Shouting across the void

I emailed Sardar with this.

So far, and particularly in blog 3: reading and interpretation, Ziauddin Sardar has offered us a traditional explication of the position of the religious pluralist. Holy books are to be read as a whole, rather than focusing too much on individual verses, religious practice may vary from one time and place to another, meanings shift through translation, and so on. This is obviously preferable to the alternative, and it is very much in the interests of the rest of us that pluralists win the religous debate.

But I cannot see how this view is compatible with the idea that a holy book is the word of God. It seems to me that it's straightforward enough to refute this.

Let's take a "problem" verse from a holy book. We're talking about the Qur'an, so we'll use one from there. The Bible, of course, would have done just as well.

Here we are, sura 4 verse 34. You may have seen that coming, Ziauddin.

"Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great."

This verse quite clearly states that women should be obedient to men, and that if a man thinks a woman in his household is about to leave him without his permission he's allowed to beat her. As is common in the Qur'an, it first prescribes some wholly outrageous behaviour, then seeks to mitigate the effect of it with a compassionate coda.

Now it's possible to offer a mitigation of this verse. You can argue that it has to be read in the context of other verses where men are told to protect and respect women, you can point out that the Qur'an was almost a feminist tract when judged by the attitudes of the time, and so on.

But you still run into one fundamental question. Would the Qur'an have been better or worse if it had ommitted "and beat them"? If you imagine a Qur'an identical to the actual Qur'an except for that omission, would it be an improvement on the actual Qur'an?

It seems to me you only have two ways to go. Either you have to argue that the Qur'an is better with those words in, and God wanted them in, or you have to concede that the Qur'an isn't perfect. If the Qur'an isn't perfect, it wasn't written by God.

It may be that there are translation errors, and "beat" actually means something else in the original. I'm not an Arabic scholar, so I can't comment. But that would then leave thousands of other problem verses to be addressed. In particular I'm thinking of the relentless obsession with human beings being used as fuel for the fires of hell. I searched my English translation (downloaded from an Islamic website) for the word fire, and it appeared 170 times. I checked the first 20, and in 18 of those human beings were providing the kindling. There are also arguments about homosexuality, slavery and so on to be had.

For each problem verse, there would have to be an argument. To paraphrase the old saying, you have to win every time, and we only have to win once. This is because the claim that a book was written by God is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If a book is by God, it should contain zero moral atrocities. If we can find any, even one, and make it stick, the book is not by God.

Not that it's an unreasonable standard for humans. Imagine if we had a conversation the length of the Qur'an? Imagine if we discoursed wisely on moral principles, the nature of metaphor, and so on. Imagine the most literate, humane and cultured conversation you could possibly have. Now imagine that in the course of that conversation I casually mentioned that I'd had to beat my wife because she was thinking of leaving me. What would you think of all my cultured pretensions? Some acts, some statements just put you beyond the pale.

It is possible to construct a defence for religion, if you were so minded. It would go something like this.

God intervenes in human lives, prompting them in the right direction, but doesn't force them in any particular direction, because he isn't a puppet master. When humans were writing their holy books, he dropped hints, encouraged in a moral direction, but wasn't always listened to. This is why the world's Holy books are such a weird mixture of war crimes and social work.

This still leaves intellectual problems with religion, and I expect I'll be running through a few in future emails, but if all religious people thought that way it would be a huge step forward, and greatly reduce the problems experienced by the rest of us.

Yours sincerely
Jon Eccles

and he responded with this patronising little snippet.

Now, no one has to accept that the Qur'an is the Word of God. It is something that we as individuals debate with ourselves and reach our own conclusion. However, I do not think that the proposition, the claim of the Qur'an itself that it is the World of God, is straight forward to refute, Mr Eccles. If that were so, it would have been refuted by now - not least by great Muslim thinkers and rationalists themselves. And a string of hostile Orientalists who have been attacking the Qur'an for centuries. Refutation is one thing. Rejection is quite another. It is natural for those who, for example, don't believe in God to reject it; or for those who believe in other scriptures; or for those who disagree with its teachings. I have no problem with that. But refutation actually requires argument and serious engagement with the Book itself. Quite another thing. And not something, I believe, that is likely to happen anytime soon!

There are some "problem" verses on a variety of subjects, not just women, and I will come to those in due course. However, dealing with these problems, which to my mind are problems of interpretation, does not mean that we should take these verses out of the Qur'an. The dichotomy you have set up -accept that the problem verses are wrong and hence the Qur'an is not the Word of God - is totally false. The fundamental question a Muslim will ask is not how many time fire is mentioned in the Qur'an, but why is the Qur'an using the metaphor of the fire? What idea of hell is it trying to communicate?

Not so much a refutation as a brushing aside.

Regulars with these religion-themed Internet spats will notice some regular themes in his reply. The first is what you might call the argument from incredulity, which can be summarised as it can't be easy to refute my holy text, or why would we have believed in it for so long? In this instance, we are talking about the Qur'an's endorsement of wife-beating. Sardar says he will address this later. In fact the subject of women has been relegated to week 36 of 52, as if it was some kind of trivial side issue.

My argument comes down to this. The Qur'an, at least in the generally agreed translation, endorses wife beating. Therefore, either wife beating is OK, or the Qur'an is in error. If it contains any errors, it cannot be the word of God.

Sardar says that if this argument worked, an Islamic scholar would have noticed this. The obvious refutation of this is that by definition Islamic scholars live in societies where wife beating is endorsed, so it's hardly surprising if they don't see it as more of a problem. The whole subject has in fact been endlessly debated, with modern 'feminist' Muslims trying to argue that there's a translation error. I did offer him this as a way out, but he chose not to take it.

Which is correct, incidentally, because it doesn't solve the problem. The Muslim woman concerned, Laleh Bakhtiar, tries to argue that the word for beat also means go away from. In other words, men who are angry with their wives should absent themselves. However, to argue this she had to go back to a nineteenth century Arabic dictionary (collated by an Englishman) to find a rare alternative meaning. Even if she is right, this simply means that the Qur'an is amibiguous on a crucial point, where clarity of meaning is vital, and that God cheerfully sentenced millions of Muslim women over centuries of time to the tyranny of a synonym.

Sardar's other device is the appeal to metaphor, which can be summed up as follows. Here we are, living in the modern age, heirs to liberal democracy, secular pluralism and the like, and yet we have all these old books we can't bear to let go of. They're crammed full of pre-industrial savagery of the most hideous kind, so what to do? I know, let's kid ourselves it's all just metaphors for things we can live with. Gloating descriptions of dead unbelievers burning in the fires of hell? Oh, that's just a poetic reference to spiritual torment. A hundred and seventy of them? Well, there's a lot of spiritual torment in the world. Precise physical descriptions of searing agony? Oh, those poets.

And yet, there is nothing especially metaphorical about the Koran. If anything, it reads like the work of someone who was determined to avoid the constant schisms of Christianity by being as clear as possible. Whatever it is, it is literally.

Of course, anyone can generate oodles of metaphor if they're so inclined. The human brain is arguably a device for turning sensory input into metaphor. And spiritual concepts are like Playdough - you can squeeze them into any shape you want. There's just no reason to believe it's in the text. It's in your head.

Bunting plays along, of course. She's got horrors of her own to metaphorise. At one point she says she's struggling with the first few verses of the Koran because they're so hard to understand. It takes a religious mind to make the banal baffling.

I'll explain it to you. God is great, do as you're told. He likes us, so we're all right. He doesn't like them, so they're fucked. There you go. Not rocket science, is it?