On Blasphemy (amb referència al cas de Dolors Miquel)

Photo of Dolors Miquel by Gianluca Battista

El Pais Catalunya (Feb 2016)

Blasphemy, as Richard Dawkins is fond of reminding us, is a victimless crime: for whilst God is obviously a real object of reference (and reverence) within human history and culture, he is not, of course, an actual entity.

And so, whilst you can certainly injure the feelings of his often hypersensitive followers, nothing that is said about or addressed directly to God makes the slightest difference to him. The most devout and beautiful of prayers as well as the most irreverent of insults, all fall on ears that are not even deaf.

Despite this being the case, there's a depressingly large number of countries that still retain - and vigorously enforce - blasphemy laws; including, of course, all the usual suspects in the Muslim world.

Shamefully, however, there are still Europeans who would also like nothing more than the opportunity to prosecute and punish those whom they accuse of bad-mouthing God; Christian reactionaries who envy Islamic militants and yearn for the good old days of Inquisition when they too could torture and murder blasphemers, heretics, atheists, witches, etc. in the name of Love and Divine Justice.

And so it doesn't really surprise to hear of the case of the poet Dolors Miquel being prosecuted - presumably under Article 525 of Spanish penal law - after publicly reciting her feminist version of the Lord's Prayer on stage in Barcelona, in which she redirects worship away from the figure of a bearded male towards that of a female deity: "Our Mother, who art in heaven / Hallowed be thy cunt."

The head of the Church in Catalonia immediately branded the verse as blasphemous and angrily dismissed the idea that it might better be understood as an ode to womanhood that celebrates fertility and life - just as he also quickly brushed aside arguments in defence of free speech.

My view - if it isn't already pretty clear - is that whist Dolors Miquel may not be the greatest poet in the world, she has every right to promote her vulva activism and gynaecological pride. The cunt isn't sacred, but neither is it blasphemous or obscene. And if phallocentric misogynists like to deny their maternal origin and wish to mutilate female genitalia rather than find happiness therein, well, that's something I find offensive ...

The Case of Maryam Namazie

maryamnamazie.com

As a graduate of Warwick University, I feel obliged to say something about the case of Maryam Namazie - the Iranian-born activist and campaigner against religious violence and stupidity - who has been barred from speaking on campus by the student union on the grounds that she's a highly inflammatory figure likely to incite hatred.

This ludicrous and deeply shameful attempt to suppress the right of a woman who receives vile death threats on a regular basis to challenge Islamofascism and defend the values of secular society is justified on the grounds that Muslim students have the right not to feel insulted or intimidated.

Ms Namazie is right to be angry about this; to be labelled as an extremist for opposing those who would veil half the world's population and behead a large number of the other half if they could, is peculiarly offensive and, what is more, does a great disservice to those men and women who are living under Islamic regimes and have no opportunity to dissent or speak out.  

Clearly, the University needs to step in and ensure that a few hypersensitive and politically ultra-orthodox students (or useful idiots as Richard Dawkins describes them) do not bring a highly respected centre of learning into disrepute.

The only heartening thing is to see many academics, feminists, and intellectuals come to her defence and, hopefully, with their public support, Ms Namazie will get to address the Warwick Atheists, Secularists, and Humanists' Society in October as planned. 

Afternote (28-09-15): After the University powers-that-be stepped in, the student union was forced to back down. An unequivocal apology was offered to Ms Namazie and she will now address the WASH Society as planned. Further details can be found in the Warwick SU News (click here). 

  

Rod Liddle: My Enemy's Enemy

Cover of the paperback edition (Fourth Estate, 2015)

I suppose, in many ways, I have quite a lot in common with Rod Liddle; we belong to the same generation and the same class and, although both born in the South, our hearts belong to the North of England, where our families originated. I even think we had the same (or at any rate similar) tinplate aeroplane to play with as children. 

These things don't necessarily make me like him, but they make me at least want to like him; to find in him a comrade of some sort; a brother-in-arms. Also, the fact that physically he suggests something of my friend Simon, albeit an older, greyer, even more disheveled version, also makes me gravitate towards him (without necessarily wishing to cruise his body, as Barthes would say).

But what of his work, I hear you ask: and what of those nasty prejudices that are said to poison his writing and ultimately make it little more than the sometimes witty but mostly just offensive and tedious ranting of an unusually erudite pub bore - Richard Littlejohn with a social degree (to paraphrase Jaz Coleman).

Well, to be honest, I'm not very familiar with his work; either as a journalist or a writer of fiction. But I have just finished reading his most recent book - Selfish, Whining Monkeys (2014) - and I enjoyed it very much. What's more, I found myself pretty much in agreement with its central argument that, for all the many things we have gained during the last fifty years, we have unintentionally lost something - and something pretty important at that; something which you rather suspect he would like to call our soul, but describes instead as social cohesion and cultural unity. 

That's, when you think about it, quite a conservative claim to make - and, inasmuch as its one that I suspect a majority of people would agree with, pretty uncontroversial too. This professional provocateur may like to swear and throw around terms designed to outrage those who are always looking to police language and correct those ways of thinking they deem unacceptable, but, actually, he's a nostalgic moralist at heart who regrets the passing of values that his parents - and my parents - lived their lives by (although, importantly, he at no time advocates a return to the past, or a getting back to basics).

This makes him sound a bit like Tony Parsons, but he's so much funnier and more interesting - and so much less prone to sentiment - than the latter (who I might also be said to have a fair bit in common with, but for whom I feel no affection).

Of course, I don't share Liddle's nominal Christianity which underpins this book and, for me, the trouble with atheism is that unless it becomes a fairly aggressive anti-theism it doesn't go far enough. That said, I can understand why Richard Dawkins might irritate with his pomposity and smiled at Liddle's disdain for the ridiculous Alain de Botton and his 'Tower of Arse'. 

And what I certainly do share is Liddle's insistence on returning to the subject of class - and, if I'm honest, a good many of his hatreds; of those who have had their struggles too, the super-smug London elite and those on what he describes as the faux-left.

We might not, were we to meet, ever become true friends in a positive sense; but, in desperate times, my enemy's enemy ... 

Can't We Talk About This?

John Keane, The Death of Theo Van Gogh (2007)

www.johnkeaneart.com

In November 2004, Dutch filmmaker and provocateur Theo Van Gogh was brutally slaughtered on an Amsterdam street for his part in the making of a short film entitled Submission; a film which, primarily, examined the relationship that exists between Muslims and their God and asks how necessary reform of Islam might be possible when Allah demands absolute obedience to his laws, with no room for doubt or critical dissent amongst his worshipers.   

Having shot his victim multiple times, Van Gogh's devout assailant then cut his throat and attempted to decapitate him in front of horrified witnesses, before finally plunging the knife deep into the dead man's chest. Apparently, among the last words spoken by Van Gogh to his killer were: Can't we talk about this?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Van Gogh's friend and collaborator on Submission - writes: 

"It was so Dutch, so sweet and innocent. Theo must have thought there was some kind of misunderstanding that could be worked out. He couldn't see that his killer was caught in a wholly different worldview. Nothing Theo could have said to him would have made any difference."

- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel, (Pocket Books, 2008), p. 321   

I recount this deeply depressing incident by way of a response to a presentation recently given by John Holroyd on the topic of Islam.

Holroyd, a Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens hating crypto-theologian, teaches philosophy and religious studies at a London college and is a man for whom these subjects are perfectly compatible, if not, indeed, one and the same thing. His paper, in essence, called for still greater dialogue between the West and the militant forces of Islamic extremism, thereby strangely echoing Van Gogh's naivety in the face of those who hate us, hate all that we love and hold dear, and mean to do us mortal harm.

Now, whilst I concede that it might be good to talk - and that loving one's enemies might be the Christian thing to do - sometimes, unfortunately, there's really nothing further to discuss and inasmuch as this loving of enemies can lead to a reluctance to actively combat the forces of murderous and reactionary violence, then Jesus's teaching might be said to result in immorality and risk the triumph of evil.   

Thus, rather than listen to Jesus, I'd sooner heed Michel Foucault who argued that fascism - whether it be political or religious in nature and whether found in the hearts and minds of others or, indeed, in our own acts and pleasures - must be vigorously resisted as an essential aspect of living an ethical life.

  

Richard Dawkins on Rape: Good Logic, Bad Thinking

In an attempt to illustrate what philosophers know as a syllogism (i.e. a statement of comparison between two terms that does not necessarily endorse either), Richard Dawkins tweets: "Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse."

As a piece of logic, it's fine. But as an example, it's extremely unfortunate and one does wish he had simply stuck with the algebriac formula of x and y. For whilst clearly not sanctioning date rape, Dawkins nevertheless perpetuates the myth that it's a less serious crime because carried out by someone known to the victim in what are deemed to be less aggravating circumstances.

Such circumstances, however, remain external to what essentially constitutes the crime itself; i.e. fucking someone against their will. If consent is not fully and freely given to sexual penetration (or, in the case of minors, cannot legally be given) and you stick your dick where it isn't wanted and shouldn't be, then that's rape professor!

Indeed, the law is pretty clear on this. So critical opposition voiced on Twitter by those who were troubled by his choice of syllogism is not necessarily proof of their moral absolutism, or inability to think logically; rather, it might simply demonstrate their superior legal knowledge, their more sophisticated understanding of rape, and their rather more sympathetic sexual politics.

Ultimately, rape is rape, just as murder is murder. The story of someone killed with kindness - perhaps a lethal dose of diamorphine discreetly administered before bedtime thereby allowing the victim to slip away peacefully in their sleep - lacks the sensational horror (and thus newsworthiness) of someone hacked to death with a chainsaw, but either way a vile crime has been committed and there's a body lying dead at the end of it.

Now, whilst speaking about degrees of violence and mitigating circumstances doesn't make much difference to a corpse, for a prominent public figure to imply that if a woman happens to know her rapist (and chances are she will) - and that if he comes carrying flowers rather than a weapon - this somehow makes the crime less serious (i.e. hardly even worth reporting), well, that makes a lot of difference - both to women who have to deal with the reality (and existential threat) of rape and, indeed, to the men who refuse to accept their shameful behaviour for what it is.      

In the end, as my friend Zena rightly argues, it's not up to men - even very clever men like Professor Dawkins - to try and define women's experiences of sexual violence.

Sadly, even good logic can result in bad thinking ...