Apathy Sketchpad

I’m watching “Science And Islam” on BBC Four. I’ve already rejected the premise out of hand, but I’m watching it anyway. I’ll buy that Muslims have made and will continue to make important discoveries, but it’ll take a lot to convince me that Islam itself has anything to do with it. (This is not helped by the fact that after about five minutes the show referenced a book called “The Hindu Art Of Reckoning” as a major breakthrough in mathematics.) Favourite quote so far: “I think one must bear in mind that this [the 8th century AD] is an era in which people actually believed in God.” — Dr Amira Bennison, Cambridge University. How good is that?

Mostly it is about the Islamic world and the culture and people thereof rather than Islam itself (the Islamic people seem uniquely incapable of distinguishing these concepts), but there are a couple of encouraging comments from Mohammed in holy texts that can’t have hurt (although the program doesn’t address other parts of scripture that may have the opposite effect) and an interesting idea about the Q’uran helping out. The idea is that Arabic was rolled out as a universal language to help people understand the book in its original form, and Arabic was modified to make it clearer so that people didn’t misinterpret it. That doubtless helped science, albeit by accident, by enabling easy, unambiguous communication. (It’s interesting that Christianity didn’t feel the need to make their message unambiguous — indeed, until recently they deliberately obfuscated it by translating it into dead languages. I think they only stopped because it was too much like hard work.)

Right now the presenter, Jim Al-Khalili, is talking to a so-called “wise woman” who has a wide variety of herbal and similar remedies. I assume he’s just being polite, but It appears not to have occured to him that they might not work. To my eyes, that proves nothing at all to do with science. That could just as easily be superstition. It becomes science when you test it. It’s a blurry line when you’re talking about the early proto-science of the eighth century, but the fact that she’s still selling this stuff in the twenty-first doesn’t seem to have put him off his “Science And Islam Walking Hand In Hand” thesis. And now he is reading from a book which says epilepsy is caused by evil spirits. “Hardly scientific,” he says, “but Islam’s most tangible contribution to medicine is less in its specific remedies and more in its overarching philosophy. It is, after all, a religion whose central idea is that we should feel compassion for our fellow humans”. No, it’s just a religion. Like all religions, it contains loads of different ideas, many of which are perfectly horrid, and adherants can choose to focus on any of them that they fancy.

I know Islam has had some bad press lately, but you won’t fix that by trying to give it the credit for any and all achievements made by its followers or their subjects. Marcus du Sautoy managed to cover much of the same ground on the same channel without as far as I recall mentioning Islam. (I imagine he probably mentioned it in passing.) That should be a clue as to how important it was. Another interesting quote from Dr Bennison just now: “it was not the case [in ninth century debates] that people were expected to adhere to a particular line or adopt a particular religion. They were allowed to express their own sentiments and their own views very freely. The point was that they should do so in elegant Arabic and in good logical reasoning”. Compare and contrast that to the reaction to the cartoons of Mohammed, an arguably quite important side of Islam that the program utterly fails to mention. Where did “butcher those who insult Islam” come from? Why should I credit Islam with the former and not blame it for the latter?

This sort of thing bothers me because it kind of spoils an otherwise interesting documentary, and because if we confuse a religion with its followers then any meaningful debate is impossible. You can’t argue against an idea if that argument is seen as an attack on the people who hold that idea (or other similar ones, since the term “Islam” can cover a multitude of sins). I think that if you call a show “Science And Islam” then it should be about the relationship between science and Islam, not about the growth of science in the Islamic world (that show should clearly be called “Science of Arabia”), and as part of that I expect you to mention that the influence of Islam on science has at times been to hinder it. Granted I’ve only seen one episode, but even if that is redressed in future episodes, I shouldn’t have to watch a whole series to get balance.

The program now ends with the observation that “the first great achievment of the medieval Islamic scientists was to prove that science isn’t Islamic… Science… transcends political borders and religious affiliations”. Which is true only in the rather weak sense that science remains true no matter which parts of it you elect to ignore: science is not Islamic, and crucially, Islam is not scientific.

It has recently come to my attention that a large block of Muslim countries are having rather too much success in forcing changes to UN resolutions to try to outlaw ‘defamation of religion’, where ‘religion’ means ‘Islam’ and ‘defamation’ means ‘any kind of criticism at all’. The whole thing just serves to demonstrate a massive failure to see the point of free speech: the speech that most needs protecting is exactly that speech that will offend the majority of people. Anything else is protected more-or-less automatically, simply because nobody will want to stop it. Moreover, one of the key purposes of a body like the UN is to limit the powers of its member states: like the EU and the Federal Government of the USA, its rules and safeguards prevent a government from abusing its power and taking basic rights such as freedom of speech away from its citizens. If you allow them to abridge freedom of speech in cases of ‘defamation of religion’ then you’re handing them a free pass to censor more-or-less anyone they like, especially when the national religion is as closely tied with the government as it is in an Islamic state. It is precisely those states whose people most need an external, international organisation to protect their rights: there are countries where apostasy is a criminal offence. That is, you can be punished by the law for choosing not to be a Muslim. It’s exactly that kind of thing that freedom of speech as a protected right is supposed to prevent.

Mostly, though, it should  be clear from the title that this is a dumb idea. This is not something that human rights law should be addressing. ‘Defamation of religion’ protects religion, not humans. It should be obvious that you can’t enact a law to protect two contradictory ideas, but that’s exactly what this does. I can’t very well say that Jesus either was or was not the son of God without insulting Islam or Christianity, and since it’s my understanding that both Jesus and God are entirely made up, I’m liable to insult both if I voice my true opinions. Assuming, that is, that they consider calling their religion intrinsically false to be insulting it. Frankly I’m not sure how words slike ‘insult’ and ‘defamation’ apply to abstract concepts like ideas.

Their justification is the standard Victim Card:

Muslim countries say they are only trying to cut down of what they see as extensive bias against Islam in the West…

Let’s see how long that lasts before they start trying to censor legitimate and unimportant critics of Islam, shall we? Go:

Muslim countries say they are only trying to cut down of what they see as extensive bias against Islam in the West. In the lead-up to Monday’s vote, many referred, for example, to the 2005 publication of Danish cartoons that satirized Muhammad, and which touched off riots through the Muslim world.

Zero seconds. Nice work there.

Of course, that article also points out one interesting fact: the legal definition of defamation requires that the statement be false. So I can say ‘it’s little wonder that there’s a bias against a bloodthirsty and backwards religion which subjugates women and tries to stifle all criticism of itself’ and there’s nothing the UN can do about it.

I just read on Chicken Girl’s blog that, thanks to the Arbitration Act 1996, if both parties agree to it in advance then the judgements of a Sharia court can be legally binding in Britain. This only applies to civil cases. According to The Times,

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

I’m not certain when domestic violence became a civil offence. It seems to me that beating someone up is a criminal act whether or not they were dumb enough to marry you first. I understand that in these situations what tends to happen is that the Sharia court gives a non-binding ruling and the woman drops her criminal case. This is, of course, fine, as long as both parties are happy with the outcome. That’s the same as the idea behind arbitration: no point invoking big, clumsy, expensive laws when the parties can agree on something cheaper and simpler. The problem… well, it’s pretty clear but let’s leave it for now.

It also strikes me that divorce, financial disputes and cases involving domestic violence are the worst possible cases to apply Sharia law to (with the exception of apostasy, although it’s hard to see a non-Muslim agreeing to a Sharia hearing and I’m pretty sure arbitrators aren’t allowed to sanction executions) because as bad as the brutal punishments Sharia metes out are, they are at least even-handed, whereas Sharia is so preposterously misogynistic that you know in advance how the court will rule in all three of those cases…

The judges on the panel gave the sons [in a divorce case] twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.

In the six cases of domestic violence, Siddiqi said the judges ordered the husbands to take anger management classes and mentoring from community elders. There was no further punishment.

How exactly this is sqaured with the Arbitration Act, I’m not sure, because the Act says

The provisions of this Part are founded on the following principles, and shall be construed accordingly-

(a) the object of arbitration is to obtain the fair resolution of disputes by an impartial tribunal without unnecessary delay or expense; …

Hard to see by what reasonable measure a system where a woman is considered to be worth half a man can possibly be considered ‘impartial’ in a case of domestic violence or a divorce settlement. That sounds to me like a very clear bias. I do wonder if that would make the courts’ rulings invalid. My internationally renowned legal expertese, alas, does not exist, but apparently I shouldn’t let that stop me making pronouncements based on what it tells me so I have decided that they are. That said, the act also says

An arbitrator is not liable for anything done or omitted in the discharge or purported discharge of his functions as arbitrator unless the act or omission is shown to have been in bad faith.

Bad faith, you say..?

The Sun has shown impressive restraint; the Mail reports it and manages (I think) to get a factual error into the first paragraph; the Mirror says

The Muslim tribunals are exploiting a loophole in the Arbitration Act 1996 which allows sharia courts to be classified as arbitration courts - with their rulings binding in law.

which I think is unfair: this isn’t a loophole; this is the whole idea. If you’re going to grant people the power to make binding judgements then you have to check them. After all, there’s no reason they should call it Sharia. They could hand out all the same rulings in a secular court. Would that be a loophole?

This is the problem: the whole idea of arbitration hangs on the ability of both parties to give voluntary consent to abide by its findings. The hoops a scientist has to jump through before an ethics committee will accept such consent are so small and high up that there are loads of scientific papers just about collecting it, so I doubt very much that we can ever be properly sure that a woman has given uncoerced consent to be judged by such ‘law’. I’m forced to agree with shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve, who said

If it is true that these tribunals are passing binding decisions in the areas of family and criminal law, I would like to know which courts are enforcing them because I would consider such action unlawful. British law is absolute and must remain so.

That said, this appears to have been reported in only one newspaper whose average reader understands the difference between ‘imply’ and ‘infer’, so I’m not really sure how much credence to give it. (Certainly the fact that an MP has commented on it shouldn’t be taken as evidence even that the story is partially true.) The Independent and the Guardian both, as far as I can see, entirely ignored this story.

Apart from anything else, as far as I can see the problem here isn’t really all that different from the one we had before they got wise to the Arbitration Act: if people agree to be oppressed, what are you going to do? The problem is in the subcultures that allow — indeed encourage — women to be treated as property and men to kill them if they won’t. I don’t mean to imply that this is the majority (or even a large minority) of muslims, but it happens. I don’t think there is a solution, but a good start would be to expose all muslims to other faiths by banning any and all faith-based school selection or home-schooling, and providing anyone who thinks they are at risk of such oppression to  go to the police and have their concerns treated very seriously and discretely investigated. I guess people have to remain free to join cults or give up freedoms for dumb reasons. But if we help them recruit or hold onto members then we’re complicit, and the present system just doesn’t give anyone adequate chance to escape.

Most of the comments on the Times piece are tripe from people who haven’t understood the situation, but I did like this one, with its utter failure to use almost any word correctly:

Adolf Hitler never succeeded in his attempts tosubmit UK to german nazi law . Muslims have managed to do what Hitler failed to obtain : Having a foreign fascist law , sharia , ruling british citizens .
I’m french , so I don’t have to tell British citizens what they should do , but …

docdory, Rouen, France

Is it wrong that my first thought was “surrender?”?

We all know about Islam in Turkey. But turkey in Islam seems also to be a big thing, at least if the halal-only Subway stores are anything to go by.

I can understand the idea behind halal chicken and so forth. It’s the fact they sell a halal ‘ham’ option that puzzles me. Pigs are considered “unclean” in Islam, so the ham comes from a turkey. That’s daft enough to begin with, but the turkey breast sub is still there. So you have a choice of two distinct turkey-based subs. In fact, it’s better than that, because Subway also offer bacon, which again is made from turkeys in the Halal stores. This means that the turkey breast and ham sub is now turkey and turkey, and the Subway Melt becomes turkey, turkey and turkey, so there are four subs with different combinations of turkey on them, and two options — double meat and ‘add bacon’ — to increase your turkey intake yet further.

It seems to me that a far more sensible approach would have been to leave regular ham and bacon from pigs on the menu for non-Muslims who might want to eat it, and trust the Islamic community not to break their own rules and then complain about being given the opportunity to do so.

Or just design an entire halal menu that isn’t bloody stupid.

I’ve just read two articles on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free website. One is by AC Grayling, who likes secularism, and the other is a response by Soumaya Ghannoushi, who doesn’t, or more accurately, doesn’t like what she terms “militant secularists”:

This brand of puritanical secularism is little more than inverted religion. It substitutes reason for god, science for theology, relentless progress for original sin and human fall. Its followers see secularism not as mere separation of religion and politics, or as state neutrality vis a vis matters of faith and belief. To them, it is a set of dogmas to be embraced willingly or imposed coercively by the force of the state.

I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of the “militant secularism” I know, but I shall ignore that. I think the major problem stems from a disagreement about what the new headscarf reforms in Turkey mean: Grayling says that “Turkish Islamists are encouraging more women to hide that automatic trigger of unbridled male lust, the tresses on the female head”, whereas Ghannoushi says “those genuinely committed to civil liberties and individual freedoms would applaud the relaxing of an oppressive law that denies women their basic right to decide their dress”. Personally, I’m not going to comment on who is right — pretty clearly the ideal is that women should be allowed to wear whatever they like, but there’s every chance that without the headscarf ban 95% of wearers would be wearing them against their will, and in that situation I think a ban can be justified easily.

Grayling’s thesis was really much more wide-reaching than that:

If the Brian-sandalistas cannot succeed by direct assault, they will do it by constant nibbling and encroachments: prayers in American publicly-funded schools, headscarves in Turkish publicly-funded universities, a little bit of anti-evolutionary biology there, a little alcohol ban there – and if that doesn’t work, they try more robust means. So it goes: creep creep, whisper, soothe, murmur a prayer with the kids in assembly, ecumenicalise, interfaith-schmooze, infiltrate, subvert, complain, campaign, scream, threaten, explode.

And that’s the point. It’s all well and good Ghannoushi saying

This crude interventionism practised in the name of secularism in Turkey and France, and religion in Iran and Saudi Arabia can only be described as despotic. Individuals’ minds and bodies are not part of the state’s jurisdiction. The state is only the manager of citizens’ public affairs, not a judge of their consciences, appearances, habits, and preferences.

but in a society like Turkey, with a 99% Islamic population, if you have completely open democracy then there’s a very real possibility that people are going to vote for an alcohol ban, the death penalty for apostasy, a ban on dogs as pets, legalisation of forced marriage, and yes, a mandate to women about what they can wear on their heads, because what unites the people is their irrational conviction that a load of nonsense in a rather silly book, as well as a lot of other nonsense that even Mohammed never thought of, handed down by word of mouth, is How You Absolutely Should Live. And before you know what’s happening, you’re living under Sharia law in an Islamic state in all but name. And then they’ll vote to change the name. Because that’s what Islam is:

“Islam is not like Christianity. It doesn’t just aim to be practised in the realm of belief but also to regulate and rule the state,” — Omer Faruk Eminagaoglu, “chairman of the association of judges and prosecutors (Yarsav) and deputy to Turkey’s chief prosecutor”

The aim of a secular democracy then, cannot be to do what the people want, but to do what the general underlying values of the people dictate — just as in this country I don’t want the Chancellor of the Exchequer to do what the people think he should do; I want him to do what the people would think he should do if we were smarter and in possession of all the information and a good working knowledge of economics. Otherwise there’s no point in having anyone remotely qualified doing the job. You end up with lowest-common-denominator politics and the country’s de facto run by the editor of the Sun. (Frankly “tabloidism” can be treated as a religion for all practical purposes.)

The problem is, though, that if you have a large majority of one religion, it stands to reason that any candidate for government office would do well to make a big deal of subscribing to that faith. If they say things like “my religion guides my values and my values guide my politics” then he’ll do well in an election because he’s playing to something that’s seen as very important by the majority of the electorate — lowest-common-denominator again — but he’s just promised to act totally unsecularly. (That’s a word. Don’t say it isn’t.) And you end up living in a theocracy, no matter how secular the values enshrined in your law may be. You only have to look to America to see how strong this effect is. That Ghannoushi refers to this as “the neutral soft secularism of the United States” baffles me.

But what can you do? You can’t simply not tell the electorate what religion the candidates are; that would never even nearly work, and in any case it wouldn’t stop a candidate championing the teachings of their religion explicitly. You can’t demand that only atheists stand for office (or only atheists vote); again it’s unenforceable (unless perhaps you make the ballot out of ham) and it’s not exactly liberal. You can’t expect religious people, either government or voters, to set their faiths aside when making decisions, because it’s too big a part of who they are.

The problem isn’t secularism; the problem is that the religion exists in the first place. You can’t justly govern lunatics without recourse to the sane, and in a population 99% Islamic, you really have no baseline level of sanity to refer back to. Don’t get me wrong, in a pluralistic, multi-cultural society like Britain religion is mostly harmless and I think any attempt to stamp it out would fail and end up doing far more harm than good. The issue, though, is that if one of the many religions present in a society is somehow ‘fitter’ than the others, it will prosper. It’s easy to imagine a large majority of Muslims or Evangelical Christians establishing itself in such a society, feeding off the good-will towards faith that the other religions have fostered.

I believe that the only solution to this problem is to make sure that children are not indoctrinated with dogma. By all means they can be taught the various customs and traditions of their parents’ religion. But threats of eternal damnation or literal Earthly punishment, for breaking stupid and arbitrary rules are not okay. Of course we can’t legislate how parents raise children. (I have no particular ethical problem with that — it just wouldn’t work.) But we can grant them all the fundamental human right to an objective, neutral and secular education. With that in place, there’s not much parents can do to stop their children becoming tolerant and balanced members of society.

Religious parents will object to this, of course. Some non-religious ones will as well. They will say that they have a fundamental human right to raise their child any way they like. I say no. I say they don’t have the right to fuck up a child’s mind any more than they have the right to fuck up the child’s body. You can very easily totally ruin someone’s life before it’s even begun if you teach them to live in an imaginary version of the real world. They grow up and experience agonising dilemmas caused by a conflict between what they want and care about and some made-up rule implanted by their parents when they were small. I’ve seen it happen. But I think that children’s rights must always trump parents’ rights because they are in every way more vulnerable (although since parents can vote and children can’t this isn’t perhaps a view shared by everyone in government). So give them a decent secular education and I think they will, in the vast majority of cases, grow up to be balanced, liberal, tolerant people — even if they do still pay mostly-harmless lip-service to their faith. They’ll be a people who can be justly governed by democracy without religion taking over. Is that “crude interventionism”? Maybe. But I think it’s a good goal and a practical and fair means by which to achieve it.

See, Odone? I’ll see your choice of “faith schools or terrorism”, and I’ll raise you a choice of “secular education or Sharia law”. They’re both false dilemmas, of course, but I’d rather live in a secular democracy that gets bombed periodically than the peace that comes with the brutality of Sharia.

Almost exactly a month ago (yeah, yeah), the Centre for Policy Studies published “In Bad Faith”, rallying against… well, let’s let the author, Christina Odone, explain…

The witch hunt is on. A Government obsessed with phoney egalitarianism and control freakery is aligning itself with the strident secularist lobby to threaten the future of faith schools in Britain.

I shall defer responding to this to the rather brilliantly ranty article published by Andrew Copson in the Guardian:

Few apart from than Odone can have noticed this dangerous development. Under Labour governments since 1997 more new state-funded faith schools have opened than under any other government, and there is no sign that this increase is being stemmed or about to be. Certainly no evidence for such a change of direction is presented in today’s pamphlet, a mish-mash of anecdote, selective factoids and non-sequiturs (”The schools are not divisive. Not one of the 72 British citizens convicted under the Terrorism Act of 2000 attended a faith school.”).

So what’s the problem?

[Faith schools] are out with Gordon Brown.

The Prime Minister may acknowledge that his faith is important to him. But so is his standing with the Labour party – all the more so given his record-low popularity with the voters. Gordon Brown knows that for the ‘Old Labour’ rump of the party, equally committed to secularism and comprehensive education, faith schools are anathema. Tony Blair and ‘New Labour’ were ready to ignore this constituency, but Gordon Brown cannot afford to.

It occurs to me that what people voted for in the last election was not faith schools, not Blair, nor Brown, but it was Labour. If Labour are largely against faith schools then surely Odone is accusing Brown of nothing more than keeping the promise Blair reneged on?

Here is her example of a faith school that’s good:

In contrast to the graffiti that covers the neighbouring buildings, and the litter on the streets and pavements, the Sir John Cass complex is impressively tidy and clean. Youngsters (the school is co-ed) in navy blue uniforms walk briskly but quietly in the corridors, greeting teachers with ‘Hello Sir’ or ‘Hello Miss’. When they spot the head, Haydn Evans, they fall silent to attention. It is easy to understand their awe: when one boy arrives with his tie askew, Evans, eyebrow raised, picks him up on it: ‘Where’s your uniform?’

He sounds like a dick who rules by fear to me. I mean, I’d hate to generalise just from that, but it’s hardly convincing me that faith schools are worth the rampant discrimination and segregation required to sustain them. In any case, this is a Church of England school with 60% Muslim students (just like most faith schools, I’m unwilling to bet), and yet they persist in the pointless and rather silly charade of having a little prayer that most of the students don’t believe in. If this school, with students from a broad mix of (parents’) faiths, is the best example in favour of faith schools you can find, surely that’s an argument against them? At least it’s an argument against the aribtrary suspension of discrimination laws for their special case?

After this she bangs on for a while about the good results faith schools get in league tables. Now I don’t know a lot about schools, but I do know a bit about science. I know that you can’t just say they’re good because “they account for a third of all primary schools but make up almost two-thirds of the top 209 primaries”. That could mean anything. It could mean that selection works. It could mean they’re largely in areas where people get good results. You have to compare them with a matched control group, not just every other school. That’s a meaningless comparison.

In any case, to be frank I’d not be at all surprised if faith schools gave good exam results. I just think that those good exam results will be on the CVs of fucked up children. That, to me, isn’t progress. I for one would rather my children, should I ever have any, grew up to be well-balanced people with poor grades than unlikeable conservative nerds. Obviously I’m exaggerating, but it’s the children of ultra-religious people who need secular education most, and saying “if you don’t like it, pick another school” is like saying “let’s legalise murder, and if you don’t like it, don’t kill anyone”: it very much misses the point. Faith schools are a Catch-22: the people who want them are the people it is most important shouldn’t get them.

She also makes an appeal to populatity, saying

Among Christian parents, faith schools are so popular that they are allegedly pushing their children into late baptisms to secure places at these schools. Meanwhile, parents who were turned away from over-subscribed faith schools refuse to accept the alternative: about 70,000 appeals are launched each year.

But this is also misleading: the public in general are against faith schools. Parents want their kids to go to good schools. They don’t care what religion that school is.

In chapter two, Odone makes a poor attempt to address the idea that selection may be responsible for the better results:

Critics maintain that faith schools use the admissions procedure to usher in a better-off intake. As evidence, they point to the schools’ under-representation of children on Free School Meals (FSM)…

But the National Audit Office warns that FSM do not necessarily serve as the best proxy for poor income. Its reservations were corroborated by research carried out last year for the Centre for the Economics of Education.

Fair enough perhaps, but let’s not forget you’re happy to use league tables against a hopelessly unmatched control as a proxy for efficacy. Besides, she’s in favour of selection:

To the Government, as Ed Balls’s attack revealed, a request for a marriage certificate as part of an application form is an ignominious attempt to flush out single mothers. To the Orthodox Jewish school, it is the only way to verify that both parents are born Jews.

Yes, but here in Britain we don’t stand for that kind of shit. Born Jews? That’s not “maintaining the religious ethos of the school”, that’s racism. I’d think Jews, of all people, would know better than that. She lists other, similar examples, which yes, do ensure that the school’s religious makeup is controlled, but plainly also act as proxies for performance selection.

Chapter four (chapter three saying nothing of any consequence) again opens with what Odone wrongly considers a lovely story about what she hopefully-wrongly perceives to be one of the better faith schools. Since the schools featured are her choice from the minority of ones that responded, from the minority of ones she contacted, I dismissed it out of hand. After that she starts explaining the idea that Muslim students or their parents might be offended by many aspects of what she quite wrongly describes as our “secular” state school system. These include “gym where their modesty is affronted” — believe me, at secondary school I would have liked little more than a decent affront to modesty in gym class and it really doesn’t happen — and “the school trip to a farm where they might come into contact with a pig” — which did happen. It was a Gloucester Old Spot. It wasn’t scary or offensive in the least. Of course, I’m not a Muslim, but screw them; if they want to complain about the prospect of their child maybe meeting a pig then they should have a better reason than “oh, we just don’t like pigs”. But Odone says that “feeling misunderstood or rejected by their peers at school, and frustrated in their ambitions beyond it, these youngsters are likely to be receptive to radical messages.” People will blow up trains because they met a pig? Are you serious?

Next is her observation, if you can call it that, that “not one of the 77 convicted on terrorism charges since the Terrorism Act 2000 attended a Muslim school”. What the Guardian article didn’t tell me was the comedy gem hiding after the semicolon: “one, Ader Ahmed, was home-schooled.” So basically he went to a really small faith school? I’m against home-schooling too. That plays right into my existing prejudice. (I realise the pamphlet isn’t aimed just at me, but then, I tend to think that people who share one opinion with me probably share other related ones too.)

Next, she starts implying that the alternative to proper Muslim schooling is little girls being packaged off to Pakistan to marry close relatives:

“The Drugs sex and rock and roll scene is not an option for Muslim girls,” Humeira Khan points out, “or if it is, it sparks huge conflict. So suddenly marrying them early or sending them home [to Pakistan or Bangladesh] becomes a huge pressure.”

Trust me, it’s not an option for anyone at school. Did you never even watch The Inbetweeners? Unless you’ve been sitting up all night watching Skins, which frankly raises even more worrying questions, there’s no reason to be afraid of what happens in the average British school. I’d be far more concerned about the effects of a Muslim education on a young girl. If that results in some people sending their children to more illiberal countries, I think we have to accept that as a consequence of being ahead of the rest of the world. Lead by example. You know or “liberate” Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The fifth chapter (by which point I was skipping the “example” schools entirely) points out that far from “educational ghettos where Christian children learn about Creationism and Muslim children about jihad, while Jewish children are taught they alone are Chosen People” (an accusation I would never make — they’re not educational! Ho ho!), “faith schools in the state system must follow the National Curriculum, including Citizenship education.” Well that’s swell and all, but — and again I don’t know a lot about schools so this may be totally wrong — surely a school which actually is pluralistic, multicultural and inclusive is going to be more effective than a school which is monoreligious, monocultural and exclusive, with a lesson (eating up an hour a week of expensive teaching time) in place to teach students tolerance as if it’s something that can be examined? Odone points out that “all maintained schools are under an ‘obligation’ to promote community cohesion,” but that doesn’t mean they actually do it. The government could mandate that all bank clerks must fly to work on jetpacks, it wouldn’t make it so.

Chapter six, ‘Smears’, mentions creationism. Odone claims that creationism in Britain is basically a myth:

Creationism, then, is not a wild fire sweeping the country’s schools; it is not taught in science classes in place of, or as an alternative to, evolution. Instead, Creationism is taught, in a handful of schools, as part of their study of the Bible in RE. Those Christian students who subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible will believe that God made the world, and man, in seven days; but thanks to the National Curriculum they will also know that science has proved otherwise. In this way their Christianity has to accommodate their learning.

Channel 4 say otherwise. And so does the scary Jewish headmaster in their film.

After that there is a summary saying “as we have seen, the charges against faith schools can be
dismissed one by one” which as I think we have seen, she didn’t actually do with any kind of success.

And that’s why she’s awarded this month’s Crackpot title.

A few days ago, a reader sent me a link to this Channel Four report. It’s a five minute video, so here it is:

There are some scary quotes in there, but the stats are worse. From their own survey, 80% of 50 Muslim, Jewish and ‘accelerated Christian education’ schools taught Creationism as fact and ignore evolution. Of those, five were state-funded schools. That’s 74% of 19 Jewish schools, 100% of 21 Evangelical schools and 50% of 10 Islamic schools. None of these schools is breaking a law*, although of course Paul Kelley would have been had he been reckless enough to educate in a secular way. The law, as has been mentioned, is an ass.

Personally, I think the best argument for teaching evolution in schools is that it’s the only way I know that you can make biology into a passably interesting subject. I for one always found it crushingly dull — because it was mostly a list of information presented in a “here’s what happens; don’t ask why, just learn it” kind of a way. Throw in evolution and you can explain why these things happen. You can talk about DNA and all the weird ways genes try to get copied. You can tie biology in to all kinds of other subjects much more effectively. I’m sure you can teach vast tracts of biology without mentioning genes or evolution, but I defy you to make it interesting.

That aside, the best reason I know of not to teach Creationism is simply that it’s patently false. Of course, Creationists won’t accept that, so a better argument is that there is no evidence to support it (because it’s so false). The only argument in favour is the whole stupid “parents’ rights” thing. And I do accept that parents have a right to educate their children in whatever way they want — but I think they should be made to look up the word “educate” before they start paying someone to preach at them, because filling impressionable young minds with damaging lies to promote an ideology is nothing more or less than exploitation — and it’s not even for personal gain: we’re talking about exploitation for the sake of an abstract concept. And I think it’s utterly abhorrent that the government would fund this.

I blame the parents for this. They should be outraged if their kids are being taught such bullshit, and they should get something done. The government are also in the wrong, of course, but you can hardly expect the government to act if the people don’t care. (You know, because the government only ever does what the people want.) People listen to parents. God knows why.

I’m not against the ides of schools being different and parents having choice. I’m not against the idea that some of those differences might be based on a religion — a school aimed at Muslims that makes sure the textbooks don’t have illustrations in articles about Mohammed, or a school aimed at Jews that only serves kosher food, that’s fine. And hopefully the genuine followers of those religions would be able to get places in those schools, because since all schools would be required to teach the same curriculum non-religious parents presumably would just pick the nearest school, or the one the kid’s friends were going to. The moment you let them teach different things then the idea of “choice” becomes an illusion: when you’re presented with one good school and one bad school, you don’t have a choice. Everyone with a brain will try to get into the good school and then you’re back to pot luck (or selection, if it’s a faith school). It’s just the same as the ridiculous claim made by the Department of Health the other day, that “operation success rates help patients choose treatment”. Their theory is that by publishing statistics on survival rates at different hospitals, they give patients a choice. No, you don’t. You just make life difficult for everyone, and worry people who can’t get into the best one. The stats should be public, certainly, but not for that reason. I think that all schools and hospitals should be good enough that you don’t care which one you use, and I think that if they’re not then you should fix it rather than shifting the onus onto patients and parents to find an acceptable one.

More to the point, if it’s legal to teach Creationism, that must mean there is no requirement for schools to teach facts that are true.

But of course, I don’t get a say. Because I don’t live in Normanton. If I did, I’d be allowed to vote against Ed Balls’ continuing reign of lunacy over the Department of Children, Schools, Families and Kittens, or whatever they’re calling Education now. (Honestly, the system of government we have here is utterly mad if you look into it for any length of time.)

---

* According to the video, anyway. My understanding is that the teaching of evolution is compulsory in publicly funded schools, but I don’t know where I can find an authoritative source of information.

If I were to design a religion with the intention of being violent and terroristic, I would definitely preach that people should wear clothes which completely obscured their identity. After that I can only hope I would be smart enough to declare police sniffer dogs “unclean”.

Are you people beginning to see yet why you can’t just kowtow to any old thing just because a religion says you should?

You all know the story. A teacher from Liverpool living and working in Sudan allowed her class to vote on the name of a teddy bear, which was then sent home with each of them in turn, and afterwards each child wrote about what they did that weekend in a kind of teddy bear diary. Thoroughly wholesome classroom activity, until the children decided on the name Mohammed, at which point of course it became blasphemy.

You can tell it was blasphemy because of course naming something Mohammed is an insult to the Prophet Mohammed, the father of Islam who died in the year 632 when he was stoned to death for nicknaming his penis “Little Mo”. (It’s a strange world that considers naming a class teddy bear after a paedophile offensive because the paedophile is sacred.) Clearly it was insensitive of her to allow the children to choose this name, and clearly she should have punished the boy who suggested it. His name, by the way, is Mohammed. Now the case has gone to trial, with the full support of the Sudanese justice minister, whose name is also Mohammed.

Mohammed is the most common name in Sudan, and indeed the second most common here, because of the strange obsession in Islamic cultures with naming every single man and boy in sight Mohammed, just in case dressing all the women in face-covering veils wasn’t confusing enough. Really they should call all the women the same thing and at least save everyone the embarrassment of admitting they can’t tell who that is under the burkha. This strange obsession probably comes from people like Ibrahim Mogra, chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain’s interfaith relations committee and an imam in Leicester, who says “some of us believe we are assured of heaven if we name our children Mohammed”. Seriously, how stupid do your beliefs have to be before you’ll question them? Your god will give you eternal paradise if you give your son a certain name — and damn you to hell if you give your stuffed bear the same name? You have to wonder if that god might be drunk on his own power. What’s next, not eating certain foods on certain days of the week? Thou Shalt Wear A Funny Hat?

Of course, there’s no reason at all to assume he does say that. None of this stuff that the more insane Muslims complain so loudly about are found anywhere in the Koran. The “no pictures of Mohammed” rule comes from a line that states that it’s impossible to accurately draw Allah. Therefore obviously it’s offensive to try and obviously the same applies to anyone else they feel like. And equally obviously it’s perfectly okay for them to burn quite irrelevant embassies and publicly whip schoolteachers should anyone break those rules.

The general reaction from everyone in the world is that the Sudanese authorities have over-reacted. Their ruling is that the teacher serve fifteen days in prison and then be deported, which the director of her school described as “very fair,” considering that “she could have had six months and [forty] lashes and a fine”. All she got was a fortnight in prison and then deported — and she’s only being deported from Sudan which in many ways is probably a favour to her. They’re mental in Sudan, you know –I hear they’ll deport you for naming a toy the wrong thing. In any case, she really can’t stay in Sudan anyway, because a lot of clerics there are demanding she be executed! That’s what they consider “justice”, apparently: name a toy bear Mohammed, death by firing squad.

That sounds crazy — because of course it is — but you have to see it from their point of view: they don’t see it as an isolated incident. Oh, no, they think it’s part of a western plot of destroy Islam (which to be fair is starting to look like a pretty good idea). I don’t know what it is about extremist Muslims that turns them into conspiracy theorists, but something must be doing it. These clerics, many of whom are called Mohammed, chant things like “shame on the UK” as if somehow some quite imaginary entity called “The UK” is responsible for the offence caused to Sudanese nutters by Sudanese children in Sudan, and when a Danish cartoonist drew a picture they didn’t like, they ignored him and attacked the Danish embassy instead, reasoning that any and all Danes were responsible and their interests would be most efficiently served by killing the nearest available ones. It’s entirely possible this is because they can’t use aeroplanes — they need the carbon credits for all their effigy and flag barbecues. (The other aspect of this which amuses me is that if there was a western “war on Islam” then it would be because Islam had started it when they attacked the embassy. That is an act of war.)

The BBC have serialised this story, by posting a long page almost identical to the last every time the slightest thing changes, because that’s how they like to run a website. According to one, “police … seized the book [which is the bear's diary and says "My Name Is Mohammed" on the front] and asked to interview the girl who owned the bear”. If they seize the bear as well I hope they enter into the spirit of the thing and write a twenty-fourth chapter in the bear’s diary detailing his being taken into custody and sealed in an evidence bag. That would make a good class display. It would teach the children the dangers of using irrational nonsense as a basis for government policy, for one thing, which might result in them growing up with a healthy disdain for the rantings of over-zealous religious wingnuts.

For my bit, I’m awarding those wingnuts the Religious Crackpot Of The Month for this month: the mad clerics shouting for death, the so-called justice department, the police, the parents who complained, the school director, and basically everybody involved in the ridiculous handling of this nonsense.

Here’s a delightfully heart-warming story. Well, a story, anyway.

It’s the story of a comedy show called Allah Made Me Funny. It’s a Muslim comedy show which will be on at Dundee University in a couple of weeks, which Dundee describe as “comedy from an Islamic perspective that is not just for Muslims, but for everyone, [which] we are showing it as part of our Islam awareness week at the university… to show the comic side of Islam and show that it is not just a serious religion,” with “nothing in it… that is offensive to the religion”. (You can watch some on the website. In fact, it’ll start chatting at you the moment the page loads. Probably I should have mentioned that sooner, and indeed probably now I should go back and edit it in, but I won’t.)

The show will not be on at Glasgow Caledonian University, because some Muslim students there complained. I don’t know if they found the title offensive (it looks offensive but patently isn’t if you give it a moment’s thought) or if they just kind of assumed it would be offensive, or maybe they’d seen the show and Dundee’s spokesman was just lying, but it would seem that Muslims can now be offended by “comedy from an Islamic perspective”.

And yes, I am a little annoyed that the university caved in to the complainants, but more than that I’m shocked at how fucking stupid these people are. They’ve complained, implicitly on religious grounds, about something designed specifically to soften the perception that their religion is an over-sensitive, mental one that complains about everything. Unfortunately the article didn’t name the morons in question, so I can’t award Religious Crackpot Of The Month to them by name, but if they’re reading this then they know who they are. Or more probably they don’t because they’re so utterly and enormously brainless.