Johann Hari

This is a column condemning cowardice – including my own. It begins with the story of a novel you cannot read. ‘The Jewel of Medina’ was written by a journalist called Sherry Jones. It recounts the life of Aisha, a girl who really was married off at the age of six to a 50 year old man called Mohammed ibn Abdallah. On her wedding day, Ayesha was playing on a see-saw outside her home. Inside, she was being betrothed. The first she knew of it was when she was banned from playing out in the street with the other children. When she was nine, she was taken to live with her now-53 year old husband. He had sex with her there and then. When she was fourteen, she was accused of adultery with a man closer to her own age. Not long after, Mohammed decreed his wives must cover their faces and bodies, even though no other women in Arabia did.

You cannot read this story today – except in the Koran and the Hadith. The man Mohammed ibn Abdallah became known to Muslims as ‘the Prophet Mohammed’, so our ability to explore this story is stunted. ‘The Jewel of Medina’ was bought by Random House and primed to be a best-seller – before a University of Texas teacher saw proofs and declared it “a national security issue.” Random House had panicked visions of a rerun Rushdie or MoToons affair. But her publishers have pulped it. It’s gone.

In Europe, we are finally abolishing the lingering blasphemy laws that hinder criticism of Christianity. But they are being succeeded by a new blasphemy law preventing criticism of Islam – enforced not by the state, but by jihadis. I seriously considered not writing this column, but the right to criticize religion is as precious – and hard-won – as the right to criticize government. We have to use it or lose it.

Some people will instantly ask: why bother criticising religion if it causes so much hassle? The answer is: look back at our history. How did Christianity lose its ability to terrorize people with phantasms of sin and Hell? How did it stop being spreading shame about natural urges – pre-marital sex, masturbation or homosexuality? Because critics pored over the religion’s stories and found gaping holes of logic or morality in them. They asked questions. How could an angel inseminate a virgin? Why does the Old Testament God command his followers to commit genocide? How can a man survive inside a whale?

Reinterpretation and ridicule crow-barred Christianity open. Ask enough tough questions, and faith is inevitably pushed farther and farther back into the misty realm of metaphor – where it is less likely to inspire people to kill and die for it. But doubtful Muslims, and the atheists who support them, are being prevented from following this path. They cannot ask: what does it reveal about Mohammed that he had sex with a child, or that he massacred a village of Jews who refused to follow him? You don’t have to murder many Theo Van Goughs or pulp many Sherry Joneses to intimidate the rest. The greatest censorship is internal: it is in all the books that will never be written and all the films that will never be shot, because we are afraid.

We need to acknowledge the double-standard – and that it will cost Muslims in the end. Insulating a religion from criticism – surrounding it with an electric wire-fence called ‘respect’ – keeps it stunted at its most infantile and fundamentalist stage. The smart, questioning and instinctively moral Muslims – the majority – learn to be silent, or are shunned (at best). What would Christianity would be like today if George Elliot and Mark Twain and Bertrand Russell had all been pulped? Take the most revolting rural-Alabama church, and metastasize it.

Since Jones has brought it up, let’s look at Mohammed’s marriage to Ayesha as a model for how we can conduct this conversation. It is true those were different times, and it may have been normal for grown men to have sex with children. The sources aren’t clear on this point. But whatever culture you live in, being penetrated when your body is not physically developed is an excruciatingly painful experience. Among Vikings it was more normal than today to have your arm chopped off, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t agony. If anything, Jones’ book whitewashes this, suggesting Mohammed’s ‘gentleness’ meant Ayesha enjoyed it.

The story of Aisha also prompts another fundamentalist-busting discussion. You can’t say Mohammed’s decision to have sex with a child has to be judged by the standards of his time, and then demand we follow his moral standards to the letter. Either we should follow his example literally, or we should critically evaluate it and choose for ourselves. Discussing this contradiction inevitably injects doubt, the mortal enemy of fanaticism. (On the Independent’s Open House blog later today, I’ll be discussing how Ayesha has become a central issue in the debate in Yemen about whether to protect children from forced marriage.)

So why do many secularists – people who cheer ‘The Life of Brian’ and ‘Jerry Springer – the Opera’ – turn into clucking Mary Whitehouses when it comes to Islam? If a book about the life of Christ was being dumped because fanatics in Mississippi might object, we would be enraged. I feel this too. I am ashamed to say I would be more scathing if I was discussing Christianity. One reason is plain fear: the image of Theo Van Gough lying on a pavement crying “Can’t we just talk about this?” Of course we rationalize it, by asking: does one joke, one column, one novel make much difference? No. But cumulatively? Absolutely.

The other reason is more honourable, if flawed. There is very real and rising prejudice against Muslims across the West today. The BBC recently sent out identically-qualified CVs to hundreds of employers. Those with Muslim names were 50 percent less likely to get interviews. Criticisms of Islamic texts are sometimes used to justify US or Israeli military atrocities. Some critics of Muslims – Geert Wilders or Martin Amis – moot mass human rights abuses here in Europe. So some secularists reason: I have plenty of criticisms of Judaism, but I wouldn’t choose to articulate them in Germany in 1933. Why try to question Islam now, when Muslims are being attacked by bigots?

But I live in the majority-Muslim East End, and this isn’t Weimar Germany. Muslims are secure enough to deal with some tough questions. It is condescending to treat Muslims like excitable children who cannot cope with the probing, mocking treatment we hand out to Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism. It is perfectly consistent to protect Muslims from bigotry while challenging the bigotries and absurdities within their holy texts.

There is now a pincer movement trying to silence critical discussion of Islam. To one side, fanatics threaten to kill you; to the other, critics call you “Islamophobic.” But consistent atheism is not racism. On the contrary: it treats all people, irrespective of skin colour, as mature adults who can cope with rational questions. When we pulp books out of fear of fundamentalism, we are decapitating the most precious freedom we have.

To read the comments on this article, and leave some of your own, click here

POSTSCRIPT: Late last year, a tiny little ten year old girl turned up alone at the court in Sana, Yemen, and declared: “I have come to get a divorce.” This hadn’t happened before. According to the Yemen Times, in some parts of the country the average marriage age is ten, and some 50 percent of marriages are to underage girls. But Nujood Ali was unique in escaping to a court door, pleading for help.

Nujood explained how her father had married her off to a thirtysomething motorcycle courier. On their wedding night, he ordered her to share a bed with him. She ran out of the room, so he dragged her back and raped her. At first she was ashamed. “But I passed through that,” she said recently. “All I want now is to finish my education. I want to be a lawyer… I want to defend oppressed people. I want to be an example for all the other girls.” After saying this, she ran off to play hide-and-seek.

The court eventually dissolved the marriage – and awarded compensation to her husband in apology. But Nujood has spearheaded a national revulsion against child-marriage. The conservative Islamic mullahs have reacted by saying there is nothing wrong with child-marriage – because Mohammed did it. I discuss this in my column today. It is true Mohammed did this. If you are trapped in the fundamentalist mindset of Mohammed-is-our-moral-exemplar, you have no way to answer back. The debate is resolved; Nujood’s “husband” was in the right.

To get out of this bind, you need to leave behind a fundamentalist reading of Islam. You need to accept that parts of it are metaphor – or, better still, abandon supernatural explanations for life altogether.

This is far from confined to Yemen. The excellent reporter Amelia Hill discovered that child marriages are happening here in Britain too. She met a young Muslim woman who at the age of fourteen was forced to marry her cousin in an unofficial “community ceremony.” She explained: “They kept whispering in my ear to ask why I wasn’t smiling. I told them I was terrified and desperate, that I was just a child and far too young to get married. I pleaded with them to help me escape, but no-one saw anything wrong in what was happening. I begged my husband not to marry me, but he told me I had no choice.” She was raped that night. “It was disgusting, awful. I used to scream and cry all night. I was too young, too tender inside. It killed me inside. Life became meaningless… I had my childhood taken away and missed out on all my teenage years. Sometimes I still wonder if it’s worth trying to have a future. Many days, I’m not at all sure it is.” After two suicide attempts, she managed to escape, and when Hill found her she was living, alone, in a refuge.

Peter Cripps, head of the Community Safety Unit at my local police station in Shoreditch, told Hill these forced child-marriages “are happening and numbers are growing.” Nobody is trying to figure out how many Muslim girls are suffering this way.

To call anyone who tries to help them “Islamopohobic” is an obscene betrayal of these young women. Some of the bravest critics of this barbarism are in fact British Muslim women: they staff and run a series of brilliant domestic violence refuges. But the fundamentalist literalist reading of Islam chokes their efforts. It will always tell the girls that child-marriage is acceptable, because Mohammed did it. If we can’t criticize and reinterpret Mohammed without being threatened, then we may be unable – in the end – to cut away the intellectual justification for abusing these girls.

POSTSCRIPT II:

Why are so many religious people so insecure that they can’t cope with being asked a few snippy questions? As you can see in the response to my column today, if you try to probe too deeply into religion – using the tools of scepticism, or humour – most believers will announce you are being “offensive” and “ignorant”. By this, they mean: shut up. Stop asking. Go away.

When my ideas are challenged, after the initial irritation I’m generally pleased. It forces me to look again at my reasoning and the evidence. There are two possible results from this. My argument could turn out to be right – in which case it will be stronger for being rigorously checked and forced to defend itself. Or it could turn out to be wrong – in which case I’ll stop making this mistake, and end up on the right path. Either way, I’m a winner.

But this process cannot occur with religious thinking. Why? Because it is not based on evidence or reason. It is based on divine revelation (that is, hallucination), or “faith.” By definition, faith is a belief for which you have no evidence. I do not have “faith” there is a computer in front of me now; I know it. I do not have “faith” America exists; I can demonstrate it.

So when religious thoughts are challenged, a very different psychological process kicks in. There is no evidence to check. There is no reasoning to run through, except castle-in-the-air arguments like Descartes’ absurd Ontological Argument. The religious person finds his mental cupboard bare. So all he can do is get angry, and tell you to stop asking difficult questions. He says his beliefs should be “respected” – by which he means protected from disagreement. But why should I respect an obviously false claim? I don’t respect people who believe in fairies – why should I respect people who believe in an invisible Creator who tinkers with the Universe?