Sharia and the bishop

Sorry this one's a few days late. I've had a busy week, plus I wanted to give the whole thing a chance to die down before stirring it all up again.

I'm talking about the Archbishop of Canterbury's speech on Sharia law, obviously. Sardar has his say here.

It's alright, I'm not so deluded as to imagine that anything I have to say will have any significant impact on the wider world. Also, I'm actually not planning to write anything too inflamatory.

For what Rowan Williams said bears little resemblance to anything you may have heard about. Far from claiming any kind of religious immunity for criminal acts, his speech focuses mainly on family and in one case employment law. Also, he says that no religious law should be allowed to infringe on liberties guaranteed by British law, and specifically cites the rights of women as an example of this.

And when I think of the life I've led, I'm hardly in a position to accuse anyone else of undermining the nation's respect for the law. I've done plenty of illegal things. I've also done plenty of things I'm ashamed of, although strangely I've never done anything illegal I was ashamed of.

Having said that, Williams does say one absolutely indefensible thing. He's talking about possible grounds for protecting individuals from having to act against their consciences, and he says this.

... any recognition of the need for such sensitivity must also have a recognised means of deciding the relative seriousness of conscience-related claims, a way of distinguishing purely cultural habits from seriously-rooted matters of faith and discipline, and distinguishing uninformed prejudice from religious prescription.

In other words, conscience only counts if it's religious. According to his vision, if I work in a newsagents, and I refuse to sell a copy of the Sun because the pictures in the Sun offend my religious beliefs, then I should be protected against disciplinary action. If I refuse to sell a copy of the Sun because I think it degrades women, I would receive no such protection.

Williams thinks he still lives in a theocracy, and that's because he does. This speech is about his desire to carry on doing so. Dismayed by the threat to the privileged status the Church of England still occupies in our political system, despite the increasingly secular views of the British people, he is seeking to protect it by inviting other religious groups to join him under the legal umbrella. Meanwhile the two thirds of the nation with no religious affiliation at all are left out in the rain.

I have an alternative suggestion for the legal status of religion. I think religions should be treated like any other pressure group. Like Greenpeace, or the National Viewers and Listeners Association. Or like any social or hobbyist group. The State should have no power to prevent Christians, communists or stamp collectors from self-organising, promoting their views and interests and so on, but should offer them no special protection either.

There should be no question of handing state schools over to the communist faith. Derogatory images of penny blacks should be allowed, however offended philatelists may be. David Bellamy should not automatically get seats in an unelected second assembly. And religions should fade into the realm of the private, where they belong.

Sardar talks about uninformed criticism of sharia in the British press, for all the world as if no informed criticism had been offered. He also says that Wiliams was using the subject as a screen for his own concerns, marking a rare moment of harmony between us.

Finally, he unveils his latest borrowing from the world of academe. After mangling chaos theory and quantum physics, he jumps disciplines and borrows from the murky world of post-structuralism. Yes, it's intertextuality. I'm not an expert on semiotics, but as far as I can tell from the discussion and the handy link Sardar provides this just means interpreting a text in relation to another text, which is what I'd always thought it meant from a cursory consideration of the word itself.

Richard Kimber introduced the term, in his analysis of verses 2:21-29, in which he says the author was trying to distance himself from the Jewish creation myth and establish a distinctive Islamic one. Sardar says he likes the idea of using intertextual techniques, but tries to fend off the problematic implication by waving Derrida at it, rather than meeting it head on.

The problematic implication is this. The whole point of comparative analysis is to compare imperfect, human texts. When Kimber says the author is trying to separate himself from Jewish texts, he's talking about Mohammed.

But the Qur'an is supposed to be the word of God. Why would a section of a book written by God have such a human motivation? If God also gave the word to the Jewish people, why would he need to distance himself from his own words? The very idea of analysing the Qur'an in that way places it on the same level as other, mortal books.

It's also supposed to have existed before the universe began, existing separately with God. Why would it have a section about the theological squabbles on one corner of a small planet orbiting a star stuck on the far end of a spiral arm of an entirely unremarkable galaxy?

And come to that, why would the Creator of the universe be so preoccupied with virgins and lewd women? Is there another Qur'an for the gazumsplats of the planet Splarg, full of advice about exactly where they can put their tentacles, and which days of the year they have to keep them to themselves?

Or, does intertextuality make Sardar nervous because the very specificity of the text is the first thing you notice about it? Does it make him nervous because to the modern mind its concerns are a little parochial?

Strangeness, but no charm

Oh God, he's at it with the cod science again (Answers to questions, Feb 6). Last time it was chaos theory, this time it's quantum physics.

Of course, whether we believe in him or not makes no difference to God himself. But if we can believe, for example, that a particle can also simultaneously be a wave, a logically contradictory suggestion but theoretically and experimentally a coherent one and the basis of quantum physics, then what is the problem with believing that God can do both: mercy and judgment?

Like chaos theory, quantum physics is a precise science, and not simply a licence to say vague things. Unlike chaos theory, which is at least meant to be applicable to a range of concepts, quantum physics is about something very precisely defined, the behaviour of subatomic particles.

It's also not logically contradictory in the sense that it refutes logic, but in the sense that it highlights problems in our concepts of what it means to talk about waves or particles. At any level above the level of the microscopic, the physical universe remains consistent and predictable, which is why we don't go spiralling into the sun. Even quantum indeteerminacy is in itself mathematically quantifiable.

Science is not like metaphor, which is a literary concept. In metaphor, qualities shared by otherwise disparate concepts are arranged into a pattern, for the purposes of entertainment or insight. You might think of it as a many-to-many relationship. In science, the relationships between concepts have to be more precise. Simply turning science into a metaphor is an attempt to grab hold of the respectability of science, as an evidence-based discipline, without applying the rigour which generates that respectability in the first place.

Here, the discussion is about the contradiction between the claim that God is merciful and the claim that he is prepared to punish. In the Qur'an this is sometimes taken to ludicrous degrees, with God being described as merciful in the very same passage as he is threatening to burn unbelievers in hell.

The correspondent, Richard Kimber (whose contributions have been consistently interesting) quotes the following verse. If you have doubts about the revelation we have sent down to our servant, then produce a single surah like it. And summon your witnesses (whom you serve) apart from God, if what you say is true. If you fail to do so - and you will fail - then beware of the fire whose fuel is people and stones, made ready for the unbelievers.

The linking minion seems to have linked to the wrong page, and I can't find the original, but Kimber's quoted remark is that this is less an invitation to explore one's doubts and more a defiant and purely rhetorical challenge to the sceptical backed up with a warning that is surely designed to intimidate.

In effect, Sardar claims that the contradiction between what the book says and what he says it says isn't a problem, because of quantum physics. If that isn't an abuse of science as metaphor, it'll do until one comes along.

He also says that the quoted passage isn't intimidation. To justify this claim, he says this.

Like the bird's nest, "fragments" of the Qur'an have to be connected to the "whole" to get an overall picture. Even though the warning here seems specific, it has to be seen in terms of the whole text.

He then goes on to talk about the Qur'an as a whole. Throughout the Qur'an, we find similar warnings to all - believers, sceptics or non-believers. So, the sceptic here is not being singled out. The warning has to do with the Qur'anic notion of accountability, emphasised again and again in the text, which suggests all of us are ultimately responsible for our actions before God whether we believe or not.

This is the strangest explanation of why a threat isn't a threat that I have ever read. It's as if someone had come up to you in the street and threatened to put you on a big fire if you didn't do as you were told, and when you complained, you were told don't worry, he says that to everybody.

And to be fair, he is at least right about the contents of the Qur'an. From start to finish, there are threats. Even when there aren't threats, for instance in the first sura, which refers to the desire to be one of the ones God isn't angry with, the constant stream of threats elsewhere sets the context. I've referred previously to the many, many references to fire, and Sardar dismissed that as a metaphor, but it's very clearly a metaphor for severe punishment.

And that is the definition of intimidation. If you don't do what I say, the intimidator says, I will arrange for a bad thing to happen to you. We know from Sardar's previous remarks that he believes that God punishes. He says so at the end of this post. Therefore, the text is intimidating. It is designed to instil fear.

But then, I suppose by his own terms he isn't tied to making sense. Sub-atomic particles do behave strangely, so why shouldn't anything mean anything you like? Does a sura begin This is the Book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear Allah? Never mind, give the quarks a bit of spin and suddenly it's an invitation to open debate.

Unfortunately for him, his approach torpedoes his original claim. If you recall, he is trying to defend the Qur'an as a perfect book, living in the infinite ether with God before the physical universe was ever created.

But if anything can be taken to mean what it says or the exact opposite of what it says depending on what's convenient, then any book could be a perfect book. As soon as you fall back on that level of - well, irrationality, let's not be frightened to call it by its name - then you have to abandon the kind of absolutism that can label a book perfect.