Passports to Many Countries

OK—first off. I tremble to write this post, because if Irshad Manji reads this it, and troubles to respond, she’ll wipe me off the map. She’s both smarter and tougher than I.

And who is Irshad Manji? Well, many people in the Arab world have an answer—she’s an infidel, a heretic, a traitor. Or, some would say, she’s a person who’s finally had the guts to speak some unpleasant truths.

Some months ago, I was trying to write a review in Amazon.com, since a number of Iguana readers were having trouble uploading their reviews. Not having read anything recently, I decided to review the King James Bible. (It seemed fair—I had read it, though years ago, and it’s a text that has survived for a substantial amount of time. I doubted anything that I could say would seriously hurt it….) I went to the page, scrolled down, and was startled to find that 46 people had give it one star, Amazon’s lowest level. Here’s my favorite:

444 of 534 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars

Far too pornographic for a Christian home!, October 6, 2012

By 

Mrs. Betty Bowers "Mrs. Betty Bowers, America... - See all my reviews

This review is from: Holy Bible: King James Version (Hardcover)

I simply refuse to poison my Christian children's precious minds with lascivious tales of daughters getting their father drunk and having sex with him (Genesis 19:30-38) - or harlots lusting after penises that are the size of donkeys' (Ezekiel 23:20). It is, however, excellent for cracking nuts and slapping bottoms.

I tell you this story because a surprising number of Christians are treating the Bible as…well, a sort of supplemental text. Or perhaps additional reading, if wanted.

Right, you say. But what does this have to do with Irshad Manji?

Well, to put words into the lady’s mouth—something certainly unnecessary and probably dangerous—it’s interesting that Christians can do that, and yet a Muslim doing the same with the Quran? In Canada, yes—but how about Saudi Arabia? I bring you The Australian:

A FAMILY row that developed into a televised debate in Saudi Arabia has ended in disaster for a young activist now facing seven years in jail and 600 lashes, as the kingdom continues to crack down on online dissent.

Raif Badawi, 30, founder of a liberal website, has been sentenced by a court in Jedda - convicted of insulting Islam and denouncing the kingdom's feared religious police. A charge of apostasy that could have carried the death penalty was dropped.

Tacked on to those offences was a charge of "parental disobedience", stemming from a bitter dispute between Badawi and his father. The row became so ugly that among those denouncing his son as an apostate was Badawi's father himself.

I read about it at the time, and then considered writing about it. I didn’t, partly out of politically correct fear of playing into Islam / Muslim bashing, and partly because, well, what is there to say? It’s ridiculous and outrageous; now, what about the other 998 words in my post?

It’s a problem I’ve had with the some parts of the Muslim world for some time. A Danish cartoonist draws an offensive cartoon—embassies burn and 100 people die in Nigeria alone in violence related to the affair. This we have to take seriously?

Manji wrote a book, The Trouble with Islam Today, in which she provides the answer—the Muslims. And I saw her defend her beliefs in a great show from Al Jazeera English called Head to Head; it was filmed in temperate waters of the Oxford Union.

Well, she was bright and articulate, as well as quite passionate. And I had come to her through music, specifically through Daniel Barenboim, the pianist and conductor. Barenboim spent ten years in Argentina before his parents moved to Israel in 1952. And speaking of courage, he’s fully the equal of Manji—would you have the balls to break a decades long prohibition of playing Wagner in Israel?

Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Barenboim, who had been selected to head the production of Wagner's operas at the 1988 Bayreuth Festival,[40] had since at least 1989 publicly opposed the Israeli ban. In that year, he had the Israel Philharmonic "rehearse" two of Wagner's works.[41] In a conversation with Edward Said, Barenboim said that "Wagner, the person, is absolutely appalling, despicable, and, in a way, very difficult to put together with the music he wrote, which so often has exactly the opposite kind of feelings ... noble, generous, etc." He called Wagner's anti-Semitism obviously "monstrous," and feels it must be faced, but argues that "Wagner did not cause the Holocaust."

Said was Muslim, and went on to become friends with Barenboim, and later to write a book with him.

Oh, and the two also dreamed up the idea of an orchestra that would have both Jewish and Muslim members. So they started the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999, and it was not always smooth—discussion between the players could get very heated.

Barenboim is believed to be the only person who holds citizenship in both Israel and Palestine. What would happen if all of us did?

A Man of the Word, a Man of the Lab

I used to feel bad about it—taking 45 minutes to watch a documentary, or—in this case—a debate. Why waste that time—shouldn’t I be writing? And even if what I’m watching will eventually turn into what I’m writing, I still felt guilty.

But I found the clip below riveting at all times, and especially because the “presenter” (as he is described in Wikipedia, Medhi Hasan, a devout Muslim, really takes the atheist Richard Dawkins on. In fact, it’s by no means certain who won the debate.

Highlights: at about 14:30, the following exchange takes place:

Dawkins: Do you actually believe that Mohammed split the moon in half? Do you actually believe that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse?

Hasan: Yeah I do, I believe in God, I believe in miracles, I

believe in revelation.

Dawkins can’t get it—he is so absolutely committed to the scientific method and the supremacy of reason that he cannot conceive of any rational person believing the above or, later on when talking to a Christian monk, the reality of the transubstantiation.

Confession—neither can I. Although I’ve always admired Flannery O’Connor’s comment on the transubstantiation: “well, if it’s just symbolic, I say to hell with it!”

It’s clear—the debate in the video clip is 47 minutes of high speed, high-powered super trains racing in opposite directions on parallel tracks.

A little later, Hasan takes on Dawkins on the following quote:

Horrible as the sexual abuse in the Catholic church was, the damage was arguably less than the damage of bringing them up Catholic in the first place.

Dawkins adduces a letter he had gotten from a victim of sexual abuse from a priest, who had also told her that her 7-year old friend, who had just died, was then in hell, since her friend had been Protestant. The woman claimed that the sexual abuse, though bad, had not been as bad as the nightmares she had had of her friend burning in hell for all eternity.

Hasan nails him, saying that Dawkins is an empiricist—would he accept one instance of something as proof that it were generally true? The two lock horns, with Hasan pounding him with the question, at the end, “is teaching my daughter about religion and the prophet Mohammed flying to the heavens on a winged horse child abuse?” At last, Dawkins gives in: “no, it’s not.”

At the end, at about minute 42, Dawkins is asked “Would the world be a better place if religion disappeared tomorrow?”

Dawkins replies, “Ah, yes!”

Well, Hasan gets the last word, saying “goodbye and, dare I say it, God bless.”

Well, Dawkins doesn’t mind getting into a scrap or two. Yesterday, he got into a scrap by tweeting, “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”

And Wikipedia states that his animus against religion is grounded on two beliefs; that religion breeds conflict, and that it encourages or justifies belief without evidence. In the case of pseudoscience—such as whatever they are calling creationism nowadays—being taught as something as valid as science, I’m totally with him. And yes, religion has brought us a bit of conflict, in the past.

And Dawkins argues—the fact that religion may inspire a person to do good is no justification for the existence of God. Ditto for the argument that it feels good to be religious, to have rituals, to meet together as a community.

And am I wrong—from a casual reading of The God Delusion seven years ago—in thinking that Dawkins sees religious belief as a cultural meme, and that it may have developed because, as children, we have an innate instinct to be obedient. That’s useful, in evolutional terms, the offspring that stays closest to the mother has a greater chance of survival than the offspring that explores, wanders, exposes himself to predators or a harsh environment.

“Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man,” is attributed to the Jesuits, no slouches in the education department. It’s true, in my case. Nobody got to me in the religion business in any serious way, and it’s unlikely now that anybody will.  

OK—that’s Dawkins. What about Hasan?

Well, he’s a Shia, he believes that the path to tread is secular, not Islamist, government, and he has written, “The Iraq war was a strategic disaster – or, as the Tory minister Kenneth Clarke put it in a recent BBC radio discussion, ‘the most disastrous foreign policy decision of my lifetime […] worse than Suez.’”

OK—so far so good. He also condemned the September 11 attacks, and wondered why British Muslims are so passionate about foreign affairs, but relatively uninterested in domestic issues.

Now comes the thorny part; consider this remark in a speech from 2009:

The kuffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to the teachings of Islam, the rational message of the Koran; they are described in the Koran as “a people of no intelligence”, Allah describes them as not of no morality, not as people of no belief – people of “no intelligence” – because they’re incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices, to shake off those easy assumptions about this world, about the existence of God. In this respect, the Koran describes the atheists as “cattle”, as cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world."[19]

Cattle? Ouch! Nor is the explanation much consolation:

“The Quranic phrase 'people of no intelligence' simply and narrowly refers to the fact that Muslims regard their views on God as the only intellectually tenable position, just as atheists (like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris) regard believers as fundamentally irrational and, even, mentally deficient."[21] The Islamophobia Watch website argued Hasan was the victim of a "witch-hunt", writing that these allegations of extremism were "aimed at getting him dismissed from his job."[22]

As always, I’m split. I have a hard time believing in transubstantiation as a physical reality, and if I really believed that I had the flesh and blood of a Jew two thousand years old, I’d be on the church floor wretching. Can you imagine the taste? And would it have been cooked? And would the priest be offended if I asked for some ketchup with the host?

I’ve also been in the room and at the bedside when my mother died. Was it a spiritual experience?

Certainly it was powerful. It changed my life, as have other experiences not spiritual. I would call it a moment of mystery, a moment when time stopped, the world stopped—for me, at least—and some power or reality beyond anything I knew came into the room, delivered death to a woman who wanted and deserved it, and left us all stunned with wonder.