Wordability » Islamists and all that

Who wants to play the proletariat?

bruce — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:13:46 +0000

There’s a kerfuffle going on at RMIT over the question of Muslim prayer-space. The Muslim students want a space of their very own.

There are already eight Muslim prayer rooms across the university’s three campuses, Dr Maddy McMaster, Acting Pro Vice-Chancellor (Students) said.

So what’s the problem?

“The university’s policy is that prayer rooms in its spiritual centre are multi-faith, open to bookings by members of all faiths,” she said.

There’s the hitch: the Muslim students aren’t about to use a room contaminated by Christians and Jews and who knows? by Zoroastrians. So they pray in corridors, and other drafty places.

They order these things better in France.

What engaged my attention was a twist. The Socialist Left on campus got all fired up in support of the Muslims. The socialist left. The socialist left. I still can’t adjust to this particular shift in the party line.

I was consoled by remembering a wicked little piece by Joan Didion called ‘The Women’s Movement’. In this 1972 essay (reprinted in The White Album) she writes as if the movement were already over. She notes that the essentials of the women’s movement, for its theorists, were Marxist. The discontents of women were an opportunity for people whose goal was The Revolution.

Marxism in America had never really taken on, she explains, and the root of the problem was the absence of a proletariat.

‘The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having.’ The minorities actually cared about issues like integrated luncheonettes and a seat at the front of the bus, and failed to see such issues as ‘ploys, counters in a larger game.’

They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of ‘brotherhood’.

And then, at that exact dispirited moment when there seemed no one at all willing to play the proletariat, along came the women’s movement and the invention of women as a ‘class’. ? The notion that ? a revolutionary class might simply be invented, ‘made-up’, named and so brought into existence, seemed at once so pragmatic and so visionary, so precisely Emersonian, that it took the breath away ?

It did indeed, and it still does. I wonder how many of the Muslim students are aware that they now constitute a revolutionary class, and how many just want to, you know, get out of the draft?

Hitchens on free speech and the Islamists

bruce — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:13:48 +0000

Christopher Hitchens has a useful piece in Vanity Fair. He recaps the fatwa on Rushdie and briefly works through the various outrages since then, Theo van Gogh, the Danish cartoons and the rest. His main points: that the problem for us now is self-censorship and that the multi-culti excuse-mongers need to reckon with the long lists of distinguished writers from the Muslim world who are as outraged as people in the West that their religion is invoked by hateful fanatics. I call it useful for latecomers to these debates – but it doesn’t hurt any of us to go over this ground regularly.

When Iran?s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on novelist Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, it was the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom. Two decades later, the violence continues, and Muslim fundamentalists have gained a new advantage: media self-censorship. ? more

Censorship bombs

bruce — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:02:26 +0000

A while ago I mentioned the The Jewel of Medina, the novel withdrawn before publication because of fears that it would provoke Islamists. Since then, Stanley Fish has further diminished his reputation – how can such a bright man be so silly? – by insisting that the publisher’s action can’t be considered censorship. Although the novel has not yet been released, it was picked up by an independent publisher in London, Martin Rynja, a man who likes taking risks, and in the US by Beaufort Books. (The story so far can be found here.) Now three men have been arrested in London in connection with the firebombing of Rynja’s home and office. Beaufort Books have (temporarily) closed their office.

Are we there yet, Stanley?

Progress in human understanding

bruce — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:56:50 +0000

The admirers and followers of the Alcoran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed through that wild and absurd performance. But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.

_ David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, 1760.

The Jewel of Medina was written by a journalist called Sherry Jones. It recounts the life of Aisha, a girl who was married off at the age of six to a 50-year-old man called Mohamed ibn Abdallah. On her wedding day, Aisha was playing on a see-saw outside her home. Inside, she was being betrothed. The first she knew of it was when she was banned from playing out in the street with the other children. When she was nine, she was taken to live with her husband, now 53. He had sex with her. When she was 14, she was accused of adultery with a man closer to her own age. Not long after, Mohamed decreed that his wives must cover their faces and bodies, even though no other women in Arabia did.

You cannot read this story today – except in the Koran and the Hadith. The man Mohamed ibn Abdallah became known to Muslims as “the Prophet Mohamed”, so our ability to explore this story is stunted. The Jewel of Medina was bought by Random House and primed to be a best-seller before a University of Texas teacher saw proofs and declared it “a national security issue”. Random House had visions of a re-run of the Rushdie or the Danish cartoons affairs. Sherry Jones’s publisher has pulped the book. It’s gone.

In Europe, we are finally abolishing the lingering blasphemy laws that hinder criticism of Christianity. But they are being succeeded by a new blasphemy law preventing criticism of Islam.

Johann Hari, ‘We Should Never Pulp Books out of Fear of Fanatics” August 2008

Islamism and all that

bruce — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:43:58 +0000

This is from the 15th chapter of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

Our curiosity is naturally prompted to inquire by what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth. . . . It will, perhaps, appear, that it was most effectually favored and assisted by the five following causes:
I. The inflexible, and if we may use the expression, the intolerant zeal of the Christians . . .
II. The doctrine of a future life, improved by every additional circumstance which could give weight and efficacy to that important truth.
III. The miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive church.
IV. The pure and austere morals of the Christians.
V. The union and discipline of the Christian republic, which gradually formed an independent and increasing state in the heart of the Roman empire.

Only saying.