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What Gets Banned
Honour-crazed fanatics in the Sudan and a hymn-banning Bishop in Britain
After the Cartoon Jihad, the Teddy Bear's Lashing. British commentators have been queueing up to register their shock at the fate Sudan's sharia fanatics are demanding for British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who faces forty lashes for allowing children to name a school mascot Mohammed.
Joan Smith has the most interesting column, in the Independent, titled Islam and the modern world don't mix.
"Ever since the outcry over The Satanic Verses nearly two decades ago, I have watched Muslim men (they almost always are men) use the claim that their honour has been insulted as an excuse for disgraceful and frequently criminal behaviour. Salman Rushdie "insults" the Prophet: burn his books. Danish cartoonists display a lack of respect for Islam: attack Danish embassies. A British Muslim girl wants to marry the "wrong" man: kill her for shaming the family. A Saudi rape victim complains that her attackers got off too lightly: increase her sentence (for being in a car with a man who wasn't her husband) to 200 lashes," she writes,
"(...)The stark fact is that the notion of "honour" and the violence linked to it cannot co-exist with the modern idea of universal human rights. It encourages men to create oppressive laws which do not recognise individual liberties, and to break the law in states where those liberties have been acknowledged."
"(...)It is not enough in these circumstances to claim that Islam is a religion of peace, and dismiss all the things non-Muslims don't like – honour killings, relentless assaults on free speech, and now an accusation of blasphemy related to a teddy bear – as aberrations. The mores of the seventh century have no relevance in modern life, especially in the arena of sex where decisions about who to sleep with are widely regarded as a personal matter.
"The damage that is being inflicted daily on the image of Islam doesn't come from people like me, who are constantly accused of Islamophobia, but practices such as forced marriage, honour killings and heated denunciations of "Western" values. I can't think of any secular country where a rape victim or a well-meaning British teacher would find themselves threatened with flogging."
Good stuff. As an illustration of how cultures differ in their values, you couldn't do better than compare the fanatics of the Sudan with a lefty Bishop in Manchester: Back in 2004, in one of the sleepier recesses of the Church of England, a minister tried to prohibit the singing of a popular hymn because he feared it might provoke nationalistic feelings.
The hymn, "I vow to thee my country", is among the most beautiful in the English Christian canon.
Christopher Howse reports, "The Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, Bishop of Hulme, said a couple of years ago that the hymn's popularity was a symptom of a "dangerous" increase in English nationalism which had parallels with the rise of Nazism. Its associations with the British Empire were also apparently questionable in a multi-faith, multi-cultural society.
"The bishop said the words, written by Sir Cecil Spring-Rice at the end of the First World War, were "totally heretical" because they suggested that people should pledge their allegiance to their country before God. "My country, right or wrong is not an appropriate sentiment for Christians to uphold," he said."
"He added he was raising the issue in the wider context of the "vilification" of foreigners in the media and had noticed it was being sung at "various national occasions".
"He said: "It's saying my country right or wrong. I don't think anybody could actually say they could adopt an approach whereby they said they would not ask any questions of their government and their policies and so on.
""The government under the Queen in this country is actually the representation of this country and it has all the... echoes of 1930s nationalism in Germany and some of the nastier aspects of right wing republicanism in the United States.""
And the Telegraph:
"The bishop said the emergence of nationalism had been evident during the Euro 2004 football tournament and recent military anniversaries such as D-Day.
""It is like American culture where there is this view that America is the land of the free when we know it is not. But there are those in America who want to maintain that it is and want to impose their understanding, their culture, their way of doing things on everybody else. That is dangerous.""
The good Bishop was recently appointed Britain's first Bishop for Urban Life and Faith. Oh, God.
