From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Fri 22 Nov 2002 - 00:38:43 GMT
Honest Intellectuals must Shed Spiritual Turbans
By Ibn Warraq
The Guardian | November 4, 2002
Aldous Huxley once defined an intellectual as someone who had
found something in life more important than sex: a witty but
inadequate definition, since it would make all impotent men and
frigid women intellectuals. A better definition would be a
freethinker, not in the narrow sense of someone who does not
accept the dogmas of traditional religion, but in the wider sense of
someone who has the will to find out, who exhibits rational doubt
about prevailing intellectual fashions, and who is unafraid to
apply critical thought to any subject. If the intellectual is really
committed to the notion of truth and free inquiry, then he or she
cannot stop the inquiring mind at the gates of any religion - let
alone Islam. And yet, that is precisely what has happened with
Islam, criticism of which in our present intellectual climate is
taboo.
The reason why many intellectuals have continued to treat Islam
as a taboo subject are many and various, including:
· Political correctness leading to Islamic correctness;
· The fear of playing into the hands of racists or reactionaries to
the detriment of the west's Muslim minorities;
· Commercial or economic motives;
· Feelings of post-colonial guilt (where the entire planet's
problems are attributed to the west's wicked ways and intentions);
· Plain physical fear; · and intellectual terrorism of writers such as
Edward Said.
Said not only taught an entire generation of Arabs the wonderful
art of self-pity (if only those wicked Zionists, imperialists and
colonialists would leave us alone, we would be great, we would
not have been humiliated, we would not be backward) but
intimidated feeble western academics, and even weaker,
invariably leftish, intellectuals into accepting that any criticism of
Islam was to be dismissed as orientalism, and hence invalid.
But the first duty of the intellectual is to tell the truth. Truth is not
much in fashion in this postmodern age when continental
charlatans have infected Anglo-American intellectuals with the
thought that objective knowledge is not only undesirable but
unobtainable. I believe that to abandon the idea of truth not only
leads to political fascism, but stops dead all intellectual inquiry.
To give up the notion of truth means forsaking the goal of
acquiring knowledge. But man, as Aristotle put it, by nature
strives to know. Truth, science, intellectual inquiry and rationality
are inextrica bly bound together. Relativism, and its illegitimate
offspring, multiculturalism, are not conducive to the critical
examination of Islam.
Said wrote a polemical book, Orientalism (1978), whose
pernicious influence is still felt in all departments of Islamic
studies, where any critical discussion of Islam is ruled out a priori
. For Said, orientalists are involved in an evil conspiracy to
denigrate Islam, to maintain its people in a state of permanent
subjugation and are a threat to Islam's future. These orientalists
are seeking knowledge of oriental peoples only in order to
dominate them; most are in the service of imperialism.
Said's thesis was swallowed whole by western intellectuals, since
it accords well with the deep anti-westernism of many of them.
This anti-westernism resurfaces regularly in Said's prose, as it did
in his comments in the Guardian after September 11. The studied
moral evasiveness, callous ness and plain nastiness of Said's
article, with its refusal to condemn outright the attacks on
America or show any sympathy for the victims or Americans,
leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth of anyone whose moral
sensibilities have not been blunted by political and Islamic
correctness. In the face of all evidence, Said still argues that it was
US foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere that brought
about these attacks.
The unfortunate result is that academics can no longer do their
work honestly. A scholar working on recently discovered Koranic
manuscripts showed some of his startling conclusions to a
distinguished colleague, a world expert on the Koran. The latter
did not ask, "What is the evidence, what are your arguments, is it
true?" The colleague simply warned him that his thesis was
unacceptable because it would upset Muslims.
Very recently, professor Josef van Ess, a scholar whose works are
essential to the study of Islamic theology, cut short his research,
fearing it would not meet the approval of Sunni Islam. Gunter
Luling was hounded out of the profession by German universities
because he proposed the radical thesis that at least a third of the
Koran was originally a pre-Islamic, Christian hymnody, and thus
had nothing to do with Mohammed. One German Arabist says
academics are now wearing "a turban spiritually in their mind",
practicing "Islamic scholarship" rather than scholarship on Islam.
Where biblical criticism has made important advances since the
16th century, when Spinoza demonstrated that the Pentateuch
could not have been written by Moses,, the Koran is virtually
unknown as a human document susceptible to analysis by the
instruments and techniques of biblical criticism.
Western scholars need to defend unflinchingly our right to
examine Islam, to explain its rise and fall by the normal
mechanisms of human history, according to the objective
standards of historical methodology.
Democracy depends on freedom of thought and free discussion.
The notion of infallibility is profoundly undemocratic and
unscientific. It is perverse for the western media to lament the
lack of an Islamic reformation and wilfully ignore books such as
Anwar Shaikh's Islam - The Arab Imperialism, or my Why I am
Not a Muslim. How do they think reformation will come about if
not with criticism?
The proposed new legislation by the Labour government to
protect Muslims, while well-intentioned, is woefully misguided. It
will mean publishers will be even more reluctant to take on works
critical of Islam. If we stifle rational discussion of Islam, what
will emerge will be the very thing that political correctness and
the government seek to avoid: virulent, racist populism. If there
are further terrorist acts then irrational xenophobia will be the
only means of expression available. We also cannot allow
Muslims subjectively to decide what constitutes "incitement to
religious hatred", since any legitimate criticism of Islam will then
be shouted down as religious hatred.
Only in a democracy where freedom of inquiry is protected will
science progress. Hastily conceived laws risk smothering the
golden thread of rationalism running through western civilisation.
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