Faith Matters is launching its paper that offers a brief insight into the Secular reforms of the Ottoman Empire, in order to analyse and debunk claims by extreme groups like Al Qaeda of it being an Islamic Caliphate, strictly governed by Shariah Law. The Ottoman Empire is often presented, by such groups as a model political system upon which to re-build a global Caliphate. Osama bin Laden marked the decline of the Ottoman Empire as the fall of Islam – that the Islamic world “has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for more than 80 years” and that “the righteous Khilafah will return with the permission of Allah”. Through the implementation of an Islamic legal and political system, extreme groups who mis-use the Islamic faith call for the rejection of liberal values and the current systems in place, which do not fundamentally clash with Islam.

The short paper authored by Ishtiaq Hussain who has long studied such ideologies, offers a new challenge to these claims, arguing that the Ottoman Empire bares little resemblance to the model proposed by such groups.  In focusing on the period known as the Tanzimat (1839-1876), Hussain shows that the Ottomans were in fact attempting to secularise their laws and state institutions rather than implementing religious laws into State laws.

These are some of the key findings in the report which show that:

• Homosexuality was decriminalised
• Ottoman society in general moved away from punishments such as stoning
• The death penalty for Apostasy was not implemented

Islamists often bypass these facts and use a warped interpretation of history in order to weave their own narrative into mainstream debate; using their own projected picture of a perfect Ottoman society living under a deeply rigid interpretation of Shariah Law in order to argue for the building of a modern day Islamic Caliphate. Those who spin this historical account help to prop up a narrative used as an ideological basis for extremism. The attacks of 9/11 were even marked by Bin Laden as “a great step towards the unity of Muslims and establishing the righteous caliphate”.  Until now, their account has been met with little intellectual resistance.

This important paper is the first of its kind to expose and dismantle the Islamist historical account of the Ottoman Empire. Alongside the Government’s new Prevent Strategy focusing on extremism in schools, online and at universities,  Hussain creates a vehicle upon which to tackle extremists who adopt this historical narrative in order to justify their intolerant and right-wing ideology.

By debunking one of the fundamental layers of Islamist narrative, this paper provides an opportunity for debate and discussion within the public sphere. It also supports those civil society organisations and policy makers who defend liberal democratic values that underpin communities in Britain and also provides another tool for Muslims to counter the small yet vocal groups who espouse such a warped interpretation of the Ottoman Empire and the Khilafah. We also hope that it counters those who lump all Muslim communities together and who undermine the history of majority Muslim countries as places where pluralism was alive and thriving.

The report is now available to download from Faith Matters website.

Does the religious freedom of Muslims in Europe depend on secularism?

Are veil and burkha bans secularist or counter-secularist?

What should the relationship be between sharia rules and secular law?

Should the state fund Islamic schools if it funds Christian ones?

Can secularism admit any limitations on freedom of expression in religious matters?

Is there a clash of cultures between European values and Islamic ones?

British Humanist Association and Central London Humanists in association with Conway Hall present this panel discussion which aims to bring together key speakers to explore the effect of secular democracy in Europe.

Secularisation is not just the increase or decrease in visible markers of religiosity or in church attendance, but also a fundamental shift in religious belief towards rationalisation and objectification. The Protestant reformers were not arguing for less religion, they were asking for more – for a continuously religious life against the Catholic cycles of sin and repentance. Yet, as Max Weber’s influential work suggests, they ended up rationalising and secularising. To say all this is not to suggest that Pakistani Islamists will have exactly the same impact as the German Protestants. There can be little doubt that they will produce a very different subject and citizen because of the disparity in context.

This point has been wholly lost on lawmakers in the Netherlands who have outlawed “ritual slaughter” practised by Jews and Muslims, because it implements a “no stun” policy. Outwardly this has all the marks of a repressive measure applied exclusively to Jews and Muslims but dressed up as “rationalism” and opposition to “medieval obscurantism”.

This would be an example of what Humerira Iqtidar would refer to as “secularisation of society”. But I can’t help thinking that the Dutch, by applying this self-inflicted folly, are less concerned about cruelty to animals than about a stupid and ineffectual majoritorian grandstand to its minorities. It’s a point that’s picked up by the Humanist:

If the humanist reason for wanting a ban on religious slaughter is animal welfare, then the implication is that animal welfare is a humanist issue. Perhaps so (one for you to debate in the comments). But if that is the case, then why should ritual slaughter be the only animal welfare issue pursued by humanists? The animal rights group VIVA state that, of the 900 million animals slaughtered for food each year in Britain, around 12 million are killed by Muslim or Jewish ritual methods. I think in order for me to want to throw my support behind a ban on ritual slaughter I’d have to be convinced that the suffering endured by that 1.3 per cent of animals at the moment of death is somehow greater than the suffering inflicted upon far greater percentages during the course of their lives through transport and living conditions. Otherwise, campaigning specifically on the issue of religious slaughter feels, for me, uncomfortably like scapegoating. As someone whose meat-eating involves plenty of ethical inconsistencies, I’m not sure I’m in a position to lecture a religious minority about theirs.

It’s a shame that the Dutch, by imposing this ban, have denied themselves the pleasure of lamb-kebab rolls and salt-beef bagels. Holland is made much worse off for it.

A Bangladesh court has ruled that people cannot be forced to wear skull caps, veils or other religious clothing in workplaces, schools and colleges.

This ruling comes after reports emerged that a college in the north of Bangladesh forced women to wear veils.

The high court also ruled that women cannot be prevented from taking part in sports or cultural activities.

The court said that wearing any form of religious clothing, for students and employees, should be a personal choice.

It has also asked the authorities to explain why it should not be made illegal to prevent girls from taking part in sports and cultural activities.

In April this year, the court ordered schools and colleges not to force women to wear the burqa, a garment that covers the entire body except the eyes and hands.

Mahbub Shafique, one of the lawyers who filed the latest litigation, told the BBC how this ruling goes a step further.

“The difference between these two is that, this particular ruling today doesn’t apply only on females it also applies to males as well.

Barring the enforced veiling of women or the enforced wearing of skull caps is is a welcome legislation and acknowledgement of the fact that women and young men are forced to wear clothing and other outward symbols of religiosity.

The fashion police, at least, have already arrived, a decade early and without any help from Islamists. But rather than forcing women to wear the burqa or niqab, their job is to force them not to. Earlier this month Italian police in the northern city of Novara fined a Tunisian immigrant, Amel Marmouri, €500 for being veiled in a post office. Belgian police are likely to be doing the same after the Brussels parliament outlawed the burqa. France expects to pass a similar law by the autumn. Holland could follow suit. The Spanish city of Lleida has forbidden the burqa in public buildings; the Minister of Labour and Immigration Celestino Corbacho has hinted at a national ban. In Canada, the Quebec government has drafted an anti-burqa law. Australian politicians are demanding one too.

The rhetoric accompanying the bans has been as gushing as the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. Jean-Francois Copé, leader of the majority UNP party in French National Assembly, has talked of ‘a reaffirmation of our ideals of liberty and fraternity’. For the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, the bans are nothing less than a ‘defence of the Enlightenment’. According to Celestino Corbacho without a burqa ban it would not be possible to protect ‘the values of our society’.

There is certainly something medieval about the burqa and the niqab. The idea that in the 21st century women should be hidden from view for reasons of modesty or religious belief is both troubling and astonishing. Yet, there is also something surreal about the way that this piece of cloth has been turned into a battleground for Western values and about the idea that the burqa poses some kind of existential threat to the West.

The campaign against the burqa is particularly puzzling when in reality so few women choose to wear it. The sight of a burqa in Paris or Brussels is almost as rare as a glimpse of a bikini in Riyadh or Karachi. France has a Muslim population of 5 million. Its government estimates that fewer than 2000 women wear a niqab or burqa. (The original survey, conducted by DCRI, the French secret service, came up with the oddly precise figure of 367; that was so low that the Interior Ministry told the DCRI to count again.) In Holland some 500 women in a Muslim population of one million do so, in Denmark the estimate is fewer than 200 out of 170,000 Muslims.

So why, at a time when Europe is beset by so many fundamental economic and social problems, have legislators become so obsessed by this piece of cloth? There are three main kinds of arguments against the burqa: practical, political and existential.

The burqa, Jean-Francois Copé has suggested, ‘poses a serious safety problem at a time when security cameras play an important role in the protection of public order’. Many worry that the burqa would allow terrorists to evade airport security or provide the perfect camouflage for bank robbers. Others fret that wearing the burqa makes it difficult to perform certain jobs, particularly those that require face-to-face contact with clients or the public – doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers.

There are clearly practical problems that come with wearing the burqa. It is, after all, a piece of clothing designed for feudal life, not the modern world. Practical problems, however, can usually be solved on a case-by-case basis without the need for national soul searching or draconian legislation. Airports already require veiled women to reveal their features when passing through security. Police have no problem demanding to see faces when checking ID cards. And if banks insist that people should not wear bulky clothing, so be it. But that is very different from the state imposing an outright ban on such clothes.

If wearing a burqa is incompatible with the needs of particular jobs, then those particular employers – hospitals, schools, shops even- can legitimately demand that employees not be clad from head to foot. But again, one can impose dress codes for certain jobs without banning a type of clothing for everyone. After all, we don’t have judges and teachers wearing bikinis on the job either.

The practical arguments for a ban on the burqa are weak and shallow. More profound is the political case. The burqa, proponents of a ban argue, undermines gender equality and makes social integration impossible. It is, Bernard-Henri Lévy has written, ‘not a dress, it’s a message, one that clearly communicates the subjugation, subservience, the crushing and the defeat of women.’

The burqa is certainly demeaning to women, and often used to enchain them. Many other practices and rituals that Western societies tolerate are, however, also degrading. Orthodox Jewish women must shave their heads and wear a wig when they marry. The Catholic Church forbids women priests. Many Protestant evangelical churches insist that wives must ‘obey’ their husbands and that the role of women is to breed new evangelicals. Nobody seriously suggests that Jewish marriage rituals be banned or that the Catholic church be forced to accept gender equality or that evangelical wives be saved by state legislation from being baby factories.

A liberal society accepts that individuals should be free to make choices that may not be in their own interests and that, to liberal eyes, demean them. This applies even to particularly distasteful expressions of degradation, such as the wearing of the burqa.

What of the suggestion that women are forced to wear the burqa, and so need protection from the law? It is true that in countries such as Saudi Arabia or Yemen women have little choice but to cover up their face. That in itself is a good reason for liberal societies not to impose coercive dress codes.

If women are forced to do something against their will, the law already protects them in democratic countries. But what evidence exists, suggests that in Europe most burqa-clad women do not act from a sense of compulsion. According to the DCRI report in France, the majority of women wearing the burqa do so voluntarily, largely as an expression of identity and as an act of provocation. A second French report by the information authority, the SGDI, came to similar conclusions. Burqa wearers, it suggested, sought to ‘provoke society, or one’s family’, and saw it as a ‘badge of militancy’, and of ‘Salafist origins’. The burqa ban will only deepen the sense of alienation out which the desire for such provocation emerges.

The burqa is a symbol of the oppression of women, not its cause. If legislators really want to help Muslim women, they could begin not by banning the burqa, but by challenging the policies and processes that marginalize migrant communities: on the one hand, the racism, social discrimination and police harassment that all too often disfigure migrant lives, and, on the other, the multicultural policies that treat minorities as members of ethnic groups rather than as citizens. Both help sideline migrant communities, aid the standing of conservative ‘community leaders’ and make life more difficult for women and other disadvantaged groups within those communities.

What of the impact of the burqa on social integration? The veil has been rightly described as ‘ghetto walls that a person wears’. It often inhibits normal social interaction – that, after all, is its very purpose – and may preclude those who wear it from integrating into society. But given that virtually no Muslim woman actually wears the burqa, it can hardly be held responsible for creating a sense of social separation.

The real significance of the burqa is that it has become a symbol of the anxieties that have come to beset Western nations. What does it mean to be French? Or British? Or Swedish? Most Western nations have undergone a crisis of identity as both traditional values, and trust in the institutions in which those values were invested, have become eroded. Unable to define clearly the ideas and values that characterize the nation, still less to win people to those ideas and values, politicians have taken the easy step of railing against symbols of ‘alienness’. In this sense the burqa bans are similar to the prohibition imposed last year by the Italian city of Lucca on kebab shops ‘to protect our culinary tradition’ or to the decree by the mayor Rome that schools can no longer serve couscous or Chinese fried rice but only ‘regional cuisine dishes’. They are attempts to define ‘Western values’ or the republican tradition by showing what such values or traditions are not at a time when politicians find it increasingly difficult to express what they are.

And this takes us to the existential argument against the burqa. ‘This is not about the burqa’, Bernard-Henri Lévy claims. ‘It’s about Voltaire. What is at stake is the Enlightenment of yesterday and today, and the heritage of both, no less sacred than that of the three monotheisms. A step backwards, just one, on this front would give the nod, all fanaticism, all the true thoughts of hatred and violence.’

The idea that the entire weight of the Enlightenment tradition should rest on banning a piece of cloth worn by a few hundred women shows how absurd has become the debate about the burqa. Certainly, it is important to defend liberal social values, the secular society and the heritage of the Enlightenment. But we cannot do so by promoting illiberal policies, stigmatizing immigrants, or banning symbols of ‘otherness’. The very values that Lévy believes are undermined by the burqa demand that we oppose any attempt by the state to ban it.

recently, i gave up posting on pickled politics, partly because of the level of personal animosity i was facing, but mostly just in frustration at my apparent inability to get my point across. now, i suppose i have nobody very much to blame for that apart from myself, but i’ve never felt that was a problem before now. now, i think i’m starting to work out what it is that is bothering me; certainly, it’s not about the denizens of one blog, or even the blogosphere, or even the media. it’s not any one set of views, not any one person, but a set of trends, a collective movement i sense in wider society.

one of the things i like about the spittoon and my co-contributors is that they take a robust approach towards the cosy relationship between the left and the various apologists for, supporters of and partisans of islamist extremism. they take, of course, an equally dim view of other forms of clerical fascism, whether it be jewish, christian, or hindu, although, of course, we are often excoriated for not writing sufficiently on these subjects. and why is that? well, the answer that “they’re not as big a problem” simply won’t do. clearly, the activities of the likes of rss/shiv sena in india, or hardcore fundamentalists in the american south ultimately affect all of us. for me personally, the behaviour of both the extreme west bank settlers and that of rejectionist ultra-orthodoxy evokes both profound heartache and deep anger – just as the “as-a-jew” clique that only appear as jews in order to display their preening self-importance whenever an opportunity to attack israel arises. however, i would nonetheless argue that, from the perspective of wider UK society, these concerns are less immediate, in that these groups have no meaningful accommodation with either our government or the UK media, however influential they may be in the communities they come from. what bothers me, really, is what the effects of ongoing and intensifying fundamentalism on me, my family and community and wider society – in this, locally speaking, islamists are in the vanguard, as the leading proponents and practitioners of violence against my community specifically and, generally, against UK civil society.

the question inevitably arises – who’s really worse? well, i think i would on balance come down in favour of the idea that wherever a particular group becomes influential and the closer they come to the levers of power, the more of a problem they are in a particular country. thus, in the UK, the utterly misguided, racism-of-lower-expectations the-west-is-ultimately-responsible-for-everything-bad-y’know attitude has allowed the entryism of islamist organisations and sympathisers everywhere from the police to government to the left-wing media. but would it be any different anywhere else? i expect not – militant fundamentalist christians are busily inching closer to the levers of power in washington, india has had already had one bjp government and i think we’re all aware of the subversion of mainstream democracy and the processes of civil society in israel by the religious parties and the settler lobby. we’ve got a lot of muslim fundamentalists here in the UK and, in a profound act of ignorance and credulity, we’ve allowed islamic education to be systematically outsourced to salafi and wahhabi dawa organisations for a generation, with entirely predictable results – i think we can say the same of many european countries, although i would fall well short of the apocalyptic and hysterical “eurabia” scenario – in fact, i’d be more worried personally about the behaviour of the catholic party in poland led by an anti-semitic priest and any prospective alliance of a russian political party with the orthodox church – not trend anyone jewish can afford to ignore.

of course, in europe particularly, this isn’t the first time we’ve been here. there was of course an “enlightenment”, which consisted in large part of reaction against the authoritarianism of various forms of christianity, whether by trying to eliminate it altogether and replace it with a sort of ersatz state paganism, as in france, or whether to regulate it as a sort of national industry, as in germany and scandinavia, or whether to simply satirise and philosophise it into a manageable social pressure and community support lobby, as in britain. the enlightenment taught that religion was nothing but a corrupt power structure which only the mad, the bad and the deluded would indulge. as we also know, removing religion simply forced the mad, the bad and the deluded to find other channels for their unpleasant attitudes and activities. we still see this outdated and reductionist position being reinvented for modern times using all the tools of modern cultural influence, from popular science to childrens’ books to comedy. religious people are portrayed as knaves or fools. there appears to be no middle ground, no compromise possible – religion must be rooted out, cleansed and exterminated.

of course, we’ve been there before too – modern fundamentalism, as karen armstrong (before she started to become part of the problem by sucking up to the goons at MPAC-UK) pointed out in her still masterful study of fundamentalism “the battle for G!D” evolved largely as a reaction against the enforced, clumsy and often brutal imposition of modernity on societies all around the world. the fundamentalisms we have today have reached their current forms because of the political, technological and social realities of the societies in which they evolved. their priorities and obsessions are driven by the battles they originally fought, against pluralism, liberalisation of dress, behaviour, increased social equality (or inequality), against practically irreversible geopolitical realities, against the aftereffects of wars and economic dislocation. those who give aid and comfort to fundamentalists are inevitably picking and choosing where they have shared priorities and obsessions – anti-imperialism, anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, anti-israel, social breakdown, the emancipation of women, the legacy of slavery – but they are always at odds with fundamental features of the societies they criticise.

what i see developing, however, is a sort of multi-lateral polarisation in which the first casualty is moderation, the second is tolerance and the third is social consensus. the effects of this, however, touch all of us, but the effects are peculiarly corrosive on those of us who are able to combine amd integrate reason and religion and deal with the subtleties of creation, revelation and evolution. we are frequently at odds with obscurantists and bigots within our faith, but we are now fighting a rearguard defence against anti-religious forces, without any letup in the attack on reasonableness, complexity and dialogue that continues from reactionary fanatics. both sides, naturally, accuse us of giving aid and comfort to the other in its mission to destroy them – if we’re not with them, we’re against them – and no prisoners will be taken.

so, on one hand, we have the forces of militant anti-religion mounting attacks on everything from headgear to faith schools, on the other we have the walls of the ghetto being built anew, only with gun-ports this time. we can also see the social contract of the enlightenment renewed; previously, the deal was “give up your difference and you’ll get rights as a citizen” – this time, it’s “you’ve abused your rights as a citizen, we can no longer tolerate your differences”. the behaviour of religious fanatics, in their quest to dominate their own communities, has destroyed the delicate balance which allowed religion to be an integrated part of civil society. naturally, comes the response: they want all or nothing? fine – let them have nothing. but what of those of us who always wanted to co-exist? who prize our cultural and spiritual distincitiveness? oh no, distinctiveness is still allowed – but religion will no longer be a valid reason for it. diversity in sexuality, gender, disability, intelligence, talent, wealth – all these are permitted, but not religion. we are offered the choice – everything or nothing. well, we want neither.

i refuse to hide in the ghetto. i contribute to this society. i work. i pay my taxes. i don’t walk about naked, nor do i hide my face from the world. i will not assimilate, nor will i act as if i am living in another country or another century. i refuse to eat foods that are forbidden to me and i refuse to forbid those foods to others who may want them. i refuse to give up the sabbath, the festivals, the Torah and my other sacred texts – and i refuse to impose my vision of them on those who do not share my perspective. if i am attacked, i will defend myself. if i am insulted, i will respond in kind. i am not looking for a fight, but i will not shrink from one. i will not allow others to define what i am. the search for social consensus has been a long and painful one – and now it has been destroyed again, by the hubris and arrogance of religious and anti-religious fanatics. i do not know if we can put the pieces back together again, but there has to be a basis for us to live together – both enforced segregation and enforced assimilation are fascistic responses.

judaism has always been not so much a culture or a religion as it has been a 3000+ year-old argument. there is nothing so boring as loads of people violently agreeing with each other – except perhaps two groups of people refusing to concede anything that the other is saying has any value or validity. the counter-enlightenment is in full swing, without any sign that it has learnt anything from the enlightenment.

From the Huff Po:

Speaking on Governor’s Island, misty-eyed New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised a decision to allow an Islamic center to be built near Ground Zero.

Bloomberg choked up during his delivery, which highlighted the spirit of religious tolerance and freedoms once sought by New York’s earliest settlers.

“We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That’s life and it’s part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11,” he said.

“Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values – and play into our enemies’ hands – if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists – and we should not stand for that.”

The Supreme Court of Bangladesh has reinstated the measure banning Islamic parties. In a document of 184 pages presented July 26 last, the Court has demolished the Fifth Amendment of the 1979Constitution, including provisions that allowed the rise of Islamic parties in parliament during military regimes (1975 – 1979, 1982 – 1990). The measure, introduced for the first time in January, has been blocked for six months because of an appeal process demanded by Islamic leaders.

Using the Supreme Court ruling as its initiative, the Bangladesh government has banned religious political parties:

Shafiq Ahmed, Minister of Justice, said the measure will be a blow to the extremist parties that can no longer use religion to political ends.

“Secularism – said the minister – will again be the cornerstone of the constitution.” For the moment the court ruling does not provide for the cancellation of the Islamic inspiration of the constitution, but according Shafiq “thanks to the demolition of the Fifth Amendment, the modifications made during the military regimes can now be challenged in court.” Moreover, the measure outlaws all those who supported the regimes from 1975 to 1990. “In theory – adds the minister – all citizens of Bangladesh may now bring a lawsuit against the former military dictator. The repeal of the amendment would also limit the possibility of future coups. “

Islamists groups in Syria will decry this as a gesture to suppress its growing influence in the country as the only viable opposition to the secular authoritarian Syrian government. But the dynamics are complicated. The influence of the Salafis, who regard the Islamist tendency to equate temporal power (their own, preferably) with divine authority as a perversion of Islam.

Islamist response to this criticism is to embrace and include conservative Salafi doctrine into its politics which has the effect of pushing the Islamists further to the right. The case of the niqab ban is an example in point. Islamists are not unanimous in their agreement of the religious mandate of the full niqab, however they support the niqab for women because (a) they do not want to alienate the support of the ultra conservatives (the Salafis) and (b) the niqab has become a flashpoint in faith identity politics which the Islamists have claimed as their ‘political space’.

Then there are the more genuine secular moderates, such as the Syrian feminists. They would rather not have what they choose to wear or not wear dictated to them by the state – whether that’s the autocratic Bashir regime or a totalitarian Islamist solution.

The debate, crudely put, is over the space between the personal and the political. Secular-minded governments have tried to keep faith out of state institutions; Islamists want their faith to guide those institutions. Personal space has also increasingly been politicised, with a rise in the wearing of the headscarf and the veil in Syria and in most Muslim-majority countries.

For the Syrian government this increased religiosity is a serious challenge to its secular, authoritarian rule. Those who look to faith to guide their lives want it to guide their leaders too. Islamists comprise the main opposition in the region: if there were free and fair elections tomorrow, the Islamists would win.

Yet even as defenders of secular rule find their arguments weakening among the general population, from the other direction even Islamists are being pressured to be more conservative. This pressure comes fromSalafism, an austere, less flexible version of Islam that has rapidly gained ground over the past three decades.

Salafists tend to retreat into enclaves against what they perceive as the corruption of society. They often see organised politics as usurping divine authority. It is important to recognise that while Salafism is still a minority view in the Islamic world, its influence is felt widely. Islamists, wary of criticism from austere Salafists that they are too compromising on political authority, have sometimes reacted by moving to the right, to shore up their position as a viable opposition.

This is a complex, unfolding argument, with deep roots, but it is one we are scarcely attentive to in the west. Yet it matters, because the same currents affect Muslim communities in Europe and North America. What shape Islam in the west takes, how liberal, how participative, how beholden to faith identity Muslim communities become will be affected by this debate. (And not only Muslim communities: a rise in faith identity will be felt across the political spectrum.)

Zeyno Baran

This is a cross-post of an interview by Barry Rubin with Zeyno Baran, senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and editor of The Other Muslims: Moderate and Secular, recently published by Palgrave-Macmillan.

Zeyno Baran: This struggle is essentially a Muslim civil war over whose definition of Islam will be accepted as “mainstream.” Will it be the version of the Islamists (shared by all political-religious radicals, both non-violent and violent)? Or that of traditional Muslims (cultural, secular, and pious)? One will become accepted by a majority of Muslims, and by extension, of non-Muslims. Since the 1970s Islamists have made tremendous headway in this struggle thanks to money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region; they were thus able to establish institutes and networks all over the world to spread Islamism. Today, many Muslims don’t even realize what they believe to be authentic Islam is in fact a primarily political ideology of recent origin. Non-Islamists are still lacking in the financial resources — whether state or private — necessary to organize effectively against the Islamists; this is true as much in the West (the focus of this book) as in Muslim-majority countries. So, in the short term I argue that Islamists will continue to be winning in this struggle. That said, I believe in the longer term both non-Islamist Muslims and non-Muslims will eventually wake up to the realization that Islamism is a serious ideological challenge to universal human rights.

Barry Rubin: Precisely what is a “moderate Muslim”? Hasn’t that term been subject of a lot of misuse and misunderstanding?

Zeyno Baran: You are exactly right — the misuse of the label “moderate Muslim,” by Islamist groups operating in the West, has indeed led to major misunderstandings. This is  precisely why I used this term in this book — to clear up this misunderstanding and  reclaim the term from the Islamists, many of whom represent themselves as  “moderates” to Western policy makers. American and European policy makers have accepted as “moderate” people who do not commit violence; to me, however, that is a very narrow definition. An Islamist that participates in the electoral process yet does so with the goal of limiting women’s rights or of introducing a sharia regime is not moderate. The contributors to this book are all true moderates — those who fully support both universal human rights and the teachings of the Islamic faith. Being “moderate” does not mean they are not pious, which is another common misunderstanding of the term.

Barry Rubin: Why is it wrong to base the definition of a “moderate” Muslim on simply those who don’t use violence?

Zeyno Baran: The true divide within Islam is not between violence and nonviolence, but between moderation and extremism. Few Muslims resort to violence — but many more share the thinking of the violent extremism. Unless the ideology of Islamism is understood as the root cause of the violence, I don’t believe we’ll see an end to the terrorism and radicalism among Muslim communities. Moderation has to start with thought; if we are giving a free pass to those with extremist ideologies as “moderates,” then the true moderates will continue to be weakened.

Barry Rubin: How have the U.S., Canadian, and European governments helped the radicals and hurt the moderates?

Zeyno Baran: Western governments, in their desire to “engage with Muslims,” have often reached out to well-established Islamist organizations as their “partners.” In doing so, these governments did not realize that they were lending legitimacy to these Islamists in the internal struggle against their moderate opponents. With the Islamists being the main “go-to Muslims” for Western governments, it has been much harder for the true moderates to make their voices heard.

Barry Rubin: Why are Western media and institutions so easily fooled by radicals, and why do they seem to favor them?

Zeyno Baran: I think when Western media and institutions look for “Muslim voices,” they automatically gravitate to those who most closely resemble their preconception of what an “authentic” Muslim sounds like — a conception that has, of course, been shaped by Islamist propaganda. In recent years, an “authentic” voice has been one that is  opposed to U.S. policies, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that is strongly critical of Israel. Many in the media share these views as well, so it is in some ways a natural fit. The true moderates are often accused of being neo-conservative or “not really Muslim” when they support U.S. policies or express a more balanced view of the state of Israel; these ideas seem to Western journalists and policy makers to be “un-Muslim,” as if there were a single Muslim way of thinking!  Certainly, the Islamists argue there are certain “Muslim opinions” on some issues — such as the Middle East peace process — but that’s because they are trying to establish their own view as the single dominant one. It is as wrong as saying there is a “Christian opinion” on an issue, given the vast range of views held by individual Christians.

Barry Rubin: How does assimilation and acculturation work with Muslim immigrants in the West and how should it work?

Zeyno Baran: Each country has had different policies and different experiences, but  in general, European countries for many decades paid little attention to assimilation; in particular, the UK and the Netherlands followed an openly multiculturalist policy that avoided any mention of  assimilation and/or acculturation. This led to Muslim immigrant enclaves being formed in parts of European cities; when an area becomes heavily Islamic, then Islamists come in with their institutions and mosques, and establish themselves as the interlocutors between the immigrant community and Western authorities. Even after many of these governments decided to change their policies and developed programs for increased acculturation, they continued to work with the Islamists, whose ultimate responsibility is not to  Muslim immigrants, but to the global Muslimumma (community) as they understand it. Since these “representatives” had no interest whatsoever in promoting the integration and assimilation of European Muslims, this led to frustration on the part of Western governments and societies, which began wondering whether Muslims can ever truly become “Western.” In turn, this frustration — directed towards all Muslims, not just the extremists — fostered a sense of anger and victimization on the part of the Muslim immigrants, who felt they would never be accepted as long as they remained Muslim. A better way to ensure social cohesion would be to address the pragmatic needs of Muslim immigrants — jobs, education, equal rights — in accordance with the social norms of the country, with a sensitivity to different religious/cultural backgrounds. In practice, this would mean allowing the establishment of dignified prayer places for Muslims, while not assuming all Muslims go to the mosque all the time, or that the mosque is the only social place for Muslims. There should be many other places where Muslims can go to socialize with each other and non-Muslims; these will develop naturally if Europeans can move away from characterizing these populations as “Muslim first.”

Barry Rubin: Has the concept of multiculturalism helped or hurt in this struggle?

Zeyno Baran: Despite being born of good intentions, the Western policies of multiculturalism have made it harder for Muslims to become Western. The pendulum of respect for cultural/religious difference has swung too far, and Muslims have been trapped into their Muslim identity as “the other,” instead of being assisted in becoming one of “us.”  One of the recent and most clear examples of this is the wearing of the burqa in the West. For years multiculturalists have looked the other way when seeing women covered from head to toe in a style contrary to most Western norms as well as to Islam itself. Islam simply mandates modesty in dress, which for many women traditionally meant the headscarf, but never the full covering. Yet, until recently, in another unintended consequence of multiculturalism, few Westerners were willing to tackle this issue as they did not want to be seen as intolerant or bigoted.  The few that have spoken out have been silenced with threats of being labeled “racist”; thus, intolerable forms of social behavior have continued to the point where they have become acceptable.

Barry Rubin: How can Western societies “win over” Muslims without losing their own identity or surrendering to the Islamists?

Zeyno Baran: The question is which Muslims? The Islamists would never be won over since their long-term goal is to see a world that is ruled with sharia. If Western societies continue to try to judge their success in “winning over Muslims” by giving into Islamist demands, then they’ll continue to lose their identity and their basic freedoms. But if Western societies were to side with non-Islamist Muslims, and learn from them how best to counter the short- and long-term goals of the Islamists, then I would say there is a great possibility that the West will not only successfully defend its own values and norms, but also help Muslims usher in a desperately-needed Islamic Renaissance.

Barry Rubin: How can moderates justify their interpretations of Islam when they appear to differ with the most important and basic Islamic texts?

Zeyno Baran: Many of these texts have been written centuries ago and in a particular context. Many moderates read them recognizing that what may have been a great social advancement in the 8^th century cannot be taken literally in the 21^st century. Over the centuries, there were many different voices widely debating how to interpret the Qur’an or the hadiths; moderates follow the tradition of those who have used their rationality and interpreted revelation as well as historic developments within their correct context. There are also many moderates who have not read many of the basic Islamic texts; yet they are no less legitimate, because 1) many of the radicals have never read many of these texts either and 2) Islam is not just about the written text but the living tradition. Indeed, for centuries Muslims learned the basics of their religion orally, passing down teachings from one generation to another. The recent radical trend we see among Muslims is due to radicals picking and choosing certain passages from the Qur’an and other key texts, interpreting them in a way to make their case, and then presenting them as the most legitimate interpretations. Again, I’ll draw an analogy with Christianity — it is as if saying that only one denomination’s interpretation of basic texts is the correct one. Paraphrasing Bernard Lewis, the situation we face within Islam is as if a KKK-controlled state found major sources of oil, and used the money to spread its own version of Islam as the most correct form and the whole world gradually began seeing them as the most authentic voices.

Barry Rubin: The Islamists are so well financed and well-organized. How can the moderates compete? How can they win?

Zeyno Baran: This is the most difficult question. The moderates have not been able to compete and won’t be able to compete unless there is help from the West. Theoretically some of the Muslim-majority countries that are threatened by Islamists could help, but in practice they are often too afraid to challenge them for fear of being labeled as “apostates.” The West knows from its own history the damage religious extremists cause to societies and the religion itself; they can help the moderates by no longer giving Islamists a free pass while their activists are working to undermine Muslim moderates and Western (or universal) values. They can also help by increasing visibility of the moderates’ work, such as those in The Other Muslims who argue for secular rule using Islam’s own texts and history, or those who push for an Islamic Renaissance, without which I believe we’ll never quite win against the radicals who are increasingly becoming the mainstream.

I grew up in a liberal household in the Middle East where religious practice was never forced on me. But when I was 17 I made the choice to wear the hijab (headscarf), in the belief that this was a religious obligation and symbol of modesty. At times, I even wore the niqab, a veil of thin chiffon cloth that covers the face.

I knew that the niqab wasn’t a religious obligation, unlike the hijab, but I wore it in markets and malls — any place where I wanted to be hidden from the prying eyes of men. Although it was restrictive — it’s difficult to manoeuvre in busy shops, to eat or cross the road — that didn’t bother me. When I wore it, I felt comfortable knowing that my face would not be known, that I would not be leered at by men. And I certainly did not feel out of place. Many women around me wore it, too, not because it was a legal requirement or because of family pressure, but out of choice.

When I moved to Britain to go to university, I came to realise that neither the hijab nor the niqab is necessary for a woman to be religious or modest, which I was so eager to feel at the age of 17. Faith comes from within, not from outer appearances. I no longer believe the hijab is a religious requirement — and I now see the niqab as a symbol of oppression and misogyny, which is why I would never wear it again.

But I would have been outraged to be told that, by force of law, I could not wear it. The French National Assembly made a terrible mistake yesterday by voting to ban the niqab. It is not the business of governments to tell women who choose to wear the veil that they are oppressing themselves. And it is certainly not a government’s place to arbitrate in theological debates as to what is or isn’t a religious requirement.

What governments do have a right to do, however, is ban any form of face covering in certain public buildings — schools and hospitals, for example — if it is not conducive to the public good. Schoolchildren should be able to see their teacher’s face, and doctors should be able to look at their patients. Legislating for such restrictions is certainly not Islamophobic. How could it be when countries such as Egypt, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have banned the niqab in certain workplaces or while driving?

But a total ban is plain draconian. Imagine it, women getting arrested and fined for not wearing the right garment. Can French lawmakers not see the irony: taking away the right of women to choose in the name of women’s rights? Women should make their own decision about the niqab, just as I did, without being patronised or punished.

The petitions were filed following several newspaper reports and investigations by the petitioners into violence inflicted on women in the name of fatwa by local religious leaders and powerful corners.

It was alleged in the petitions that a number of deaths, suicides and incidents of grievous hurt of women were reported arising from punishment given in salish, but the law-enforcement agencies took no action to prevent those unlawful actions.

This can only be good news for the thousands of victims of extra-judicial punishments, the large majority of whom have traditionally been women. A catalogue of abuses against women by decree of sharia court and by fatwa have been recorded in Bangladesh over the years by human rights groups. Some of them have been described in this article. Interesting to find Bangladeshi clerics quoted in that article, warning against the travesties of justice instigated by spurious sharia judges who, for a fee, spout fatwas:

Maulana Haq said an Alem or Mufti (Islamic scholar) can pronounce ‘fatwa’ but none has the right to punish anyone. “Punishment can be given only by a court, not the people who utter fatwa,” he observed.

The Khatib admitted that due to ignorance of some village leaders and illiterate ‘morals’, poor women are victimised by fatwa. “They are like quacks, they don’t deserve the right to utter any fatwa.”

More recently, there is the incident of the sixteen year old girl who received 101 lashes by order of a sharia court because she had become pregnant as a result of being raped.

Bangladesh’s High Court has ordered authorities in an eastern district to protect and produce in court a 16-year-old girl who was lashed 101 times earlier this month after becoming pregnant as the result of a rape. The girl, who has not been named, received the punishment on the orders of village elders in the Brahmanbaria district who issued a “fatwa,” or Islamic ruling, declaring that she be flogged for immoral behavior. The elders pardoned the 20 year-old rapist. The incident occurred five months after the country’s highest court issued a ruling ordering authorities to investigate incidents of extra-judicial punishments and take action against those responsible.

The August ruling came after a rash of earlier floggings of women, including one who spoke to a man from a different community, another who filed a rape complaint, and a third who refused sexual advances made by a relative. In each case locally-issued fatwas ordered punishment of 101 lashes.

In the latest case, Bangladesh’s Daily Star reported that the assailant, who used to taunt the 16-year-old on her way to school, raped her last April. She kept it quiet and her family subsequently married her off to a man in a neighboring village.

But when medical tests shortly after the marriage showed her to be months into her pregnancy, he divorced her. After an abortion she returned to her family home, but village elders then declared the family should be isolated until she was punished.

The banning of fatwas will not stop violence against women or misogyny in general, but it will certainly help to prevent the miseries inflicted on women compounded by fatwa punishment.

Congratulations to Barrister Sara Hossain and her team for successfully pushing this through the courts and onto the statute books.

So, great news for the women of Bangladesh. But bad news, we suspect, for Islamists and Sholto Byrnes and his friends at the New Statesman. Not that we’re sorry.

Systems of religious law are common in many parts of the world and many of them have been reformed. But as the report points out, every single one of these reforms, whether it produced a common legal code or reformed different religious laws, took place because of internal movements for reform. These occurred in moments of greater secularisation.

Today, Banks and government aid agencies are promoting sharia laws and other parallel systems as a form of cheap and accessible justice. Many of them acknowledge that these systems do not, in fact, deliver justice. They are a particular problem for women and minorities since they reinforce the power of local elites. But no-one cares enough about this to change policy.

In fact, many papers are being written to provide intellectual justification for this policy. Worthy academics, misread women’s rights arguments. There is much talk of ‘balancing rights’ between group rights and individual rights. Beware when you hear talk of balancing of rights. Generally, it a code for denying women rights. Sometimes it is an explicit denial of women’s rights

In a post-conflict, post imperial world, peace and stability, will only be secure when women are forced back into submission and the Chiefs are back in power. That is what is happening in the dying days of Britain’s role as international policeman. That is what talking to the Taliban means. And it is happening in many other places away from the attention of the world. Fundamentalists are not seen as a threat to peace and security. As long as they promise not to plant bombs in Britain, they will be allowed to making lives miserable abroad. It is women who constitute the threat to security by disrupting the plans of the powerful.

In the course of years of work with women’s rights activists, I have often been asked why Britain’s major export is fundamentalism, particularly those that the last Labour government had decided were ‘moderates’.

We have a new government now, but I am concerned that this government will not change much. For one, indirect rule is one of the old and tested method of Empire as well considered a cheap alternative to post- Empire. Also, fundamentalists who preach the politics of purity are quite entertainingly promiscuous about getting into bed with any political party. They will re-invent themselves as part of the Big Society and offer cut price services on everything. In fact, one of the main organizing centres for global movements of fundamentalism – the East London Mosque – already does just that.

So if anyone thinks that law is not an issue and that the coming cuts to public services are what matters; think again. Private law alongside services delivered by religious organizations will be offered as part of a cheap two -for -one deal which will effectively contain and isolate Muslims in Britain.

One of the most powerful arguments that the ‘Sharia Councils’ use is that they exist to provide women their ‘Islamic rights’. Women, it is said, want these councils. They must be given a choice.

Over 20 years ago, I made a film about Sati – the upper caste Hindu practice of burning of women on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Having long been abolished, some women appeared to defy the law in order to publicly and ritually kill themselves. The patriarchs who controlled their lives claimed that they were not there, or had fainted when their daughters- in- law were possessed by a spirit and made this important spiritual decision.

In fact, it was precisely because sati had been illegal for over a century that spirit possession suddenly appeared. When it was legal, women were told it was their duty to kill themselves and they would be made to do their duty if they appeared reluctant. But once it was illegal, then suddenly women did it out of ‘choice’. No man, was man enough to stop them.

So it is with repressive legal systems. Threaten women enough with the consequences of their immorality, threaten them with shunning and many will certainly make ‘a choice.’ Not least many will make a choice to show that they are indeed good Muslims.

But there is another reason. One researcher studying ‘Sharia Councils’ found that many of the women she interviewed had not had a registered marriage. If you are not formally married you cannot be formally divorced. One way of solving this is to make sure that there are plenty of opportunities to register marriages, including allowing mosques to be places of registration. Another would be to look at the changes in immigration rules which have made it harder to get married in this country, thus driving many people to informal solutions. Another is to produce clear messages that the decisions made by Sharia Councils may very well be illegal and also do not have weight in law in many Muslim countries. In other words, they cause pain and humiliation but are worthless pieces of paper.

Many of these messages can be delivered loudly and clearly by groups and organizations who believe that religious laws are capable of reform and know the wide range of practice and interpretation that exists. I urge such groups to come forward and make common cause with the One Law for All Campaign. In Canada, it the multiple voices – of the ‘no sharia’ campaign and the campaign organized by the YWCA and the Canadian Council of Muslim Women which were successful in reversing the decision to allow religious arbitration.

I think it is highly significant that in Britain there has been silence where there should have been condemnation. There is active support for ‘sharia laws’ precisely because it is limited to denying women rights in the family. No hands are being cut off, so there can’t be a problem. Unfortunately for us, senior law officers will find that human rights expert bodies often have a similar attitude. They have done little research on the impact of family laws and the denial of justice caused by parallel systems of justice. That is why the findings of this report are so important. It is such dedicated work that changes the thinking of the experts.

The issue of ‘Sharia’ law was used strategically by the Church of England too. The Archbishop of Canterbury, needed to assert that religious law has a place in British life. He made that statement at the time his own Church was in danger of splitting on questions of equality such as gay marriage.

But in spite of these problems, there are signs of hope and the start of many converging movements for change. This election brought Conservatives to power – but it also signaled the defeat of the far right in all its various forms – the BNP was seen off, UKIP did abysmally and Respect was utterly defeated. In the face of coming hardship, the British people of all racial and religious backgrounds refused the politics of hate, fear and intimidation. The electorate, it seems, is way ahead of the anti- racist activists and theorists. Today, in Tower Hamlets, there is a mobilization apparently against racism. Many good and honest people will march shoulder to shoulder with the East London Mosque and the front organizations of the SWP. They want to express their solidarity with Muslims against the threat of the English Defence League to march in Tower Hamlets.

Unfortunately for them, local activists who have fought both racism and fundamentalism for years, do not recognize the East London Mosque as a leader in a campaign against racism. These activists have said loud and clear that while the EDL promotes hatred of Muslims, the organizations associated with the mosque too, promote hatred – often of local Muslims and many others.

Local anti-fascists, both black and white, have recognized the political agenda of hate behind the apparently anti-racist march. They know that the defeated forces of Respect are using a language of anti-racism to create an atmosphere of hysteria. They themselves have been intimidated for raising the great struggle for accountability for the mass killings that occurred in 1971: killings in which activists of the Jamaat I Islami were allegedly involved. If they are not Muslim, they are attacked as Islamophobes.

But the ideologues of an exhausted anti-racism, are, after all, only a few. A very foolish few. Many more, numbering millions, are those who have repeatedly rejected the politics of fundamentalism. You find them here in Britain, but also in Bangladesh and Pakistan, in India and Iran, in Sudan and Iraq and many other places. And that is why, this campaign, which allies liberty to equality in the interest of justice, is so important. For us in Britain; and right across the world.

The report is being launched to coincide with a 20 June 2010 rally on the issue of Sharia law.

Based on an 8 March 2010 Seminar on Sharia Law, research, interviews, and One Law for All case files, the report has identified a number of problem areas:

• Sharia law’s civil code is arbitrary and discriminatory against women and children in particular. With the rise in the acceptance of Sharia courts, discrimination is being further institutionalised with some UK law firms additionally offering clients advice on Sharia law and the use of collaborative law.
• Sharia law is practiced in Britain primarily by Sharia Councils and Muslims Arbitration Tribunals. Both operate on religious principles and are harmful to women although Muslim Arbitration Tribunals are wrongly regarded as being of more concern because they operate as tribunals under the Arbitration Act 1996, making their rulings binding in law.
• Sharia Councils, on the other hand, claim to mediate on family issues but in practice often this differs little from arbitration: they frequently ask those appearing before them to sign an agreement to abide by their decisions; they call themselves courts, and the presiding imams, judges. Their decisions are then imposed and regarded as having the weight of legal judgements.
• There is neither control over the appointment of “judges” in Sharia Councils or Tribunals nor an independent mechanism for monitoring them. Clients often do not have access to legal advice and representation. The proceedings are not recorded, nor are there any searchable legal judgements, nor any real right of appeal.
• Sharia law cannot be compared to secular legal systems because it is considered sacred law that cannot be challenged. There is no scope to look at the interests of the individuals involved, as required by UK family law.
• These legal processes ignore both common law and due process, far less Human Rights, and provide little protection and safety for women in violent situations.
• There is a general assumption that those who attend Sharia courts do so voluntarily and that unfair decisions can be challenged in a British court. Many of the principles of Sharia law are contrary to British law and public policy, and would in theory therefore be unlikely to be upheld in a British court. In reality, however, women are often pressured by their families into going to these courts and adhering to unfair decisions, and may lack knowledge of English and their rights under British law. Moreover, refusal to settle a dispute in a Sharia court can give rise to threats and intimidation, or at best being ostracised.

According to Maryam Namazie, spokesperson of the One Law for All Campaign and an author of the report, “The existence of a parallel legal system that is denying a large section of the British population their fundamental human rights is scandalous. Our findings show that it is essential to abolish all religious courts in the UK. Their very existence and legitimisation puts pressure on vulnerable women not to assert their civil rights in a British court. As long as Sharia Councils and Tribunals are allowed to continue to make rulings on issues of family law, women will be pressured into accepting decisions which are prejudicial to them and their children.”

The report recommends that Sharia courts be closed on the grounds that they work against rather than for equality, and are incompatible with human rights. Recommendations include:

1. initiating a Human Rights challenge to Muslim Arbitration Tribunals and/or Sharia Councils
2. amending the Arbitration Act under which the Muslim Arbitration Tribunals operate in a similar way to which the Canadian equivalent of the Arbitration Act was amended in 2005 to exclude religious arbitration
3. launching a major and nationwide helpline and information campaign to inform people of their rights under British law
4. proposing legislation under the EU Citizens Rights Initiative to address the issue EU-wide, and
5. strengthening secularism and the separation of religion from the state, the judicial system and education, in order to more fully protect citizenship rights.

The full report can be downloaded here.

A PANEL of 13 “faith advisers” appointed by former Labour Communities Secretary John Denham is to be scrapped by the new coalition Government. His Tory successor Eric Pickles wants to move away from a “cronies-based” approach to faith issues and instead tackle problems by direct “face-to-face” contact with ordinary people themselves.

Within days of becoming minister, Mr Pickles ordered a review of the panel which was set up by Labour in January. I’ve been told by a senior Government source that the unpaid panel is “highly unlikely” to meet again.

The panel has met twice, the last time in March. Although a spokesman for the Department of Communities and Local Government (CLG) said its membership and remit was “under review”, sources close to Mr Pickles said: “It’s unlikely to meet again. We’re going to end this habit of Labour appointing its mates and then kicking issues into the long grass. We very much want to engage with faith groups, but we’re going to do it face to face and not through panels.”

Panel members included Canon Dr Alan Billings, a former director of the Centre for Ethics and Religion at Lancaster University, and Rosalind Preston, the president of the Jewish Volunteer Network.

The panel also included Cheshire dentist Wakkas Khan, who was president of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies from 2004-2006. The Department of Communities and Local Government press release at the time of the announcement gave a misleading impression of his background. Specifically, it stated that as well as being a founder member of the Government-backed Radical Middle Way, he was director of the Exploring Islam Foundation.

I learn from Carter Ruck libel lawyers (who contacted me when I was researching a possible story on this last week) that, contrary to widespread belief, this is NOT the same Exploring Islam Foundation that last week launched an advertising campaign on the side of London cabs. Here’s the Times report detailing that. Instead, Mr Khan’s lawyer at Carter Ruck tells me that “at university, and subsequently while he was from 2004-6 President of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies in the UK and Ireland, ‘Exploring Islam Foundation’ was one of the concepts Wakkas Khan initiated and sought to develop as a discussion forum”.

Carter Ruck tell me that he submitted his CV to CLG in September 2009 and listed the directorship under “past positions…2006…”. He has never had any connection with the current campaign group.

It was therefore the Government and Mr Denham who misled the public into believing that Mr Khan was a current director of something called the Exploring Islam Foundation. It’s not the first error CLG has made in this area.

“Do Anglicans, even moderates, really think of G!D as a sexless being? I was under the impression that most moderate religious people still think of G!D as male. People could use the singular ‘they’ and refer to a ‘parent’ if they were really that bothered.”

i think she could with some justice aim this question at judaism, but it is, nonetheless, a bit of an old chestnut. the best way i can answer it is that in the same way that we deal with anthropomorphism in the text: G!D Isn’t male any more than G!D Has a “hand”, or a “back”, G!D Forbid. when the Text speaks in these terms, it is only to be understood as the way *we* understand the interaction, not the *actual reality* – hence, when we speak of G!D as “Father” or “King”, these are merely the interactions and relevant relationships that are being described, not the Ultimate Reality of the Divine. by the same token, a number of incredibly important Divine Names and interaction/relationships are *female*, such as “E-L ShaDaY”, which comes from the word ShaDaYiM (breasts) and “Ha-RaHaMaN”, which comes the word ReHeM (womb), not to mention the considerable symbology of the Divine Feminine in kabbalah around the SheKhiNaH (Divine Presence) and “Matronit” and the male-female interrelationships actually *within* the G!DHead. one might also mention the idea that the “community of israel” is synonymous with G!D’s “bride” on some level, so that would require one of us to be “male” and the other “female” in that particular situation.

“And then there’s Jesus – no-one could lead themselves to believe he was genderless. Judaism has Moses, Islam has Mohammed – all these prophets are male. How does a person get around that one?”

perhaps by mentioning the seven major jewish prophetesses, sarah, miriam, deborah, hannah, abigail, huldah and esther – (talmudic reference: BT megillah 14a)? according to the great authority rashi, rebecca, rachel and leah should also be included.

a more serious criticism, i believe, is the following:

“If one accepts and follows traditions without question purely on the basis that they are traditions, this leaves the door wide open for all kinds of nasty things. In general, it silences and disables those who disagree with the traditions and would like to do things differently. It’s those ‘harmless’ traditions which can make people feel stifled and like there’s only one right way to do things. At the very least, they discourage creativity, critical thinking and independence.”

this is certainly a position with which we at the spittoon can identify – certainly within judaism (and, i and others would argue, within islam as well) the idea that there is One True Way Of Doing Stuff is a corrosive and oppressive idea not borne out by a truly insightful examination of the texts involved. however, the accompanying analysis is flawed:

“One can usually assess how harmless a tradition is by examining what the penalties are, if any, of not following it. In your example, I would imagine that a Jewish/Muslim pork-eater would face many negative reactions from their community, plus residual religious guilt, and that this is probably the real reason why they ‘like following the tradition’.”

now, this might be a perfectly adequate summary of how the uneducated “feel” about the law in question, in fact, the penalty in halakhah is the indication of exactly how important the principle incurring the penalty is in the first place. in fact, halakhically, the penalty is thirty-nine lashes, a comparatively light penalty compared to breaking shabbat, which is a stoning offence. now, before you get all bent out of shape on how unpleasant it is to get lashed, you’d have to also consider the standard of evidence, which required five further tests before the lashes could be administered:

1. the pork-eating in question would have to be done in front of two kosher witnesses (many, many difficulties in establishing what one of these looks like)
2. the two witnesses would need to have absolutely no discrepancy in their statements.
3. the pork-eater would have to receive a warning from the witnesses that by so doing, he would incur a penalty of lashes.
4. the pork-eater would have to respond that he had understood the warning and the penalty, reiterating precisely what they both were.
5. the eating would then have to occur within 3 seconds of this response.

incidentally, to be binding, the verdict would also have to be handed down by a properly constituted and duly authorised religious court – and there hasn’t been such a court for approximately 1500 years, but considering the re-establishment of such courts is a religious duty, i personally would prefer to rely on the other safeguards. even so, i hope you can see from the standard required that anyone who actually meets it is clearly out to make a point. oh, and, incidentally, if you ran away before the verdict was carried out, you couldn’t be re-arrested. in such a case, the negative feeling from your community is likely to be the only sanction.

another interesting challenge is made here:

“To what extent, for a religious person, is their holy book really their holy book, if they disregard most of its teachings (or haven’t even read it all the way through)?”

for jews, as we were born into a covenantal relationship, we are as subject to it as to the laws of the country we were born into. the same obtains with UK law. presumably amy’s not suggesting that i’m not obliged to follow the regulations of her majesty’s revenue collectors despite the fact that i may never have read them or heard of their provisions? by the same token:

“To align oneself with a movement, an organisation, that one disagrees with at least in part, knowing that in doing so you are giving it power – numbers at least, and in many cases, money too?”

i am not sure how this is different from being a citizen of a country whose policies you may or may not agree with – you’ve still got to pay your taxes.

as part of this discussion, i analysed deuteronomy 22:29 in its context. this provoked a number of further responses including:

“Regarding the Deuteronomy verse (22:29), it says that ’she shall be his wife, because he hath humbled her’ – humbled? That’s rather chilling, no? Is that a mistranslation too?”

not only that, but it is also misrepresenting what the text says, which is ‘AiNah” – “forced”, but not in a *physically* violent way, as in verse 25, more in such a way as to give her no choice but to marry him. i would say that this represents bringing about a marriage by “putting the woman in a compromising position”; if you know pride and prejudice, it’s what wickham does to lydia bennet to get money out of the family; he has to be bribed to marry her. the Torah is trying here to prevent the woman becoming unmarriageable; there is nothing to say that she can’t *then* divorce *him* (after betrothal and before final marriage), thus retaining her autonomy and a hefty divorce payout; it is just that *he* is forever prevented from divorcing *her*, not the other way around. i would understand this verse as a face-saving exercise.

amy then goes on to say:

“Regardless of whether rape occurred or it was ‘just sex’, isn’t it a bit sexist to generally suggest that it’s okay to buy a woman in this way?”

now, i’m not sure you can really project your attitude back to the bronze age as if human values and relationships have always been the same; i mean, that is the same sort of point of view that would reduce shakespeare’s “merchant of venice” to simple antisemitism. the initial audience of the Torah (as opposed to G!D) wouldn’t really understand what you’re getting at here. the thing is, you aren’t “buying a woman”; you’re contracting for procreative services, as it were, which can only be done by ensuring exclusivity on the woman’s part. the woman must enter into the contract without coercion and of her own free will and can exit it at her discretion on virtually any grounds (including bad breath) and is, for the duration of the contracted marriage, entitled to a statutory level of maintenance (and alimony), clothing, housing and sexual satisfaction, breach of which by the husband is, needless to say, grounds for divorce. this quite simply was revolutionary within the context in which the Torah was given; not only in that the woman had to agree, but that she maintained her rights, her property and right of cancellation. in fact, it compares positively to modern civil law in most respects – most people agree that merely falling in love is a rather worse basis for marriage than shared values and clear responsibilities on both sides! both sides contribute assets – the wife’s contribution is *not* a dowry, but her reproductive capabilities, hence:

“(Following your interpretation, it’s a bit like having to pay for something you broke in a shop – fair enough if it’s a vase, but a person? Why does having sex make you a broken person?)”

well, it doesn’t, nor is this implied, although permit me to observe, tongue-in-cheek, that most of us would pay more for new underpants than for second-hand. the statutory levels, in any case, are nominal – in reality, these would in the past have been negotiated, in the case of a woman who had emancipated herself from her father (or previous husband by divorce or widowhood) possibly by the woman herself. and there’s more:

“If God is a supremely knowledgeable being, with ultimate powers, and is perfectly good and moral, why couldn’t he send a clear message – even in the bronze age – that women are people, not property?”

the same reason that G!D also didn’t send the clear message “don’t drive on the wrong side of the road” – it wouldn’t have made sense at the time, only now. the clarity would in fact have been precisely the opposite.

“What stopped him from telling these citizens in no uncertain terms that it’s okay for women to have sex, they don’t have to be virgins until they’re married, and it’s not right to buy and sell them?”

the fact that this wasn’t a student dorm at berkeley, it was bronze age canaan – and if you hopped behind a bush with someone, you’d be liable to end up with your throat slit, or sold into slavery, thus precipitating a blood feud; it wasn’t like there was a police force and cctv; this was the wild fecking west! people took what they could get and, like it or not, if a woman didn’t have protection from a father, guardian or husband, she might be fair game, unless she stayed within the protection of the law. to be honest, this feels somewhat anachronistic reasoning, based on a very different axiomatic substructure, as the following statement identifies:

“I find it quite convenient that you’re explaining away misogyny as mistranslation, and contradictions as just not knowing the ‘right’ context of the verses in question. You seem to be taking it as your a priori assumption that there can’t possibly be any real inconsistency in the texts, there can’t possibly be any real misogyny. Why not? Why can’t there be?”

the answer to this is that if, axiomatically, one believes, as i do, that the Torah is a Divine document, any inconsistency in the texts is there to teach us something and the basis of traditional methodologies is the ability to identify the root cause of the inconsistency in order to illustrate the teaching point concerned. this has certainly been our approach as long as we can remember -and, more to the point, this is documented quite a long way back. secondly, in the conception we have of G!D it would make no more sense for G!D to Be a “misogynist” than it would for G!D to have a “hand”, or to “be angry”; these things are simply expressions of how we experience what we interpret out of the text. we believe that G!D Expects us to behave with respect and compassion to each other, not to systematically disadvantage half the human race. now, obviously, if you have different assumptions, then these might include a priori that any statement in the Torah reflects bronze age sensibility and capability in terms of gender relations, science and critical reasoning and therefore there can’t possibly be any real lessons to be learned from it. on this i suspect i might have to differ from you, seeing as how our culture is based almost entirely on this document and in most respects is generally considered to have produced major leaders in each field who are also committed to some of the same assumptions about the document. this is not to say that they are all going to agree with each other all the time:

“Why is your ‘methodology’ necessarily going to result in a clear, unequivocal message?”

because it is based on a clear set of assumptions and underpinned by a unified philosophical structure – i’m not saying that this necessitates clarity and unequivocable messaging in all cases, because it doesn’t, but in the case of this particular verse, it clearly precludes certain interpretations such as “G!D Is a misogynist” as nonsensical. there are some other pertinent questions that obtain:

“On what do you base your faith in it?”

on the fact that this way of doing things has preserved the sole remaining diaspora culture of the ancient world through several millennia of unremitting and occasionally genocidal hostility. in other words, it works.

“How do you know that the eventual interpretation is right, in any case?”

the principle we test it against is “after the majority shall you incline” (exodus 23:2) but we *also* preserve minority opinions (BT bava metzia 59b) in case eventually they become majority.

“What do you check it against?”

it’s peer-reviewed. all jewish law has been aggressively picked apart, analysed, defended or amended on this basis. that is what the talmud documents.

“Then you say that two contradictory positions can both be the word of the ‘living god’? How is that even possible – how can a creator of the universe not make his mind up?”

of course – but “it is not in heaven” (deuteronomy 30:10), so we are told we have to work it out for ourselves, on the authority of the Torah itself, so the majority opinion came down on one side at that time. G!D may well Have an opinion, but in the famous talmudic debate of the “oven of achnai” (the reference given above) the majority decision was to say “bugger off, G!D, this is a human decision now, You Said so in the Torah”.

“Not be 100% clear about his message? Do you not find it slightly odd that all this interpretation is necessary?”

no, we find it incredibly empowering that we are being treated like grown-ups responsible for our own actions, not children with no sense of right or wrong.

“Why doesn’t God reiterate his message and clear things up? Hasn’t he got the power to do this?”

well, yes, obviously, but during the “oven of achnai” debate, the position of the majority was “we do not make legal decisions on the basis of Divine Voices from Heaven”.

we still haven’t quite got to the bottom of the equality debate here, however:

“When I talk about a sense of equality, I am talking about equality between men and women – e.g. what is it that leads you to know that stoning a woman to death for not being a virgin is wrong? Would you only know that it’s wrong if you’d read all the scriptures? Or would you know that it’s wrong based on your own empathy and reasoning? I would argue the latter, seeing as I know it’s wrong, and I haven’t read all the scriptures or engaged in textual interpretation.”

i would argue that the case that you are basing it on your own “empathy and reasoning” alone is not a strong argument. nobody grows up in a vacuum. you have these attitudes because you developed them, based on your upbringing. i would argue that you *have* been influenced indirectly by them because they have influenced the society you grew up in. i can even point to the bit of Torah that it comes from: “you shall love the stranger [person who is different from yourself] for you were strangers in egypt” (leviticus 19:34) nor am i saying that my own reasoning is inoperative – obviously, i needed to use it to apply the verse to this situation, similarly the sages needed to apply it in order to get the relevant safeguards in place to prevent it happening unless it really, really, really, REALLY applied. if you’re going to do something as drastic as stoning a woman to death for not being a virgin, you’d better be really sure that’s what the text says – and that what the text says applies to this EXACT situation.

“This is what I’m talking about. A religious person reads such a horrendous verse, thinks ‘That can’t be right’ and proceeds to delve more deeply into the scriptures to find some way of justifying it.”

i don’t really understand why this should be so wrong – it is the way the Torah does thought experiments; under what circumstances might such a penalty apply? what might justify it in *practice*? are you sure? are you really, really sure? what principle is being upheld? that’s not the same as “justifying” it – you can’t be “justifying” it if you end up effectively prohibiting it, which was the actual effect – but then again, you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know the proper context for Torah, which is as the written component of jewish law, not as a copy of “gender relations for dummies”, which is how it is so often abused by literalist protestants and bible-bashers in particular.

“I doubt that a person starts reading scriptures and then concludes ‘Well whaddaya know? Stoning women is immoral!’”

i agree – and so do the sages! although there are more morally complex issues in the Torah than this one.

amy is also good enough to address a criticism i make of her that she is generalising about religious people:

“Sure, not all religious people follow their religion in exactly the same way, but they do believe in a god/gods, and their holy texts do mean something to them. These are the two aspects of religion that I critique in my piece, and they appear to me to be pretty universal among the faithful. The rest is a critique of the arguments used by religious feminists to defend the misogyny in their holy texts, and examples of religiously-inspired misogyny. What is it that I’m generalising about? What is it exactly that you object to?”

well, i suppose what i object to is the implication that religious feminists are “defending misogyny”, because as i have attempted to show, i don’t think the misogyny is there either in intent or in application – except by people who really don’t understand either the text concerned, or who don’t follow an acceptable standard of textual interpretation. i accept that it *could* result in misogyny, because it *has* – but human beings do get things wrong from time to time and Torah is not easy.

anyway, i hope this is not too irrelevant and that there are enough interesting nuggets here for the conversation to continue here; certainly i would encourage people to take a look at the original piece.

Said one protester: “All the time you are asked which religion you belong to, but we want to be considered as only Lebanese,” she said. “Secularism is about every religion. It unites everyone but we need to forget whatever religion we are.”

The march was organized over the Internet by five Lebanese who together formed the grassroots group Laique Pride. They had hoped for 2,000 participants in the march, a figure easily surpassed as hundreds turned out in the sun.

Slogans such as “Civil marriage, not civil war” and “What about freedom of opinion?” could be read from huge placards in between Lebanese flags. Dozens of protesters wore white T-shirts with “What’s my religion?” on the front and “None of your business” on the back.

Omar Habib, 29, carried a fluorescent banner with skull and crossbones. “Sectarianism: danger,” it read.

“This is the biggest problem we have, not just in Lebanon but in all of the Middle East. It’s high time we did something,” he said. “I will be here every day if I need to. Politically there are messages about non-sectarianism, but most importantly [politicians] need to realize that the people are against sectarianism.”

More here.

hat/tip: normblog