Once upon a time I was a Tao-y arty little hippy whose family happens to be flaming scarlet. It happens that I know a good deal about the diversity of the Islamic tradition, or at any rate more than Galloway, German and Livingstone, who appal me and my simple belief that atheism and feminism are the hallmarks of the Left. What follows is certain reflections on religion and the proposed legislation against inciting religious hatred which may be of interest to comrades.
New Labour seems to view religion in terms of the devotees of Yahweh-Allah-Jehovah, a chap not a girl's best friend. The National Secular Society chronicles Blair's enthusiasm for 'faith communities'. I do not think Zen, wicca and feminist theology are embraced at these meetings. MAB's hypnotizing of some on the Left is known. Women Against Fundamentalisms remains a little-known organization. Southall Black Sisters operate on a shoe-string. Something has gone wrong and it seems to me that it is bad news for all women. Koorosh Modorresi of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran offers some analysis. Julia Bard of WAF notes:
Britain's minorities, once described in terms of national, cultural and socio-economic, as well as religious, characteristics, are now increasingly viewed as homogeneous groups defined solely by religion. Priests are using the mosque, the synagogue, the gurdwara, the temple, the evangelical church to edge themselves into positions of political as well as spiritual leadership, defining the community's agenda and power structure, and negotiating with the state for resources. Most people neither know nor care about tensions and conflicts within minorities, so when a recognisable spokesman (and it is always a man) emerges, they unquestioningly accept him as a legitimate representative.
Plurality is too readily seen in terms of monoliths of conventionally religious people having agreed it's a bad idea to want to kill each other. Actually plurality consists of individuals finding their own paths and mostly damned and rejected by the conventionally religious and all ancient religions carry within them the seeds of the destruction they now perceive as coming from outside.
Patriarchal religion is the enemy of all, and an enemy thought slain. Its world is as defined by one or more men who happened to be speaking on behalf of God as very long time ago, a god strangely ignorant both of everything else going on in the world at the time and of the capacity of women to be philosophers, mathematicians, engineers, soldiers or bus-drivers, a god who, despite being omnipotent and thus aware of the lack of global communication, saw fit to reveal himself only to a few when it would have been a cinch to hop about the planet with the same message.
The historical Moses is thought to have lived in around 1400 BC. In the 1500 years or so between him and Paul, a multiplicity of world-shaping events and perspectives on being human occurred elsewhere on the planet, the whole of Ancient Greece and with it the birth of democracy, most of Classical Rome, the Upanishads, Confucius, Zoroastrianism, Lao-Tzu, none of which is significant to the conservative Christian other than as error or sin or at best feeble gropings for troof. This is first order lunacy: discuss. It worked when there was no mass communication, when the nearest city was an alien land many leagues distant. It doesn't work now.
The conservative religious male is deluded, about the universe, about the reality of individuals, especially female and gay ones. He exists in his own little world bounded by the dictates of Yahweh-Allah-Jehovah and thinks himself better than those who do not. Why he thinks he is better is because he kids himself he is surrendering ego to the dictates of the Yahweh-Allah-Jehovah as laid down in the book. Actually love is the ego-killer, the opener of the doors of perception, and must lead to seeing people as they are not as you think they are. Actually he is arrogant and egocentric, which is why Cardinal Ratzinger is bad not mad when he says Buddhism is the new threat to the Church.
March 1997: Ratzinger describes Buddhism as "an auto-erotic spirituality" in an interview with a French newspaper. Ratzinger said, "In the 1950s someone said that the undoing of the Catholic church in the 20th century wouldn't come from Marxism but from Buddhism. They were right."
National Catholic Reporter, September 15 2000
Law suppressing 'inflammatory' views of the supposed holy renders us subordinate to the fantasy-merchants. Or saying they're insane is not 'inciting religious hatred'? In post-Enlightenment, post-Woodstock Britain people have to be deferential to these guys? Get real, Mr Blunkett, get real - fast.
As the Reformation was an expansion of thought beyond the entirely arbitrary limits set by the Vatican, the minds of humans, so the Enlightenment and the present day are expansions of thought beyond the bounds set by Christianity. Minds can go anywhere. Those who live in mental cages are going to have to grasp yet again (something about tumbrils springs to mind) that they may not cage everyone else.
Some Muslims/Jews are racist, sexist, homophobic and the enemies of freedom and democracy and demonstrate this in words and deeds both in the West and in the Middle East. It is abhorrent that Muslims/Jews who are not racist, sexist, homophobic and the enemies of freedom and democracy be abused by villains who assume all Muslims/Jews are racist, sexist, homophobic and the enemies of freedom and democracy. The villains who abuse Muslims are largely white. The villains who abuse Jews are often brown. What is not going to happen is that the Muslims/Jews who are racist, sexist etc are going to change because their racism, sexism etc are, they claim, divinely ordained. Additionally there are those who revile a religion simply because it is different to their own and therefore the spawn of the Evil One and secularists, rationalists, atheists, humanists who think all religion is superstitious nonsense and a tool to manipulate the gullible. That, I think, broadly covers every possible target of the proposed law from the post 9/11 anti-Muslim hysterics to the repulsive Griffin to Abu Hamza to members of the National Secular Society.
Religious hatred is not the same as race hatred. Firstly, a religion is a chosen set of convictions. Secondly, hating a race necessarily entails hatred of members of that race. Hating a religion does not necessarily entail hating believers in that religion. To say one hates Zoroastrianians means just that but to say Christianity is ghastly life-denying garbage leaves gaps - one's nice Christian neighbour is not ghastly life-denying garbage but is blind to what his creed really is. One's nice Christian neighbour then points out that the blindness is not his. The chief gap-filler is probably individual sovereignty: I think what you believe is a load of sick garbage but I am I and you are you and what you believe is your business, so long as you don't try to impose it on me.
People are going to continue to be profoundly and relentlessly hostile to religious beliefs that are, as Modorresi puts it, 'anti-human'. Prosecuting those who express that hostility is only going to increase it.
Freedom has enabled the dissemination and blossoming of ideas humans long known in all traditions but kept down by the orthodox, has enabled people to explore their own traditions and those of others. The literalists have been left behind by history. My guess would be that not too many people of any background care over-much about those who hold the world was created in seven days or equivalent fantasies from their own traditions. Christians and Jews are not shy about saying so. There are suggestions that Muslims are, for reasons ranging from pressure from Islamists to wishing to maintain a united front.
Have you talked to a Sikhophobe lately? Did the guy you got chatting to launch into a diatribe against Hindus? I thought not.
The most recent honour killing I have read of was performed by a Sikh. It was reported as an aberrant act by an individual male, an act hardly unknown to Westerners. It was not accompanied by the three-ringed circus of criticism, analyses and apologetics that tends to accompany such actions by Muslims. Undoubtedly there are horrible Sikhs, fascist Hindus, repulsive Christians. They tend to be given the benefit of individuality. What Islam has that no other religion represented in the UK has is a host of Islamic nations, all of which are human rights hells and which not unreasonably create a negative perspective of Islam and give rise to the thought why should Muslims be any different here than there? That Muslims 'there' may hate 'there' and fight for civil rights at great personal risk goes uncelebrated by Muslims 'here'. If your spokesmen give the impression you think things are organized better in Iran or Pakistan, however erroneous that is as the real views of all Muslims here, you should not be surprised that people are hostile.
Inner freedom, whether in Zen, the Tao or the mystic traditions of the monotheisms, is recognized as liberation from illusion, imagined mind-constructs of reality, strangely thought remote from real life. Blind certainty as to the 'nature of women' kept us out of public life, out of the universities, until uncomfortably recently. The Jewish mystic tradition, the Qabbalah, describes the path to self-knowledge as Jacob's Ladder. At the bottom are the form, self, illusion and fear, at the top essence, other, reality and love. The lowest levels of consciousness are represented politically by totalitarianism: fascism, Stalinism and fundamentalism
The Self and Faith must both be tossed away;
Blasphemers call such action blasphemy
Love has no time for blasphemy or faith
Nor lovers for the Self, that feeble wraith
Begin the journey without fear; be calm;
Forget what is and what is not Islam.
Farid Ud-Din Attar (fl C12th AD), The Conference of the Birds
Within the monotheisms thinking people - poets and other such persons beyond the Pale - have explored the gamut of human possibility; the female principle is recognized in Islam, as it is in Judaism (the Shekinah) and Christianity (the Sophia): within any single religion are individuals with diametrically opposed beliefs and any number of gradations in between, particularly concerning smiting enemies and putting them to fire and the sword; each religion has two separate versions, one in which love rules and one in which fear rules. Those for whom love is the key may be hurt by contempt for the very concept of faith but are those who achieve some detachment and recognition of the separateness of others and consequent right of others to their own views and are not as a rule those who vociferously want to shut others up.
That is why Ibn al-Árabî says Allah can be referred to as both huwa (He) and hiya (She).
Islam and the Divine Feminine
The Net abounds with diatribes about female dress from Catholics as well as Muslims. Are we to be legally bound to take such people seriously? Religion, as I have indicated, is not homogenous. Evidently there are sane and indeed utterly adorable religious people. Laws are not framed in terms of 'thou shalt not offend the sane and utterly adorable', not least because very few people want to offend them. Laws are framed in terms of concepts such as 'blasphemy', 'offence to religion' and 'inciting religious hatred'. Laws protecting religion open the door to silencing derision of the women-haters and gay-bashers, the sexual neurotics who believe bare flesh is a sin, the fascists who believe in Kirche, Küche, Kinder. We shall on no account explore religion or ask why their god is male. We shall do and be what we are told and accept the penalties of revolt because the apostles of a few ancient texts absolutely must not be offended, outraged, nauseated, inflamed, made furious, and be damned to the rest of us. This is not acceptable in the C21st.
'Everybody knows' Muslims are people who interpret the Quran literally and Islam never suffered the trauma of the Enlightenment. Historically, educated Islam has no problem with allegorical interpretation (although considerable problems, universal at the time, with sharing them with the masses - and with its being done by those who can't reason): "But this is not possible unless he has previously learned what reasoning as such is, and how many kinds it has, and which of them are valid." (Ibn Rushd, known to the West as Averroes, On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, appx AD 1178). "The meaning of 'allegorical interpretation' is: extension of the significance of an expression from real to metaphorical significance" (Ibid) "And if someone today wanted to find out by himself all the arguments which have been discovered by the theorists of the legal schools on controversial questions, he would deserve to be ridiculed, because such a task is impossible for him, apart from the fact that the work has been done already...If this is so then whenever we find in the works of our predecessors of former nations a theory about beings and a reflection on them confirmation to what the conditions of demonstration require, we ought to study what they said about the matter and what they affirmed in their books." (Ibid) As a quaint historical footnote, I add that Russell in his History of Western Philosophy says of Pope Boniface VIII (accused of heresy), "it seems he was an Averroist". Indeed cultural syntheses are strange things.
With Ibn Arabi and Ibn Rushd, among others, under its belt, Islam is intellectually equipped to relate to the C21st. Islamic art, Islamic architecture, Islamic poetry rank with the best in the world, and indeed one of English literature's greatest poems was originally the work of a Persian. There will always be the dim and dark of any creed or none who spew hatred but the negative image of Islam is a tragedy that is rectifiable.
