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.