought to be, how we feel all right; degradation and humiliation are intrusions on that. I don’t think when we are humiliated or degraded we normally think of our ‘dignity’. I still think dignity is in a way asking too much – I think we can claim a right not to be degraded but I’m not sure we can claim a right to dignity. But it’s also true that I don’t object to that usage, whereas I do object to Kass’s. I think Kass’s really is meaningless, because I think humans don’t have dignity in the sense that he means it – dignity such that it’s a violation of it for a cognitive scientist to research emotions or morality. His idea of it depends, as he says all too frankly in the closing pages, on our being ‘in the image of God.’ I’m leery of the word because it seems to be all tangled up with nonsense on stilts of that kind.

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 refused my invitation to condemn unequivocally the practice of stoning women to death for adultery. It had happened during the lifetime of the Prophet, he said, “so you are asking me to condemn my Prophet”.

If that’s what it takes, certainly. If ‘your Prophet’ commands or condones stoning women to death for adultery (or anything else for that matter) then yes.

Bunglawala is not the guy to turn to for reasonable views.

Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, also said it appeared to have been a “quite horrible misunderstanding” and Ms Gibbons should never have been arrested. There was no apparent intention to offend Islamic sensibilities or defame the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad, he said.

What if there had been? If there had been, should she then have been arrested? 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.

Notice that the government still feels obliged (understandably under the circumstances) to keep saying with nervous urgency that it respects respects respects.

After the meeting with Ambassador Omer Siddig, Mr Miliband said he emphasised Britain’s respect of Islam and the “close relations” between the two countries. “The Sudanese Ambassador undertook to ensure our concerns were relayed to Khartoum at the highest level. He also said he would reflect back to Khartoum the real respect for the Islamic religion in this country.”

Uh huh. That’s not respect, it’s fear.