Extraordinary claims

In some of my recent posts, questions of scientific standards have emerged in the comments, and it's made me want to write about extraordinary claims.

There is an old philosophical saw to the effect that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The meaning should be transparent enough.

Suppose you meet me in the street, and you ask me where I got the newspaper I was carrying. If I said I'd got it from the newsagents down the road, you'd accept that easily enough. If I said I'd been given it by some aliens in the woods, you'd expect a higher level of verification before you could accept the statement.

Notice that these are everyday standards of evidence we're talking about. All scientific claims require sufficient evidence, which by everday standards will always seem extraordinary.

According to Sardar, the definition of a Muslim is that they accept that the Qur'an is the word of God. He goes on to assert that the Qur'an is a perfect book, that it is apparent to the doubting mind (Sardar's phrase) that it is inimitable by humans, and that it existed in Paradise with God, before the universe was created.

Let's have a look at what is actually asserted here. According to the Islamic version of history, the angel Gibreel (Gabriel in the Qur'an) appeared to an illiterate Arabian called Mohammed in the desert on repeated occasions, and recited the book to him direct from God. Because he was illiterate, the book was either transcribed by sages as he recited each sura to them after the event, or passed on orally.

After Mohammed died, a committee was set up to adjudicate between rival versions of the text, some bits of which had been circulating orally for decades. The version assembled by this committee dovetailed exactly with the perfect version, which had been sitting in heaven with God, and in this form is beyond the power of humans to imitate.

This is, to say the least, an extraordinary claim. I'm tempted to say committee again, just for the comedic value. To demonstrate it to a doubting mind, an extraordinary level of evidence would be required.

Note that we are not talking here about a scientific proof, which would always require sufficient evidence whether it was extraordinary or not. We are talking about an everyday acceptance. Because the claim is so extraordinary, the evidence for any kind of acceptance would have to be similarly extraordinary.

Note also that for a book to be perfect, every verse has to be similarly perfect. Sardar tries to dodge round this point by arguing that the book should be read as a whole, but this is a mere fudge. If at any point a single amendment to the text would clearly be an improvement on the existing text, then the perfection claim fails. This is a stiff test, to my mind beyond any book, but then perfection is an extraordinarily big claim.

The book would also have to be absolutely internally consistent, and morally admirable, but those aren't even the biggest evidential challenges. To then go on and meet the requirement of inimitability to a doubting mind some groundbreaking work would be necessary.

Firstly you would have to arrive at some kind of objective assessment of the poetic 'capacity' of humans. This sentence in itself is so absurd that the whole concept of the evidential test, and therefore the whole claim, is instantly nullified. To any genuinely doubting mind, anyway.

Then you would have to 'demonstrate' (how??) that the Qur'an exceeded those limits. You would have to show that the Qur'an, that turgid, repetitive, hell-fixated, lowbrow rant of a book, was somehow in an entirely different league from Ovid, from Moliere, from John Lydon.

Then you would have to show that the gap between the two was so large that it was beyond the bounds of serendipity. In other words, that those parts of the text which were beyond the capacity of humans were so many, and so marvelously interlaced, that mere accident was an inadequate explanation.

Good luck with all of that. Or, when making your extraordinary claims about the miraculous success of your committee, you could stop referring to your doubting minds.

I think I might go through some of my other writings and fill them with rhetorical italics as well. It effectively highlights the bizarre nature of certain claims, and it's much more fun than reading the Qur'an.

Unhappy

Heather Plant is unhappy. While I continue to enjoy this blog and have been learning a great deal, much of the discussion is depressing me. Some of the atheists are getting me down.

Oh dear, I hope it was nothing I said. Oh, it seems it was. ... or that I'm a whacko "godbotherer" (as one blogger described you two on another site), from the atheist point of view,", she passively aggresses.

Perhaps I should explain. Godbotherer is a piece of English slang for a religious person. It's not generally considered offensive, except possibly by godbotherers.

She seems bemused that anyone could possibly respond to pro-religious polemic with anger, when they could be responding with Tibetan Buddhism. I wrote this to explain, and put it in the comments box.

The problem with the approach you suggest is that the Qur'an isn't that kind of a book. It has its lyrical sections, but much of it is written in a straightforward tone, and contains precisely stated rules, many of which should not be allowed to go unchallenged. Like this one.

If any of your women are guilty of lewdness, Take the evidence of four (Reliable) witnesses from amongst you against them; and if they testify, confine them to houses until death do claim them, or Allah ordain for them some (other) way (4:13).

Now I don't suppose for a moment Sardar would live by that verse as written. However, in defending the perfection of the Qur'an he ties himself to all the statements within it. There comes a point where you have to choose which side you're on. It just isn’t OK to describe a book which contains that obscenity as perfect. And yet Sardar himself defines a Muslim as someone who accepts the book as the word of God.

The truly perfect verse at this point would read much more like 'If any of your women (your women??) are guilty of lewdness, mind your own business. It's got nothing to do with you. Watch your own lewdness, and leave them to theirs.' If it said that it would be a better book.

It doesn't say that, of course, it says something hideous instead. And this kind of thing is why we argue so vociferously. It's because this isn't some kind of abstract argument about ethereal subjective experiences, it's a battle for civil rights - women's rights, gay rights, sexual rights for everyone in this country, from any background. It's a battle for the right of children to grow up without being indoctrinated in a religion from age six, and for the right of adults to change or abandon their religious beliefs without fear of violence.

Islam isn't the only threat to civil liberties in this country. It isn't even one of the major ones. For the 96% of Britons who don't come from a Muslim background it's a very minor threat indeed. And nothing in this endorses the detention of Muslims without trial, extraordinary rendition of Muslims for torture abroad, or the invasion of Muslim countries for economic reasons.

And not all Muslims endorse the text as written. Sardar is so concerned to get away from it he brings in quantum physics, chaos theory and Derrida to help him make out it doesn't say what it does.

But we've never held back from expressing our anger about threats to civil rights before, and I fail to see why we should when the menace happens to come from a religion. There are two million people from a Muslim background in Britain. That's a million women, two hundred thousand gay people and four hundred thousand children. If we don't speak up for their rights, who will?

Comments boxes aren't the ideal space to comment in, so apologies for any slight incoherence in the text. Also, I forgot to make it funny. Sorry about that.

Did the earth move for you, Kevin?

It's worth repeating this. The world is full of religious nutters, and they aren't all Muslims. Also, they aren't always being vile to women. Sometimes they're being vile to gay people instead.

Here on the BBC news, for instance, is Shlomo Benizri of the Israeli Shas party (BBC news), which may or may not be an acronym (Stop Homoerotic Arse Shenanigans? Secretly Hankering After Sodomy?).

According to the BBC, he called on lawmakers to stop "passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes".

Earthquakes? I once recall a Chris Morris characters denouncing gays in the military because they showed up on the enemy radar, but that was a joke.

Of course. It's the old divine vengeance. Israel's passed some fairly basic gay rights legislation, and the Orthodox (to think that in everyday parlance, orthodox means mainstream) are getting all up themselves over it. As it were.

Apparently the recent earthquakes in Israel were Jehovah's comment on the subject. All I can say is, he's not the vengeance machine he used to be. In the olden days entire cities came tumbling down. Now he just shakes the ground a bit. Oh yes, and makes a few puddles round Tewkesbury.

Of course, he knows where to come down hard. Pakistan. New Orleans. Sri Lanka. All the unreligious places.

There's a picture of a Shas demo on the BBC page, with one of their banners on it. Don't sodomize Jerusalem, it says. You know, before I saw that it hadn't even occurred to me to try, but now I think I might take some time off.

And did you spot the clue in the text? That's right, sodomize. With a Z. The American spelling. Because who are the real problem people in Israel? Messaianic Zionist Americans.

Which is great for all the other American Jews. Just imagine, being in a religion where all the firebreathing young militants are ideologically obliged to go and live somewhere else. What's that, God? You want all the true Christians to go and make Antarctica safe for Jesus? I'll let them know right away.

So as I said, it's not all Muslims. But just so they don't feel left out, here's something on Muslim homophobia from the Times, courtesy of the Grand Tufti. In this age of the War on Terror, it's worth making the point that the vast majority of victims of Islam are other Muslims.

Why the scabrous tone?

Noah commented on the post below (Blog 9: heading for the fall). He asked about angels and quarks, but to begin with he quotes from the Qur’an.

...and reason with them in the most courteous manner. [16:125] he says.

He may mean that he intends to reason courteously, but I read it as a question about the tone of my blog. And it is a pugnacious little thing, isn’t it? Why oh why can’t I be nicer about religion?

This is why.

Firstly, in relation to the specific discussion in that post, I do get very annoyed when religious people hijack the language of science in an attempt to inject a kind of respectability into their claims which their methodology doesn't warrant.

In science, the evidence always comes first. The justification for scientific claims like the existence of quarks proceeds not from being a member of the science community, but from experimental evidence for them. Such claims are always made cautiously, and all scientific claims are prefaced by an implied 'unless an alternative theory is accepted which explains the data better'.

Religious claims are simply asserted. No claim made on that basis can be treated with the same degree of respect as a scientific claim, because it hasn't been subject to any proper process of verification. As I’ve often said about religion, if you must you can, but I do wish you wouldn’t abuse science at the same time.

Secondly, in relation to this particular blog, I emailed a comment in earlier, and I was very annoyed by Sardar's response (see first post on this blog).

Thirdly, my tone is not unusual in the world of free, open debate on any issue. Political blogs, for instance, are often far more unpleasant than I am. I fail to see why religion should expect any special privileges in this regard, and I choose my tone so as to make clear that I am not granting it any.

Fourthly, religions are always so very rude about us. For instance, the Koran says this. As for those who disbelieve in Our communications, We shall make them enter fire; so oft as their skins are thoroughly burned, We will change them for other skins, that they may taste the chastisement; surely Allah is Mighty, Wise” (Sura 4.56). And that’s before we’ve raised the subject of lewd women.

Sardar says two things about this kind of thing. Firstly he says that vengeance isn’t threatened against atheists, but against people who behave badly. Every time he tries to claim this, though, he is consistently handicapped by all the verses which say exactly the opposite. Like this one. Secondly he tries to claim it as metaphor. I’m not sure why I’m supposed to be comforted by this. Nonetheless, if insults up to and including threatening people with being burned for infinite amounts of time can be wished away by the use of the word metaphor, perhaps sensitive religious souls could try pretending I’m mocking them metaphorically as well.

Fifthly, I mainly write to be entertaining. It’s hard to be entertaining and respectful at the same time, and given the above quote I’m not particularly motivated to try.

Finally, in most cases religion is not voluntary. In the Islamic world in particular, most practicing Muslims are only so because they’ve been forcibly inducted into the Muslim community at an age when the mind is too young to form a coherent judgement. This is true in the case of Sardar, who chooses to describe the process in some detail, apparently not understanding the impression it leaves in the minds of people who haven't been subjected to such treatment.

You will notice that although I am constantly rude about Islam, I am never rude about Muslims in general (although I may well be rude about, and to, individuals). This is because in a very real sense It Actually Isn’t Their Fault. However, the very fact of religious indoctrination, practised everywhere from Kansas to Karachi, does mean we have to shout more loudly than we otherwise might, so we can be heard in places where less piercing voices might not reach.

When dealing with a world view which only survives by the indoctrination of the very young, which asserts the perfection of a book chock-full of moral atrocities, without evidence, which is constantly being quoted to justify the most outrageous acts, it seems almost insulting to be asked to moderate one's tone. However, we can afford to generous as well, so here's a little something for Noah. He ends with another quote. Say: "Have you ever considered that if all the water you have sunk down in the ground, who it is, that could bring you the clear-flowing water?" [67:30] Here, for his edification, are two short pieces about aquifers and water tables. Science: bringing understanding where previously there was only religion.

Blog 9: Heading for the fall

In blog 9, Sardar moves on to 2:30-39. You may or may not know that the Islamic version of Adam and Eve is slightly different from the Jewish and Christian one. For a start, Eve isn't named. Secondly, the Islamic version is actually a branch of quantum physics.

For otherwise, why would Sardar say this?

First God informs the angels he intends to add a new order to creation. So what are angels? They too are part of creation, they praise God and act in total obedience. We know the angel Gibreel (Gabriel) was the intermediary who brought God's word to Muhammad. Beyond that I have no knowledge of angelic hosts and am quite content; although others may know better. If I can accept the need for the quarks and gluons of quantum theory and the string theory universe of umpteen dimensions, I can happily live with the concept of angels.

He seems to be saying that even though the idea of angels is a bit weird, it's no weirder than quantum physics. Unfortunately, the main objection to angels isn't their weirdness, it's the total lack of any evidence for them. Of course, to the religious mind that's hardly a barrier. Instead, concepts are rated according to their subjective qualities. The idea of angels feels weird, quantum physics feels weird, therefore they must be equivalent somehow.

I'll tell you what really is weird. The idea that God created the entire universe, then waited twelve billion years, made a man on the previously mentioned small planet orbiting a star stuck on the far end of a spiral arm of an entirely unremarkable galaxy and then made the angels bow down to him. That's weird. And not weird like quantum physics, so much as weird like human sacrifice or the divine right of kings. The weirdness being that it's surprising to see people still discussing it seriously.

Or is it just another of those slippery metaphors? Not that it says so in the text, which presents it as a straightforward factual narrative, but perhaps it's metaphor because it just is, same as all the bits which are true because they just are.

Sardar avoids any clear judgement on the historical truth of the story, referring to it at different times as symbolic, allegorical and an incident, and instead moves on to the fall. To save your time, it's made up entirely of the kind of statements that regular readers of religious guff on the Internet might refer to as The Kind of Thing They Say. I would just point out that Adam and Satan's great crime, the central crime of the story, didn't actually hurt anybody. Worth reminding people of that when they talk about the ethical basis of religion.

He rounds off with an attempt to reclaim the narrative for feminism, and indeed there is none of the oppressive misogyny of the Genesis version. This is because Adam's wife hardly appears. It's not her the angels are being asked to bow down to though, but Adam, so the patriarchy appears intact after all.

The Qur'an rounds this section off with its favourite subject as well. Yes folks, it's the traditional Islamic human pyre. But those who reject Faith and belie Our Signs, they shall be companions of the Fire; they shall abide therein, it says, charmingly. Once more, despite Sardar's regular protestations that punishment is for evil people, not Hindus or atheists, the threat is explicitly aimed at the faithless.

Bunting, meanwhile, has her own comment. She points out how confusing the text is, with its ambiguous use of pronouns, and asks if it's a problem with translation. If it is that it's that everywhere. I've checked out five different translations (grippping, that was), and it's confused in all of them. If I didn't know it was the perfect word of God, I'd say it was just bad writing. Or writing by committee. How did they put the thing together? Oh yeah.

Not that confusing her is hard. A few weeks ago she seemed to find the first few verses of the Qur'an quite baffling, then recently she had this exchange with Richard Dawkins, in a recorded Guardian debate. Commenting on her liberal interpretation of Catholicism, Dawkins asked her I take it you don't believe in the virgin birth?, to which she replied well, we'll get into very complex territory, because I'm not sure what belief is. Let me put it simply for you Madeleine. Let's assume we all agree that first century Palestine existed. Let's forget the debate about whether there was or wasn't a historical Jesus, and assume that there was. You remember his mother, Mary. Did she or didn't she get pregnant in the usual way? Honestly, it's not rocket science.

What a triumph for human progress, though. After the Spanish Inquisition, after the shackling of Parisian philosophers in the thirteenth century, after the Crusades and the Teutonic Knights, the irresistible march of science reduces one Catholic to I'm not sure what belief is. I'm no longer young, and I've not got much chance of very heaven, but frankly in this long-awaited dawn it's bliss just to be alive.

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?

Blog 8: the pursuit of paradise

This blog is mainly about how nice heaven would be, and it seems futile to disagree. In the middle of it, there's another of his usual logical knots for us to unpick.

And I have to admit I find it curious that, on one hand, people find Muslims too focused on religion in this life, fanatic about wanting Islamic states and Islamic law. And then, on the other hand, consider us too paradise obsessed, determined to get away from this world too quickly and destructively thereby bequeathing the task of state building to those unscathed and left behind.

This would only make sense if it were necessary to choose one or the other to focus on. He is describing two beliefs: that turning states into theocracies and organising your life around trying to get to heaven are both bad ideas. Like Bertrand Russell with the barber who shaves everyone who doesn't shave themselves (but who shaves the barber?), he manages to construct two statements which sound contradictory, when it's the description itself that generates an illusory paradox. Unlike Russell, he isn't doing it on purpose.

In fact, both beliefs fit together rather well. It amounts to saying that Muslims are too focused on religion in this life and the next, because they're too focused on religion full stop.

Then he goes on to point out that there's nothing in the Qur'an about seventy two virgins, and this is true. That's because it's in the hadith - testimonies of acts and sayings attributed to Mohammed. The particular collection isn't on the USC-MSA website, but I've been able to find it quoted here.

It was mentioned by [a string of unreliable sources], who heard the Prophet Muhammad (Allah's blessings and peace be upon him) saying: 'The smallest reward for the people of Heaven is an abode where there are 80,000 servants and 72 wives, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and ruby, as wide as the distance from al-Jabiyyah to San'a.

Frankly, I'm rather more shocked by the 80,000 servants. I mean, that's more than the queen's got. You'd have to be a special kind of stupid to crash yourself into a skyscraper on the basis of that kind of third hand gossip, anyway.

If you think the Qur'an's got some weird shit in it, you ain't seen nothing until you've seen the hadith. Here's one of my favourite chunks, from Imam al-Bukhari, talking about those lucky enough to make it into heaven.

Everyone will have two wives from the houris, who will be so beautiful, pure and transparent that the marrow of the bones of their legs will be seen through the bones and the flesh.

Each to their own, I suppose. I've always been attracted to opaque women, myself. The surreality of it reminds me a little of the bit in the New Testament where Jesus is being crucified, and the dead rise and walk through the streets of Jerusalem (Matthew, 27:52-53). Without apparently earning a mention in any Roman text of the period, which might seem a strange omission in a major provincial capital of a highly literate and news-hungry empire. Keep it in the afterlife, guys, that's my advice. No-one expects independent verification if you keep it in the afterlife.

Anyway, after entirely failing to mention the correct source of the seventy two virgins he goes on to say that in the everlasting bliss of the eternal we will all, male and female, be restored to our pure state, ie virginal innocence. The only antidote to the misogyny marshalled by Muslims in their history is reading and understanding the words of equality presented in the book.

He bases this feminist vision on the fact that the Qur'anpassage quoted describes the residents of heaven as companions, and uses the Arabic word azwaj, which can be male or female. He quotes 2:25, 4:13 and 56:34 in support of this.

As always, though, his own book shoots him in the back. Sura 56 says of the companions that they will have beautiful, big, and lustrous eyes, and be Like unto Pearls well-guarded. I defy you to read that as a unisex description. Worse, a few verses later Allah has made them virgin - pure (and undefiled). Oh yes, the virgins. So that's where they'd got to. I wonder which gender they are.

Having set up an indisputably male fantasy of heaven, the sura then goes on to describe hell. I can't face copying and pasting the usual dreary tortures - just read them for yourself.

The text following 4:13 throws up a lovely sample of Islamic feminism though.

If any of your women are guilty of lewdness, Take the evidence of four (Reliable) witnesses from amongst you against them; and if they testify, confine them to houses until death do claim them, or Allah ordain for them some (other) way.

Now that's just disgusting. I remember the first time I read the Qur'an, and was nauseated by the constant repetition of misogynistic vileness, and it never gets any easier. In fact, it's so vile I'm walking away from this post now, so if there's typos you'll just have to live with them. It was fun up to that point, but I'm just not finding it amusing anymore.

The fine art of spin

It's just amazing, what a book can be made to say, if you try hard enough.

Here's Ishmael, having a go.

The Qur'an states that the bare minimum for salvation is to not associate any partners with God (4:116). According to this criterion even the bulk of agnostics will attain salvation. The Qur'an is adamant that salvation is not the sole property of any one community and repudiates other beliefs that hold this doctrine (2:111).

Here are the verses he refers to.

(2:111) And they say: "None shall enter Paradise unless he be a Jew or a Christian." Those are their (vain) desires. Say: "Produce your proof if ye are truthful."

(4:116) Allah forgiveth not (The sin of) joining other gods with Him; but He forgiveth whom He pleaseth other sins than this: one who joins other gods with Allah, Hath strayed far, far away (from the right).

(2:111) simply claims that the statement that only Jews or Christians will get into Paradise is untrue. The idea that the invitation extends to agnostics or atheists is refuted by the next verse. Nay,-whoever submits His whole self to Allah and is a doer of good,- He will get his reward with his Lord; on such shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.

People who submit part or none of themselves to Allah can derive no comfort from this, as the text requires you to submit your whole self, as well as doing good. And notice that the text makes no attempt to define doing good in a human context. It could equally mean promoting the correct beliefs about Allah.

(4:116), meanwhile, doesn't say that you will be forgiven your sins, it simply says that you may be, if Allah pleaseth. That's a minimum in the sense that everyone who does worse is without hope, but it isn't a measure of compassion, as implied, as lots of people will have done better, and still not have been forgiven, if Allah didn't pleaseth. And what a strange set of priorities. Sardar previously said in defence of the concept of divine punishment that Stalin shouldn't receive the same treatment as St Francis of Assissi. Judging by this passage, he's got a far better chance than any Hindu.

Which leads me back to the central ethical objection to the Abrahamic religions. Their morality isn't about the correct treatment of human beings, it's about believing the right things. When reference to correct behaviour is made, it's always in the context of behaving well because God wants you to, rather than simply because it's the right thing to do.

Atheists and agnostics are excluded from God's grace by their beliefs, and behaving well doesn't come into it. Modern worshippers can see a problem with this, so they try to redefine the words to mean things they don't say.

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.

Peace in our time

Victory!

They've decided to allow comments after all. Not full, proper comments, like they allow for everything else, including all kinds of sensitive subjects, but it's a step in the right direction.

They say this.

To preserve the quality of debate we've decided to review all comments before publishing, but we'd like as many as possible to appear on the site. So, to make the selection process easier, please take a look at our talk policy before posting your comment.

Unlike this blog, they haven't had the foresight to specifically allow offensive remarks from holy books, so be careful when you're quoting.

Oh God, they're so embarrassing.

This is the kind of thing we're dealing with. Badr has written in to comment on some old guff. He's comparing the relationship with God to the relationship between parent and child, and says this to Madeleine Bunting.

You have kids I presume? Did you "encourage them to be lawyers, doctors, etc ..."? Even if you don't and you didn't, it's common for parents to do so, even though they don't "own" their kids. Children opposing their parents in the matter of simple career choice (particularly if the child wants a rather outlandish career), is seldom tolerated.

Umm, no, Badr. When children grow up, we let them choose their own careers. That's because they're free adults. I bet yours are cringing right now.

Horse play - or, slings and arrows

Now I've been a bit mean to Sardar at times. I admit it. He really came through the other day, though.

He had an exchange of letters with a man called Abdullah al-Hasan, who is even more religious than he is. I don't think he'd agree with my definition there, but Hasan definitely would.

Hasan told him he wasn't properly qualified to explain the Qur'an to an audience, because he wasn't one of the clergy. Strangely, he then went on to claim that Islam doesn't have a clergy. I know this isn't true, because I've seen them on the telly. Frocks, hellfire, pointless arguments about bugger all - if they aren't clergy, I don't know what all those bishops think they're up to.

Sardar dismantled him with a rhetorical hammer. You could tell he was seriously pissed off. The likes of me just get a patronising brush off, like we're not worth noticing, but people like Hasan really get his goat. It was enough for him to make blog 7 entirely about them.

And you can see why. There's Sardar stuck between two opposing worlds. It's like he's tied to two horses by the same rope, trying to hold them together, and the more they pull against each other the tighter things get.

And what does Hasan do? He gets on the Islamic horse, and gallops off as far away from the other horse as possible, leaving Sardar tied in knots in the middle. He's already believing six thousand incompatible things before breakfast, now the friction burns are killing him.

And we're not helping. We're on the other horse, whispering sweet nothings in its ear about how much greener the grass is over the hill. We have to, because we care about our horse, we've raised it since it was a gleam in Francis Bacon's eye and we have to defend it against concepts like perfect books. But we feel his pain.

And he ends brilliantly. For his Parthian shot, he quotes an Islamic scholar. A woman. To a certain kind of Muslim, and I think that's the type Hasan is, that's like rubbing his face in menstrual blood. Good.

Answers to questions

In these responses to readers emails, Sardar talks about something he calls transmodernism. He explains it something like this.

Our limited logic has trapped us in a dualistic thinking - this or that, but not both, or bits of both. Thus, either we are for tradition or against it, for modernity or against it.

This is just plain wrong, for a start. Thinking logically doesn't mean you have to be entirely for or against any general concept. The logical approach would be to unpick the concepts of tradition and modernity for a subtler analysis. I think he may be confusing logic with atomism, but even then he's way off base.

Transmodernity goes "beyond" and "above" both modernity and tradition but incorporates the positive aspects of both, creating a new synthesis, he continues. The main problem with that sentence is the word new. I personally like to 'innovate' with transbreakfastism, incorporating the positive aspects of muesli and toast. No boring old 'either-or' literalism for me in the mornings. I wouldn't go around imagining that applying the Hegelian dialectic to a thesis and an antithesis was groundbreaking, though.

He then explains postmodernism, and its dislike of the notion of Truth, and points out that this is in conflict with traditional ideas such as faith. Again, I'm still waiting to be informed, but it certainly isn't false.

To 'synthesise' modernity with tradition, he offers - wait for it - chaos theory. Transmodernism is the transfer of modernity from the edge of chaos into a new order of society. As such, transmodernism and tradition are not two opposing worldviews but a new synthesis of both.

If this argument turned up in PZ Myers' Inbox, it would get published on the Pharyngula website under the heading I get email. Chaos theory isn't some kind of carte blanche for metaphorical vagueness. It's based on precise mathematics, in a determinist model. Nothing is more annoying to scientists than people who co-opt semi-digested portions of science and regurgitate them in areas they aren't in any way connected with.

If he simply means that he wants to take the good in tradition and retain it, while rejecting the bad, he should say so. He's grasping for something more though - complex systems at the edge of chaos have the ability to spontaneously self-organise themselves into a higher order; in other words the system "evolves" spontaneously into a new mode of existence, he says.

At least he put evolves in inverted commas. I think he's talking about emergence, the idea that complex systems develop properties which aren't encoded in any individual component. Flocks of birds, for instance, will show complex patterns even if the rules of behaviour any individual bird follows are simple.

But complex systems don't necessarily 'evolve' more levels of complexity. Some complex systems remain stable, some 'devolve' and some go extinct.

And some ideas just aren't synthesisable. For instance, the idea that everything is open to doubt is simply incompatible with the idea that some books are perfect beyond doubt. Hoping for a synthesis here is like putting a tarantula in a glass case with a tarantula hawk, and hoping for a transtarantula hawk. These ideas will inevitably display mutual hostility, until at some point one of them eats the other.

Of course, there are aspects of traditionalism, whatever that is, which are indeed valuable. Just not the idea of a perfect book.

You can see what he wants. He wants the two sides of his life to make sense together. He wants to be a British Muslim, and for eachh part of that phrase to make sense in the context of the other. I do sympathise. I live among British Muslims, and I see how hard it is for the kids. Mainly, though, I see how hard it is for the wives.

And you can't merge perfection. Perfection is an obsidian block, that free thought flows round without merging. Until it eventually wears it away.

The Qur'an and doubt, part 2

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds;
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 way,
Show us the straight path,
Keep us on the right path.

The way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace, those whose (portion) is not wrath, and who go not astray.
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.

Madeleine Bunting describes these verses as impenetrable. Frankly, if that's enough to baffle her I'm glad I don't have to teach her mail merge.

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.
Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds, Lord of the Worlds.
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.
The way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace, not the path of those upon whom Thy wrath is brought down, nor of those who go astray.

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. Praise be to Allah, lord of the worlds, who cherishes and sustains them. You're master of the day of judgment. You're the only one we worship or ask for help. Show us the right path, the way of those you show grace to, not the path of those upon whom Thy wrath is brought down, nor of those who go astray.

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.

Shouting across the void

I emailed Sardar with this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours sincerely
Jon Eccles

and he responded with this patronising little snippet.

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

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

Not so much a refutation as a brushing aside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.