The Left still not getting Islam

The Immigrant Council of Ireland is not happy. (Nothing new in that, you might think.) The reason is that a member of the judiciary made an ... injudicious remark in court. From the Irish Independent:

A judge has caused outrage after saying he thinks "Muslims feel they can actually beat their wives" during the trial of a Somali man accused of burglary at his former wife's house.

Judge Anthony Halpin’s comments made before a packed courtroom yesterday caused a government minister and the Immigrant Council of Ireland to say he needs to immediately clarify or withdraw the remark made during a criminal case.

[...]

Judge Halpin, who started sitting in the Tallaght court in September 2011, made the comments in relation to Muslims during the case of Khadar Younis (46), of Belfry Hall in Citywest, Dublin, who had denied breaking into his divorced wife's home while she was asleep in bed. He also pleaded not guilty to breaking a protection order and being in the possession of a knife while in the house. 

The court heard that his former wife, Kara Ibrahim, wanted to drop the case, saying Younis was a good father to their four children, but not a good husband to her.

Defence solicitor John O'Leary told the court that his client had been divorced by a Muslim cleric under the Qur'an. 

Judge Halpin responded, saying: "I think Muslims feel they can actually beat their wives".

Which sent the ICI reaching for their smelling salts.

Last night the Immigrant Council of Ireland called on the Judge to withdraw the remark.

“While we have not seen the court record the remarks as reported to us are disappointing, wrong and offensive.

“People in positions of authority in the community have a particular duty not to feed racism or xenophobia, this applies to politicians, local media commentators and members of the judiciary. The remarks should either be withdrawn or clarified as a matter of urgency,” a spokesperson said.

At least one Imam was not pleased either.

Dr Taufiq Al Sattar said the comments were in contradiction to all religious teachings.

“No religion says you should hurt anybody and no religion says you should harm anybody. We all have to be tolerant. We all have to compromise

“No religion says you hurt anybody, not your wife or your neighbour or anyone. This is common sense,” the cleric, who established a prayer centre in west Dublin, said.

No religion says you should hurt anybody? I cannot pretend to be an expert on Koranic exegesis, but the holy book of Islam does contain the following somewhat problematic passage:

“Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great." [Sura 4:34]

See here for more edifying passages on the subject. Don’t worry, it’s  pretty mild compared to what the Koran says about Christians and Jews, to say nothing of pagans.

But what I find interesting in this story is the position of the ICI. They censure Judge Halpin, not for criticising Islam, but for “feeding racism and xenophobia.”

Islam, as Muslims themselves will quickly tell you, is not a race. It is a religion that makes universal claims on mankind. It includes people of all races and Muslims are proud of that fact.

The left doesn’t grasp that. Because leftists do not take religion seriously, and because our society as a whole has come to see religion as more a matter of tribal self-identification than of belief and practice, they prefer to assume that Muslims are exotic dark-skinned foreigners, while Christians are boring white Europeans. Of course, neither generalisation is true.

Based on its statements as quoted above, the ICI is arguing that a particular religion should be above criticism, simply because many of its adherents in Ireland are immigrants. Irish leftists are normally passionately against religion’s being allowed to dictate public policy. But where Islam is concerned, apparently, this does not apply. Judges, and other people, will just have to learn to keep their opinions on some matters to themselves.

Of course, given that Christianity originated abroad (not too far, in fact, from the birthplace of Islam) and given that many Christians in this country come from eastern Europe and the Philippines, perhaps the ICI is going to denounce criticism of Christianity as racist too? Don’t hold your breath, though.

An Evening With Reza Aslan

On Monday evening I went to hear Dr Reza Aslan, ex-Christian, Muslim revert and author of both a history of Islam and Zealot, a bestselling book about the life of Jesus Christ, speak at Trinity College Dublin.

Aslan is man with a colourful history. Born in Iran into a family of “lukewarm Muslims and exuberant atheists”, he moved with his parents to the US in 1979 to escape the Islamic Revolution. As a teenager in the US, he converted to evangelical Protestant Christianity. At university, however, he abandoned Christianity and eventually returned to the Islam of his ancestors. He is now Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside. His new book claims that Jesus was a Jewish freedom fighter and not a divine Messiah. It has had a mixed reception; the Irish Catholic (20 March) enthuses that is “has been described as a meticulously researched biography of Jesus”, while ChristianityToday says it “relies on outdated scholarship and breathtaking leaps in logic”.

Arriving at the College, I made my way to the Graduate Memorial Building chamber where the talk was to take place. Despite the fact that I hadn’t seen any posters on campus announcing the event, there appeared to be around a hundred people present. With a twinge of dismay I noted how young the students seemed. I bought a copy of Zealot, which was on sale by the door, and took a seat. Dr Aslan strolled in, accompanied by the meeting’s chairman Prof Benjamin Wold, and things got under way.

Aslan told us that he became a Christian in his teens, but began questioning the truth of evangelicalism when he went to study Religion at Santa Clara university. Astonishingly, he also told us that his Jesuit teachers “encouraged me to go back to the faith of my fathers” when his faith in Christianity began to wane. (Nice work, Jesuits!) Eventually, he decided that he could not conceive of one man as God, because God cannot be described in terms of human attributes. “My God is not a human being.” So it was that he returned to Islam.

The striking thing about Aslan is the charming and sophisticated way in which he comes across. A small, clean-shaven man in a black suit, with an American accent and the top three buttons of his shirt suavely undone, he does not look like the dangerous apologist for Islamism that some in the Counter-Jihad movement consider him to be. His message was well pitched for his audience. He stressed the subjective aspect of his search for religious truth and the individual nature of his own faith. In Islam, he says, he found “a central metaphor for God which was not merely emotionally satisfying, but which I already believed.” He told us that he had never asked an Imam’s opinion or advice about anything. He said he welcomed recent polls in the US which showed increasing numbers of young people describing themselves as non-affiliated religiously.

All this went down well with the middle-class students who had come to hear him. A fire-breathing fundamentalist Imam, like one of those the British government always seems to be vainly trying to deport, would not have cut much ice with them. But an urbane, exotic-looking academic who came out with things like “For me, the symbols and metaphors of Islam have profound meaning” was something else altogether. And it was clear that what Aslan had to say fell on fertile ground. The girl sitting next to me giggled with pleasure whenever he made a dig at the American right. When, at the end of the talk, I asked him to sign a copy of Zealot, he greeted me warmly, shook my hand, signed the book with a roccoco flourish, handed it back and – I’m not kidding – winked at me. In fact, he was so very charming, he made me feel clumsy and loutish.

At one point, Aslan mentioned findings of a poll by the Pew Research Centre, which in 2012 found that one fifth of US adults, and one third of US respondents under the age of 30, claimed to be religiously “unaffiliated”. As far as I could tell, this basically seemed to mean that they were “spiritual but not religious” – they believed in something, but preferred not to be associated with a particular religious structure. Aslan explicitly said that he thought this was a good development.

I was reminded of something that the author Christopher Caldwell said in his book about Muslim immigration, Reflections onthe Revolution in Europe. Part of Islam’s appeal lies in its simplicity. It has a simple theology, no sacraments, no clergy in the Christian sense of the word. It has no religious hierarchy. This means that Islam is potentially attractive to people who dislike, or think they dislike, “institutional religion”. It also means that Islamic groups, whatever they may call themselves, cannot claim to speak on behalf of all Muslims. This week, it was reported that a butcher in Cologne was repeatedly threatened by young Muslims who felt “provoked” by a plastic pig in his shop window. It was cold comfort when a Muslim organisation, DITB, assured him that the youths had “misunderstood” their religion.

Aslan may well think that a rise in the unaffiliated, a weakening of the tribal links that tie many Westerners to Christianity, will be good for Islam. Judging by the warm reception he received in Trinity College on Monday evening, and the absence of challenging questions from the floor about his critique of Christianity, he need not fear much resistance.

The Media and the Mob

Gerard Cunningham, writing in The Village, is not happy about what he considers to be the scant coverage given to the “Pantigate” affair by the mainstream media.

You’ll recall that Rory O’Neill made remarks on the Saturday Night Show on 12 January which described certain named individuals as homophobes. The individuals, aware that they did not, in fact, have an irrational fear and hatred of homosexuals, objected to this, and solicitors’ letters were sent. RTÉ duly removed the segment from its player and apologised for any distress that might have been caused.

Cunningham:

Broadsheet.ie, TheJournal.ie and Krank.ie reported on the removal of the clip from the Player. The next day the Irish Independent reported that John Waters had complained to RTÉ. The Mayo News picked up the story too (O’Neill is from Ballinrobe), and that was about it. Noel Whelan and Una Mullally wrote opinion pieces in the Irish Times from different perspectives, but there was little other reporting in the mainstream press.

Well, he’s just mentioned at least seven separate articles in different, mostly national, newspapers. Not exactly an airbrushing from history.

Cunningham goes on to tell us that, thankfully, “bloggers”  rescued the “story” from the oblivion into which it was threatening to fade.

The story that hardly anyone old-media was reporting refused to die. Blogs proliferated and were shared online, journalists were tackled on twitter about why they weren’t covering the story ... RTÉ received a lot of heat online for their actions (over 800 complaints about the apology) but the truth is, it could have been anyone. [He means, I think, that newspapers are so terrified of being sued for defamation that they would all have behaved much like RTÉ did.]

Given the current cultural climate in Ireland, it probably isn’t too hard to whip up 800 hotheads who take umbrage at the suggestion that support for traditional marriage does not equal “homophobia”, and get them to fire off an e-mail. Cunningham seems to think that because a lot of angry comments are floating around Twitter about something, that thing must necessarily be an issue of major national importance.

RTÉ estimated that over 2,000 people attended a protest over the affair on Sunday 2 February. In contrast, the reactionary Reform Alliance conference attracted 1,400, after weeks of front pages and endless hyperbole on television and radio.

Ah. Up to now, Cunningham’s tone has been fairly measured. But reactionary is one of those buzzwords that, like bourgeoisie and patriarchy, immediately have the effect of nailing one’s ideological colours to the mast. (As an aside, I cannot think of any conservative equivalent for a liberal – I mean, a term used to describe a liberal which a liberal would not use to describe himself. Godless liberal, perhaps, but you’re not going to see that in a mainstream magazine, unless it is being used ironically.)

The Panti Bliss saga shows Ireland still hasn’t worked out the appropriate paremeters for rigorous debate. It shows the tin ear of newspapers and broadcast media, which failed to register the level of support for Panti – next to no-one sided with the Ionas. It shows the powerf of social media to colonise stories that the old media cannot (or will not) cover. And a bravery which the old media seem tellingly to have forgotten.

Well, Mr Cunningham, if “next to no-one” disagrees with you, how exactly is airing your opinion online “brave”?

Cunningham does not specify whom he refers to when he says that “next to no-one sided with the Ionas.” Next to no-one in Ireland? But how does he know? Next to no-one he follows on Twitter? That is more plausible. But to imagine that angry Tweeters (is that the term for them?) constitute some kind of legitimate demos, whose mighty collective voice should determine the content of newspaper editorials, is to invite mob rule.

He is right about one thing, though: the power of social media. It can not only topple tipsy TDs, it can also determine the content, perhaps also the outcomes, of national debates. Time to get liking and sharing.