This is all we need

I worried about this some time ago. It looks as though I was right to be worried. 

(From 3 quarks daily)

Sorry, you need to click on the graph to see it properly - I can't make it shrink to fit...

The Dark Ages (cont.)

Remember people saying that the position of women in Afghanistan would be immeasurably improved by invasion? Wasn't that one of the reasons we 'went in'? Well, read this from today's Independent, about the murder of Malalai Kakar. Here's an extract:

Commander Kakar had earned particular enmity from the zealots for leading a female team of 10 officers who would carry out raids to free wives and daughters being held captive by their male relatives. Her office became a refuge for women being threatened and mistreated and she regularly challenged orders from conservative judges to force them to return to their families.

The Dark Ages

The home of Martin Rynja, the director of Gibson Square, which plans to publish The Jewel of the Medina, was attacked by Islamist arsonists yesterday. You can read about it here.

Announcing the publication of The Jewel of the Medina earlier this month, Mr Rynja said he felt such books were important in a liberal democracy. "If a novel of quality and skill that casts light on a beautiful subject we know too little of in the West, but have a genuine interest in, cannot be published here, it would truly mean that the clock has been turned back to the dark ages. The Jewel of the Medina has become an important barometer of our time," he said.

Something apt from Dover Beach

Ian McEwan has just come out against Islamism*, as he calls it. I’m not sure what distinguishes Islamism from Islam, other than the generally derogatory aura created by the suffix ‘ism’, but that’s by-the-by. He’s quoted as saying: “I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on – we know it well.” Absolutely, Ian, and I couldn’t agree more.

I read about these comments in today’s Independent on Sunday, which also contains a list of the 101 most influential gay people in Britain. Thirty years ago, it would have been hard to find ten, and they’d have been artists or in show business (I’m thinking Danny La Rue). The list certainly wouldn’t have included business executives, rabbis, EU commissioners, rugby union referees or senior policemen. Coincidentally, the IoS reports that, in Saudi Arabia, 21 young men have just been arrested for the sin of homosexuality. They were rounded up in Qatif last Friday by the religious police, not a force that would have welcomed Brian Paddick with open arms, one imagines, who operate under the aegis of something called the Commission for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a typically grandiose name for the usual befrocked gang of bigoted thugs that tend to run these things. The young men arrested can expect to be flogged or worse. Maybe they should seek asylum in an allied state.

What I can’t understand is why the IoS should consider McEwan’s views to be an ‘astonishingly strong attack’. In a country which still pays lip service to ideas of sexual equality, freedom of speech, recognition of gay rights, rational argument rather than revealed truth, etc. they seem to me to be astonishingly mild. If this is ‘hate speech’, it would be interesting to know in what way the crime distinguishes itself from the surely licit act of uttering a list of simple truths expressed in objective terms. Would any Muslim argue that Islam isn’t based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality, but on the opposite of these things – moral relativism, empirical observation, equality for all regardless of sex and sexual orientation? Wouldn’t that be seen as apostasy?

Maybe it’s just because McEwan prefaced the list with the verb ‘detest’. So ‘hate crime’ is nothing more than a statement of fact preceded by the word ‘I’ and a synonym of ‘hate’? In that case, we’re all in the shit. What about if I announce that I’m not that keen on people from the land of Nokia. Would the Finnish ambassador have a case against me?

Ian McEwan may be a public figure, but he hasn’t been elected, doesn’t depend on public money and represents no one but himself. He certainly wouldn’t defend himself by claiming to represent the word of God – unlike, say, homophobic MP Iris Robinson, who seems to have forgotten that ten percent of her constituents may not appreciate being called loathsome. Oh sorry, Iris. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Tell that to Robinson’s cronies in Saudi.

*The quotes come from an interview given to the Italian Corriere della Sera, so this may be a trans-language hiccup.

Veils

Cranach's Venus is too saucy for London Underground travellers, according to Transport for London, which has banned its use in an advertisement. This wonderful image, at once demure and enticing, had been chosen to advertise a Royal Academy show devoted to the great 16th century artist. It's one of a number of Venuses produced by Cranach: there's a particularly lascivious one, wearing a splendid hat and lounging against, if not actually dangling from, a tree while she listens to Cupid, who's no doubt used to this sort of behaviour. He's complaining that he's been stung by bees while trying to steal their honey. The painting represents the notion that all pleasure is mixed with pain, and it's an allegory that might be applied to Transport for London's decision to punish the RA for daring to bring a little artistic pleasure into travellers' lives.

Apparently the painting might 'offend'. A Transport for London spokesman said: "Millions of people travel on the London Underground each day and they have no choice but to view whatever ads are posted there. We have to take into account the full range of travellers and endeavour not to cause offence in the adverts we display." It's pretty clear to me that the only travellers of this 'full range' who might be offended by the painting are Muslim males and, at a pinch, our own home-grown fundamentalist killjoys. It's a pre-emptive strike in favour of bigotry, with the authorities trying to double-guess what might be 'upsetting' and who might be 'upset', though they can't actually say this.

Poor old Cranach. Poor us.

Sharia hits fan

Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has created a brouhaha after suggesting on Radio 4 that the acceptance, or 'accommodation', in the UK of some aspects of Sharia law might be ‘unavoidable’. This is already the case, apparently, with Sharia courts in Britain dealing with thousands of cases involving marital or financial disputes, without a whiff of fundamentalist alarm. So Williams’ possibly slightly regretful recognition of the fact is a bland enough position to hold and wholly in line with the Anglican church’s take on the world as something you can’t do very much about, so why not rub along with it. Accommodation is all.

For the tabloids, though, his comments were tantamount to endorsing mutilation in public squares, mass infibulation and obligatory burkhas for all Page Three models. In their Talibanesque way, they want his head, his blood, and any other essential organs going, though what constitutes essential for an archbishop is material for theologians rather than lay thinkers. They accuse him of wanting to destroy Britain, a place they happily execrate, day in day out, for its appalling youth, corrupt government, filthy manners and fondness for employing Polish plumbers and paying them under the table.

Yet what on earth should someone like Williams say? Hang the infidels? Re-impose tithes? Make everyone sing Kumbaya with a cheesy smile, wearing Cliff Richard tee-shirts? He’s a major religious figure, after all, so it’s part of his remit to believe that state legislation should represent ethical choices. He’s also, by all accounts, an ecumenical type, so can hardly pretend that the only valid ethical choices are Anglican. Ergo, he’s shafted.

Perhaps all this fuss will persuade people that no religious belief of any kind should be allowed to interfere with the law, which represents and defends all members of a society regardless of their household gods, and which should have no truck with the kind of nonsense religious leaders - invariably old, invariably male, all too frequently celibate - spout with such punitive abandon.

If this is true for lapidation and the chopping off of hands, it’s equally true for the malicious interference of, for example, the catholic church in the business of countries like Spain and Italy. Let’s face facts. If you let one bossy old know-all into the legislating chamber, you open the door to the whole damn gang.

Sign language

Come on. Stop faffing around. Read this article. Then sign the petition.

Writing as madness

This summer, I saw a painting I'd never seen before, in the Centre Pompidou. Entitled Peinture (Ecriture rose) and covering a fair-sized chunk of wall (maybe three metres by four), it's the work of Simon Hantai and was done in 1958-59, which makes it almost half a century old. It's remarkable for a number of reasons, none of which can be deduced from the very poor photograph of part of it that you can see above, perhaps the most obvious being the fact that the colour pink, despite the work's title, isn't used at any point (as Helene Cixous has pointed out). The symbols on the canvas are references to earlier works but the body of the painting, its essential surface, is composed of writing. Hantai spent a year on the picture, working each morning to cover the entire canvas with meticulously copied extracts from philosophical and religious texts. The effect, of course, is to annihilate their meaning, but it's also a monument to the word as object in the same way that anything produced by a pre-Gutenberg copyist might be considered to be.

Two or three days later we were in the Arab Institute near Notre Dame, an extraordinary building containing a small but fine collection. Among the exhibits was an eighteenth century Iranian copy of the Koran, inscribed on a roll with the same kind of maniacal devotion as Hantai's, and, whatever its intentions may have been - and they were surely diametrically opposed to those of Hantai - the final effect is remarkably similar. In both cases, the actual sense of the word is subsumed in the representation of it as sign. The purpose of this Koran must have been to make the holy word available to its readers, but the manner of its transmittal renders it useless other than as totem. It disappears into the paradoxical beauty of the work as completely as Hantai's religious and philosophical texts, written in what appears to be a variety of coloured inks - red, blue, green, but never pink.

Racist lunatic arrested

Good news from Brussels (and how often do you hear that?), as one of the most laughably despicable figures in Italian politics gets picked up by police after attempting to take part in an illegal demonstration against the 'islamisation of Europe'. Mario Borghezio, the ranting turd to the right of the photograph, is a member of the Northern League and, to Italy's shame, a European MP. He became known some years ago when he began to disinfect the train seats used by black women so that Italians could sit on them without dirtying their nylons, an action that should have led to disgrace and political oblivion but, among leghisti, had the opposite effect. He's the kind of person you remember, and remember avoiding, from school: the playground bully who picks on the really really weak then runs to teacher for protection. He despises authority when he's preaching to the racist rabble who support him, yet invokes it the minute he's in trouble (you can enjoy the vision of him bending to knuckle-lick the pope on his rudimentary official site). He's all in favour of violent 'solutions' when addressing the mob, and was once arrested for having set fire to the shanty home of some Romanian immigrants during a torch-lit march, a fire from which the Romanians barely escaped with their lives (two months in jail, never served), but a snivelling crybaby if anyone slaps him. And as an Italian Euro MP, he's among the highest-paid politicians in the world. Poveraccio.

UPDATE: Diddles wasn't given a glass of water for five whole hours. Altogether now - Poveraccio.

Vade retro, empiricism

One of the few areas in which fundamentalist Islam seemed to offer a less obscurantist view of the world than fundamentalist Christianity was that of evolution. Alas, no longer. An article in today's Independent reveals that a bunch of Turkish nutters calling itself, without intentional irony, the Science Research Foundation (BAV) is spearheading creationist claptrap in the Middle East. Not content with that, the group recently mass-mailed its Atlas of Creation (never mind the evidence, feel the weight: 6 kg of lavishly illustrated tosh) to schools and scientists in Western Europe. They're also building creationist theme parks museums, along the lines of the one in the States. Who knows where all the money is coming from? Even more worrying is the fact that Turkey's education minister publicly supports 'intelligent design'. What price EU accession now?

It will be fun to see if the ID cranks in the States and, increasingly, in the faith-friendly Britain created by Middle East envoy and peacemaker to the stars, Tony Blair, will jump into bed with their new Islamic brothers-in-codswallop.

Questions of honour

In a country that sees fit to knight Cliff Rìchard, the decision to give a gong to Salman Rushdie, if only as a nod towards the idea that fiction has at least as much value as Summer Holiday and a brief affair (ahem) with a female tennis player, is a welcome one. Of course there are writers I’d prefer. It would have been good, for example, to see Penelope Fitzgerald damed (to coin a verb) before she died, or Sybille Bedford. Basil Bunting might have enjoyed a knighthood, though I doubt it. Ian Hamilton Finlay certainly wouldn’t, but it would have been fun to offer him one, just to see. Of living writers, James Hamilton-Paterson deserves far more recognition, although possibly not from the queen and Yo! Blair, who barely read, or, in the latter’s case, write. And what about J.H. Prynne, or Christine Brooke-Rose, or Stewart Home? (OK, my little joke.)

But it isn’t welcome to everyone. I’ve always assumed that fatwa is short for fatuous waffle, on the grounds that any statement produced by a celibate sclerotic in a long black frock is unlikely to have much sense to it. The problem is that fatuous waffle hurts, and can even kill, as some of Rushdie’s translators and collaborators could attest if there really were the life beyond.

Maybe it’s time we came up with some sort of death threat we can fling back. The targets, as holy books have it, are legion. Some Muslim, for example, who said that Rushdie deserved to die a thousand times after the publication of Satanic Verses, coincidentally my favourite Rushdie novel, and has since been knighted, a man whose name I shall not seek out for the benefit of this post because it would do him too much honour (honour on honour). Or Shirley Williams, one of the thousands of anxious appeasers to superstition. Or all those people, including Jack Straw, who say that Rushdie is unreadable, as if that were the issue.