In this blog, part 2 on doubt, Sardar makes some throw away remarks about atheists, backed up by some quotes from the Qur'an. Lest we forget, in his world that's a form of evidence. It's perhaps worth listing the verses he quotes, and putting them in context. In particular, let's see what happens to the people the verses refer to.
So, we can be arrogant, apparently, us atheist types. He quotes sura 35, verses 42-43 (but when a warner came to them, it has only increased their flight (from righteousness), On account of their arrogance in the land and their plotting of Evil, but the plotting of Evil will hem in only the authors thereof), sura 39 verse 59 (Nay, but there came to thee my Signs, and thou didst reject them: thou wast Haughty, and became one of those who reject faith!) and sura 45 verse 31 (But as to those who rejected Allah, to them will be said: "Were not Our Signs rehearsed to you? But ye were arrogant, and were a people given to sin!).
We can also become self-satisfied and engage in self-exaltation , which is apparently best illustrated by sura 27 verse 14 (And they rejected those Signs in iniquity and arrogance, though their souls were convinced thereof: so see what was the end of those who acted corruptly! ) and sura 38 verse 2 (But the Unbelievers (are steeped) in self-glory and Separatism).
Finally, we try to privilege our own position in society through political expediency or opportunism. Here Sardar cites the first verse quoted above again (35: 42-43).
According to Sardar, atheism is not in itself a problem for Islam. He has many atheist friends, he says ( he consistently reminds us of his liberalism and pluaralism, and it's not a bad example for the other god-botherers). However, he does specifically include his friends in his criticisms.
And yet, if you read the verses immediately following the ones he's offered, it's clear what happens to arrogant, self-satisfied, self-exalting people in the end. On the Day of Judgment wilt thou see those who told lies against Allah;- their faces will be turned black; Is there not in Hell an abode for the Haughty? (39: 60). This Day We will forget you as ye forgot the meeting of this Day of yours! and your abode is the Fire, and no helpers have ye! (45: 34)
Each of the five verses quoted follows up with references to punishment, the two above with the usual burning of skin, dismissed by Sardar as a metaphor, yet constantly, exhaustingly repeated again and again throughout the entire book. If it is a metaphor, it's clearly a metaphor for something extremely unpleasant.
You might think I've been a little harsh in this blog, too mocking, too unwilling to compromise, too set on my Western rationalist course. Well, I can make one claim in my defense, which is that I've never actually threatened anybody. Disagreeing with me does have a consequence. You will be vigorously debated. If you've annoyed me, you'll know about it. But it stops there. Arrogance? Self-exaltation? Stop with the playground taunts of divine retribution, and we can talk about it.
Not that Sardar explicitly threatens anyone (although he has referred to the inevitability of divine punishment on Judgement Day in previous posts). It's just that every time he tries to strike a liberal pose, the fundamental illiberalism of his own book rises up to undercut him.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Al-Baqara 1-7: The Qur'an and doubt
In this, unnumbered blog, we are into the second and longest sura, the cow (Al-Baqara).
Sardar says
The straightforward declaration that this is God's word recognises the human capacity to doubt. Throughout, the Qur'an takes doubt seriously. It is presented as a continuum which stretches from being an essential aid to belief all the way to a blinkered determination not to believe under any circumstances. Doubt is a function of our free will; we are free to accept or reject belief in God who speaks to us through the Qur'an. Repeatedly, the Qur'an engages with various kinds of doubt. It offers arguments to test our doubts and arrive, by a rational process, at conviction in the uniqueness of the Qur'an, the truth of its origin and the guidance it contains. For example, a little later in al-Baqara we read: "If you have doubts about the revelation we have sent down to our servant, then produce a single surah like it." (23) The distinctive use of Arabic language in the Qur'an, unlike any other Arabic text, makes it inimitable and is testimony to its authorship, to its being a work that in structure and scope is beyond human capability. 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.
After such a paean to the open-minded virtues of the Qur'an, it seems almost cruel to quote the first verse of the sura. Still, sometimes you have to be cruel to be - well, sometimes you just have to be cruel.
This is the Book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear Allah.
Well there's a clear statement of the value of doubt. And trust me, the Qur'an is like that all the way through. The sheer mental effort involved in pretending it's some kind of invitation to a debate is impressive in itself.
He says that this is the Koran taking doubt seriously. Well, Ahab was serious about whales, but that's a limited comfort from the whales' point of view.
As must be immediately apparent to any genuinely disinterested observer, the verse clearly delineates an exclusion zone, within which there is no room for doubt. It doesn't say you can't dispute the meaning of the book, but once it's agreed what the book says, there's no room for doubt about that. Genuine, open ended, scientific, secular, Enlightenment doubt? No chance.
Bizarrely, he then claims that this sura is so sublime, so impossibly complex that it is in itself evidence of divine authorship.
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. I'm looking forward to watching him trying to demonstrate that. I'm not the only one on his case, and he may be surprised to learn what happens when text is examined by some genuinely doubting minds.
The rest is mush. He's revealing at one moment, when he says The purpose of the Qur'an, we read, is to be a guidance to those described as muttaqi, often translated as God fearing. However, I prefer the translations that give this as 'God conscious'.
I bet you do. Unfortunately, there's no trace of that liberalism in any of the three translations offered in the Koran he himself links to. They render the text as those who fear Allah, those who ward off evil and those who guard against evil. It's nice that a few modern people translate God fearing as God conscious, but it clearly isn't the mainstream.
Otherwise, it's stuff about the relationship with God, not hugely different in tone or sentiment from the kind of thing you'd get in most Church of England pulpits on a Sunday morning. And if you can wade through it, it does yield us an insight.
For it shows up why the Sardars and Buntings of this world fail to understand doubt so completely. They've never lived in a world of radical doubt, a world where everything is genuinely up for grabs, where it takes the most concrete of evidence to reach the most tentative conclusion, and where paradigms can topple at any moment. They pile mush on mush to deduce more mush, and they genuinely can't see what a hash they're making, because the need to produce something rigorous never crosses their minds. They're so far from a modern understanding of doubt, they still haven't caught up with Socrates. They don't know that they don't know.
Sardar says
The straightforward declaration that this is God's word recognises the human capacity to doubt. Throughout, the Qur'an takes doubt seriously. It is presented as a continuum which stretches from being an essential aid to belief all the way to a blinkered determination not to believe under any circumstances. Doubt is a function of our free will; we are free to accept or reject belief in God who speaks to us through the Qur'an. Repeatedly, the Qur'an engages with various kinds of doubt. It offers arguments to test our doubts and arrive, by a rational process, at conviction in the uniqueness of the Qur'an, the truth of its origin and the guidance it contains. For example, a little later in al-Baqara we read: "If you have doubts about the revelation we have sent down to our servant, then produce a single surah like it." (23) The distinctive use of Arabic language in the Qur'an, unlike any other Arabic text, makes it inimitable and is testimony to its authorship, to its being a work that in structure and scope is beyond human capability. 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.
After such a paean to the open-minded virtues of the Qur'an, it seems almost cruel to quote the first verse of the sura. Still, sometimes you have to be cruel to be - well, sometimes you just have to be cruel.
This is the Book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear Allah.
Well there's a clear statement of the value of doubt. And trust me, the Qur'an is like that all the way through. The sheer mental effort involved in pretending it's some kind of invitation to a debate is impressive in itself.
He says that this is the Koran taking doubt seriously. Well, Ahab was serious about whales, but that's a limited comfort from the whales' point of view.
As must be immediately apparent to any genuinely disinterested observer, the verse clearly delineates an exclusion zone, within which there is no room for doubt. It doesn't say you can't dispute the meaning of the book, but once it's agreed what the book says, there's no room for doubt about that. Genuine, open ended, scientific, secular, Enlightenment doubt? No chance.
Bizarrely, he then claims that this sura is so sublime, so impossibly complex that it is in itself evidence of divine authorship.
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. I'm looking forward to watching him trying to demonstrate that. I'm not the only one on his case, and he may be surprised to learn what happens when text is examined by some genuinely doubting minds.
The rest is mush. He's revealing at one moment, when he says The purpose of the Qur'an, we read, is to be a guidance to those described as muttaqi, often translated as God fearing. However, I prefer the translations that give this as 'God conscious'.
I bet you do. Unfortunately, there's no trace of that liberalism in any of the three translations offered in the Koran he himself links to. They render the text as those who fear Allah, those who ward off evil and those who guard against evil. It's nice that a few modern people translate God fearing as God conscious, but it clearly isn't the mainstream.
Otherwise, it's stuff about the relationship with God, not hugely different in tone or sentiment from the kind of thing you'd get in most Church of England pulpits on a Sunday morning. And if you can wade through it, it does yield us an insight.
For it shows up why the Sardars and Buntings of this world fail to understand doubt so completely. They've never lived in a world of radical doubt, a world where everything is genuinely up for grabs, where it takes the most concrete of evidence to reach the most tentative conclusion, and where paradigms can topple at any moment. They pile mush on mush to deduce more mush, and they genuinely can't see what a hash they're making, because the need to produce something rigorous never crosses their minds. They're so far from a modern understanding of doubt, they still haven't caught up with Socrates. They don't know that they don't know.
Blog 5: Twists and turns on the straight path
So far as I can tell, blog 5 consists entirely of platitudes, knitted together into a kind of cosmic Arran jumper. I've read through it several times in search of anything concrete enough to actually argue about, but so far without success.
The comments are open. If anyone can shed any light, any light at all, they're entirely welcome to do so there. Just remember, think of the children. I believe that children are the future, so teach them well and let them show the way.
You've got to search for the hero inside yourself ...
The comments are open. If anyone can shed any light, any light at all, they're entirely welcome to do so there. Just remember, think of the children. I believe that children are the future, so teach them well and let them show the way.
You've got to search for the hero inside yourself ...
Blog 4: The Opening - my explanation
Blog 4 is about the first seven verses of the Qu'ran, which in the translations Sardar uses go like this. Each line is given three different translations.
Let me help. No honestly, it's the least I can do. Let's start by reducing the three versions to one and taking out the repetition.
Now let's remove the pointless capital letters, replace the deliberately anachronistic words with modern synonyms and tidy up the phrasing.
I left the last bit, because that kind of thing only really sounds right when you phrase it anachronistically. To be fair, it's an entire sura in which no-one is explicitly burnt at all, metaphorically or otherwise.
Except that as Sardar says, you have to read every bit in relation to every other bit, so given all the burning in the rest of it it's fairly clear what wrath means. I'll have (much) more to say on this subject. And just saying it's a metaphor won't cover it, because I'll be arguing that specific passages very clearly aren't.
And Sardar himself has limits to his liberalism. As he says here
There will be a day when all different worlds will return to their source, the forgiving and just Lord, to receive their individual share of reward and punishment.
So don't go thinking he's come further than he has. I'm sure he'd fit in just fine in Texas.
To go back to the seven verses, though, what's so impenetrable about that? I've stripped it of its poetic phrasing, but that's all.
And maybe that's it. Maybe it isn't about the actual meaning of the words. Maybe it's about the rhetorical impact. Sardar certainly waxes lyrical about it on that level. Which makes sense if you remember that Muhammad was illiterate, and delivered the text orally. Assuming he ever did of course.
And taken in context with the rest of the book, there are endless reams of possibilities. Why a certain word in one context, a slightly different word in another? Why repetition in one place, and not in another?
But these are games you can play with any text. Postmodernists delight themselves for hours, taking bus timetables and phone books, and weaving fabrics of meaning from them. It's not without its rewards, but the moment you start playing you move away from ultimate meaning. That's the whole point of it.
And this is the problem with the metaphorical spiritual approach. It borrows postmodern techniques for its purposes, but it can't face seeing them through. To make the attribution of superhuman origins stick, you'd have to show that a religious text was rich in meaning beyond the possibility of human authorship, and humans are so good at that kind of thing it's an unachievable goal.
It's particularly true of this text, when the surface meaning is so clear. God made the world, various things about God are admirable, we don't worship anyone else, and so on. There's really no reason to be so perplexed.
In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.
Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds,
All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds.
Most Gracious, Most Merciful;
The Beneficent, the Merciful.
The Beneficent, the Merciful.
Master of the Day of Judgment.
Master of the Day of Judgment,
Master of the Day of Judgment.
Thee do we worship, and Thine aid we seek.
Thee (alone) we worship; Thee (alone) we ask for help.
Thee do we serve and Thee do we beseech for help.
Show us the straight path,
Keep us on the right path.
The path of those whom Thou hast favoured; Not the (path) of those who earn Thine anger nor of those who go astray.
The path of those upon whom Thou hast bestowed favors. Not (the path) of those upon whom Thy wrath is brought down, nor of those who go astray.
Let me help. No honestly, it's the least I can do. Let's start by reducing the three versions to one and taking out the repetition.
In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful, the Beneficent.
Master of the Day of Judgment.
Thee alone do we worship, and thee alone we ask for help.
Show us the straight way, the right path.
Now let's remove the pointless capital letters, replace the deliberately anachronistic words with modern synonyms and tidy up the phrasing.
In the name of Allah, most gracious and merciful, who does good.
I left the last bit, because that kind of thing only really sounds right when you phrase it anachronistically. To be fair, it's an entire sura in which no-one is explicitly burnt at all, metaphorically or otherwise.
Except that as Sardar says, you have to read every bit in relation to every other bit, so given all the burning in the rest of it it's fairly clear what wrath means. I'll have (much) more to say on this subject. And just saying it's a metaphor won't cover it, because I'll be arguing that specific passages very clearly aren't.
And Sardar himself has limits to his liberalism. As he says here
There will be a day when all different worlds will return to their source, the forgiving and just Lord, to receive their individual share of reward and punishment.
So don't go thinking he's come further than he has. I'm sure he'd fit in just fine in Texas.
To go back to the seven verses, though, what's so impenetrable about that? I've stripped it of its poetic phrasing, but that's all.
And maybe that's it. Maybe it isn't about the actual meaning of the words. Maybe it's about the rhetorical impact. Sardar certainly waxes lyrical about it on that level. Which makes sense if you remember that Muhammad was illiterate, and delivered the text orally. Assuming he ever did of course.
And taken in context with the rest of the book, there are endless reams of possibilities. Why a certain word in one context, a slightly different word in another? Why repetition in one place, and not in another?
But these are games you can play with any text. Postmodernists delight themselves for hours, taking bus timetables and phone books, and weaving fabrics of meaning from them. It's not without its rewards, but the moment you start playing you move away from ultimate meaning. That's the whole point of it.
And this is the problem with the metaphorical spiritual approach. It borrows postmodern techniques for its purposes, but it can't face seeing them through. To make the attribution of superhuman origins stick, you'd have to show that a religious text was rich in meaning beyond the possibility of human authorship, and humans are so good at that kind of thing it's an unachievable goal.
It's particularly true of this text, when the surface meaning is so clear. God made the world, various things about God are admirable, we don't worship anyone else, and so on. There's really no reason to be so perplexed.
Blog 3: Reading and interpretation
I've not much to say about blog 3, except that it would be nice if the majority of religious people were like this. The real argument starts when we get onto solid topics.
Blog 2: Nature and style of the Qur'an
In blog 2, Sardar runs through some of the basics, and introduces a little history. The important thing for our purposes is this. Muhammad was illiterate, and many of the suras were passed on by oral tradition, in a manner analagous to say the Iliad or the Mabinogion.
To quote Sardar
Othman, a companion of Muhammad and his third successor as leader of the Muslim community established a committee charged with assembling an authoritative text of the Qur'an, to be written down exactly as the prophet had recited it.
In other words the great book of Muhammad wasn't even assembled until after his death. It was actually compiled from an oral tradition, and by Sardar's own admission there were different versions of many texts. And yet Muslims are required to believe that the result is a perfect, entirely accurate rendering of the original, and somehow dovetails perfectly with the etheral, Platonic version which is believed to have existed before the universe was created. This is as ludicrous, though not as offensive, as any number of virgins in heaven. I mean, perfection by committee. Have these people never been to a meeting?
Sardar appears to believe this himself. To the external observer, it must surely seem massively implausible. Imagine trying to assemble an original Iliad from the multitude of available versions after Homer had died.
It is often argued that the Koran has a historicity lacking in the Bible, that its texts are more reliable. In the face of the facts, even as attested to in the official Muslim version, this surely cannot be sustained.
He also lays out that official version of Muslim history as if it was uncontroversial fact. He says that after Muhammad's death the Muslim community expanded, sliding gently over the wars of military conquest which made this possible. The lack of any reliable impartial source for any of this is not mentioned.
But it's the maculate origin of the text which is my main concern in this post. As I've previously argued and will continue to argue, it's possible to create a suitable religion for the modern world, if you really must. You simply accept that holy books are written by people, for people, and contain a mixture of good and bad advice. Give to the poor, but don't hit your wife. God will love you, but he won't burn them. It's futile and pointless, but comparatively harmless when you consider the alternative.
But if you want to have a perfect holy book, an immaculate work of God, then it should be proof to all criticism, and no book can take that kind of pressure.
To quote Sardar
Othman, a companion of Muhammad and his third successor as leader of the Muslim community established a committee charged with assembling an authoritative text of the Qur'an, to be written down exactly as the prophet had recited it.
In other words the great book of Muhammad wasn't even assembled until after his death. It was actually compiled from an oral tradition, and by Sardar's own admission there were different versions of many texts. And yet Muslims are required to believe that the result is a perfect, entirely accurate rendering of the original, and somehow dovetails perfectly with the etheral, Platonic version which is believed to have existed before the universe was created. This is as ludicrous, though not as offensive, as any number of virgins in heaven. I mean, perfection by committee. Have these people never been to a meeting?
Sardar appears to believe this himself. To the external observer, it must surely seem massively implausible. Imagine trying to assemble an original Iliad from the multitude of available versions after Homer had died.
It is often argued that the Koran has a historicity lacking in the Bible, that its texts are more reliable. In the face of the facts, even as attested to in the official Muslim version, this surely cannot be sustained.
He also lays out that official version of Muslim history as if it was uncontroversial fact. He says that after Muhammad's death the Muslim community expanded, sliding gently over the wars of military conquest which made this possible. The lack of any reliable impartial source for any of this is not mentioned.
But it's the maculate origin of the text which is my main concern in this post. As I've previously argued and will continue to argue, it's possible to create a suitable religion for the modern world, if you really must. You simply accept that holy books are written by people, for people, and contain a mixture of good and bad advice. Give to the poor, but don't hit your wife. God will love you, but he won't burn them. It's futile and pointless, but comparatively harmless when you consider the alternative.
But if you want to have a perfect holy book, an immaculate work of God, then it should be proof to all criticism, and no book can take that kind of pressure.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Shouting across the void
I emailed Sardar with this.
and he responded with this patronising little snippet.
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?
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?
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Blog 1: The Qur'an and me
Blog 1: The Qur'an and me
I think Sardar may have meant us to be charmed by this rather than chilled. He starts off his analysis of the Qur'an by talking about his introduction to it. It all started with his mother, who started reading it to him when he was nearly six. Apparently this is considered a little late - four to five is the standard. Soon after, he started at the local madrassa, run by the man with a big stick. Wherever religion thrives, you'll normally find a man with a big stick.
At nine he moved to London, which is probably why he's managed to achieve as much independence of thought as he has. The impact of suddenly being dropped in a successful secular society should never be underestimated. If Britain had been less racist and more welcoming, Pakistani and Bangla Deshi immigrants might have freed themselves from their religious shackles completely by now. Instead things are actually getting worse. Talk about missed opportunities.
Just to serve as a counterpoint, here's a history of the religion in my upbringing.
My parents weren't religious, but somehow never felt the need to impose that on me. On no occasion did my mother sit me on her knee and make me go through the simpler ideas of Bertrand Russell. No man with a stick ever intimidated me into the study of Hume or Wittgenstein. Learning The Selfish Gene by heart would have earned me a visit to a counsellor rather than a pile of barfi.
I had religious teachers, and religious scoutmasters, and they did their best. Somehow though, in the absence of any power to compel, it was all rather futile.
And that's the point. Religion transmits itself from host to target by striking early. You do meet the odd exception, but by and large British people aren't religious unless their parents were. Break the cycle, force religious ideas to compete with secular ones on a level playing field, and metaphysics loses its sting.
Which is why they take such pains to make sure that doesn't happen. What was done to Sardar reminds me of The Truman Show. As Ed Harris says at one point, we accept the reality we are presented with. A dose of mother love, a dose of fear, and the Stockholm Syndrome does the rest.
Really, we should be impressed by Sardar, despite his pointless, tedious metaphysical and metaphorical gibbering. At every turn, you can see the mental struggle. How does a compassionate and humane man, shackled by family, imam and early environment to a book of staggering savagery and crudity, create for himself a metaphorical language to help him square the circle of his contradictory life? I actually think he's done very well.
But it doesn't make it true. And Sardar consistently refers to the Islamic world as if it were some kind of evidence for itself. In our exchange of comments, he tries to refute my argument by saying that if it were true, an Islamic scholar would have pointed it out by now.
And yet this, his very first post, accounts for the persistence of that world. Why are there so many Muslims? Because the children of Muslim parents are made into Muslims before they're old enough to think for themselves, and they repeat the process on their own children.
Of course, the fact that a belief system has a mechanism for transmitting itself successfully down the generations doesn't in itself refute that belief system. What is does do is account for that belief system's success, without needing to appeal to the metaphysical.
I think Sardar may have meant us to be charmed by this rather than chilled. He starts off his analysis of the Qur'an by talking about his introduction to it. It all started with his mother, who started reading it to him when he was nearly six. Apparently this is considered a little late - four to five is the standard. Soon after, he started at the local madrassa, run by the man with a big stick. Wherever religion thrives, you'll normally find a man with a big stick.
At nine he moved to London, which is probably why he's managed to achieve as much independence of thought as he has. The impact of suddenly being dropped in a successful secular society should never be underestimated. If Britain had been less racist and more welcoming, Pakistani and Bangla Deshi immigrants might have freed themselves from their religious shackles completely by now. Instead things are actually getting worse. Talk about missed opportunities.
Just to serve as a counterpoint, here's a history of the religion in my upbringing.
My parents weren't religious, but somehow never felt the need to impose that on me. On no occasion did my mother sit me on her knee and make me go through the simpler ideas of Bertrand Russell. No man with a stick ever intimidated me into the study of Hume or Wittgenstein. Learning The Selfish Gene by heart would have earned me a visit to a counsellor rather than a pile of barfi.
I had religious teachers, and religious scoutmasters, and they did their best. Somehow though, in the absence of any power to compel, it was all rather futile.
And that's the point. Religion transmits itself from host to target by striking early. You do meet the odd exception, but by and large British people aren't religious unless their parents were. Break the cycle, force religious ideas to compete with secular ones on a level playing field, and metaphysics loses its sting.
Which is why they take such pains to make sure that doesn't happen. What was done to Sardar reminds me of The Truman Show. As Ed Harris says at one point, we accept the reality we are presented with. A dose of mother love, a dose of fear, and the Stockholm Syndrome does the rest.
Really, we should be impressed by Sardar, despite his pointless, tedious metaphysical and metaphorical gibbering. At every turn, you can see the mental struggle. How does a compassionate and humane man, shackled by family, imam and early environment to a book of staggering savagery and crudity, create for himself a metaphorical language to help him square the circle of his contradictory life? I actually think he's done very well.
But it doesn't make it true. And Sardar consistently refers to the Islamic world as if it were some kind of evidence for itself. In our exchange of comments, he tries to refute my argument by saying that if it were true, an Islamic scholar would have pointed it out by now.
And yet this, his very first post, accounts for the persistence of that world. Why are there so many Muslims? Because the children of Muslim parents are made into Muslims before they're old enough to think for themselves, and they repeat the process on their own children.
Of course, the fact that a belief system has a mechanism for transmitting itself successfully down the generations doesn't in itself refute that belief system. What is does do is account for that belief system's success, without needing to appeal to the metaphysical.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Blogging the Qur'an
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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