The language barrier: How Islamists outshine Arab secularists

[Originally posted at NOW]

A little over a year ago, I visited a Jordanian friend in Amman. Determined atheists that we both are, as the Black Label bottle steadily drained our conversation turned, as it often would, to the evergreen subject of the woefully elevated positions of the region’s Parties of God in all their forms and guises.

“Man, let me show you something,” he suddenly said, reaching for the TV remote. “This is why the secularists can’t beat the Islamists today.” Flicking to one of at least a dozen available Islamic channels, we listened as a shrouded televangelist expounded on the boundless splendors of the pious path. “Just listen to the guy’s fusha [classical Arabic],” my friend said in sincere admiration. “It’s effortless.” And so it was – without the slightest stutter or pause, our imam filled the room with the music of 7th-century Arabian vocabulary, every single letter adorned with precisely the correct diacritical flourish. Picture someone mellifluously chatting in the tongue of Shakespeare and you’ll get something of the oratorical effect.

“Now compare that with these guys,” said my friend, switching to a political talk show featuring two beardless Jordanians in suits. Clearly ill-at-ease in the fusha they were compelled (by widely-observed custom) to speak on air – which is likely the only time they speak it – the contrast in style was disastrous. In awkward monotone, they would punctuate every other word with an “uhhh” as they frantically scanned their limited mental lexicons for the formally proper noun or adjective. “It doesn’t matter that what they’re saying is a thousand times more enlightening than the Islamist propaganda,” my friend said. “Who could listen to this for more than thirty seconds?”

That thought came rushing back to me on Saturday when I watched another Islamist, the fugitive cleric-cum-militiaman Ahmad al-Assir, mount an 11-minute-long diatribe against the “liberals” (what contempt he put into the word) of Lebanon’s moderate Sunni Future Movement. Secure in his amply-demonstrated fusha proficiency, Assir actually reverted to colloquial dialect to land his most personal jab, directed at Future leader Saad Hariri, “who doesn’t know how to string two words together in Arabic.” It’s a reference to the former prime minister’s famously shaky fusha, most memorably demonstrated in a calamitous 2009 parliament address. But Assir wasn’t trying to score literary points: he meant to undermine Hariri’s religious, and ultimately political, legitimacy as the representative of Lebanon’s Sunnis. It was an assertion of the supposed authenticity, the unshakeable Arabness, of Islamism compared to effete and decadent liberalism.

Older generations of Arab nationalist intellectuals championed the revival and protection of Arabic out of fear that “the nation” and its culture were losing ground to an ascendant West. Today, the new and graver danger is of young Arab minds being seduced by hyper-articulate jihadists, to whose rhetorical charms even this British kafir is not entirely invulnerable.

Among other things, this makes all the more necessary the secular Arabic literary heritage, from the classic pre-Islamic mu`allaqat through such brilliant medieval reprobates as Abu Nuwas to modern giants like Mahmoud Darwish. Indeed, there’s reason to believe a thread running through the entire oeuvre of the permanently clean-shaven Darwish, who never hid his dislike of Hamas and lamented those who “don’t know the difference between the mosque (al-jam`) and the university (al-jam`a),” was an unspoken determination to claim Arabic (and specifically classical Arabic, the clerics’ home ground) for an avowedly secular renaissance, or nahda. (The contribution of those who manage to turn these works into music and other art forms – Marcel Khalifé being perhaps the most obvious example – is also invaluable, not least because of the profanity of music in and of itself in the Wahhabist worldview. One recalls Khalifé’s farcical 1999 blasphemy trial.) Unless and until that is achieved, the Islamists will continue to exploit the appearance of an intellectual – and even cultural – superiority that is of course entirely and dangerously illusory.

A victory for religious freedom

[Originally posted at NOW]

Novy's passionate devotion to his faith in the Flying Spaghetti Monster is an inspiration to us all (Source: dailymail.co.uk)

So woeful has become the lot of believers in the world’s many great faiths in recent years – what with the incessant menace emanating on all fronts from militant atheism and intolerant rationalism – that the rare occasions on which a small measure of slack is cut for a religious community are always worth celebrating.

The latest act of successful resistance against the oppressive secularist machine took place this weekend in the Czech Republic, where Lukáš Nový won the right to wear a plastic pasta strainer on his head in his official government ID card photo, as per the teachings of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, of which he is a devotee. Government officials rightly ruled that to prevent him from practicing his faith in this way would constitute a violation of the country’s religious equality laws.

This is now the second time that the long-beleaguered Pastafarian community (as Flying Spaghetti Monster worshippers are also known) has made such a breakthrough, the first being the case of Austrian citizen Niko Alm, who successfully earned the right to wear his spaghetti sieve in his driving license photo in 2011.

One can only hope these small gains will pave the way for wider acceptance of Pastafarianism, whose claim that the Universe was created by a beer-drinking deity composed of spaghetti and meatballs has every bit as much supporting evidence as the alternative Creation accounts of more established religions.

On attending the Pope's Mass

Pope Benedict XVI wields a stick (Alex Rowell)

I’ll say this much for Joseph Ratzinger: no one could accuse him of over-emotive speechmaking. With his barely-audible lethargic croak, rising infrequently and with great strain to a mumble, there is little danger of him whipping a crowd into a frenzy of bloodlust or vengeance. He would, indeed, be incapable of holding an audience of any kind were it not for his claim to be the quasi-divine “vicar” of Christ on earth, with the “infallibility”, “supreme authority” and other special powers that that heady title entails.

Having reached the waterfront venue in central Beirut a full hour before the Popemobile arrived, and having outlasted many a devout Catholic and hardened journalist in staying till the very end under the roasting sun, I think I can fairly claim to have given my first Mass my best shot. Much as when I visited Jerusalem, I went into the experience with an open mind; willing to be taken wherever my emotions moved me. Ignore, to the extent possible, the unspeakable crimes in which the man is complicit, I told myself. Perhaps seeing him live in the flesh, I speculated, would induce some stirring within me, however slight, of the awe, or contentment, or “agape”, or whatever exactly it is that the faithful get out of these things. Even Larkin admitted to an “awkward reverence”, after all.

And yet, here as in the Old City, precisely the opposite turned out to be the case. Once again it squarely struck me that personal exposure to “holiness” only confirms its essential banality. Just as the Western Wall is really just a wall, and the Stone of the Anointing is really just a stone, so a mediocre man in a hat and costume is really just a mediocre man. Non-Catholics already know this, of course, but as the minutes became hours and the postures succumbed to gravity, I wondered how many of “the flock” were privately beginning to suspect it too. Indeed, when the chairs began to empty by the hundreds while the Baba was still on the mic, I might have even felt a twinge of pity for the geriatric if I didn’t remember what infamous villainy he was capable of.

Not that I intend to go into any of that now, nauseating as it was to see a quarter of a million people cheering a paedophile-enabler (in case you’re interested, the authoritative account of Ratzinger’s widely-underestimated role in these crimes against humanity is human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC’s ‘The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse’). My point, as I was saying – which is one I’ve known since childhood, just as every child in the crowd yesterday knew, as did most of the adults if they only had the honesty to admit it to themselves – is that religion is desperately, unrescuably dull.

It might seem like a frivolous criticism, but it’s enough by itself to discredit the whole enterprise. Take humour alone, or rather the lack thereof. As the philosopher Alfred Whitehead pointed out, “The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature”. How can a book without laughter – that famously most efficacious of medicines; “the sunshine”, as Hugo put it, “that chases winter from the human face” – claim to give comfort to troubled souls, let alone pave the way to eternal bliss?  

Or, in the present case, how can God’s own incarnation fail to keep common mortals listening for a mere two hours? How could he be anything less than brilliantly, incomparably captivating? One might have expected the creator of the Universe to be a bit of a personality. (One might also have expected him to be a bit kinder with the weather – I counted no fewer than four limp bodies carried away on stretchers.)

In short, if yesterday were any indication of what the party’s like up in heaven, it underscored once again why most atheists are happy enough to be excluded. 

In denial? Just blame atheists

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

Pat Robertson, the veteran Baptist televangelist, is blaming atheism for the Wisconsin massacre (Source: wardrobedoor.blogspot.com)

No week is exactly a “good” week for atheists: a group so universally disliked that the American public would sooner elect a Muslim or gay president. Yet this week may be worse than most.

In addition to being blamed for Nazism, Stalinism, natural disasters and global chaos in general, it appears that we are even being indicted for Sunday’s tragic massacre in Wisconsin.

Pat Robertson, the Baptist televangelist, who readers may remember for blaming 9/11 on secularists, has come out with an equally inventive explanation for the Wisconsin atrocity. The culprits, he speculated, were “people who are atheists; they hate God, they hate the expression of God, and they are angry with the world, angry with themselves, angry with society, and they take it out on innocent people who are worshipping God.”

How is one to respond decently to this slander? I suppose it would be in poor taste to note that Wade M. Page, the actual perpetrator of the Wisconsin massacre, had a large cross tattooed on his shoulder, and seemed to be motivated more than anything else by white supremacist ideology, whose relations with the Church have a long and very unpleasant history.

Not that I’m suggesting Page’s motive was religious. But I’d argue that the kind of person who is thinking of murdering for a racial cause is likely to become more, rather than less determined if he believes the Almighty will approve. To throw the charge of this fanaticism back at those who dispute the whole God hypothesis in the first place is not only a base shirking of moral and intellectual honesty, but a transparent symptom of denial.

William Lane Craig is a crackpot and a bigot

‘New Atheism’ – to annex the term glibly used to describe the age-old intellectual movement rooted in the traditions of Lucretius, Socrates, Spinoza and Hume, inter multa alia – has come in for a spot of abuse this week, resulting from the latest round in the battle of egos between Richard Dawkins and the Christian apologist William Lane Craig. I won’t insult my reader by explaining who the former is, but for those unfamiliar with the latter, Craig is something of a hero in the online Christian community, lionised as their most formidable answer to the atheist heavyweights Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, et al. – a status enhanced to the point of near-mythology by Dawkins’ repeated refusal to debate him. 

Previously, Dawkins explained this refusal on the grounds that he does not, as a matter of policy, debate “creationists” or “people whose only claim to fame is that they are professional debaters”. Then, following yet another taunting by Craig earlier this year, he published an article in last Thursday’s Guardian (‘Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig’) elaborating that Craig was a “deplorable apologist for genocide”, referring to Craig’s defence of God’s ordering the Israelites to exterminate the men, women and children of the various tribes encountered on the road to the biblical Land of Israel (Deuteronomy 20). These points may be valid, and it is of course Dawkins’ right to debate whoever he wants, yet one can’t help noting that other atheists of stature, including Hitchens and Harris, did not consider the sharing of a podium with Craig to be beneath them in the same way. 

And so it was perhaps inevitable that certain journalists would interpret Dawkins’ evasions as common cowardice. Within days, the Guardian ran a response from one Daniel Came (‘Richard Dawkins’ refusal to debate is cynical and anti-intellectualist’), who said it was “no surprise that Dawkins and [A.C.] Grayling aren’t exactly queuing up to enter a public forum with an intellectually rigorous theist like Craig to have their views dissected and the inadequacy of their arguments exposed”. Peter Hitchens, the Christian brother of Christopher, sneered in his Daily Mail column (‘An Evening without Richard Dawkins’) that while a “serious Atheist philosopher would be able to give [Craig] a run for his money, [Dawkins] would have been embarrassingly out of his depth” had he turned up on the night. And Tim Stanley, an Oxford historian (who I cannot stop myself from adding is writing a biography of Pat Buchanan), penned an article in the Telegraph bluntly titled, ‘Richard Dawkins is either a fool or a coward for refusing to debate William Lane Craig’, in which he posited that “this time, [Dawkins] understood that he was up against a pro [...] Like Jonah, he was confronted by the truth and he ran away”. 

This is tiresome, of course, for Craig is anything but intimidating. He is, instead, a crackpot and a homophobe, on a level comparable with the most fanatical televangelist or Tea Party zealot. In his debate with (Christopher) Hitchens, he proclaimed the literal truth of every letter of scripture, professing belief not just in the more quotidian miracles of the virgin birth and the resurrection but also in the occult arcana of demons, exorcisms and black magic. And in a podcast hosted on his website, he embarked on a loathsome crusade against homosexuality; describing it as “immoral”; “blasphemous”; “incredibly dangerous” and “extremely self-destructive”. To these slurs he added comparisons of homosexuality with both drug addiction and biological deformity:

If [homosexuality] is genetically based, then it's akin to a birth defect, it's like being born with a cleft palate.

To encourage a person to embark on a homosexual lifestyle is like encouraging somebody to start chain-smoking, or mainlining heroin - it's that dangerous.

If there were ever a good reason not to debate Craig, it would be to prevent the lending of legitimacy to disgusting bigotry of this kind. But let us have no fear of confrontation. If so many Christians are prepared to join ranks with this odious man – and so many ostensibly reputable columnists are prepared to defend him in print – then evidently he does need to be debated in public, and denounced and defeated as comprehensively as possible. If Dawkins is unwilling to do this, let it be made known to Craig that there are many others – present company included – ready to take his place.