religion | ukwatch.net

Beyond the dogma: the real abortion debate

tim — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:54:29 +0000

The debate about abortion today often takes the form of competing scientific claims: about exactly when the fetus becomes viable, whether it feels pain, the psychological effects on the woman, and so on. These are the issues regarded on both sides as the crucial ones on which to convince the public and more particularly policy-makers. But fundamentally the question of whether women should be free to have abortions is not a scientific one but a moral and political one. And this was the focus of a public debate taking place as part of the Future of Abortion conference organised by BPAS (the British Pregnancy Advisory Service), with heavyweight speakers on either side.

BPAS chief Ann Furedi was joined by Jon O’Brien of the intriguing US lobby group Catholics for Choice, up against Josephine Quintavalle of the anti-abortion Comment on Reproductive Ethics and conservative journalist Dominic Lawson. The discussion ranged widely, but was most interesting when it touched on the core moral question that is at the heart of the political controversy. While acknowledging that nobody ever sets out to have an abortion for fun, Ann Furedi made the case boldly that abortion can be a morally good thing, as opposed to a ‘necessary evil’. This position is rarely heard, but it is crucial to any serious debate about abortion.

Dominic Lawson’s anti-abortion argument hinged on the idea that a woman’s decision to abort is the crucial moral factor. This seems reasonable enough, but it is one-sided. Too often the discussion proceeds from the assumption that once pregnant all a woman has to do to have a baby is not have an abortion. Debates about ‘when life begins’ focus on the sperm, the egg and the embryo as if those factors alone are sufficient to create a human life. The forgotten ‘factor of production’ is nine months of a woman’s life. The availability of abortion means this factor cannot be taken for granted. The principles of autonomy and equality mean that it should not.

Of course, it is quite true that if a woman does not abort her embryo or fetus, and if she continues to look after herself and eat properly, ‘nature will take its course’, and the chances are she will have a child. But human beings have always tried to exert control over this process, and modern medicine allows women to have relatively simple and easy abortions at almost any point during pregnancy. In this context, it is disingenuous to pretend that women, like wild animals or plants, are mere vessels for natural processes. Not only is it untrue, but it obscures the resulting moral significance of a woman’s decision not to abort. A woman’s decision to go ahead with a pregnancy, to have a child, is not morally neutral – depending on the circumstances, it can be a morally good or morally bad decision. Crucially, since it concerns her own life, it need not – and probably should not – be a selfless decision.

In fact, many mainstream anti-abortion arguments implicitly acknowledge that what is really at issue is not the life of the fetus, but the motivation of the woman, and especially whether it is selfless or selfish. The greatest moral condemnation is reserved for those women who have abortions because they want to pursue their careers, or simply for the sake of convenience (as with the notorious news story about a woman choosing to have an abortion because pregnancy would have interfered with a skiing holiday). Dominic Lawson suggested at the debate that, with so many infertile couples desperate for children, it was obvious that women with unwanted pregnancies ought to opt for adoption rather than abortion. In this view, abortion is immoral because it is selfish.

Ultimately, who is to decide whether any particular woman’s reason is good enough? The real question here is how much value we place on individual autonomy. Anti-abortionists typically see virtue in resignation (especially when it comes to women), and ‘accepting the consequences of our actions’, however avoidable. Those of us who support the right to abortion do so because we believe men and women should take responsibility for our own lives, and assert as much control over them as possible.

Even those who condemn abortion in general are usually sympathetic to women who want abortions because they’ve been raped. Living with the consequences of a careless night of passion is one thing, but the idea that a brutal physical violation should lead to such a serious disruption to a woman’s life as having to carry the child of her attacker is abhorrent to most people. Given the possibility of a swift abortion, it is impossible to justify in ordinary moral terms. Here, anti-abortionists must fall back on ‘the absolute sanctity of life’. Josephine Quintavalle deliberately brought the example of rape up at the debate, because it is the one most often used against her. She gave the example of a woman she’d counselled and who had gone ahead with a pregnancy in such circumstances and now had no regrets. This anecdote is hardly a convincing argument for denying abortion to anyone else, but Quintavalle had already confessed that her position is grounded in Roman Catholic doctrine rather than moral reasoning.

Too often, religious doctrine is presented as the beginning and the end of the anti-abortion argument. This is partly because Catholics and other religious activists are the most vocal opponents of abortion. But Jon O’Brien reminded us that millions of morally thoughtful Catholics do not accept the teaching of the Vatican on the issue (as is even more the case with contraception), and some actually question its theological foundations. Perhaps more importantly, millions of non-believers (like Lawson) have strong moral intuitions against abortion, which they bring to bear on the political debate without recourse to irrational absolutes. It is not enough, then, to dismiss anti-abortionists as zealots.

Most people, certainly in Britain, do accept that abortion is morally acceptable at least some of the time, and further, that the best person to decide whether it is or isn’t is the particular woman in question. If these women are to continue to have access to safe abortion, we must not be afraid to have out the argument, and should not be afraid to make a strong moral case grounded not in science, but in respect for individual autonomy and equality between the sexes.

False Propheteering

Ellie Keen — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 17:27:57 +0000

“And thus I clothe my naked villany,
With odd old ends stol'n forth of holy writ
And seem saint, when most I play the devil.”
Richard 111, William Shakespeare.

There were two of those “this cannot be real” moments, during March. One was that a man who enjoined a “crusade”, has barely had a passing acquaintanceship with the truth in years, has joint responsibility for over a million Iraqi deaths in five years and those of an average of six thousand Iraqi children a month from his tenure beginning 1997 through March 2003, is to teach subjects including “Faith” at Yale University. (The aforementioned deaths added to the silent slaughter of a nation, starting in August 1990.) The second surreality is that he is to address the congregation on “Faith” from the pulpit at London's (Roman Catholic) Westminster Cathedral, on the 3rd of April, at the invitation of no less than a Cardinal: Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor.
For those who have been vacationing on another planet for approaching eighteen years, meet Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, QC., who embraced Catholicism in time for Christmas, was welcomed in to the arms of the Church by the Pope himself and the Cardinal. “If he wants a public platform, it should be from the Dock at the War Crimes Tribunal at the International Criminal Court at The Hague”, remarked a friend, pithily. At least the Catholic church cannot be accused of being elitist, embracing a man accused of involvement in an illegal war, responsible for carnage equal to many of history's most shameful bloodbaths and facilitator-in-charge of the lies which have led to the destruction of the cradle where his “faith” was nurtured.

Can the Cardinal be unaware that his speaker shares responsibility for the damage - thought irreparable - to Ur, where Abraham, Father, for believers, of his religion and of Islam and Judaism was born? Has the destruction of Qurna, thought to be site of the Garden of Eden, also passed him by?

Perhaps Blair might reflect publicly from the pulpit on the enormity of his wickedness and read from Revelations: “Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city…” and since it was all about oil, reflect from the same Book: “Behold, I come as a thief” and also on: “Those men who have not the seal of God on their foreheads”. Catholics are big on confessions and they are not needed more than by the man who helped destroy the region of wonders, where his “faith” was born and beliefs flourished. Gut wrenching ironies in evil do not come greater

This man who has, arguably, “not the seal …” could perhaps explain his statement of March 16th 2003, four days before the illegal invasion of Iraq, where he said from the Azores - having met with his (“we pray together”) partner in crime George W. Bush and Spain's then Prime Minister Aznar: “... Saddam (remains) armed with weapons of mass destruction ... disarmament never happens.” Two days later, he lied to the House of Commons saying that the Iraqi regime's behaviour had resulted in the departure of the weapons inspectors. The weapons inspectors of course fled before the (illegal) four day bombing of Christmas 1998, warned by their then Head, Australia's Richard Butler, another man who, it was subsequently established, sometimes found truth a confusing concept. That Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, Blair assured Parliament, was “palpably absurd”.

Catholic sources stated that Mr Blair would have had to attend confession in the days leading up to his reception in to the Church, in order to seek pardon for his sins. They must have been long days, with quite a list. Surprising he had time for anything else. The Book of Proverbs is fairly explicit about the most deadly of sins, all of which, an impartial observer would surely perceive, Britain's former barrister Prime Minister to have broken on a massive scale:
* A proud look
* A lying tongue
* Hands that shed innocent blood
* A heart that deviseth wicked imaginations
* Feet that be swift in running to make mischief
* A false witness that speaketh lies
* He that soweth discord

Blair has, arguably, hit the sinners' jackpot. The “mother of all sinners”, some might conclude. Whereas Collins describes faith as: “A specific system of religious beliefs”, “faithless” seems more apt in the case of this former figurehead of the “Mother of Parliaments”: “Treacherous or disloyal” (Collins) certainly describes the ignominy to which he has reduced and to where he led Britain, in the eyes of much of the world, during his tenure as Prime Minister.

Ironically, his conversion took place within forty eight hours of the ninth anniversary of another illegal assault on Mesopotamia, the four day (illegal) Christmas blitz of 1998, “Operation Desert Fox”, which also coincided with the great Islamic and Jewish festivals. A few mea culpas for that would not go amiss.

Blair's beliefs even fly in the face of one of Catholicism's sanctities, the right to life of the unborn child. He voted for abortion and as John Smeaton, National Director of the Society for the Unborn Child commented: “During his premiership Tony Blair became one of the world's most significant architects of the culture of death, promoting abortion, experimentation on unborn embryos, including cloned embryos, and euthanasia by neglect.”

He will also be speaking exactly two weeks after the body of the Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul, Paulos Faraj Rahho, was found in a shallow grave, possibly murdered, as so many of the real believers of Blair's new faith, since the invasion, whose kind lived and worshipped in the region for nearly two thousand years.

Will he reflect on his responsibility in the deaths of so many and the flight of an estimated half of Iraq's Christians? Will he reflect that his enjoined “crusade” indeed mirrors the slaughter, flight and terror of those against whom Salahadin's forces fought against those earlier, never to be forgotten, marauding, invading blood lettings? Will he reflect on another Christian, Tareq Aziz, Iraq's former - or for many, still - Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, held with other Ministers and legal representatives of the Republic of Iraq, illegally and without charge?

As this man of a “faith”, so flimsy that he has said he could not talk about it during his premiership in case he was regarded as “a nutter”, speaks from the pulpit, will he reflect on those of real belief, who stayed in Iraq through unimaginable hardships and ongoing bombings for which he bears much responsibility, the priests, the Bishops and Cardinal Emmanuel Delli, who, with their Muslim and other Faith counterparts, stayed throughout, to help and comfort?

The Church, however, is not all as welcoming to potential war criminals as Cardinal O'Connor. The Catholic organisation Pax Christi is holding a silent vigil for Blair's arrival and a protest to drown him out, with musical instruments of every kind, drums, cymbals, sirens, whistles, horns, rattles, cowbells, drummers, percussionists and students from the Royal Academy of Music, have vowed to make Blair's pulpit debut unforgettable. Brian Eno, musician and Producer of U2, Coldplay, David Bowie and other internationally renowned performers, will be there; diversity includes a Catholic nun with a burglar alarm. (See: http://www.stopwar.org.uk )

The burglar alarm may have resonance for some who have read the United States “Camp Victory” website recently. Under “Freedom Facts” is:
“The (US Army) Gulf Region Division has met its oil projects goals by increasing crude oil infrastructure capacity to 3 million barrels per day; increasing the natural gas infrastructure capacity to 800 million standard cubic feet per day....... The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers budget invested $1.7 billion in Iraq’s oil infrastructure.”

Blair is to link his address on “Faith” with “globalisation”. Stop the War's Media Officer, David Wilson comments: “or ‘Why I think it's good to invade other people's countries’”.

The former Prime Minister's alleged adherence to Mammon before God is a separate article. Another anomaly which deserves a place here, however, is the Messianic certainty of the “rightness” of the decisions he has shared with George W. Bush. Both, it would appear, seem to believe to have been directly guided by God.

The address at Westminster Cathedral as the fifth anniversary of their “crusade” is commemorated, is a week (depending on where you are on the planet) of the bringing down of the statue of Saddam Hussein on 9th April 2003.

The beliefs of fundamentalists in some “Judeo-Christian” traditions is that this is the date of Christ’s rising from the dead. The date of Easter changes from year to year, so that it coincides with the astronomical setting at the time of Christ's resurrection. April 9th, 30 A.D. has been shown to be the day the resurrection occurred, they believe.

Further: “... the Bible gives a very specific date and hour for the birth of the Church. Though the Bible does not speak to us in terms of the Roman calendar date for the birth of the Church, yet very obviously it speaks in the language of the Hebrew liturgical calendar as given by Moses. The birth of the Church took place about ‘the third hour of the day’, on the ‘Day of Pentecost’, as recorded in Acts 2. This was ‘50 days’ after the resurrection of Christ. The resurrection of Christ was on the ‘day after’ the Jewish ‘Sabbath’ that occurred during ‘the Feast of Unleavened Bread’. Now all that is very specific language. Translated into Roman calendar dates, Christ was resurrected from the dead on Sunday morning of April 9th, 30 A.D. Exactly 50 days later the Church was born on Sunday morning, about 9:00 A.M., May 28th, 30 A.D., the day of Pentecost.(http://www.2think.org ) This has been described as 'the time of rapture of the Prophets'.*

This all gives rise to serious questions as to whether there really are those in high places prepared to not alone ram raid for oil, but who believe in fundamentalist dominance from: “The Nile to the Euphrates”.

Back to Mammon. Catholicism's new son commands huge sums for his spoken offerings. This publication has failed to confirm whether his Cathedral address is free. London's Evening Standard newspaper “believed” this was the case.

Oh yes - and Westminster Cathedral was built on the site of a jail. Some may feel the irony of Blair's choice for the place of his newest self reinvention.

See also: London Review of Books, 20th March 2008 : Frank Kermode: 'Did it Happen on 9th April?' Review of “The Resurrection”, by Geza Vermez., http://www.lrb.co.uk

Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist and activist who has visited the Arab and Muslim world on numerous occasions. She has written and broadcast on Iraq, her coverage of which was nominated for several awards. She was also senior researcher for John Pilger's award-winning documentary,
"Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq". http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partID=4
and author, with Nikki van der Gaag, of “Baghdad” in the “Great Cities” series, for World Almanac Books (2006.)
http://www.amazon.com/Baghdad-Great-Cities-World-Nikki/dp/0836850491/sr=...

Please also see:

It Goes Back to 1990: Activist's Memoir of the Iraq War, By Felicity Arbuthnot

Terrified, humiliated – and innocent: the evidence against 42-day detention

Understanding Evangelical s Prophesy of War and the End Times: finding Hope in the Era of the Neo-Crusades

Religion is now a potential ally of radical social change

JamieSW — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:37:36 +0000

The two faces of modern religion were on stark display in Britain this week. In Canterbury, the much-abused anti-war archbishop, Rowan Williams, used his Easter sermon to launch a powerful attack on individualist consumerism and "the greed of societies that assume there will always be enough to meet their desires -enough oil, enough power, enough territory". Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the conservative Cardinal Keith O'Brien, leader of Scotland's Catholics, denounced the government for a "monstrous attack on human rights" through its "evil" endorsement of "Frankenstein" experiments. There are clearly serious arguments about the government's embryology bill and its licensing of the use of empty animal eggs for short-term human stem-cell research into life-destroying diseases, but the message from the cardinal's outburst was plain: in his wing of the church, the policing of sexuality and procreation trumps the cause of human suffering and liberation every time.

For the militant secularists whose voices have grown ever louder in recent years, O'Brien's is the only face of religion that matters. This has been the decade of liberal rage against religion, reflected in the runaway success of books like Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great. In the eyes of secular absolutists - whose attitudes uncannily mirror those of religious literalists - religion is simply an intellectual travesty, a perverse belief in a supernatural being and an affront to the enlightenment that refuses to die. As the novelist Martin Amis declared recently: "Opposition to religion occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally."

Entirely missing from their perspective is the social context and significance of the religious resurgence they are so anxious to beat back. Panicked by the rise of radical Islamism and the newly assertive religious identity of migrant communities in a secular Europe, the anti-religious evangelists are increasingly using atheism as a banner for the defence of the global liberal capitalist order and the wars fought since 2001 to assert its dominance. At the same time, they are unable to recognise the ethnic dimension of their Islamophobia, let alone the deeper reasons why people continue to search for spiritual meaning in a grossly destructive economic environment where social alternatives have been pronounced dead and narcissistic consumption is king.

Historically, of course, it was the left, rather than liberalism, that was most hostile to religion. From Tsarist Russia to Tibet, after all, organised religion stood with the established order, preaching social deference to the powers that be and leaving hope of justice to the hereafter. But as religion has declined in Europe and elsewhere and capitalism has eroded the ties binding religious institutions to ruling elites, that has become ever less true.

In the wake of the cold war, the pressure on the Catholic church to struggle against godless communism disappeared, and the pope who had played such a key role in its demise became one of the few international figures in the 1990s to speak out against "savage capitalism" and western warmongering. At the same time, Islamist groups which had provided crucial support for conservative pro-western regimes around the Muslim world in the postwar era began to fill the political space left by the decline of Arab nationalism and the left, increasingly drawing their support from the poor and marginalised.

Religion cannot but now find itself in conflict with the unfettered rule of money - a capitalism that seeks to dominate exactly the social and personal arena which religion has always regarded as its own preserve. And as it becomes less useful as an ideological prop for power, religion's more radical and anti-establishment strains have become stronger. That is the context in which, for example, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela declares Jesus as the first socialist and Che Guevara-style images of the founder of Christianity are carried on demonstrations in Caracas.

Not that there should be any difficulty in extracting a radical social message from religious traditions, though you'd never know it from grim textual exegesis favoured by the militant secularists. The rightwing bishop Michael Nazar-Ali - who recently blamed multiculturalism for supposed "no-go" Muslim areas - tried to argue at the weekend that Jesus had been guilty of "typical Middle Eastern exaggeration" when he warned that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God": a hard case to sustain, given the similar message of downfall for the rich and liberation for the poor in the Magnificat, the sermon on the mount, Jesus's exhortatory quotations from the prophet Isaiah, or the even more militant epistle of James.

No wonder the medieval church tried so hard to prevent people reading such incendiary stuff in their own language. But similar demands for equality and social justice can of course also be found in Judaism ("you shall not oppress a stranger"), Islam ("a white has no superiority over a black nor a black over a white"), and other religions.

None of that is to deny the strength of regressive trends within religion and its texts, from the Vatican's opposition to contraception in Aids-blighted Africa, to Hindu nationalism, takfiri Islam, or the power of rightwing US evangelicals (though that is mercifully now loosening). Nor does it in any way imply compromise with social conservatism over women's or gay rights. But it does highlight the scope for stronger alliances between the secular left and religious progressives against poverty, capitalism and war - an engagement that has the potential to change both sides in other ways, too. The National Union of Teachers' proposal for secular schools to offer religious instruction as a way out of the faith school controversy is one such positive attempt at engagement.

Just as the French republican tradition of liberation came to be used as a stick to beat Muslims in a completely different social context from which it emerged, so the militant secularists who fetishise metaphysics and cosmology as a reason to declare the religious beyond the liberal pale are now ending up as apologists for western supremacism and violence. Like nationalism, religion can play a reactionary or a progressive role, and the struggle is now within it, not against it. For the future, it can be an ally of radical change.

Islam, Law and Finance: the Elusive Divine

Ellie Keen — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:15:46 +0000

A controversy over the relationship of what is termed sharia or "Islamic law" to wider legal systems was ignited on 7 February 2008 from an unlikely source: an academic lecture by the spiritual head of England's established church. The Archbishop of Canterbury's address explored the landscape of "plural jurisdiction" in Britain and considered with sympathy "what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moralcodes".

The message conveyed from a text replete with caveats and circumlocutions was (in the words of Rowan Williams's preceding BBC radio interview) that "as a matter of fact certain provisions of sharia are already recognised" in society and law, and that their application is "unavoidable".

The media furore that has ensued is aspredictable as it is founded on widespread ignorance of the ostensible substance of the argument (see Tina Beattie, "Rowan Williams and sharia law", 12 February 2008). In this it is part of a wider pattern whereby news stories about aspects of "Islamic" activity and social practice - "Islamic law" or "Islamic banking" or "Islamic dress", for example - come to prominence and are circulated without a proper examination of the provenance and meaning of these terms.

In many European countries in particular (the Netherlands, France, Denmark and Germany, as well as Britain) "Islam"-related issues connected to the veil, medical hygiene, or religious imagery become the trigger for entrenching opinion, drawing battle-lines and fomenting indignation. If the pattern is to be broken and a more constructive form of public discourse conducted, it can only be done by informed reason, including historical and linguistic clarification.

The mirage of fixity

A vital step is to note what lies beneath the surface of controversy and what is seldom taken into account. In this case, to pose the question as being in favour of or opposed to something called "Islamic law" is to start from the wrong place. The assumption of both sides of the argument is that sharia - for it or against it - is a given text, a code available in set form to which jurists and believers may or may not relate.

This assumption of fixity is, on closer examination, on three accounts quite false. First, "Islamic" law - or more properly, legal practice in the fifty-seven Muslim countries - is, like any other system, plural and multivocal: the result of centuries of inherited practice and precedent, allowing of many different interpretations. There is no fixed legal code, and never has been.

Second, the interpretation of law, and the selection of which precedents or past cases to invoke - including which bits of a supposedly sacred text to use - are a function of contemporary power relations (whether of class, state or religious establishment).

Third, and most important of all, the very term so often fought over - sharia -is a misnomer; for it is not a legal or sacred code at all, but a political slogan and modern invention of 19th-century neo-Wahhabi reformers. In fact, sharia is no more specific than the terms "British way of life" or "the Italian way" or "American values". The scholarly authority Aziz al-Azmeh has noted that sharia is more akin to generic terms like nomos or dharma: it cannot serve as the basis for any decisions on legal codes or practices.

The paper trail

What do the texts say? The Qur'an, the only part of the Muslim tradition that is divinely sanctioned, contains around 6,000 verses, of which less than a hundred are concerned with matters of a legal nature; nearly all relate to personal and family matters. In no way can this legacy, supposedly immutable and definitive, form the basis for a modern legal code. The word sharia occurs only four times in the Qur'an; it denominates, in a general way, "the right path" (indeed each community, be it Muslim, Jewish or Christian is to have its own such "path").

A common confusion is made between sharia and fiqh (Islamic juridsprudence) - the corpus of law which has arisen over centuries and which forms the basis for law in many Muslim countries, andis obliged like any modern legal system to pronounce on all matters, from the personal to the commercial. This is not divinely sanctioned. Indeed the only parts of Islam that have such sanction are classified as deen (religion).

Fiqh, therefore, is a system of conventional law,without divine sanction, and allowing of many interpretations. Beyond the fact that the Sunni world has four main schools of fiqh - Maleki, Shafei, Hanbali, Hanafi - each reflecting developments in medieval Islamic society and politics, the Shi'a have their own, distinct, system. Where the confusion has arisen - and where both Islamic fundamentalists and well-meaning but ill-informed western observers like the Canterbury archbishop have contributed to the problem - is in pretending that there is one single legal text (sharia) and that this supposedly univocal code carries divine authority. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The interest at stake

A similar ideological slippage, and abandonment of a comparative common sense, arise in regard to the issue of Islamic "economic principles" and in particular of "Islamic banking". A dose of economic realism, and firsthand knowledge of the region, may also help to dispel some of the effusions thathave been circulated in recent years about a supposedly different basis for conducting economic life in the Muslim world (from the "Islamic economics" of the Iranian revolution, to the current vogue for "Islamic banking"). These fashions reveal - as much as do the straight exercise of political power or the subjugation of women - the way that supposedly religious or cultural values are used to rebrand or disguise what are on closer examination universal forms of resource- and power-manipulation.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 proclaimed a new set of "Islamic economic principles", based on some vague extrapolation of the principle of zakat (charity), one of the five duties of the Muslim. It succeeded, however, only in creating a perfectly recognisable ramshackle rentier economy, laced with corruption and inefficiency; in short, a conventional product of "development" in what was known as the "third world", and little different from its oil-producing counterparts Nigeria, Venezuela and Indonesia.

The resurgence of "Islamic banking" - a practice and idea that has spread from Malaysia to Turkey, Egypt and the Gulf - is now expected to account for assets reaching $1 trillion bythe year 2010. Such western institutions as HSBC, Dow Jones, Citibank, BNP Paris and others have all signed up to this parade of corporate piety. The financial press of the middle east is full of articles concerned about the shortage of "experts" and "appropriately qualified scholars" in Islamic finance. But all this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, good secular salt at that. Anyone who has studied the economic history of the Muslim world - from the trading activities of the Prophet Mohammed in Mecca and Medina in the 7th century to the banks and finance houses of the Arab Gulf today - will know that business is conducted as it is everywhere on sound capitalist principles.

There is no basis for the supposed textual or canonical theory of "Islamic banking". The late Maxime Rodinson - the greatest authority on this matter- showed in his great work Islam and Capitalism that there is, in fact, no Qur'anic or authoritative prohibition on the taking of interest; there is only (as in most religions) a condemnation of riba' (excess, or profiteering). Muslim writers have long differed on what riba' means; some confine it to profiteering in essentials like foodstuffs.

Nor, in the end, do the supposedly "Islamic" banks of today provide a fundamentally different service. They do two things: first, offer a degree of local affiliation or allegiance to investors (much as does in principle the Bradford & Bingley building society, or the Chase Manhattan bank); second, serve as a more friendly recipient for investors with cash (especially in the sense of asking fewer questions about the origin of the funds than do - in this era of client identification and post-9/11 controls - many other financial institutions in the west). Islamic banking is capitalist banking with a different cover: a way in the end to ensure that more money -whether it comes from the exports of the oil producers, drugs production in Afghanistan, or the hard-earned toil of minimum-wage service-workers in Europe's cities - is put into circulation. It is, as the British ambassador to one Gulf state put it to me, "a means of getting the money out from underneath the bed".Its relation to tradition, sanctity, the Qur'an and all that is purely presentational.

Moreover, the supposedly compulsory ban on profiteering does not apply when interests of state are involved: if Islamic authority and what is often misleadingly called "sharia" prohibit excess profits, then where are the voices of criticism when it comes to exorbitant and (in terms of production costs) wholly unjustified increases in the price of oil? If ever there was a case of riba', one to which all Islamic oil producers subscribe, it is the rent that Opec (and its free-riders like Russia) extract from the sale of oil. Here, as in so many other matters, it is religious text and tradition that serve capital (when not greed) and not the other way around.

The fist of "tradition"

Much of the controversy about Islamic law, as in the current British uproar over the remarks of the Archbishop of Canterbury, leads those proposing a compromise with sharia to allow "some" elements of it,but to condemn its "inhuman" or "barbarous" (to cite two familiar adjectives of choice) side such as stoning, or denial of the legal equality of women. But this is not the fundamental issue, which is respect for tradition itself (and, a closely related factor, the official obsequiousness towards bearded patriarchs of all religions who today claim to own and be able to interpret it).

The supposed authority of Islamic text and tradition is the greatest of all fallacies underlying this moving theatre of Islamic banking and finance, as of the misconceived debate on sharia. Similar sleights of authoritarian hand occur in Judaism and Christianity, in regard to such issues as the status of women, the rights of gays, and the celibacy of the clergy. A lot of forgetting is necessary to uphold reverence for such traditions, which are based often on medieval practice (e.g. the principle of a celibate clergy must suppress the fact that St Peter and many of his successors were married).

In any event, the reverence for tradition is only the other side of power-interests seeking expression and consolidation. The word "tradition" should alert a person to the very modern forces it connotes, and often conceals.

At a Glance: Sharia Law in Britain

Ellie Keen — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:23:51 +0000

The remarks by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, have seen the media and politicians unleash a vicious wave of Islamophobia, from the ravings of the tabloid press, to the disgraceful Independent on Sunday splash about domestic violence and the shocking claims about “inbreeding” by Phil Woolas MP, who has responded to the current hysteria by leaping head-first into the racist gutter.

What are the basic facts behind the Muslim-baiting?

1. Most British Muslims do not demand Sharia law.

Muslim Council of Britain: “We do not wish to see a parallel system or a separate system of judiciary for Muslims.”

Shaista Gohir, government adviser: “The majority of Muslims do not want it. Many Muslim commentators and the media are wrongly assuming that all Muslims want Sharia law in the UK.”

2. What British Muslims want is for the UK, US and Israel to end their bloody occupations of Muslim countries.

3. They want an end to the racism against British Muslims, who are overwhelmingly dark-skinned.

4. A 2004 ICM poll found 61% of British Muslims might support Sharia courts being introduced in Britain, but only to resolve civil cases within the Muslim community, and only so long as the penalties did not contravene British law.

5. Archbishop Rowan Williams argued for “a delegation of certain legal functions to the religious courts of a community”, not for an extensive parallel legal system. The aspects of Sharia being considered by Williams are restricted to matters of family and finance law, i.e. civil matters. No one is suggesting introducing an Islamic penal code.

6. Religious courts already operate in this country for Orthodox Jews. Why shouldn’t Muslims enjoy the same right?

7. Sharia courts also operate in the UK, although without official recognition and concentrating only on mundane issues such as inheritance and divorce. Many British Muslims are already married under Sharia law, eat meat slaughtered by it, and bank according to it.

8. The UK is already amending its finance laws to allow Sharia-compliant products such as halal mortgages and Islamic bonds, in part to attract billions of petro-dollars from the cash-rich Gulf.

9. Ontario, Canada, for 15 years had a system of “faith based arbitration” whereby family issues such as inheritance and property division could be adjudicated by religious authorities. In 2005 Ontario’s attorney general reviewed how the system worked for Muslims and “did not find any evidence to suggest that women are being systematically discriminated against as a result of arbitration of family law issues”.

10. Criticism of Islam segues effortlessly with prejudice against black immigrants. “Niggers out” no longer wins many votes, but Muslim-bashing presses the same political buttons. For our rulers, Islam is a doubly-convenient scapegoat for resistance to the West’s “war on terror”. Any discussion of Islam today is therefore a discussion about war and about racism. By ignoring this basic fact the media join hands with the racists and the warmongers.

For the latest, see the excellent resource islamophobia-watch.com

Living under an alien law

JamieSW — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:41:24 +0000

The newspapers are terrified. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, has raised the suggestion that some forms of sharia law be introduced as a means of “constructive accommodation” with British Muslims.

The Sun raised the prospect of “medieval punishments” being inflicted on Britons, and complained that Williams was “giving heart to Muslim terrorists plotting our destruction”.

The Telegraph explained to its readers that sharia is associated with “amputation of limbs, death by stoning or lashes” for such crimes as theft. Perhaps the Telegraph is concerned about its former proprietor, the convicted fraudster Lord Conrad Black. On their account, if he had been tried under sharia law he wouldn’t have a limb left on his body.

However, even liberal opinion is expressing concern, arguing that Muslim women will experience reduced freedom if religious courts are allowed to adjudicate in matters of family life.

There is a further implication that what is proposed is somehow “alien”. This is “a Christian country with Christian laws”, according to the national director of the right wing pressure group Christian Voice. And Gordon Brown has conceded to this nationalist sentiment, arguing that “British law should be based on British values”.

The scare stories have little to do with what is actually proposed. The archbishop called for allowances to be made for the practice of sharia law within the confines of English law, on a limited basis and with the mutual consent of everyone affected.

He argued, quite correctly, that there is a diversity of interpretation among Muslim jurists about what sharia entails, and endorsed the liberal variants. He pointed out that Britain already has separate arrangements for other religious communities. Orthodox Jews are entitled to work out some of their arrangements in a rabbinical court. Muslims can already choose to have disputes settled privately under sharia law. And there are already sharia-compliant products and services operating in Britain, for instance in banking.

So the hysteria is not really about anything Rowan Williams actually said. It is an expression of the Islamophobia that has been cultivated in the West as an obnoxious cultural counterpart to the “war on terror”.

Meanwhile, the tabloids are several centuries behind on this scoop – Britain already has a system of alien laws. It is maintained in large part by right wing bigots in outlandish medieval costumes, such as the “law lords” or the “privy council”.

Drawn from a ruling class with an alien culture – and values that most of us don’t share – our overseers in wigs and cloaks have always been rather fond of telling us how to live.

They tell us who we can have sex with, and have even been given to legislating on what kind of sex we can have; under what conditions we may be married and to whom, and when we may divorce; what we can protest about, when and for how long; when we can strike, and for what we may strike; what we can consume, and where we can consume it.

Whether outlawing homosexuality, restricting abortion, or regulating the ingestion of recreational substances, these laws have never had anything to do with the values of ordinary people.

For example, at the moment, the state is considering restrictions on a woman’s right to abortion. This campaign is being driven by right wing anti-abortionists such as Ann Widdecombe MP.

The fact that state control of the female body has resulted in the deaths of women in backstreet abortions doesn’t stop these people calling themselves “pro-life” – but they represent a minority of the British people, and certainly a minority of women.

As usual, the trouble with the archbishop of Canterbury is not that he “went too far”, but that he didn’t go far enough. He rightly challenges the state’s monopoly on public identity, but does so primarily in order to carve out a larger space for religious power.

One of Rowan Williams’s political interventions in 2007 was to co-author a letter to the prime minister asking that Catholic adoption agencies be exempted from regulation that would compel them to consider gay people as adoptees. To put it another way – he asked the state to guarantee the Catholic church’s right to operate homophobic policies.

In the case of sharia law, on one level Williams isn’t asking the state to withdraw, but to get more involved in the regulation of religious and personal life. He suggests that certain forms of Islam are more acceptable than others – and that those variants ought to be encouraged and recognised by the state.

It is quite right that Muslims should have the same rights that any other religious group has – but the best way to ensure that is for the state to keep out of our moral lives. And a good first move in that direction would be to divest the Church of England of its peculiar privileges and authority.