On the Guardian website, there’s a - well, let's say a series of posts, called Blogging the Qur’an. They call it a debate, but I’m not quite sure why.
The two participants in the debate, Ziauddin Sardar and Madeleine Bunting, are both godbotherers, and both have written articles arguing their point of spiritual view on the website before. The comments function, normally such a mainstay in the section the Guardian has after all chosen to call Comment is free, has been disabled. How this carefully mediated religious love-in deserves to be called a debate when it’s actually less like a debate than anything else they publish is a mystery. I emailed them to ask, but received no response.
To be fair, you can comment by email, and they do publish a selection of them. I had one published (Your say, second letter), and Mr Sardar did respond to it (Answers to questions, fourth paragraph). I’ll show both in a future post (the response annoyed me so much, it’s actually one of the main reasons why I’ve started this blog).
It’s not proper, free debate though. Never mind, you can get that here. Anyone can comment, whatever they believe.
There are rules. I decided to use the Guardian’s own talk policy. It seemed perfectly adequate to cover the discussion they decided not to allow.
There is one extra rule. Any remark which breaks the rules of civilised discourse will still be allowed, if it's a direct quotation from one of the world’s holy books. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how the debate could ever take place.
Watch this space.
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