Stopping to smell the roses

Andrew Gilligan’s superb ‘review’ of Tony Blair’s new book A Journey is well worth the read. Gilligan himself played a fundamental role in the undoing of the ’45-minute claim’, on which Blair goes into some detail.

But it is, of course, Iraq where the trust issue reached crisis point. Fascinatingly, Blair admits that even by the tests of his own stated criteria for liberal interventionism, as set out in a speech in Chicago, the case for war was “finely balanced”. Again, not something you’d have known from his campaigning certainty at the time.

The disaster that unfolded post-war is described in those Blairish sentences lacking active verbs – implying that it was almost a force of nature, over which we had no control. Evil outsiders, such as
al-Qaeda and Iran, are blamed – with no mention of who created the vacuum for them to fill. The British reconstruction effort is described as “adequate”, and all problems are blamed on the US – a straightforwardly false claim.

Blair does come clean on some untruths – admitting, just as The Sunday Telegraph revealed last year, that military planning began in early 2002 (in July that year, he’d denied to MPs that any such planning was taking place). He makes a very significant admission about the famous 45-minute claim – that the Government “should, in retrospect, have corrected [it]” in the way it was reported. Instead, he and his press secretary, Alastair Campbell, went to war with me and the BBC.

It is mildly flattering to learn that Blair believes his integrity “probably never recovered” from my charge that his staff “sexed up” the dossier and the 45-minute claim. “I’m not saying we handled the allegation well,” he writes, probably the closest to an apology I and the BBC will ever get. We can also perhaps endorse Blair’s description of Campbell as a “crazy person” who by that stage “had probably gone over the edge”.

Yet in telling this part of the tale, there is the same lack of feeling for which the book so rightly criticises Gordon Brown. When Dr David Kelly died, Blair writes, “the media would declare it was a scandal. They were absolutely capable of ensuring that there was one.” Surely Dr Kelly’s death was a scandal, with or without the help of the media.

In a passage about coming to terms with the deaths he inflicted, Blair explains why he cannot express regret: “Regret can seem bound to the past,” he says. “Responsibility has its present and future tense.” This seems unlikely to convince the Army bereaved. And on the wider death toll, Blair says that estimates of 600,000 are wrong – why, it was a mere 112,000!

Read the full article.

I’m sure it’s a great book.  But I’m happy to wait for the paperback, when it arrives at the local library which I’m not a member of.

This matter, questioning the sexual behaviour of a man held to be a prophet by 1.2 billion people, is unsurprisingly fraught: it is only a few weeks since the conviction of three men for attempting to diesel bomb the UK publisher of ‘Jewel of Medina’.

But it is not just historical novelists and academics who discuss Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha, some people who are not very keen on Islam also tend to focus on it. Here are a couple of examples taken from the comments threads at Harry’s Place.

From a discussion about thugs rampaging through Luton "to oppose extremism"

From a discussion about the row caused by some parents complaining about interfaith assemblies

The “argument” goes that Muslims believe Muhammad to be a perfect model for behaviour and therefore the fact of Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha somehow proves Islam to be a depraved religion. That no good can come of following it etc etc ad nauseam. This attempt to aggressively apply a modern British definition of paedophilia to seventh century Arabia strikes me as a sign of severe anthropological illiteracy; but the right to express such offensive, anthropologically illiterate statements must be defended staunchly.

In the jurisprudence of the main schools of Islamic law it was accepted that a child could have a marriage arranged for them by their marriage guardian but it should not be consummated until puberty was reached, when the child would have the “Option of Puberty” (khiyar al-bulugh). This meant that the child would be allowed to repudiate the marriage if it had been contracted by a marriage guardian who did not have the right of ijbar (ie who was not their father or, apart from the Hanbalis, their father’s father). As the Qur’an does not deal with these matters many of the rules governing them would have been drawn from pre-Islamic custom and Muhammad’s implicit endorsement of them through not rejecting them.

In considering the question of marriage age in Islam it is, therefore, entirely appropriate to discuss Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha. A book entitled ‘Does God Hate Women?’, which looks at various religious attitudes towards women, would do a disservice to its readers if it were to ignore a matter of such relevance: marriage to a pre-pubescant child with whom consummation occurs upon reaching puberty is not a model most people would be happy with in the modern world (although Bolivia sets the age of consent at puberty).

Which is probably why nearly all Muslim countries have reformed these rules beyond recognition. The age of consent in Algeria and Malaysia is 16, in Indonesia it is 19 for males and 16 for females. In Egypt it’s 18 for both and Tunisia 20. Reform has not, however, come to Saudi Arabia. Back in April the world followed the case of a mother trying to obtain a divorce for her eight-year-old daughter who had been married off by her father to a friend he owed a debt. In the end she succeeded and now there is even talk of Saudi Arabia preventing marriage before the age of 18.

Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha would logically only be of real concern to a non-Muslim living in 21st century Britain if Muslims were, following his model, regularly involved in child marriages. But, apart from possibly in Saudi Arabia and Iran, they aren’t. If your claim is that Islam is fundamentally depraved because Muslims seek to emulate Muhammad and he married a six-year-old, then it is entirely shot down by Muslims not emulating Muhammad on this matter.

But people like “Old Peculier” and “kafuruk” are not concerned by this. They just want to level two of the most heinous accusations thinkable at Muhammad because he is respected by Muslims. It’s stupid and designed to offend but, if people really want to prove their idiocy in this way, then they must be entitled to do so. Not because it’s A Good Thing that people accuse Muhammad of paedophilia, but because defending their right to make such statements is the best way to defend those who would publish books like ‘Jewel of Medina’ and ‘Does God Hate Women?’.

Beheshti, Mirza, Taj

Three men, Ali Beheshti (41), Abrar Mirza (23) and Abbas Taj (31) who conspired to firebomb the residence of publisher Martin Rynja in September 2008, have been found guilty of recklessly damaging property and endangering life.

Rynja had been planning to publish a novel by US author Shelley Jones called the Jewel of Medina.

Fortunately all three men, who possessed the collective IQ of a cabbage, had been under police surveillance. Officers followed them on the night of the attack and arrested Beheshti, a former member of al-Mouhajiroun and Mirza at the scene. The fire was quickly put out. Taj was the driver of the getaway car.

The men were under surveillance by police who had warned Martin Rynja, 43, and his partner, to move out of their four-storey townhouse, which had an office in the basement.

Taj’s car, a Honda Accord, had been bugged by officers and their conversation was recorded as they drove to the square.

Beheshti was heard asking Taj: “You wanna be the emir [leader], yeh?” and Taj replied: “That would be you.”

“You know what we gotta do, anyway, innit?” Beheshti added.

In the early hours of September 27 last year the three men were observed driving twice through the square in Islington before Beheshti and Mirza approached the front door with a petrol can in a white plastic bag, poured diesel fuel through the letter box and used a disposable lighter to set it on fire.

Taj, the driver, tried to plead not guilty, claiming to have just given his two friends a lift without any idea what they were up to. The jury were not convinced.

Though it is imperative to denounce braindead crimes like these used to intimidate artists, the unfortunate fact is they work:

Publishers Random House decided not to put out the book because of fears it could offend Muslims, while another major US publisher also pulled out. Gibson Square delayed publication of the book following the attack.

Hat tip: DavidMWW