h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Personally I think Charles Moore must be rubbing his hands in glee. He was, I assume, aiming to characterise Muslims as a bunch of violent reactionary throwbacks.

And their response? To confirm precisely the point he was making. Brilliant guys. Why not sentence him to death?

The thing I like most about this is the Muslims saying "You'd think people would have learned from the example of the Satanic Verses."

Yes, boys, we learned that you Muslims are a nasty group of medieval-minded thugs whose faith is so shaky it can't take a bit of criticism from what was in fact a desperately boring book. We learned that you have no interest in integrating into a modern civilised democracy. We learned to view the word "Islam" as being synonymous with "intolerant violence". I speak as someone who was in Bradford watching Muslims burning books in the street and throwing bricks at policemen.

I certainly learned something from the example of the Satanic Verses, but it's possibly not what the Muslims quoted would have perhaps liked me to learn.

H.

Indeed. I think that the Gruiad's coverage and the Muslim Council's reaction has demonstrated quite wonderfully why a bill outlawing incitment to religous hatred is the last thing we need.

I think an important point here is that often NON-violent Muslims will bleat that the thugs are "not true/proper/whatever Muslims". They said the same thing about the 9/11 hijackers. They plead that they (the violent ones) should be treated the same as any other criminal murderer, and that we should ignore the religious element to their atrocities.

Well, sorry, but no. THEY - the thugs, the book burners, the police-brickers, the suicide bombers and hijackers - THEY identify themselves as Muslims, they say, out loud, over and over again that they are doing what they do BECAUSE they are Muslims, specifically. Why should we not believe them?

H.

Obviously, Moore was being deliberately provocative.

I'm sure he isn't so ignorant to not be aware that many royal marriages/betrothals in Europe used to occur at ages which could be interpreted as paedophilic if one assumed that marriage meant immediate sex (though some of his readers might well be).
Age of marriage is irrelevant - age of first evidence of sex (pregnancy/childbirth) would be a much better indicator.

I don't see how what he said could be interpreted as inciting religious hatred unless he implied that modern-day muslims were disproportionately likely to marry or have sex with underage girls, and that turned out to be incorrect (which I suspect it would do in the UK).
In the UK, I'd guess that teenage pregnancies are probably rather lower in Muslim communities than the population as a whole.

Hoo, I think it's valid to consider the arguments when people say "X is a non-violent religion, and these people have completely distorted the teachings to their own ends".
We might well conclude that the moderates are actually right, and that technically the violent *are* not following the true faith.
However, even if that is the case, the next logical question is "How many other people are being taught the same distorted version of the religion, and what can we do to stop it".
Expanding ones disgust at the act of a few to people unconnected except by supposed shared religion and saying "They're all as bad as each other" isn't going to solve the real problem, though it may be easier than actually solving the real problem.

In a sense, it's irrelevant whether someone is truly of religion X, or not, or whether *they* actually believe that they are, or are using the religion as a cover for politics, or any combination of the above.

If there's an organisation turning out people who are harmful, it doesn't much matter what cover they are actually under when it comes to the action that should be taken.

For example, who actually *cares* whether the IRA members planting bombs were fervent Catholics, atheist republicans, or durg-profittering gangsters. Who cares whether Loyalist people planting bombs were fervent Protestants, atheist antirepublicans, or drug-profiteering gangsters.
Unless knowing the motivation actually helps to locate and stop them, why bother caring about it.

<>

Perhaps he meant inciting hatred from a religious group? In which case, he succeeded.


az

Teenage sex has always gone on and will continue to go on. This has even been true in 'moral' times when there were strict social penalties (fow girls, anyway!).

Teaching abstinence is futile. Educating our children so that they realise they can make their own choices (eg - you don't *have* to do it until you're ready...and, by the way if you do it you're *both* meant to enjoy it) seems like a good idea. But it's far from foolproof. That's why the good lord invented contraception!



I've always thought that teenagers should be taught to masturbate (those who don't learn it spontaneously)

I was just wondering why the leap to teenage sex came from, then realised it was the original topic.
It seems *such* a long time ago (the topic, I mean)...

An alternative thread on the Telegraph story might be a good idea.

Now could anybody explain this Satanic Verses thing because I think it may have been a little before my time.

yeah anyway, obviously the headline was meant to shock but papers generally aren't in the business of sacking people because they're controversial. And I certainly see no grounds for its censorship.

Satanic Verses, quick'n'dirty precis, please correct if you think I've missed something out or misrepresented:

In, I think, 1989, Salman Rushdie wrote a terrible, tedious book called "The Satanic Verses". If it had been like his other books the only people who would have given a monkey's would have been the sort of bespectacled pointy-heads who appear on "Newsnight Review" and were on nodding terms with Jacques Derrida.

Except it wasn't like his other books, in that it dared to take some liberties with the Koran and speculate on the life of Mohammed.

Lots and lots of Muslims who had never read the book and were never likely to were instructed to be terribly offended by it, and of course because they're religious and they do everything they're told and don't have any truck with independent thought, of course they were. Awfully offended.

The Ayatollah Khomeini, the then leader of Iran, who had almost certainly never even *seen* a copy of the book much less read it, given that it was written in English, added a new word to the vocabulary of most English people when he issued a fatwa.

Now, apologist so-called moderate Muslims will tell you that a fatwa is something like an advisory instruction, something Muslims should try to do to live better lives. However, in this particular case, "fatwa" meant something very specific, something unambiguous and very clear, at least as reported to the British public.

It meant "death sentence". Khomeini issued an instruction that it was the duty of any true Muslim who was able, to find Rushdie and kill him.

It is likely that more than anything else until September 11th 2001, this single act cemented in the minds of the British public the impression of Islam as a violent, backward religion followed by nasty foreign thugs who wanted to kill British people, and Muslims in Britain as potentially seditious terrorist sleeper agents.

Now, the British government took a slightly dim view of a foreign leader sentencing one of their citizens to death for the "crime" of writing a book. However, they were realistic enough to realise that, with over a million Muslims resident in this country, the chances were probably pretty good that at least one of them would try to prove to the Ayatollah and his Muslim brothers just how devout he was by taking a pop at Salman. As a result, at massive cost to the taxpayer, Rushdie was placed under 24 hour police protection.

At the time, Cat Stevens, now styling himself "Yusuf Islam", publicly supported the death sentence on Rushdie issued by the regime in Iran. This may go some way to explaining why the US authorities didn't exactly welcome him with open arms a couple of months back.

There were also riots on the streets of Bradford (a city with a large, militant Muslim population), riots in which lots of copies of the book were ritually burned in the street, riots in which many police and law-abiding citizens going about their business (including a personal friend of mine) were injured by bricks thrown by Muslims so offended by this terribly boring book they'd never read that they thought it was acceptable to physically assault people. I witnessed these riots at first hand, as I was at university in Bradford at the time.

Slightly (very, very slightly) more moderate Muslims attempted to prevent the publication of the book by intimidating and threatening the publishers, first with legal action, then with violence. They demanded that the law on blasphemy be extended to cover Islam, when most rational UK citizens were beginning to realise that this was a perfect demonstration why there shouldn't be a blasphemy law at all.

Sales of the book were massive, of course, far far beyond what it would ever have got if Khomeini had minded his own business. But it was desperately boring and dull, and most people I know who read wish they hadn't bothered and couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Mind you, none of the people I knew who read it were Muslims. None of the Muslims I knew had read it, they just knew they were offended by it, presumably by osmosis.

Apologist Muslims tried to point out that Khomeini had no authority to issue the fatwa, and in any case a fatwa condemning someone to death is not permitted in Islam. I'm not sure who they thought they were fooling.

Most hilariously of all, a Bollywood movie was made, in which the ugly, tedious and insufferably self-satisfied and arrogant Rushdie was portrayed as a handsome, suave, white-suited playboy, laughing in the face of Islam from his yacht before eventually getting his comeuppance from God in a ropey special-effects climax, but not before doing a few song-and-dance numbers.

And then... it all died down. The book came out in paperback, and went pretty well. Rushdie made occasional appearances with his guards at literary functions. Loony homicidal Muslim assassins were noticeable by their absence, or at least by their lack of success. And eventually most people forgot about it. Khomeini died, his successor made some weak statement which could be summed up as "the old man didn't mean it, really, can we all just forget about it?", Rushdie started going to parties without his guards, and life pretty much went on. Muslims were probably just thinking it was at last all over and forgotten when 9/11 happened.

H.

Wasn't one of the translators murdered and another attacked?

Anyhow, read it, found it tedious, and honestly couldn't find the bit that was supposed to be so offensive (apparently it's just a page or two of the book, not the whole book itself).


az

*nods in agreement*

Mind you I actually rather enjoyed reading it. Though it wasn't as good as 'Midnight's Children'

Of course, lest we assume that intolerance is restricted to any one faith, it wasn't THAT long ago that all sorts of books were banned from Britain under pressure from the churches.

And this sort of thing still goes on:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4085023.stm

I seem to recall that The Life of Brian faced similar charges.

To paraphrase Hoo, are people so insecure in their beliefs that they can't bear to see anyone make fun of them? Or even question them?


az

To be slightly fairer, maybe it's more that some people are insecure as to thair personal identity and thus identify with a group defined by religion. And beleagured groups may well act more aggressively when confronted.

(Oops. Clicked too soon)

What I mean is that the attack is seen as being not on a personal faith but as on 'us lot'.

I'm inclined to agree with Edward. I think everybody identifies with some group or other (or with a number of such groups, in varying degrees), and will tend, again in varying degrees, to defend that group and its integrity against outsiders. Where that group's identity is defined by some set of rather rigid beliefs/values, and particularly where that set is self-defined as inherently superior, challenges are likely to be perceived as threatening to a degree that provokes extreme responses.

Noggin

And definition by religion is especially dangerous because of its tendency to be conflated with government and with concepts such as 'morality' and 'natural order'.

Back to Teenage Pregnancy...one of the stupidest aspects of teaching abstinence it that it is extremely unlikely to have any impact. It also occurs to me that countries which have tolerant attitudes to sex also have much lower rates of teenage pregnancy than, for instance, the UK.

(btw - another factoid I've just discovered: The divorce rate amongst Americans who declare themselves to agnostic or atheist is far lower than that amongst conservative Christians)

I can understand religious people feeling defensive, but to the extent that they must undermine everything that isn't in accord with their own beliefs? Whatever happened to live and let live?

Re: abstinence. I agree that this cannot be effective with the majority of teenagers as it goes against everything they are feeling. Far better to incorporate their feelings with education and knowledge.


az