“The harsh truth that this is the only life we have should make us try and improve it for as many people as possible.”
I was born into a Muslim family and grew up in a country that now describes itself as an Islamic republic. My close family members identify themselves as Muslim: some more orthodox, others less. My earliest memories are of my circumcision and my first day at Koranic school—psychoanalysts may make what they wish of that. Even before I could read or write the national language I learned to read the Koran in Arabic without understanding a word of it—a common experience for thousands of Muslim children. As soon as I was able to think for myself, I discarded all the religious dogmas that had been foisted on me. I now consider myself a secular humanist who believes that all religions are sick men's dreams, false—demonstrably false—and pernicious. Such is my background and position, and there the matter would have rested but for the Rushdie affair* and the rise of Islam, I, who had never written a book before, was galvanized into writing this one by these events. Many of my postwar generation must have wondered how we would personally have stood in the ideologically charged atmosphere of the 1930s—for Nazism, for Communism, for freedom, for democracy, for king and country, for anti-imperialism? It is rare in one's life that one has an opportunity to show on what side of an important life and death issue one stands—the Rushdie affair and the rise of Islam are two such issues and this book is my stand. For those who regret not being alive in the 1930s to be able to show their commitment to a cause, there is, first the Rushdie affair, and, second, the war that is taking place in Algeria, the Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, a war whose principal victims are Muslims, Muslim women, Muslim intellectuals, writers, ordinary, decent people. This book is my war effort. Each time I have doubted the wisdom of writing such a book, new murders in the name of God and Islam committed in Algeria or Iran or Turkey or the Sudan have urged me on to complete it. The most infuriating and nauseating aspect of the Rushdie affair was the spate of articles and books written by Western apologists for Islam—journalists, xiv W H Y I AM NOT A MUSLI M scholars, fellow travelers, converts (some from communism)—who claimed to be speaking for Muslims. This is surely condescension of the worst kind, and it is untrue: these authors do not speak for all Muslims. Many courageous individuals from the Muslim world supported and continue to support Rushdie. The Egyptian journal, Rose al-Youssef even published extracts from the Satanic Verses in January 1994. The present work attempts to sow a drop of doubt in an ocean of dogmatic certainty by taking an uncompromising and critical look at almost all the fundamental tenets of Islam. Here, anticipating criticism, I can only cite the words of the great John Stuart Mill, and those of his greatest modern admirer, Von Hayek. First from Mill, On Liberty: "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being 'pushed to an extreme'; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."1 Again from Mill: But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. .. . We can never be sure that the opinion we arc endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.2 Now Von Hayek: In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. .. . To deprecate the value of intellectual freedom because it will never mean for everybody the same possibility of independent thought is completely to miss the reasons which give intellectual freedom its value. What is essential to make it serve its function as the prime mover of intellectual progress is not that everybody may be able to think or write anything, but that any cause or idea may be argued by somebody. So long as dissent is not suppressed, there will always be some who will query the ideas ruling their contemporaries and put new ideas to the test of argument and propaganda... (continues)*Christopher Hitchens on the Rushdie affair
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And if you've never read the essay whose title it echoes:
The Lecture that is here reproduced was delivered at the Battersea Town Hall on Sunday March 6, 1927, under the auspices of the South London Branch of the National Secular Society.As your Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is ‘Why I am not a Christian’. Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by the word ‘Christian’. It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians—all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on—are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.
WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?
Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity. I think, however, that there are two different items which are quite essential to anybody calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature—namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and in immortality, and yet they would not call themselves Christians. I think you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think you have any right to call yourself a Christian. Of course there is another sense which you find in Whitaker’s Almanack and in geography books, where the population of the world is said to be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshippers, and so on; and in that sense we are all Christians. The geography books count us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which I suppose we can ignore. Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things; first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant Him a very high degree of moral goodness.
But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense. For instance, it concluded the belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override Their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell... (continues)
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Dr. Oliver,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing these. I watched the entire presentation by Ibn Warraq and noted some authors that I am familiar with and more that I want to learn more about. Toward the end of his presentation he mentioned that after Mohammed died in 632 A.D. that the Islamic religion became more rigid as the followers divided up into different sects and created dogmatic rules that had to be followed. This reminded me of a similar thing happening after the death of Christ. Several centuries passed before the books of the New Testament were approved and those who had a different version of events were killed or had their writings suppressed. Perhaps the solution to intolerance will be a Third Enlightenment.
Don