Roach Motel

The latest issue of Democratiya includes Ophelia Benson’s review of Ibn Warraq’s Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out:

In his introductory chapter, Ibn Warraq reproduces a pronouncement on apostasy in Islam from the ultra-conservative Tehran daily Kayhan International in 1986. It includes this observation.

The anti-apostasy punishments of Islam are proper laws to rescue mankind from falling into the cesspool of treason, betrayal, and disloyalty and to remind the human being of his ideological commitments. A committed man should not violate his promise and vow, especially his promise to God. (p. 32.)

A more wrong-headed idea is difficult to imagine. To define changing one’s mind about any particular set of ideas and truth claims as treason, betrayal, and disloyalty is to forbid thinking itself. Making the human being’s ideological commitments a permanent, irrevocable matter of loyalty is to impose ossification, dogmatism, conformity, and plain mindless stubbornness on an entire society, or, worse, an entire global ‘community of believers’.

Indeed. The issue of Islamic apostasy and its punishment will, to sane people, most likely have an absurd, looking glass quality, and it may be difficult to grasp the seriousness, even excitement, with which mental freedom, and its punishment, is discussed. Here’s a clip from Kuwait’s Al-Risala TV, filmed November 5, 2007, in which Muslim scholars and audience members share their thoughts on piety and murder. One choice exchange hinges on the charming moral logic that a person is, of course, free to leave Islam - on the understanding that indignant believers are free to kill that person for doing so.

Audience member: Sir, if you become an apostate, your punishment is death. There is a great problem that most of us, 70% of us, are Muslims because they were born to Muslim fathers and mothers. Before a person converts to Islam, he has the liberty to choose, but remember that if you want to convert from Islam, you will be punished by death. So you have the liberty to choose, but on the condition...

Al-Sweidan: That’s not liberty.

Audience member: It has conditions...

Al-Sweidan: What you are saying is: You have the right to become an apostate, but I will kill you.

Audience member: That’s right. I won’t tell him not to.

Al-Sweidan: What can be worse than being killed?

Audience member: That’s why he will not become an apostate.

It may, again, be difficult to conceive of a belief system in which the individual is reduced so severely to a mere sub-unit of the collective and in which affiliation is, according to many, a decidedly one-way street. This belief in punishing doubt and intellectual freedom is an intimately vile contrivance and a profound corruption of moral autonomy. It’s also a tool for generating fear and a license for sadism disguised as piety. Insofar as such ideas are normative within Islamic theology and its institutions, widespread shame is warranted, along with disrepute, resistance and no small amount of disgust. For some strange reason, the term “Roach Motel” springs readily to mind.

Update: Meanwhile, closer to home...

Ibn Warraq can be heard debating with Tariq Ramadan and others here. Warraq’s latest book, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, is reviewed here by Rebecca Bynum. My discussion with Ophelia Benson can be found here. 

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Comments

[KB Player]

1697 was the year when they last executed someone for blasphemy in Britain. A few months ago I caught a debate between a couple of Muslims about whether death for apostasy was right on the BBC and had this eerie sense of having tuned into a station broadcasting several hundred years ago.

[Doom]

Urhm, I've heard this before. I believe every communist system and most socialist systems voted in are quite often a one way deal, with death, torture, and exile for the lucky of those who disagree or changed their minds (at a minimum, re-education, though that often was (is) just a slower, more cruel form of, death). So, I have heard of this type of thing before. It is well documented and understood, even in the West. Although, I think the muslims will beat out the secularist version, over time, imho.

[David]

KB,

“…and had this eerie sense of having tuned into a station broadcasting several hundred years ago.”

Well, quite. And I marvel at how expressions of revulsion are remarkably muted among many Western presenters and commentators, at least on the European programmes I’ve seen. It would, I think, be refreshing – and hugely important – to see more expressions of contempt and utter disgust. A little shame and humiliation may be of great use in prompting reform.

[Mr. Shrunk]

The notion that an individual maintains freedom and liberty even when he is presented with having to decide among options that are almost identically undesirable isnt that rare. Any society, by its nature, will restrict the behavior of members through coercion of some kind, and if that society places liberty and freedom as something sacred and always good, that society will maintain that freedom is never lost regardless of what the society does to its members. Modern democratic societies tend to view their members as wholly free--and I wouldnt be surprised to hear the same kind of rhetoric from a politician or a democratic apologist regarding the violation of a law within their own society: for example, people have freedom of speech in the U.S. and can say what they please, but if what the people say is offensive, lude, or libelious, then there is possibility of censor or punishment.

It is also a very popular justification Christians have regarding the behavior of Jehovah/Jesus toward non-believers--people have free-will, and they can choose to not follow or believe in Jehovah or Jesus and the consequence is hell; nonChristians are choosing to go to hell or be punished because they have the choice whether to choose Jesus. It seems to be the argument of all despotism--people have the liberty to not serve, but under the condition that if you do not serve you will suffer. And this blessed morsel of liberty apparently secures the innocence of the despot.

[clazy]

This sort of thing always brings Milton's Areopagitica to my mind, in which he asks:"If every action, which is good or evil in man at ripe years, were to be under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what were virtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent?" Laws forbidding apostasy completely ignore that dynamic, because they are not interested in individuals but in the control of masses.

Milton had a wonderful understanding of original sin and the Fall as a condition under which people are confronted with choices. "[P]erhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.... [W]hat wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil?"

Where are the Miltons of Islam? KB says the last execution of a blasphemer in the UK took place in 1697--53 years after Areopagitica was published and 3 centuries ago. Can Islam yield to an individualism that asserts, with Milton: "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary."

There's a striking passage in Areopagitica that suggests the logic by which Islam becomes Talibanized: "If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreation and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth but what by their allowance shall be thought honest; for such Plato was provided of." Etc.

It's great stuff. I love Paradise Lost.

[clazy]

p.s. http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/areopagitica.html

[David]

I’m guessing the Guardian’s Faisal Bodi, a news editor for Islam Channel TV, doesn’t have much time for Milton, or other heathen literature. At the time of the Abdul Rahman case, with “esteemed” Afghan clerics calling for the man’s public dismemberment, Bodi was happy to inform Guardian readers that the hostility to religious and intellectual freedom is “an understandable response from people who cherish the religious basis of their societies to protect them… from the damage that an inferior worldview can wreak.”

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/faisal_bodi/2006/03/faisal_bodi_post.html

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=1295

http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2007/02/alguardian_the_.html

In light of Mr Bodi’s unabashed defence of Islam Taliban-style, perhaps it’s time to correct his misapprehension regarding which worldview is inferior. And I don’t think we need to spare his feelings, or those of others like him.