I'm lying around the house with a mancold, feeling deeply sorry for myself, which is why this is taking a while.
But I'm determined to get this done and sign off for a break, so here we go. Sardar's methods. How does he seek to reconcile the irreconciliable opposites of secular liberalism and Qur'anic literalism? More bluntly, what does he do with the awkward bits?
Sometimes he just flat out ignores them. Take the murder of the calf worshippers. In spite of worshipping the golden calf, a cardinal sin in monotheism, they were forgiven, says Sardar.
Whereas the text says So turn (in repentance) to your Maker, and slay yourselves (the wrong-doers); that will be better for you in the sight of your Maker (2:54). In other words, they were only forgiven once they'd murdered the polytheists among them.
He hasn't actually lied, but it's a dishonest evasion, roughly comparable with a news report that said Dennis Nielsen had forgiven his victims. I pointed out the omission in the comments, but got no response.
Then there's the appeal to metaphor. He uses this about the constant gloating descriptions of unbelievers burning in hell. As yet, he hasn't explained what it's a metaphor for.
Alternatively, complaints about specific verses are brushed off with the remark that you have to read every verse in the context of all the other verses.
And most commonly recently, there's the appeal to historical context. Apparently half of it is only relevant to the time when it was written.
The appeal to context fails for the same reason as the appeal to metaphor or holistic reading. None of these approaches are supported by the text. At no point does it say it's all right, it's just a metaphor, or some of this advice has a sell-by date, or you'll need to cross reference this bit.
But there's another, more serious problem for all three techniques, which is that they're applied selectively. So one moment Sardar is telling you you shouldn't make too much of a single verse, the next he's making three posts out of one use of the word middle. Then he says the horrors are just metaphors, but lets the nice bits mean exactly what they say.
In recent posts, the arbitrary division between the global and the historically specific seems to be his main method. The second sura apparently jumps from the contextual to the general constantly, without ever actually saying it's doing so.
He's aware of the problem. At one point he says The test for those who aspire to become a middle community is to distinguish between the circumstantial, that which is specific to a particular time and place and the general principle which will always be applicable but which needs to find the appropriate form to serve the needs of another time and place.
It's nice that he's noticed the issue, but it might help if he brought some of his much vaunted scholarly skills to bear on it. He doesn't for instance try to establish general principles which would differentiate the one from the other, or highlight verses in the text which can be taken as symbolising the change from one mode of interpretation to the other. He just chooses the interpretation which suits his case.
So all the perfection claim means in the end is that you can defend the book by going through it and making a series of arbitrary decisions. This nice bit is literal, that horrid bit is metaphorical. This nugget of pre-industrial wisdom only applies to seventh century Arabia, that nugget is for all time. This verse should be read in relation to that verse, which stands on its own, and isn't affected by the first verse.
But if such techniques are allowed, then any book can be made to seem perfect. You could do a similar job on the Iliad, for instance, and when you'd finished it would look almost respectable. The courage and the piety of the participants could be talked up, and the war crimes written off as metaphor or context.
Which leads me to wonder why Muslims are prepared to settle for so little. Surely if a book was the work of God, the divinity of it would leap off the page. Why would you need so many arbitrary decisions? Why would God put in the bit about slaying calf worshippers? Or walling up lewd women? Or the right to beat your wife? Why would it all be written from the male point of view anyway?
When discussing slavery, wouldn't God feel the need to distance himself from it? Surely he'd treat it as a far worse crime than polytheism? When discussing homosexuality, why wouldn't he celebrate it as the public boon it so clearly is?
But maybe that's what happens when you tell people something is true from age six. The absurdity of it is made invisible to them. As Ed Harris says in the Truman Show, we accept the reality with which we are presented.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
Hiatus
I'm going to have to take a short break, due to pressure of work. I'm currently involved in launching a distance learning website, at the same time as maintaining my existing teaching responsibilities.
I will finish the promised post on Sardar's methods. It will appear later in the week.
I will finish the promised post on Sardar's methods. It will appear later in the week.
Monday, April 7, 2008
What did you think of him so far?
Yes, I was thinking of Morecambe and Wise.
We're a quarter of the way now (14 weeks done out of 55), and Sardar's goals and methods are becoming clear. To understand them we have to start with his central problem. His problem is this.
He's clearly a man with a moderate tendency in religion. He talks about the need for Muslims to be a 'middle' people, he makes the right liberal noises about women, holy war and so on. If he was a Christian, he'd be something like Madeleine Bunting, or the old Bishop of Durham.
But in one respect he's as fundamentalist as Sayyid Qutb. The Qur'an is the word of God, full stop. While Christians of his stamp are entirely happy to regard the Bible as flawed, full of good things but also error-strewn and prone to moral outrages, for Sardar there is no question of that kind of laxity with the Qur'an.
Which is a problem, because the Qur'an has just as many dodgy bits as the Bible. In fact it's arguably worse, because it combines Old Testament atrocities with New Testament hellfire.
So that's his problem. The option to write off the appalling bits as human error just isn't there. Instead, he has to find ways to maintain the pretence that they don't say what they clearly do.
So that's his problem. What's ours? Well, we don't really have an equivalent problem, because we've limited our goals to demonstrating that his problem actually is a problem. All we have to do is just pick holes in his analysis. Not all of it, because it isn't a problem for us if he's partly right. If we can find one verse in the Qur'an which fails the divinity test, the whole thing fails with it, because God's word has to be perfect. In point of fact we've found hundreds, but really we didn't need most of them at all. The rules of the game would seem incredibly unfair, if they weren't his rules.
Of course, one of his methods is to deny the implications of these rules, but we'll be talking about his methods in the next post.
What are his goals? Well, his main goal is to resolve this problem, but just to prove he can juggle more than one logical impossibility at a time he gives himself another one.
His other goal is to demonstrate that the Qur'an is the work of God, purely by showing how wonderful it is. The text itself, when examined, questioned by a doubting mind, leads to the conclusion its origin is not human but a revelation of the divine, he says, as if his job wasn't impossible already.
We can dispose of this fairly quickly, just by considering the number of hurdles you'd have to jump before any genuinely doubting mind could consider such a claim established.
Firstly, you'd need to refute any suggestion of contradiction, moral obscenity or historical inaccuracy in the book. The book would have to be visibly perfect from a scholarly point of view. This is just a restatement of his first goal.
But then, on top of that, you'd need to find some kind of measure of human capacity in the field of holy book writing. Perhaps you'd look for structural complexity, for thematic consistency, for nobility of sentiment. To be honest the mind kind of bounces off the question, but he's posed it so we can only do our best.
Once you'd come up with a set of criteria, you'd then have to show that the Qur'an met at least one of them. That it was more poetic than Ovid, more subtly structured than a Shakespeare play, more inspiring to the spirit than a Martin Luther King speech. And not just a bit more. So much better, so much more divine that it was beyond the bounds of mere coincidence.
That's what you'd have to do to convince the doubting mind. Of course, to convince the religious mind you'd just have to say how nice it would be. Especially if you'd had control of that mind ever since it was six.
He seems to have backed away from this evidentiary goal of late, and we've heard no mention of it for a while. He's still pursuing his first goal though. In fact he restated it in Answers to questions recently. I refer to the premise I stated at the start of this blog: namely, that for me the Qur'an is the Word of God. The whole function of this blog is to discover how Muslim believers relate to the Qur'an today.
Of course, it may just be that he doesn't use words as precisely as secularists. I was surprised to learn that finding out how Muslim believers relate to the Qur'an today was the whole function of this blog, because I'd thought it was mainly a personal view, rather than an analysis of the broad spectrum of contemporary Muslim opinion. I'm also not sure why the Qur'an should be the word of God for him. Surely it either is or it isn't.
I don't think he really means what that paragraph implies at all. I think he thinks the Qur'an is the word of God full stop, and I think this blog is a personal view rather than a summary of Muslim thought. I also think that our expectation that the words he uses should mean something coherent and consistent by our standards is irrelevant to him.
In my observation, religious people treat religion as if it was literature. There is no need for statements to be consistent with each other, as long as they have metaphorical resonance. Meaning is just a complex web of cross-references, and the kind of precision that for instance a scientist would bring to an analysis would seem limiting to them. Of course, they then go on to make factual claims which could only be sustained with a more rigorous methodology, but for them that doesn't seem to matter.
That's why they're so rubbish at proper argument. It's because they don't really care. Oh, they may write articles and comments with some superficial methodical intent, but on some level they're just humouring us. For them, unverifiable supposition is always where it's at.
So for Sardar, the use of the word whole doesn't imply any kind of logical exclusion. If we were to say that a particular goal was the whole function of a blog, we would mean that other goals weren't its function. He does not. To him the word whole is probably more of an emotional intensifier, meaning something like this next bit really matters to me. Similarly, how Muslim believers relate to the Qur'an today is code for how Muslims like me do.
So that's his goals. Our goals are simple. We don't think the Qur'an is the word of God, and we think Sardar's attempts to reconcile the text as written with his own liberal views do violence to the text. We seek to establish that the text is a plausible candidate for the kind of treatment that modern theologians give the Bible, but cannot be taken seriously as the word of God, because no conceivable deity would write such a book.
Let's not leave our real motive so ulterior, though. We seek to undermine the idea of revealed truth because we think it's a step towards a planet with no religion on it at all. We've seen it in Britain. True religion, true Book-bashing literalism, is powerful medicine. This new brand, this liberal religion, is more like some kind of homeopathic tincture. It looks like the real thing, but doesn't offer any protection against the epidemic of secularism at all.
So much for problems and goals. What about his methods? And ours? More on that later in the week.
We're a quarter of the way now (14 weeks done out of 55), and Sardar's goals and methods are becoming clear. To understand them we have to start with his central problem. His problem is this.
He's clearly a man with a moderate tendency in religion. He talks about the need for Muslims to be a 'middle' people, he makes the right liberal noises about women, holy war and so on. If he was a Christian, he'd be something like Madeleine Bunting, or the old Bishop of Durham.
But in one respect he's as fundamentalist as Sayyid Qutb. The Qur'an is the word of God, full stop. While Christians of his stamp are entirely happy to regard the Bible as flawed, full of good things but also error-strewn and prone to moral outrages, for Sardar there is no question of that kind of laxity with the Qur'an.
Which is a problem, because the Qur'an has just as many dodgy bits as the Bible. In fact it's arguably worse, because it combines Old Testament atrocities with New Testament hellfire.
So that's his problem. The option to write off the appalling bits as human error just isn't there. Instead, he has to find ways to maintain the pretence that they don't say what they clearly do.
So that's his problem. What's ours? Well, we don't really have an equivalent problem, because we've limited our goals to demonstrating that his problem actually is a problem. All we have to do is just pick holes in his analysis. Not all of it, because it isn't a problem for us if he's partly right. If we can find one verse in the Qur'an which fails the divinity test, the whole thing fails with it, because God's word has to be perfect. In point of fact we've found hundreds, but really we didn't need most of them at all. The rules of the game would seem incredibly unfair, if they weren't his rules.
Of course, one of his methods is to deny the implications of these rules, but we'll be talking about his methods in the next post.
What are his goals? Well, his main goal is to resolve this problem, but just to prove he can juggle more than one logical impossibility at a time he gives himself another one.
His other goal is to demonstrate that the Qur'an is the work of God, purely by showing how wonderful it is. The text itself, when examined, questioned by a doubting mind, leads to the conclusion its origin is not human but a revelation of the divine, he says, as if his job wasn't impossible already.
We can dispose of this fairly quickly, just by considering the number of hurdles you'd have to jump before any genuinely doubting mind could consider such a claim established.
Firstly, you'd need to refute any suggestion of contradiction, moral obscenity or historical inaccuracy in the book. The book would have to be visibly perfect from a scholarly point of view. This is just a restatement of his first goal.
But then, on top of that, you'd need to find some kind of measure of human capacity in the field of holy book writing. Perhaps you'd look for structural complexity, for thematic consistency, for nobility of sentiment. To be honest the mind kind of bounces off the question, but he's posed it so we can only do our best.
Once you'd come up with a set of criteria, you'd then have to show that the Qur'an met at least one of them. That it was more poetic than Ovid, more subtly structured than a Shakespeare play, more inspiring to the spirit than a Martin Luther King speech. And not just a bit more. So much better, so much more divine that it was beyond the bounds of mere coincidence.
That's what you'd have to do to convince the doubting mind. Of course, to convince the religious mind you'd just have to say how nice it would be. Especially if you'd had control of that mind ever since it was six.
He seems to have backed away from this evidentiary goal of late, and we've heard no mention of it for a while. He's still pursuing his first goal though. In fact he restated it in Answers to questions recently. I refer to the premise I stated at the start of this blog: namely, that for me the Qur'an is the Word of God. The whole function of this blog is to discover how Muslim believers relate to the Qur'an today.
Of course, it may just be that he doesn't use words as precisely as secularists. I was surprised to learn that finding out how Muslim believers relate to the Qur'an today was the whole function of this blog, because I'd thought it was mainly a personal view, rather than an analysis of the broad spectrum of contemporary Muslim opinion. I'm also not sure why the Qur'an should be the word of God for him. Surely it either is or it isn't.
I don't think he really means what that paragraph implies at all. I think he thinks the Qur'an is the word of God full stop, and I think this blog is a personal view rather than a summary of Muslim thought. I also think that our expectation that the words he uses should mean something coherent and consistent by our standards is irrelevant to him.
In my observation, religious people treat religion as if it was literature. There is no need for statements to be consistent with each other, as long as they have metaphorical resonance. Meaning is just a complex web of cross-references, and the kind of precision that for instance a scientist would bring to an analysis would seem limiting to them. Of course, they then go on to make factual claims which could only be sustained with a more rigorous methodology, but for them that doesn't seem to matter.
That's why they're so rubbish at proper argument. It's because they don't really care. Oh, they may write articles and comments with some superficial methodical intent, but on some level they're just humouring us. For them, unverifiable supposition is always where it's at.
So for Sardar, the use of the word whole doesn't imply any kind of logical exclusion. If we were to say that a particular goal was the whole function of a blog, we would mean that other goals weren't its function. He does not. To him the word whole is probably more of an emotional intensifier, meaning something like this next bit really matters to me. Similarly, how Muslim believers relate to the Qur'an today is code for how Muslims like me do.
So that's his goals. Our goals are simple. We don't think the Qur'an is the word of God, and we think Sardar's attempts to reconcile the text as written with his own liberal views do violence to the text. We seek to establish that the text is a plausible candidate for the kind of treatment that modern theologians give the Bible, but cannot be taken seriously as the word of God, because no conceivable deity would write such a book.
Let's not leave our real motive so ulterior, though. We seek to undermine the idea of revealed truth because we think it's a step towards a planet with no religion on it at all. We've seen it in Britain. True religion, true Book-bashing literalism, is powerful medicine. This new brand, this liberal religion, is more like some kind of homeopathic tincture. It looks like the real thing, but doesn't offer any protection against the epidemic of secularism at all.
So much for problems and goals. What about his methods? And ours? More on that later in the week.
The hajj
This week we're talking about the hajj, or pilgrimage. Sardar's writing about 2:196-203, and his remarks are a useful reminder that monotheists aren't always savage and cruel. Sometimes they're just banal.
It seems to me that in the hajj one of the great enduring philosophical disputes - the supposed contradiction between the collective and the individual that has divided societies and been responsible for some of the greatest atrocities of history - is dissolved or rather resolved as an illusory distinction. All people are individual and unique but necessarily and inevitably must live within communities, in human groupings among and with other people. We are faced not with a contradiction but with realities that must be balanced, and in being conscious of God, the creator and judge of all, we find the understanding and guidance to effect this balance. It is not just the mass of humanity gathered together that makes the hajj such a moving, humbling and inspiring experience. It is the profundity of the way of thinking about our relationship to God, to other people and ourselves it teaches.
So his religious contemplation has revealed to him, and he's revealed to us, that society is a balance between the needs of the many and the needs of the individual. Has he made plans to make this vital insight into human affairs better known? Will there be a press conference?
There's a bit at the end of the post which may come as a surprise to some people. During this second stay in Muna, the pilgrims sacrifice an animal. Say what? It's a remarkable thing, that such a seemingly pagan act should survive in the rituals of the most anti-pagan religion in the world.
A Muslim colleague once told me that children are also required to give animals up for sacrifice. Apparently they are encouraged to build up a relationship with a lamb, visiting it and feeding it, and the lamb is then slaughtered in front of them. This is supposed to teach the child about the importance of giving things up for God, and is associated with the story of Abraham being prepared to sacrifice his son. It still amazes me that there are British children out there who are occasionally required to put down their Gameboys and go and watch a pet being killed.
There's nothing else here of note, so it gives me the opportunity to talk about an exchange in last week's comments.
It came up in the discussion of jihad. I didn't post, I was having a week off, but I did put in a comment. It was about one of my personal bete noires, the way that religious people talk about their religion's official version of events as if it was confirmed history. Sardar does this all the time, but this post was an adventurous foray into the world of the unverifiable even by his standards. I said this.
I ask again - is there any independent historical confirmation that any of these events even took place?
If not, you're judging these events based purely on victors' history. It's like trying to understand the Russian revolution when the only accounts you have are the ones written by Lenin and Trotsky.
So far so unremarkable, you might have thought, but it earned this reply from Rosalinda, which I think gives us a useful insight into the moderate religious mind.
Independent sources for history? You mean like any sources which bashed Muhammed and Islam from beginning to end? So if there are none then it means the entire Islamic history is a huge lie because it was written by the "victors"? In that case Muhammed and Muslims deserve unbounded admiration for managing this exploit that noone in history managed to do no matter how powerful and mighty they grew to become. What about the sources which bash Muhammed and Islam, why should they be more trusted? They could have been motivated by simple hatred, jalousy and meanness. History, like holy books, can be interpreted in anyway the reader feels "right" or suits their own subjective opinion. In any case, Muslims believe in the authenticity of their history and they have reliable sources they trust. If none of these sources can be singled out as giving them plenty of excuse for illegitimate violence (and that is a fact), then I don't see what the fuss non-Muslims are making is about.
I responded with this.
By independent sources, I mean any non-Muslim sources. It's a perfectly standard historical question. It doesn't mean that Muslim sources would be excluded, just that their bias (as well as the bias of other sources) would be taken into account.
I can imagine a communist asking me the same question about the Russian Revolution. "Oh, you mean sources attacking us, why would we listen to them?"
We listen to them because without a plurality of historical accounts, history cannot be considered firm. On any other subject than religion, the common sense of this would be obvious. No-one would interpret the English Civil War based purely on the accounts of Oliver Cromwell's official recorders, for instance.
In the field of religious history in particular, one of the main reasons why intellectual Christians have had to move away from a literalist interpretation of the Bible is that other historical data conflicts with it. The Christians may have made a tactical error in locating their source events in the middle of the Roman Empire, rather than an obscure desert backwater.
With religions like Mormonism and the south Pacific cargo cults, we can track the inglorious development of an actual real world religion in recent times. Extrapolating from this observation to history, we can see that religious belief in itself offers no guarantee of historical authenticity.
I've yet to receive a reply, but due to moderation my second comment only appeared this morning, and the discussion has moved on to today's post anyway. This is a problem with the structure of the blog, where the snappy discussion common to Internet debates is made impossible by the interval between comments being added and their appearing. This one went up inside 24 hours, but sometimes it's days.
The reason why I think the exchange is interesting is that it shows the contradictory relationship religious moderates have with the concept of evidence. On the one hand, Rosalinda criticises the (non-existent) alternative sources on the grounds of their bias against Islam, in other words their (hypothetical) failure to consider the facts objectively. She even says that History, like holy books, can be interpreted in any way the reader feels "right" or suits their own subjective opinion.
For religious moderates have taken on board a form of cultural relativism. Rosalinda identifies a problem with history, which is that it's hard to reach precise conclusions given that every historian approaches a problem with their own preconceptions, and uses that to undermine the very idea of secular historical scholarship.
But then she says In any case, Muslims believe in the authenticity of their history and they have reliable sources they trust. This is a direct contradiction of her previous sentence.
Having used relativism for the purpose she requires of it, she abandons it when it comes to analysing her own beliefs. The fact that Muslims believe, for her, is apparently enough to make a source reliable. As usual, belief becomes evidence for itself.
So this approach is contradictory, but it's also plain wrong. History isn't just about perspective. We know that Winston Churchill existed because we've got film of him. We know that Henry VII existed, because we've got a wide variety of sources that refer to him, written by friends and enemies. We can even claim to understand the broad historical facts regarding his divorce with Katherine of Aragon, again because they are commonly agreed by all factions.
We don't know that Mohammed existed, because we don't have that body of evidence. He could just as easily be a composite of various figures, united in one man by the famous posthumous committee. We certainly don't know anything about the actual historical relationship between the Muslims and the people around them, because we don't have external confirmation of any of it, and without a plurality of sources we can't assert reliable historical truth.
Not that historical truth seems to be a crucial issue for her. If none of these sources can be singled out as giving them plenty of excuse for illegitimate violence (and that is a fact), then I don't see what the fuss non-Muslims are making is about, she says.
This reminds me of abugaafar's remarks last week, enthusiastically picked up by his allies, including Sardar. I said my piece on that last week, but this is part of the same argument. History, like Qur'anic exegesis, isn't about propping up or undermining beliefs. It's about finding out the truth. To the extent that it's being done with the goal of proving a position, it's being done badly. If a historical account or a scriptural analysis is problematic, then those problems should be aired, and the question of motives shouldn't come into it.
For light relief, we turn to ummmahmed. Most of the Wars that Islam fought were for Defensive purposes and nver wars of Aggression, he says.
That's some defending, that is. Just think, they started in Arabia, they fought a series of defensive battles and by the end of it they had an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Gobi desert. A thousand years later, the Ottomans were still fending off aggressors outside the gates of Vienna.
I just wish we'd had more Muslims at Dunkirk. We'd have defended our way to Berlin before the autumn.
It seems to me that in the hajj one of the great enduring philosophical disputes - the supposed contradiction between the collective and the individual that has divided societies and been responsible for some of the greatest atrocities of history - is dissolved or rather resolved as an illusory distinction. All people are individual and unique but necessarily and inevitably must live within communities, in human groupings among and with other people. We are faced not with a contradiction but with realities that must be balanced, and in being conscious of God, the creator and judge of all, we find the understanding and guidance to effect this balance. It is not just the mass of humanity gathered together that makes the hajj such a moving, humbling and inspiring experience. It is the profundity of the way of thinking about our relationship to God, to other people and ourselves it teaches.
So his religious contemplation has revealed to him, and he's revealed to us, that society is a balance between the needs of the many and the needs of the individual. Has he made plans to make this vital insight into human affairs better known? Will there be a press conference?
There's a bit at the end of the post which may come as a surprise to some people. During this second stay in Muna, the pilgrims sacrifice an animal. Say what? It's a remarkable thing, that such a seemingly pagan act should survive in the rituals of the most anti-pagan religion in the world.
A Muslim colleague once told me that children are also required to give animals up for sacrifice. Apparently they are encouraged to build up a relationship with a lamb, visiting it and feeding it, and the lamb is then slaughtered in front of them. This is supposed to teach the child about the importance of giving things up for God, and is associated with the story of Abraham being prepared to sacrifice his son. It still amazes me that there are British children out there who are occasionally required to put down their Gameboys and go and watch a pet being killed.
There's nothing else here of note, so it gives me the opportunity to talk about an exchange in last week's comments.
It came up in the discussion of jihad. I didn't post, I was having a week off, but I did put in a comment. It was about one of my personal bete noires, the way that religious people talk about their religion's official version of events as if it was confirmed history. Sardar does this all the time, but this post was an adventurous foray into the world of the unverifiable even by his standards. I said this.
I ask again - is there any independent historical confirmation that any of these events even took place?
If not, you're judging these events based purely on victors' history. It's like trying to understand the Russian revolution when the only accounts you have are the ones written by Lenin and Trotsky.
So far so unremarkable, you might have thought, but it earned this reply from Rosalinda, which I think gives us a useful insight into the moderate religious mind.
Independent sources for history? You mean like any sources which bashed Muhammed and Islam from beginning to end? So if there are none then it means the entire Islamic history is a huge lie because it was written by the "victors"? In that case Muhammed and Muslims deserve unbounded admiration for managing this exploit that noone in history managed to do no matter how powerful and mighty they grew to become. What about the sources which bash Muhammed and Islam, why should they be more trusted? They could have been motivated by simple hatred, jalousy and meanness. History, like holy books, can be interpreted in anyway the reader feels "right" or suits their own subjective opinion. In any case, Muslims believe in the authenticity of their history and they have reliable sources they trust. If none of these sources can be singled out as giving them plenty of excuse for illegitimate violence (and that is a fact), then I don't see what the fuss non-Muslims are making is about.
I responded with this.
By independent sources, I mean any non-Muslim sources. It's a perfectly standard historical question. It doesn't mean that Muslim sources would be excluded, just that their bias (as well as the bias of other sources) would be taken into account.
I can imagine a communist asking me the same question about the Russian Revolution. "Oh, you mean sources attacking us, why would we listen to them?"
We listen to them because without a plurality of historical accounts, history cannot be considered firm. On any other subject than religion, the common sense of this would be obvious. No-one would interpret the English Civil War based purely on the accounts of Oliver Cromwell's official recorders, for instance.
In the field of religious history in particular, one of the main reasons why intellectual Christians have had to move away from a literalist interpretation of the Bible is that other historical data conflicts with it. The Christians may have made a tactical error in locating their source events in the middle of the Roman Empire, rather than an obscure desert backwater.
With religions like Mormonism and the south Pacific cargo cults, we can track the inglorious development of an actual real world religion in recent times. Extrapolating from this observation to history, we can see that religious belief in itself offers no guarantee of historical authenticity.
I've yet to receive a reply, but due to moderation my second comment only appeared this morning, and the discussion has moved on to today's post anyway. This is a problem with the structure of the blog, where the snappy discussion common to Internet debates is made impossible by the interval between comments being added and their appearing. This one went up inside 24 hours, but sometimes it's days.
The reason why I think the exchange is interesting is that it shows the contradictory relationship religious moderates have with the concept of evidence. On the one hand, Rosalinda criticises the (non-existent) alternative sources on the grounds of their bias against Islam, in other words their (hypothetical) failure to consider the facts objectively. She even says that History, like holy books, can be interpreted in any way the reader feels "right" or suits their own subjective opinion.
For religious moderates have taken on board a form of cultural relativism. Rosalinda identifies a problem with history, which is that it's hard to reach precise conclusions given that every historian approaches a problem with their own preconceptions, and uses that to undermine the very idea of secular historical scholarship.
But then she says In any case, Muslims believe in the authenticity of their history and they have reliable sources they trust. This is a direct contradiction of her previous sentence.
Having used relativism for the purpose she requires of it, she abandons it when it comes to analysing her own beliefs. The fact that Muslims believe, for her, is apparently enough to make a source reliable. As usual, belief becomes evidence for itself.
So this approach is contradictory, but it's also plain wrong. History isn't just about perspective. We know that Winston Churchill existed because we've got film of him. We know that Henry VII existed, because we've got a wide variety of sources that refer to him, written by friends and enemies. We can even claim to understand the broad historical facts regarding his divorce with Katherine of Aragon, again because they are commonly agreed by all factions.
We don't know that Mohammed existed, because we don't have that body of evidence. He could just as easily be a composite of various figures, united in one man by the famous posthumous committee. We certainly don't know anything about the actual historical relationship between the Muslims and the people around them, because we don't have external confirmation of any of it, and without a plurality of sources we can't assert reliable historical truth.
Not that historical truth seems to be a crucial issue for her. If none of these sources can be singled out as giving them plenty of excuse for illegitimate violence (and that is a fact), then I don't see what the fuss non-Muslims are making is about, she says.
This reminds me of abugaafar's remarks last week, enthusiastically picked up by his allies, including Sardar. I said my piece on that last week, but this is part of the same argument. History, like Qur'anic exegesis, isn't about propping up or undermining beliefs. It's about finding out the truth. To the extent that it's being done with the goal of proving a position, it's being done badly. If a historical account or a scriptural analysis is problematic, then those problems should be aired, and the question of motives shouldn't come into it.
For light relief, we turn to ummmahmed. Most of the Wars that Islam fought were for Defensive purposes and nver wars of Aggression, he says.
That's some defending, that is. Just think, they started in Arabia, they fought a series of defensive battles and by the end of it they had an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Gobi desert. A thousand years later, the Ottomans were still fending off aggressors outside the gates of Vienna.
I just wish we'd had more Muslims at Dunkirk. We'd have defended our way to Berlin before the autumn.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Jihad
I'm starting to find this whole thing a bit dispiriting.
Partly it's the appalling quality of argument. Here's an example, from abugaafar in the Comments.
It is a supreme paradox that liberal thinkers who are most determined to refute Mr Sardar's interpretations of the Qur'an are trying, in effect, to ram Islam into the same narrow mould favoured by the most illiberal Muslim zealots. It is as if they wish to agree with the zealots that the only true Islam is an illiberal Islam.
Now I'm sure you can all see the problem with this argument, apart from the misuse of the word paradox. The problem is that it doesn't refute any of our arguments. It simply describes our position, that Sardar's liberal interpretation of the Qur'an is contradicted by the text itself, in negative language.
If Sardar's version of Islam is reasonable, then we stand indicted. If on the other hand it's a gross distortion, however admirable his motives, then we do not. The argument is clearly about that, and questions about motive have no bearing on the central point. This is surely self-evident. Otherwise we would have to let him get away with basic errors just because he meant well.
One can hardly blame abugaafar, who is just a visitor adding a comment, but Sardar apparently entirely fails to notice the paucity of the argument as well. He quotes the comment approvingly, and adds that some bloggers here insist in framing the Qur'an in a particular way. Notice the dread word framing. It's a useful device where close textual analysis can be written off as just an interpretation. He's previously said that he doesn't have time to respond to our analysis in detail, yet he's quite happy to waste time on an argument that isn't an analysis at all.
Honestly, Guardian Editor. We realise you had to use a Muslim, but couldn't you have found an intellectual? Sardar says he has a scientific background - didn't they teach him how to reason?
But that's not the main problem. The main problem is that the whole exercise forces me, week after week, to drag myself back to the Qur'an.
I think it's starting to have an effect. I can feel my spirits drooping as the drip, drip, drip of horror corrodes my higher faculties. The same thing happened with The Bonfire of the Vanities, although Tom Wolfe was doing it on purpose.
So I'm having a week off. I have a backlog of stuff to do for work, and there are plenty of people to carry on the struggle. David Pavett, atr007, Dr Jazz, Miskatonic, they'll all carry the argument just fine without me.
When not working on session plans and handouts, I shall go and read some Ovid. He's ironic where the Qur'an is pompous and subtle where the Qur'an is banal. Also his cheerful brand of promiscuous polytheism will make a refreshing change. I think I might start offering Ovidotherapy classes to Islam survivors, to help them with the recuperative process.
One quick quibble, though. How do you square Islam's supposed opposition to religious violence with the murder of the calf worshippers (2:54)? Sardar skipped this appalling judicial murder when we passed that way a few weeks ago, presumably hoping we wouldn't notice. We did though.
Partly it's the appalling quality of argument. Here's an example, from abugaafar in the Comments.
It is a supreme paradox that liberal thinkers who are most determined to refute Mr Sardar's interpretations of the Qur'an are trying, in effect, to ram Islam into the same narrow mould favoured by the most illiberal Muslim zealots. It is as if they wish to agree with the zealots that the only true Islam is an illiberal Islam.
Now I'm sure you can all see the problem with this argument, apart from the misuse of the word paradox. The problem is that it doesn't refute any of our arguments. It simply describes our position, that Sardar's liberal interpretation of the Qur'an is contradicted by the text itself, in negative language.
If Sardar's version of Islam is reasonable, then we stand indicted. If on the other hand it's a gross distortion, however admirable his motives, then we do not. The argument is clearly about that, and questions about motive have no bearing on the central point. This is surely self-evident. Otherwise we would have to let him get away with basic errors just because he meant well.
One can hardly blame abugaafar, who is just a visitor adding a comment, but Sardar apparently entirely fails to notice the paucity of the argument as well. He quotes the comment approvingly, and adds that some bloggers here insist in framing the Qur'an in a particular way. Notice the dread word framing. It's a useful device where close textual analysis can be written off as just an interpretation. He's previously said that he doesn't have time to respond to our analysis in detail, yet he's quite happy to waste time on an argument that isn't an analysis at all.
Honestly, Guardian Editor. We realise you had to use a Muslim, but couldn't you have found an intellectual? Sardar says he has a scientific background - didn't they teach him how to reason?
But that's not the main problem. The main problem is that the whole exercise forces me, week after week, to drag myself back to the Qur'an.
I think it's starting to have an effect. I can feel my spirits drooping as the drip, drip, drip of horror corrodes my higher faculties. The same thing happened with The Bonfire of the Vanities, although Tom Wolfe was doing it on purpose.
So I'm having a week off. I have a backlog of stuff to do for work, and there are plenty of people to carry on the struggle. David Pavett, atr007, Dr Jazz, Miskatonic, they'll all carry the argument just fine without me.
When not working on session plans and handouts, I shall go and read some Ovid. He's ironic where the Qur'an is pompous and subtle where the Qur'an is banal. Also his cheerful brand of promiscuous polytheism will make a refreshing change. I think I might start offering Ovidotherapy classes to Islam survivors, to help them with the recuperative process.
One quick quibble, though. How do you square Islam's supposed opposition to religious violence with the murder of the calf worshippers (2:54)? Sardar skipped this appalling judicial murder when we passed that way a few weeks ago, presumably hoping we wouldn't notice. We did though.
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