Beyond belief!

After all those brickbats, a couple of bouquets.

First, this afternoon's Beyond Belief on Radio 4 on French secularism. It is well worth a listen. 

Its three guests were: Kay Chadwick, Reader in French Historical Studies at Liverpool University; Mona Siddiqui, professor of Islamic and Inter-religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh; and Natasha Lehrer, writer and literary editor of the Jewish Quarterly.

The first part looked at the history of French secularism; the second part look at how French secularism stands now; and dividing the two parts was an interview with a Muslim gentleman from a French "organisation against Islamophobia" who blamed the French state for pretty much everything, whose contribution was then discussed.

I found it all very interesting, and I suspect the discussion about the tensions between French secularism and French Islam didn't pan out quite how listeners would have expected. (It certainly didn't pan out how I expected - to put it mildly!).

The three guests were well contrasted. 

Mona Siddiqui gave a defence of French secularism and the way it "puts the citizen before the religion." She criticised the "mantra" of Muslims across Europe - whether they be Turks in Germany or South Asians in the UK - that the state is to blame. She said she didn't agree with them. She also said there are lots of issues that are "endemic" to these communities that aren't being looked at by those communities - and that those communities are the ones that need to "do some soul-searching". She said that the "visibility" of French Muslims is a "problem" - and meant that their hijab-wearing (etc) causing that problem. 

Natasha Lehrer espoused what might be called 'the left-liberal line', that it's understandable if French Muslims find French secularism problematic and that they blame the French state. They feel as if they have "no hope" because they face long-term, increasing mass unemployment and systematic discrimination, she said (which, of course, is uncannily close to 'the BBC line' in report after report from the banlieues).

Kay Chadwick rejected the 'anti-Islamophobia' guy's claim that "Islamophobia is the acceptable face of racism in France", and rejected the term 'Islamophobia'. She agreed with Mona, saying that French secularism discards ethnicity in favour of 'being French' first and foremost. 

Natasha countered that the French state is failing to bring ethnic minorities "into the fold" and that discrimination is rife.

Mona Siddiqui

Mona replied that the big issue facing Europe is "about values", and that we would welcome immigrants if they bought into our values of liberal European democracy. However, we are now seeing that no matter what we do with these communities "their values are essentially different from European liberal values" - and some of those people's values are essentially different because they choose to keep them different, and a lot of these communities "do fail" on those values.   

Natasha disagreed saying that allowing and valuing diversity is what a tolerant multicultural society demands, but Mona interrupted her to say "But that's only if it's positive", and a lot of the "demands" aren't a positive contribution to liberal democracy. It's all very well talking about diversity, Mona went on, but when different "diversities" rub up against each other that can be a problem. You've got to buy into liberal democracy. 

Natasha persisted in her point that the state is failing and there's discrimination. (50% of people in French jails are Muslim, she said - obviously blaming the French state for that). 

Mona said that shouldn't "eclipse the other problems", and it's a chicken and egg situation anyhow. Problems like low educational standards could be the result of problems within these communities or within society as a whole. It's hard to measure.  

Kay said many do live integrated lives; others don't. Everyone should respect each other. 

Mona said that a lack of integration and extremism don't necessarily tie up and Natasha surprisingly agreed with her, saying that many of the people who have gone off to fight in Syria (etc) come from fairly comfortable backgrounds and that "to simplify it to being a question of deprivation or exclusion is fairly inaccurate" - though that is what she herself appeared to have been arguing all along up till that point! 

As for their concluding comments? Well, Mona said she loved France when she lived there and would be happy to live there again; Natasha said that being Jewish in France isn't a problem and that French secularism is being used by politicians - and damagingly so for "cohesiveness"; and Kay said that we should hold on to cross-cultural unity but that France is a place where you can be many things, thanks to French secularism.

As for presenter Ernie Rea, he let it all flow and gave the 'anti-Islamophobia' guy a fair hearing but raised sceptical point about the man's incessant blaming of the French state both during the interview and after it.

As I say, well worth a listen - though I probably should have put something about 'spoilers' at the top of the post first!

As for my second bouquet, that must go to Andrew Marr and this morning's Start the Week on Russian from the Tsars to Putin - and not forgetting the commissars. 

It had Simon Sebag Montefiore on the Romanovs, presenting a highly juicy take on their wickedness (which suggests that his blockbuster on them probably isn't written 'in the academic style'); plus Amanda Vickery on the Siege of Leningrad and that Shostokovich symphony; Arkady Ostrovsky on the fall of the Soviet Union, very interestingly putting the case for Boris Yeltsin (among other things); and David Aaronovitch engagingly discussing his communist parents' cult-like ties to The Party.

Also well worth a listen. 

'Beyond Belief': Muhammed and Aisha

Sahih al-Bukhari, 7:62:64 & 65

This week's Beyond Belief on Radio 4 was quite a bad-tempered affair at times.

It featured two Muslim converts and an infidel, and the two Muslim converts were surprisingly rude on occasions to the infidel - historian Tom Holland. (Ed - Fancy that! Who knew that Muslim converts could be so uptight and huffy?)

The programme discussed the Hadiths - the collected stories and traditions about Muhammed compiled after his death and held in high importance by Muslims.

The programme's guests were (to cite the descriptions provided by the BBC): Jonathan Brown, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilisation at Georgetown University; Sahib Bleher, Imam and author on the Qur'an; and Tom Holland, a Classicist and author of several best selling books including In The Shadow of the Sword, on the origins of Islam.

This is the second time I've failed to warm to Sahib Bleher on Beyond Belief. 

The last time I heard him he was being less than moderate in his denunciation of the 'heretical' Ahmedis. Our Is the BBC biased? post at the time laid out the extraordinary record of this man, a co-founder of the Islamic Party of Britain. (He thinks 9/11 was organised by the U.S. and Israel, has described 7/7 as a "set-up", refers to the Holocaust as "the Holocult", and associates with the anti-Semitic far-right.) 

Quite why Radio 4 keeps inviting him on is beyond me.

Professor Brown is  much more respectable (if no less prickly). He's a distinguished academic after all.

The Prince Alwaleed bin Talal whose chair he holds at Georgetown University, if you were wondering, is a billionaire member of the Saudi royal family. He funds lots of Western universities. There's a Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies at Cambridge University and an Alwaleed Centre at Edinburgh University too.

For those who missed it, here's part of their discussion - the bit where Tom Holland stopped turning the other cheek.

It's well worth following closely not just for the good sense of Tom Holland, but also to study the slippery response of Sahib Bleher and the truly extraordinary arguments of Georgetown University's Professor Brown - arguments that even seemed to take presenter Ernie Rae aback. (Ernie Rae deserves credit here for asking the questions many an astonished Radio 4 listener would have wanted asking):

*****

Tom Holland: The classic example...I guess the single hadith that has caused most anxiety would be one which describes Aisha, the favourite wife of Muhammed, marrying him at six, and them Muhammed consummates the relationship when she is nine. People tended not to have a problem with this until quite recently, as under-aged sex has become ever more of a taboo, so this has provoked more and more anxiety among Muslim commentators, and various attempts have been madeto solve it - either by saying, "Well, this was the practice of the age", which is, of course, to relativise the prophetic model, or to say, "The chains of transmission by which we know this aren't reliable", which, of course, I would absolutely agree but, again, that is to problematise the relationship. Or possibly to go back and look at this hadith and to regard it not as sort of a literal detail, not as a snatch of historical information telling us what the historical Muhammed did, but as something more symbolic, something more representative of the significance of Aisha within the Muslim tradition.

Ernie Rea: Sahib?

Sahib Bleher: It's the usual mud slinging that's going on here again. A careful reading of the hadiths defined that Aisha was about five years younger than Fatima. That means that when she was betrothed to Muhammed then she must have been at least ten years old. It was another four years before she moved over to his household. so the marriage wouldn't have been married until she was fourteen or fifteen...

Tom Holland (interrupting): So Bukhari is wrong?

Ernie Rea: So where does this story that she was nine when the relationship was consummated come from?

Sahib Bleher: Well, there are various reports. But this is the whole thing. You don't...

Tom Holland (interrupting): But they are canonical accounts of Hadith, aren't they? I mean, they are absolutely canonical.

Ernie Rea: Jonathan?

Jonathan Brown: I think it's an absolutely authentic report. In fact I think the scholar whose work does represent the state of the field in Western scholarship on Hadith, the German scholar Harald Motzki, if you were to take his methods of dating hadiths, I think you could date that report of Aisha back to actually about the time of Aisha, so I think...

Ernie Rea (interrupting): Contemporary reports, you're saying?

Jonathan Brown: Yes, I think that's accurate. I think even from a non-Muslim perspective it's a good argument that that goes back to Aisha.

Ernie Rea: So how do you reconcile this with your sense of modernity?

Jonathan Brown: Well, I reconcile it because nobody had a problem with this until 1905. I mean (laughing) there was just not an issue. Even Western scholars writing about Muhammed in 1800, even in the 20th Century, just didn't care about...

Ernie Rea (interrupting): So the problem is that you're using Muhammed as a moral exemplar. You're saying this is the person that we should follow and he had sex with his wife when she was just nine years old?

Jonathan Brown (interrupting): OK, OK, well, Muslim scholars have been very clear about this. You cannot have sex with someone who is not physically able to have sex. Just because the Prophet did something doesn't mean Muslims have to do it. In fact the Prophet himself in another hadith refused to marry his daughter to somebody he felt was too old for her. Just because the Prophet did something it means it's permissible in general. It doesn't mean you have to do it. And, in fact, it also doesn't mean that you can't make very good arguments that it's bad policy. I mean, if you look and you say now people go to high school and have ambitions of university degrees and they want to have careers in our day today, it might be very good policy for Muslims to say it's better not to marry until you're sixteen or eighteen years old. That's why if you look at most Muslim countries, now have age restrictions that are sixteen or eighteen years old.

Ernie Rea: Tom?

Tom Holland: Now, this is absolutely an illustration of the point that is possible when you have hadiths that are generally held to be reliable that by the moral standards, say, of the 21st Century secular liberal society are regarded as rebarbative it is possible to sort of essentially wash away the more unpalatable aspects of it - and that. obviously, has to be a process that I personally hope will carry on. But we also have to recognise that there are plenty of people out there who do still regard the fact that Muhammed slept with a nine year old as sanctioning them to do the same. And we have the evidence for that in the fate of the capture Yazidi girls. That is what is providing Islamic State with their sanction. So this is not a purely academic exercise. It is having a knock-on effect in the Middle East.

Ernie Rea: Jonathan?

Jonathan Brown: This idea that somehow what's happening to Yazidi girls in Iraq is caused by this hadith...an American soldier in Iraq was convicted by an American military court of raping and murdering an Iraqi child, and American soldiers sexually abused Iraqi children in Abu Ghraib prison...

Tom Holland (interrupting): They probably weren't saying that they were inspired by a religious leader.

Jonathan Brown: No, no, my point is...(laughing)...my point is that this kind of action of warfare is not just the purview of Muslims.

Tom Holland: No. No one is saying it is, but the issue is that Islamic State are sanctioning what they are doing...they are sanctioning slavery, execution, the rape of nine year olds by drawing on the hadiths. I'm not saying that is what every Muslim does. It's clearly not what has happened over the course of Islamic civilisation, but the fact that it is possible to use hadiths in this way seems to me a problem.

Jonathan Brown: There's families in Iraq and families in Afghanistan that gladly marry their children off at young ages not in a war time and not in situations where the Islamic State is taking over. So this is not just something that is being used by some extremist organisation. This is part of the culture in those areas.

Ernie Rea: But Jonathan, you don't think it's a problem that people like Islamic State and Boko Haram in Nigeria can use a hadith as justification for the sexual abuse of their captives?

Jonathan Brown: I think the problem is that they're engaging in the practices. I don't blame a body of tradition that's been around for 1400 years for the decisions of some group that exists today. I blame people who use and abuse the law for those decisions. I don't blame the legal tradition itself.

Archaeology and Bias

Radio 4's often engaging Beyond Belief tackled the fascinating topic of 'Archaeology and Religion' this week. 

Ernie Rea's guests were: Professor Robin Coningham, the man who led the excavation in Nepal which seems to have proved that Buddha lived around 200-300 years earlier than is commonly supposed; Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou of Exeter University, an occasional BBC presenter who specialises in Israelite and Judahite history; and Professor Tim Insoll of Manchester University, whose main work is in the field of early Islam. 

All three believe that they are not biased in their work, preferring to see themselves as disinterested academics pursuing a knowledge of history for its own sake - though Francesca Stavrakopoulou conceded that, being human, even archaeologists can't be entirely certain that they are bias-free. Thus, Francesca herself may be an atheist but that doesn't impact on her work, she says, and Tim Insoll may be a Catholic but that doesn't impact on his work either. 

Against this attractively unprejudiced-sounding panel was set Geoffrey Smith, a Christian Zionist. He was interviewed (briefly) midway through the programme.

Ernie Rae questioned him about whether he was looking for confirmation of his faith through Biblical archaeology, about the whether he thinks the story of King David is true, and about whether any archaeological evidence could shake his faith in the Biblical accounts. Mr Smith said that he's discovered nothing so far to shake his faith. 

Though reasonable-sounding, Geoffrey Smith did seem to me to have been set up by the programme, cast as the kind of blinkered person who uses archaeology merely to reinforce his own faith - unlike the programme's three main guests - and, thus, as representing the 'bad side' of archaeology. 

As his area of interest overlapped strongly with hers, Francesca Stavrakopoulou was then allowed  to sit in judgement on what Mr Smith had said.

As someone whose views have proved controversial (especially her questioning of the existence of King David) and who robustly defended Ilan Ziv’s film, Jerusalem: An Archaeological Mystery Story after it was broadcast , it was therefore hardly surprising that she gave his views short shrift ("simply wrong", "misinformative" [sic], "distorted", etc). 

If things weren't bad enough for Geoffrey Smith, there followed an exchange between Ernie Rae and Francesca Stavrakopoulou where Ernie raised "this business about the extent of the kingdom of David - whether it was widespread or whether he was just a tribal leader" and said it was a "a political hot potato".

Francesca suggested it was more plausible to take the dismissive view about King David and said that, even if the Biblical account was true, 

David himself, according to the Bible, took on Jerusalem as a site that was occupied by the indigenous peoples before him so, even if you can prove that David made Jerusalem his capital city, brought the symbol of God, the Ark of the Covenant, into Jerusalem and, so, laid the foundations, if you like, for the beginnings of this great state, there were still indigenous people living in that place before him. So it doesn't solve any of the problems that we face today when we look at contemporary Jerusalem.

I think we know where she's coming from on the Israel-Palestinian issue.

Most striking of all, Ernie Rae then raised an example of archaeological sites that become "seriously problematic: "I'm thinking of the Dome of the Rock, the Temple Mount."

The following exchange ensued:

Francesca Stavrakopoulou: When it comes to the Temple Mount or the Dome of the Rock it is incredibly difficult. A lot of the digging that's going on in that particular area in Jerusalem at the moment is ideologically charged.

Ernie Rae: A lot of it is financed by American evangelicals... 

Francesca Stavrakopoulou: A huge amount.

Ernie Rae: ...who basically think that until you restore the Temple the Messiah will not come again, so I'm tempted to say 'if you want to look at the motivation of the archaeologists, follow the money, find out who's funding it'. 

Francesca Stavrakopoulou: That's exactly right. So much of archaeology, particularly in my field, comes down to 'Where does the money come from?'

I have to admit that, even though the subject interests me, I did listen to this programme half-expecting - and fearing - that Israeli archaeology would get a bad press, especially after seeing Francesca's name on the guest list.

Even so, it was still disappointing to find that the sole modern representatives of 'bad' modern archaeologists turned out to be Israeli archaeologists and their Christian evangelical supporters. 

It's the sort of thing that leads us to blog about BBC bias.