Since their earliest origins, Christian cultures have been preoccupied with the temptations of the Devil, and humanity’s susceptibility to them. ‘Every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.’ (James 1: 14-15)

The popularity of Satan, the arch-tempter, may be on the wane, but Police Scotland, in preparing to implement the Scottish Hate Crime Act, have found a contemporary devil to replace him: the Hate Monster. ‘When yer feeling insecure, when ye feel angry; he’ll be there, feeding aff they emotions. Getting bigger and bigger, till he’s weighing ye doon [sic].’

Beware, anyone who has ever felt any heated disagreement with someone or something, especially where a ‘protected characteristic’ is involved: you may be possessed by the Hate Monster and anything you say or do, especially on social media, may be used by righteous informers and priests – sorry, police – as evidence of your sinful mind.

As far as the protected characteristic of religion is concerned, the unbeliever may be glad that, under section 9(b) of the Act, expressions of ‘antipathy, dislike, ridicule or insult’ are not, on their own, automatically deemed to constitute ‘threatening or abusive’ behaviour, which is the first element in the section 4(2) offence of ‘stirring up hatred’. (The second element of the offence is the intent to ‘stir up hatred against a group of persons’ on the basis of their protected characteristic.)

Yet to advocates of open debate, this carve-out for free expression about religion offers tepid comfort. Not only is it apparently confined to certain categories of expression, but it does not apply to any of the other protected characteristics, including, most controversially, ‘transgender identity’.

As a criterion of judging whether apparently threatening or abusive behaviour is ‘reasonable’ and therefore defensible, section 4(5) invokes the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, including of ‘ideas that offend, shock or disturb’. However, under section 9, while ‘discussion or criticism’ of protected characteristics is not automatically deemed threatening or abusive, antipathy, ridicule and the like presumably would be in the case of any characteristic except religion.

Altogether, the wording of the Act raises several questions about how it will function in practice, and how sections 4 and 9 will relate to each other.

If someone is gauche enough, for instance, to criticise the claim that a man can change into a woman, how is he or she to know whether doing so will be deemed mere discussion or an act that a ‘reasonable’ person would consider threatening or abusive – and if the latter, whether it will itself still be judged ‘reasonable’ on the basis of the ECHR right to freedom of expression, or will be held an unreasonable, impermissible act of stirring up hatred against trans people? Who should decide what is ‘reasonable’ in such fraught debates? You might as well ask a lay court to adjudicate on the relative merits of con- and transubstantiation.

Moreover, if it is a question of intent, how is the court to determine, as a second and distinct test, what the defendant intended the effect of their words to be, other than by the words themselves?

The overall thrust of the ‘stirring-up’ offences is to imply that the expression of disagreement about characteristics specially defined and sanctioned by the Scottish state is always potentially criminal. This is a short step from criminalising thought itself. And that is what the Hate Monster is all about.

The idea that thought can be sinful goes right back to the Old Testament: ‘But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.’ (Leviticus 18: 28)

From next week in Scotland, therefore, who knows how mild an expression of doubtful or dissenting views, in particular ‘gender critical’ ones, may be sufficient to saddle a person with a criminal record – or whether most dissenters will be too afraid to speak at all, because they do not want to risk it. No wonder the Act has been so heavily criticised by women’s rights campaigners, as well as free speech advocates more generally.

Of course, if you are inclined to express antipathy to women, no need to worry – biological sex, unlike transgender identity, is not on the protected list.

Section 12 does contain a power for the Ministers to add ‘the characteristic of sex’ to the list. So in theory, if supporters of women’s rights ever won a majority at Holyrood, they could implement this section, and then sit back and watch the police and the courts tearing their hair out as trans women denounced women for misgendering, and women denounced trans women for misogyny.

In the long term, though, slapping more restrictions on speech about ever more categories of protected groups will benefit no one, except perhaps those who happen to be in power for the time being. If we want a society which is not a dictatorship, if we believe in intellectual and moral progress rather than stagnation, then we have to be prepared for give and take: to be offended, insulted, made uncomfortable and even upset by the views of people who disagree with us, even on the most sensitive subjects of all.

As Jonathan Rauch put it, ‘To appeal to a country’s conscience, you need an antagonist.’ If you demonise your antagonists, if you label anyone who disagrees with you an agent of Satan or the Hate Monster, then you as a country are depriving yourselves of the opportunity for moral doubt and conflict, which is the essence of a conscience.

Plato once defined thinking as the soul’s dialogue with itself. Take away a country’s opportunity for dialogue and disagreement, and you might as well kill its soul.

The post From Satan to the Hate Monster appeared first on The Freethinker.

Know your place, woman!

In February, the National Secular Society (NSS) complained to the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator about a sermon given to the good folks of Rosyth Baptist Church, a registered charity, in which the ‘reverend’ Chris Demetriou clamped down on any uppity women who might be among his flock. As the NSS reported: ‘[In the sermon, Demetriou] explains a wife “should submit to her husband’s leadership” because “that’s the Lord’s pattern for us”. She submits to him “out of obedience to Christ”.’ (It should be noted that Demetriou has belatedly—and rather lamely—responded to the NSS’s complaints.)

So, there you have it. From now on, should any women disagree with anything I write in the Freethinker or elsewhere, I shall simply employ Demetriou’s Defence: know your place, woman! [Praise the Lord! – Ed.]

Know your place, infidel!

In a new report for the UK Commission for Countering Extremism, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens warns that ‘Anti-blasphemy activism in the UK is gaining momentum and showing signs of becoming increasingly radicalised.’ Meleagrou-Hitchens has provided a valuable summary and analysis of the threats posed by Islamists to free thought in the UK. It is eye-opening even for those of us who pay close attention to this sort of thing. And, as he astutely notes, it is not just non-Muslims like the Batley schoolteacher who face Islamist intimidation, but ‘heretical’ Muslims too—Ahmadi Muslims in particular, one of whom was murdered in Glasgow in 2016 for his beliefs. At a time when gay MPs have been scared by Islamists into giving up their seats, and when even the Speaker of the House of Commons is more or less openly expressing his fear of Islamist violence against MPs, Meleagrou-Hitchens’s analysis is essential, if also alarming, reading.

From Pakistan with terror

Meleagrou-Hitchens reports that much of this ‘anti-blasphemy activism’ is linked to ‘the emergence of a UK wing of the extremist Pakistani anti-blasphemy political party, Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP).’ This is unsurprising, given the long and ignoble tradition of Pakistani Islamists’ interference in other countries (the Pakistani government’s support for the Taliban in Afghanistan being the most disgraceful example)—not to mention the equally ignoble tradition of persecuting infidels within Pakistan itself.

Just this month, the BBC reported that a young man has been sentenced to death by a Pakistani court for the crime of sharing images and videos offensive to Muslims. Despite all this, Pakistan remains a ‘major non-NATO ally’, thus sullying the name of an organisation that, for all its past and present crimes and follies, is now one of the world’s great bulwarks of liberal democracy. So it goes.

A note on ‘extremism’

Michael Gove has produced a new official definition of ‘extremism’ that is both broad and vague, and therefore a threat to free speech. There are many problems with having the state define what constitutes ‘extremism’ in the first place—it is a contested word and concept, one liable to misuse by governments wishing to muzzle the opposition. What business is it of the state to define the limits of acceptable political discourse? What business is it of anyone to do so, unless they want to shut their critics up?

But the Gove definition is particularly dubious. As the NSS put it, it could include ‘those who seek to “undermine” the country’s institutions or values’, a group which would include opponents of the established Church of England and the monarchy (the NSS spoke before the definition was made public on 14 March, but its concerns still apply). On the one hand, then, the UK Commission for Countering Extremism (!) is rightly concerned about Islamic ‘anti-blasphemy activism’; on the other, the government seems to want to erode free speech in this country even further.

By the way, would blasphemy not be considered ‘extremist’ by the votaries of the various faiths? Indeed, it was not so long ago that we had an official blasphemy ban on the law books. The government’s attempts to counter the phenomenon nebulously described as ‘extremism’ is a little too close for my liking to a ban on blasphemy—even on free speech tout court.

The Scottish Hate Monster

Meanwhile, Scotland’s long-delayed and authoritarian Hate Crime Act will come into force on (appropriately) 1 April, with ‘non-crime hate incidents’ also being recorded. Thankfully, a Police Scotland video has resurfaced to put us all in our places. The narrator, in condescending faux chummy Scots, informs us that the ‘Hate Monster’ will grow within us every time we commit a hate crime. The criminal urge can just creep up on you, it seems: one moment you’re a bit peeved and ‘then, before ye know it, ye’ve committed a hate crime.’ A sound basis for prosecution…

Being Scottish, I have long had concerns about the Hate Crime Act. In 2022, I went so far as to say how shameful—and terrifying—it was. And this in one of the heartlands of the Enlightenment, no less! I can easily see how things I have written (including in this very Faith Watch), and things which have appeared in the Freethinker generally, might fall afoul of the Act or be seized upon by some offence-seeking enemy of free thought.

With Michael Gove and Humza Yousaf fighting for our freedoms, who needs tyrants? All I can say is that we at the Freethinker have no intention of being silenced.

Of rum and Ramadan

The month of Muslim fasting and prayer began on 10 March. There is no objection to people freely practising their religion, of course, but let us not forget the closeted apostates and liberal or non-practising Muslims around the world forced into doing so on pain of ostracisation—or worse. In Nigeria, for example, 11 Muslims have already been arrested for the crime of eating during the hours of fasting. That is why it is nice to see the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) planning to have a picnic in defiance of religious bullying this month.

Apparently, 23 March is Atheist Day, which I would normally find very silly except for the happy coincidence that it falls within Ramadan this year and is the date on which CEMB invites everyone to ‘take a shot of Rum for #atheists and #exMuslims across the globe’ using the hashtag #AtheistDayRUMadan. I for one will join in, though probably with whisky rather than rum. Happy Rumadan!

Ramadan and the Uyghurs

While Ramadan can inspire Islamic bullying and tyranny, it is also a good time to remember the Uyghur Muslims, who are facing genocide at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. Their plight has faded from the media as other horrors have risen up to capture our attention, but they should not be forgotten.

For them, Ramadan is a dangerous time indeed. As the Campaign for Uyghurs put it:

‘The blessed month of Ramadan is also synonymous with the extreme torture and hardships perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as it wages a brutal war on Islam amidst the ongoing Uyghur genocide. The CCP ludicrously deems any public expression of the Islamic faith as “religious extremism” [there’s that word again] and outlaws religious practices among the Uyghurs, including fasting, owning a Qur’an, and praying. During Ramadan, Uyghurs are forced to abandon their fasts, consume non-halal (prohibited) products, and engage in other activities that contradict their faith. If they refuse, they are subject to severe punishment.’

So even as I have no sympathy with religious belief and practice, I feel a little softer towards Ramadan these days than I normally would. Of course, the only thing is to be consistent in one’s advocation of liberty: just as nobody should be compelled to practice religion, nobody should be prevented from doing so if they freely choose it.

Alexander and Hephaestion redux

In happier news, one of the most famously gay places in all of history has legalised same-sex marriage. Despite the best efforts of the Greek Orthodox Church, the first-ever gay wedding in the Athens City Hall was conducted on 7 March. Nearly three thousand years after Achilles and Patroclus, and more than two thousand after Alexander and Hephaestion, it’s about time! Perhaps now is a good moment to revisit Mary Renault’s beautiful novel about the latter pair, Fire from Heaven (1969); it is a personal favourite of mine, and its sequels, The Persian Boy (1972) and Funeral Games (1981), are also well worth reading.

I can’t resist an apt quote from Fire from Heaven here. Alexander has just expressed his love for his closest friend: ‘Hephaistion had known for many ages that if a god should offer him one gift in all his lifetime, he would choose this. Joy hit him like a lightning bolt.’

The continued decay of subcontinental (and global) secularism

In last month’s Faith Watch, I wrote of Narendra Modi’s ‘assault on India’s rich secularist history’. Well, here we are again. Less than two months after Modi opened a new temple to Ram in Ayodhya, his government has announced that it is set to fulfil another Hindu nationalist dream by enacting the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which was passed in 2019. Even the name of the act sounds slightly sinister.

As the writer and Modi critic Mukul Kesavan wrote in 2019, when the act was just a bill, ‘Couched in the language of refuge and seemingly directed at foreigners, the CAB’s main purpose is the de-legitimization of Muslim citizenship.’ He went on to describe it as one of ‘the greatest institutional threats to Indian democracy today.’

With Modi and his party up for re-election later this year, it is no wonder they are so flagrantly pandering to their Hindu nationalist base. Modi is likely to win a third term, so for how much longer will India be able to retain the title of the world’s largest secular democracy? Meanwhile, with Donald Trump, darling of the Christian nationalists, tying with and sometimes even surpassing Joe Biden in the polls, the world’s oldest secular democracy might also be preparing to self-immolate this year.

Perhaps nations like India and the US have forgotten the value of secularism. They should look to Iran, where a poll run by the state found a huge majority in favour of secular government. And, in a rebuke to all those who so vacuously celebrated World Hijab Day on 1 February, it also found that most Iranians are opposed to the mandatory hijab.

Should India and the US choose to abandon their hard-won secular democracies, they will miss them dearly—and they will have to fight for them all over again. At least the ideals of secular democracy will survive among those who most appreciate its worth.

Yet more papal piffle

The above words could be applied to almost everything every pope has ever said, including Pope Francis’s recent intervention wherein he might as well have told the Ukrainians to surrender to annihilation (having forgotten his church’s historical complicity with fascism, Francis has now reportedly joined Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping in congratulating Putin on his recent election victory), but I have in mind a book released earlier this year: The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Ratzinger. I read (though ‘endured’ might be a better word) this book, intending to review it more fully, but it is so bad that it is not worth the effort. Instead, I shall limit myself to a few reflections.

First, why is a respected university press publishing a book almost entirely composed of theological waffle written mostly by committed theological wafflers? They may as well publish a Cambridge Companion to Scientology written by L. Ron Hubbard fans. If Catholics (or Scientologists) want to publish this stuff, they are free to do so – and they certainly have the resources with which to do it. And there is no reasonable objection to the publication of historical-analytical volumes on religion and theology.

But a serious academic press printing what amounts to mumbo-jumbo? I look forward to a future Cambridge Companion to John Frum Worship consisting entirely of pseudo-sophisticated analysis by Melanesian acolytes of the eponymous cargo cult. (Again, anthropological study is an entirely different thing.)

The Ratzinger book opens breathlessly, with the editors placing their subject alongside Aristotle and Shakespeare in the depth of his influence (in his case, on Catholic theology rather than philosophy and literature). He is also compared with Augustine and Aquinas (of course), but at least that pair had the excuse of living in periods of relative ignorance. The editors and contributors clearly think of Ratzinger as a great and humane scholar. A useful tonic to this hero worship is Daniel Gawthrop’s 2013 book The Trial of Pope Benedict, which (so far as I am concerned, anyway) exposes Ratzinger as the nasty, authoritarian, reactionary old bigot and bully that he was.

Here is an example of theo-waffle from Joseph Ratzinger, as quoted by a contributor to the Companion, so that the reader can judge for him- or herself this towering intellect:

‘The truth cannot unfold except in an otherness open to God, who wishes to reveal his own otherness in and through my human brothers and sisters. Hence it is not fitting to state in an exclusive way: “I possess the truth.” The truth is not possessed by anyone; it is always a gift which calls us to undertake a journey of ever closer assimilation to truth… truth is disclosed only in an encounter of love.’

As with so much theology, this babble is reminiscent of the worst stylings of the postmodernists. It is an irony that conservative theologians like Ratzinger, who abhor postmodernism and the like, sound so much like them—and carry about as much intellectual weight, assuming as they do all the things that they need, and have signally failed, to prove before they even begin and building an absurd and abstruse system on top of those assumptions. Change a few words here and there, and the most sophisticated Christian theology can be rendered into a postmodernist, or even a cargo cult, tract. (And it is beyond me how the above quote can be squared with another contributor’s statement that ‘the Catholic Church, for Ratzinger, is…the Spirit-filled infallible authority…’)

Here is another example, this time from one of the contributors, whose simultaneous pomposity and meaninglessness might make even Jacques Derrida scoff: ‘[F]or Ratzinger, communion is the fundamental figure of reality, created and uncreated, and historically mediated relationality is thus disclosive of the deepest meaning of being.’ Thus disclosive of the deepest meaning of being—magnificent.

According to Ratzinger and his Cambridge companions, Christianity is a pre-eminently and uniquely rational religion. Curious, then, that even its most ‘sophisticated’ defenders fall back on such fatuous language (all the better to befuddle, I suppose). There is also the awkward fact that Ratzinger himself, as discussed in the book, admitted that silly doctrines such as the Trinity can only be accepted on the basis of revelation—after all, they do not do very well under rational scrutiny. And what of the plain superstition that is literal transubstantiation? Or intercessory prayer?

Worst of all, the Companion barely deals with the thousands of child rapes that Ratzinger was arguably morally culpable for. When it does, it is to excuse him and to warp the record to portray him as a saviour rather than an enabler. On moral as well as intellectual grounds, then, this book is almost as rancid as its subject.

I cannot think of an excuse for Cambridge University Press here. Would they take an obvious work of fiction, complete with its own metaphysics and theology and imagined history, and allow deluded people who believe that the fiction is real to write so sincerely about it?

There is a Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, but, so far as I can tell, none of its contributors believes in Aslan or Gandalf or treats fantasy as reality rather than literature—and it now strikes me that the papal piffle that fills the pages of the Ratzinger companion would be much more at home in the back-end of some anthology of third-rate fantasy.

Further reading:

Secularism, women’s rights, and religious charities

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

Blasphemy and free speech in the UK

Blasphemy and bishops: how secularists are navigating the culture wars, by Emma Park

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle?

Blasphemy Month at the Freethinker

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

On trial for blasphemy: the Freethinker’s first editor and offensive cartoons, by Bob Forder

Freethought in Pakistan

Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community, by Shaukat Korai

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

From religious orthodoxy to free thought, by Tehreem Azeem

Indian secularism and Hindu nationalism

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

The post Faith Watch, March 2024 appeared first on The Freethinker.

In 1877, a woman was put on trial for publishing what the prosecutor called a ‘dirty, filthy book’.

The book was a manual on rudimentary contraception, called Fruits of Philosophy. And the woman was Annie Besant – feminist, freethinker and vice-president of the National Secular Society. She and Charles Bradlaugh, the founder and president of the NSS, were both prosecuted for obscenity over this ‘dirty, filthy book’.

Besant’s story is extraordinary. In a highly patriarchal, highly Christian society, she fought fearlessly for the right of couples in Victorian England’s desperately poor and overcrowded slums to access information which would allow them to control their family planning. Alongside that, she fought for the right to free speech, and the right of women to control their bodies. 

Incredibly, Besant’s ‘dirty, filthy book’ is still upsetting religious fundamentalists even today, nearly 150 years later.

Last November, the NSS held a history talk in London all about Victorian birth control, including the fight to publish Fruits of Philosophy. To our astonishment, our talk was picketed by an anti-abortion Christian group. This was particularly bizarre; the manual argued one of the main aims of contraception was to reduce abortion. But when questioned, the protestors revealed that their group is not just against abortion – they are against all forms of birth control.

While it was somewhat amusing that an anti-abortion group would embarrass itself by protesting against this small and rather tame history talk, it was also disturbing. The incident revealed the extent to which the religiously-motivated desire to control women’s bodies, women’s choices and women’s participation in society is still alive in Britain.

Secularism is a feminist issue. This was true at the time of Besant’s trial, and it is true today, worldwide.

The 2023 United Nations Gender Social Norms index found that there has been no improvement in worldwide biases against women in the last decade. It also found that gender hierarchies in religious practices can strongly influence behaviours and attitudes.

It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that in recent years we have seen some dramatic and devastating leaps backward – driven, in part, by fundamentalist religion.

In 2021, the Taliban re-took Afghanistan and immediately set about imposing its fundamentalist Islamic ideology on women and girls. Women there are now banned from most public places. To visit the few places where they are permitted outside their homes, they must now be clad in a burqa. Girls cannot attend school from over the age of 11.

Male doctors have been banned from treating female patients, a policy with deadly implications. Naturally, the Taliban ordered pharmacies to clear their stocks of contraception. Is it any wonder that since the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan has seen a surge in women attempting suicide?

Then there is Iran. Following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the theocratic Iranian state has required all women and girls over the age of nine to wear hijab in public. Women who break this law are often subject to brutal punishment, as horrifically demonstrated in 2022 when Mahsa Amini died at the hands of Iran’s notorious ‘morality police’. She had been arrested for failing to wear hijab correctly. Witnesses saw her being brutally tortured in the back of a police van. She died days later. She was 22 years old.

Mahsa Amini’s death sparked huge waves of protest in Iran, which were described as the biggest challenge to the government since the Islamic Revolution. The regime’s response was to double down on its laws, rather than make any meaningful change.

But perhaps it is a matter of time. Consistent surveys find that most Iranians oppose mandatory hijab and, on top of this, support a secular state. Protests may have died down, but the mood of resistance has not been extinguished. As one banner displayed during international protests against Iran said: ‘To the world leaders. Iranian women do not need you to save them. They only need you to stop saving their murderers.’

So how are leaders in the UK responding to the brutal oppression and killing of women in Iran, Afghanistan and other countries where religion prescribes patriarchy and misogyny?

Well, the suffering of women forced to wear hijab did not stop UK schools, universities, and even the Home Office this year observing ‘World Hijab Day’ – an event which explicitly celebrates the veiling of women.

And it did not stop Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council last year approving a 16-foot steel statue of a veiled woman for a park in Smethwick, Birmingham. The statue, called ‘The Strength of the Hijab’, was revealed to the public just days before the first anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death. It is as if it was timed as an act of triumph against Iran’s courageous women who dare to show their hair; a tribute to the morality police.

Much of British authorities’ enthusiasm for the hijab comes from a concern to appear ‘respectful’ of minority groups. But an unwillingness to think critically about religious practices which are at odds with democratic values spells disaster for women’s rights. It also does Muslims a disservice by erasing debate and dissent from within that community.

This attitude is coupled with a fear of challenging religion – a fear which is, sadly, quite rational. There are now too many examples of people being accused of bigotry, losing their jobs, being threatened and even being physically attacked for questioning, criticising or poking fun at religion.

And it is something that schools with concerns about hijab have had to face. In 2017, St Stephen’s Primary School in east London told parents that girls under eight should not be sent to school in hijab, because of concerns about integration and the promotion of ideologies which are incompatible with British values. This sparked a furious backlash from Islamist fundamentalists, who bombarded school leaders with emails, many of which were threatening. As a result, the school backed down on its policy.

Decision-makers in the UK still operate under the belief that religion is a wholly positive force that should be respected, accommodated and showcased, not something to be questioned. This is particularly evident in the charity sector.

Incredibly, there are registered charities promoting the idea that husbands can dominate and even beat their wives, and that women who dress ‘sexily’ (for example, by wearing trousers) are to blame for rape. We have even seen charities signposting material which says the torturous and illegal practice of female genital mutilation has benefits, including reducing ‘excessive sensitivity of the clitoris’ which is ‘very annoying to the husband, especially at the time of intercourse’.

These charities do this in the name of religion. ‘The advancement of religion’ is a recognised charitable purpose in law. [On the problems with the ‘advancement of religion’ provision, see further in the Freethinker and New Humanist – Ed.]

As long as a charity is registered under this purpose, it seems to have carte blanche to say just about anything. Charities are meant to provide a public benefit in return for the generous tax breaks and Gift Aid they get. But it is difficult to see how promoting misogyny benefits the public – at least the female half of the public.

The fact that the state is willing to forgive misogyny when it is cloaked in religion reveals just how normalised it is. And what else could we expect, when the UK’s own state religion, the established Church of England, is itself drenched in sexism.

It is quite incredible that in the 21st century, 500 Anglican churches ban female priests. The Church has said this is because it is ‘committed to enabling’ those who are ‘unable to receive the ministry of women bishops or priests’ to ‘flourish’.

The established Church’s commitment to helping chauvinists within their ranks ‘flourish’ tacitly implies that there is something so subversive about women with authority that it is reasonable for men to reject them.

Let us not forget that as the established church, the C of E is part of our state. The lines between theology and politics are blurred when it comes to a state church. This is institutionalised, structural sexism at the highest level.

Religiously sanctioned notions that women exist to serve men translate into decision making which limits women’s opportunities, and feed into relationships which are coercive, controlling and abusive.

While women’s rights in the UK have inarguably progressed, women are still under-represented in positions of power and overrepresented as victims of domestic violence. A meagre seven per cent of FTSE 100 companies had female CEOs in 2023. Only 35 per cent of members of the House of Commons and 29 per cent of the Lords are female. According to Refuge, one in four women in England and Wales will experience domestic abuse in her lifetime, two women a week are killed by a current or former partner, and domestic abuse drives three women a week to suicide. Ninety-three per cent of defendants in domestic abuse cases are male while 84 per cent of victims are female.

If Annie Besant were alive today, what would she think? 

While she would no doubt welcome the many successes achieved by feminists and secularists in improving equality for women, I think she would also be dismayed and bewildered at the numerous and complex threats posed to women by fundamentalist religion today.

Progress on women’s rights can only go so far if we only treat the symptoms of misogyny, and not the causes. And one of the most important causes is patriarchal religion, which is not only tolerated by the British state, but nurtured, protected and endorsed.

That is why, to protect the rights of women and girls worldwide, we must not allow religion to pull the veil over our eyes when it comes to injustice, discrimination and oppression.

We must be free to look religion in the eye, to challenge it, and to criticise it in the strongest terms, without fear of punishment by society or the state.

We must stop letting religious extremists exploit our good intentions to promote pluralism and inclusivity by portraying symbols of misogynistic oppression as symbols of social justice.

And we must separate church and state to ensure women’s rights are never subordinated to religious agendas.

The National Secular Society is holding a free online talk on April 10^th with Michael Meyer, the author of a new biography on Annie Besant. More information and booking here.

The post Secularism is a feminist issue appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Alex Byrne is not necessarily the sort of person whom you would have expected to become involved in the ‘culture wars’. After an initial career in advertising, he studied philosophy at Birkbeck, King’s College London and Princeton, and then did a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. In 1994 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an Instructor in Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, where he is now a professor. Up till a few years ago, his research centred on abstract philosophical questions like the nature of ‘colour’.

Byrne became interested in the disputes over the meaning of sex and gender in about 2017, after learning about an early academic furore over the analogy or disanalogy between transgenderism and transracialism. He then had a ‘ringside seat’ in the trans debate, or gender debate as it is also known, when his wife, Carole Hooven, was ‘cancelled’ by certain people at Harvard University for publicly expressing her view that sex is biological and binary. His own book, Trouble with Gender, was under contract to Oxford University Press, but the latter withdrew from the contract last year. He discussed the possible reasons for this in an article for Quillette. Trouble with Gender will be published by Polity on 27 October 2023.

I interviewed Professor Byrne across the Atlantic via Zoom. In the edited transcript below, we explore the origins of his interest in the trans debate and his later experience of it, what the debate is actually about, his reasons for writing a book about it, and how a philosopher can contribute to the debate by making clear distinctions.

We also consider how the atmosphere in philosophy departments has changed in recent years, and whether philosophers have a duty to defend words against their destruction.

On debating the trans debate: polite notice

The Freethinker is committed to open, well-reasoned and civilised discussion, in particular on issues where dogma, authoritarianism or fear have led to the suppression or distortion of certain points of view. We are also opposed to extremism and fanaticism of any kind, considering such qualities incompatible with our guiding principles of liberty, reason and humanity. Further discussion here.

We have endeavoured to find contributors to oppose the views advocated in previous articles on the trans or gender debate, but our invitations have so far been met with silence or refusal. If there is anyone out there who has experience or expertise on this topic, and who thinks that the various arguments put forward by Alex Byrne, Helen Joyce and Eliza Mondegreen are fundamentally flawed, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please get in touch via this link.

As always, any opinions expressed below are the sole responsibility of those expressing them.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

Freethinker: How did you get into philosophy in the first place?

Alex Byrne: It was a rather convoluted route. I think that is true of many philosophers. I started off doing mathematics and physics and then I worked in advertising in London for a number of years. And while I was doing that, I went to Birkbeck College in the evenings to study for a second undergraduate degree in philosophy. I had always been interested in philosophy, but in Britain at the time, it was very hard to put a name to the sorts of issues that I was interested in. I did not realise that there was an actual subject that dealt with these problems and questions that fascinated me. One formative episode was when I saw Men of Ideas by Bryan Magee. I also read AJ Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, and found it completely enthralling. I believed for a while that logical positivism was the solution to all philosophical problems – I was soon disabused of that.

Looking back over your career in the philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics, what are the contributions you have made to these fields of which you are the most proud?

That is a difficult question. You should really ask someone else about my contributions, such as they are. I have done a lot of work on perception, and in particular the perception of colour. Most of this has been with David Hilbert, a philosopher at the University of Illinois, Chicago. We have written many papers together defending the view that colours are physical properties. In particular, they are just ways of altering the incident light. This is quite a controversial view in the philosophy of colour – a little subdiscipline of philosophy. One view that is perhaps more popular than our physicalist view goes back to the ancient Greeks, that nothing actually is coloured. Even though it seems or looks as if tomatoes are red and grass is green and the sky is blue, in fact, this is just some sort of global illusion and nothing is really coloured. Or at best, if something really is coloured, it is an item in the mind, a mental image or picture.

I think it was Democritus who said, ‘By convention hot, by convention cold, but in reality atoms and void…’

Yes. Democritus is the standard source for this eliminativist view. As that quotation brings out, it is not just colour that is supposed to be an illusion or only in the mind or a matter of convention. It is also other perceptible properties like heat, tastes, smells, sounds and so on.

How and why did you move from this rather abstruse subject to sex and gender?

I had always been interested in sex differences and the explanation of sex differences – why males and females of our species in particular differ in some trait. Also I had always been interested in issues of free speech and was temperamentally inclined towards an absolutist position about speech. And then, in 2017, the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published a paper called ‘In Defense of Transracialism’, which appeared in the leading journal of feminist philosophy, Hypatia. There was a huge fuss about this paper, which essentially argued that the same courtesies and tolerant attitude granted to a transgender person like Caitlyn Jenner should be extended towards a transracial person like Rachel Dolezal.

The whole message of Tuvel’s paper was very progressive, and you might have thought that, within feminist philosophy, her paper would have been praised. But instead, the opposite happened: it was widely condemned as having the potential to cause great harm to various communities. An open letter appeared signed by many academics, including Judith Butler, the author of Gender Trouble, calling for the paper’s retraction. It was not retracted in the end, fortunately, but it brought home to me very vividly that philosophy at that time had an extremely intolerant side, opposed to academic freedom, which I thoroughly disapproved of.

You mentioned Judith Butler’s book, Gender Trouble. Your book is called Trouble with Gender. Is that a deliberate allusion?

Yes. It is also an allusion to Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham, the British science fiction writer.

You talk about the trouble that Tuvel’s paper caused in academic philosophy. When I was at Oxford in the 2000s, the Philosophy Faculty had a reputation for competitive, no-holds-barred debate. From what I have heard, that was true of many philosophy departments at the time. Is it still the case today? Is frank discussion still possible in university philosophy departments?

Yes, it certainly is, although I think that, over the years, that style of open combat and trying to tear the speaker down has changed. Back in the day, when an invited speaker came to deliver a talk at a colloquium, the attitude of some philosophers was, ‘We have to go into the talk with the aim of humiliating the speaker or destroying his or her ideas, and if we do that, then that is a satisfactory colloquium session.’ Sometimes philosophers went too far in that regard, and the result was that the discipline was less hospitable and welcoming to some people than it should have been.

Now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction: the emphasis is much more on constructive criticism and telling the speaker that his or her paper was excellent and incisive and a great contribution to the topic at hand. There is much more overt praising of speakers at the end of talks than there used to be. And as far as hot-button topics like sex and gender go, unfortunately it is not possible to have a freewheeling discussion without some people getting offended or hurt. As a result, we do not have no-holds-barred discussions about what women are or whether sex is binary.

This timidity came as something of a surprise to me. Philosophers talk a big game. They say, ‘Oh, of course, nothing’s off the table. We philosophers question our most deeply held assumptions. Some of what we say might be very disconcerting or upsetting. You just won’t have any firm ground to stand on after the philosopher has done her work and convinced you that you don’t even know that you have two hands. After all, you might be the victim of an evil demon or be a hapless brain in a vat.’

But when the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing. When there is the real prospect of being socially shamed or ostracised by their peers for questioning orthodoxy, many philosophers do not have the stomach for it.

In your experience, is that true on both sides of the Atlantic?

Yes.

Apart from the trans or gender debate, are there any other issues that cause this amount of friction?

At the moment it is mainly sex and gender. Race is another topic with plenty of no-go zones, in philosophy and elsewhere. Interestingly, in the subdiscipline called the philosophy of race, it is perfectly acceptable to argue for a biological theory of race – that what it is to be black or east Asian or white is to have a certain kind of ancient ancestry, a pure matter of biology, in some broad sense. 

Why is it that this issue of what a person is, or rather, what a woman is, has become such a huge bone of contention among so many people?

That is a good question. I am not sure what the answer is. The question, what is a woman, was asked most famously by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949). And feminist philosophers have been obsessed with the question ever since. But it has never before had the valence that it has now. I suspect that part of the explanation is that in the UK, for example, organisations like Stonewall started hanging their hat on the slogan that ‘trans women are women’. If they had said instead, ‘trans women are trans women’, or ‘trans women deserve to be treated as women’, there is no reason why the issue of what a woman is would have become so contentious. It is quite surreal the way the ‘what is a woman’ question is now used as a kind of ‘gotcha’ question to ask politicians.

In response to this question, for instance, Keir Starmer, the current Labour leader, said in 2021 that it was ‘not right’ to say that only women have a cervix. Then in March this year, he said that, ‘For 99.9 per cent of women, it is completely biological … and of course they haven’t got a penis.’ Finally, in July, he decided that a woman is an ‘adult female’. And as you point out in your book, ‘woman’ was Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2022. Is there a sort of fixation on this question? Why is it always about women?

Of course it is ‘what is a woman?’ – rather than ‘what is a man?’ Not because the ‘woman’ version of the question is harder to answer, but because issues of access to various spaces – sporting competitions, prisons, shelters and so on – are really only an issue for women; there is not a corresponding issue for men. Generally speaking, men could not give a fig about whether trans men are included in men-only sporting contests or use men’s changing rooms or are in the male prison estate. In fact, I think most trans men would very wisely choose to be in the female estate rather than the male estate.

This is one of those rare examples, like the Beatles, where the direction of cultural export goes from the UK to the US. The ‘adult human female’ slogan started in the UK, in 2018, when the infamous billboard went up that quoted the then Google dictionary definition: ‘Woman, wʊmən, noun, adult human female’.

It was only some years later that this made its way over the Atlantic, when Matt Walsh, a conservative commentator who is very popular over here, made a documentary called What is a Woman? The answer that Walsh’s wife gives at the end of the documentary is that a woman is an ‘adult human female’. To get to that rather unexciting point, Walsh interviewed many experts – including, memorably, a gender studies professor – who were completely unable to answer the question coherently.

To sum up, what is really at the heart of the trans debate? What exactly is it about?

That is a good question. There are specific questions or specific issues that divide the so-called gender-critical side from the trans-activist side. One question is about the nature of women and men. What is it to be a woman or a man? Another question is about the nature of sex. Are there two sexes or more than two? Or is sex in some sense socially constructed? Is the notion of sex in good order anyway? Maybe it should be completely junked. And another question is about gender identity. Do we all have gender identities? And is a misaligned gender identity the explanation of why some people suffer distress at their sexed bodies?

There are all these specific issues which are hotly debated. And then, of course, there is the even more contentious issue of how to treat children and adolescents with gender dysphoria – whether to give some of them puberty blockers, for example.

But beyond listing these questions, it is not clear to me that there is some sort of overarching issue which is really what the whole trans debate is about. Everyone sensible in this debate thinks that trans people should be afforded the same dignity and rights as everyone else. They should not be discriminated against, they should receive proper health care, they should be treated with respect in day-to-day life just like their fellow citizens, and if some adults wish to transition, they should be able to.

Is the struggle for trans rights analogous to the historic struggle for gay rights?

No, it is not, because there is no particular right being demanded that trans people lack.

Are there points at which women’s rights and trans rights, whatever these are, will inevitably clash, or do you think there is a way of reconciling them?

I would not put it in terms of a clash of rights, but there certainly are points of conflict. The most obvious of these is in sports. If you are a trans woman and you live your life as a woman and are treated by most people as a woman, it is at least understandable that you would wish to join the women’s team or take part in women’s sporting competitions. On the other side, women have an interest in having female-only categories for many sports. So there is a clear conflict of interest there. Another clear conflict of interest is in the case of prisons.

Let’s talk about your book in a bit more detail. In the ‘acknowledgements’ section, you say your greatest debt is to your wife, Carole Hooven, who was a lecturer on human evolutionary biology at Harvard. In 2021, she published T, which was a popular science book about testosterone. Last year, she wrote an article describing how she was accused of transphobia by certain members of Harvard for explaining on Fox News that sex is binary and biological. To what extent have your wife’s experiences influenced your own interest in the trans (or gender) debate and your views about it?

As a result of the episode you mention, Carole is no longer a lecturer in human evolutionary biology at Harvard. She has a position as an associate in the psychology department, in Steven Pinker’s lab. When this whole affair snowballed, it became apparent that it was not feasible for her to continue teaching in her old department. So she left. Carole’s experiences influenced the book a great deal. In addition to witnessing the backlash against Rebecca Tuvel, Kathleen Stock and other philosophers like Holly Lawford-Smith, I got a ringside seat when it came to Carole’s own cancellation over sex and gender.

That experience made me more determined to write a book on the topic. It is not that I am a particularly courageous person, but it did seem to be extremely unchivalrous to stand by and do nothing when I knew that I had things to say. And many philosophers were promulgating various confusions and mistakes which, I thought, I was in a position to correct.

Where would you put yourself politically?

I am a boring centrist. I have no political affiliation to speak of. I have always voted Democrat in the US. Temperamentally, I think I would really like to be a conservative, but I have never found an intellectually satisfactory way of being one. Socially, I have liberal views of the sort held by most academics.

In your introduction to Trouble with Gender, you write that your book is not about the ‘vitriolic political issues’ associated with the trans debate. Nonetheless, it was refused publication by Oxford University Press, after previously having been accepted. Why do you think OUP refused to publish your book in the end?

This is speculation on my part, but it is worth looking at the immediate history, in particular the fuss over Holly Lawford-Smith’s book Gender Critical Feminism, also published by Oxford University Press. Announcement of its publication produced two petitions of complaint. As I discussed in Quillette, one of these was signed by the OUP Guild (the union representing OUP staff in New York). The other was signed by ‘members of the international scholarly community with a relationship of some kind, or several kinds, to Oxford University Press’. The letters protested against the publication of Lawford-Smith’s book and told OUP to change its procedures so this sort of thing would never happen again.

As for my book, it is not as if OUP should have been surprised by what I actually produced, because I wrote a proposal, eagerly accepted at first, which accurately described the final manuscript. OUP’s single formal complaint against the book, namely that it did not treat the subject in ‘a sufficiently serious or respectful way’, is ludicrous. At least, I hope that readers will find it ludicrous.

Do you think that OUP’s response to your book is a symptom of the way things are going in academia at the moment? Is there a cowardice and an unwillingness to deal with arguments that challenge a particularly entrenched view about things?

Yes, for sure. It is a worrying trend. It is the same phenomenon as the philosophers who talk the talk but do not walk the walk. To put it another way, when academic publishing is subjected to a genuine stress test, it completely fails, even though the advertising beforehand was that it would work perfectly. OUP publishes all sorts of controversial philosophy books, which defend views that other philosophers think are ridiculous, misguided, or completely wrong. Often, in the pages of OUP philosophy books, the author will criticise other philosophers in the most uncompromising terms. It also happens that OUP philosophy books are reviewed by other philosophers in an extremely critical way.

So you might think that OUP would gladly publish a book on a hot topic like sex and gender – maybe that book would get trashed by other philosophers, but this is just the way of academic publishing, and nothing to be ashamed of. That is not what happened.

Your book is designed for a popular rather than an academic audience. Did you intend it to stir up controversy or make inflammatory claims?

No. I knew that some of the claims would be controversial. For example, there is a chapter in which the view that women are adult human females is defended. There is a chapter on sex which defends the orthodox view of what sex is and tries to expose various confusions surrounding this topic. There is a chapter which argues that gender identity, at least as people popularly conceive of it, is a myth. All these are inflammatory claims, but I did not intend to provoke or stir up controversy. No doubt I will, though. The book has eight chapters, and each one will annoy some people.

What does your book contribute to the trans debate that has not been said before?

It is a very different book from, say, Helen Joyce’s Trans or Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls. It deliberately does not take a stand on any social and political issues. It is not written from a feminist or gender critical perspective. It just brings the tools of philosophy to bear on the questions that everyone seems to be asking these days and tries to sort things out. The fact that it is not about social and political issues gives me more room to treat these topics in the detail that they deserve.

I would regard it as a success if readers discovered how you can actually argue about these issues. They do not even have to have to agree with what I say; they just have to see how evidence and argument can be brought to bear on questions like, ‘what is a woman?’ or ‘does everyone have a gender identity?’ Normally, in public discussions of these issues, people do not really argue, in the sense that one side presents evidence and reasons and then the other side counters or presents their own evidence and reasons. They start shouting at each other instead.

What can a philosopher specifically contribute to a debate about sex and gender? Should it not be left to the biologists and psychologists?

I hope that my book demonstrates exactly what a philosopher can bring to the table. Philosophers are good at making crucial distinctions, being relatively clear and precise, and being able to set out arguments in the appropriate way, so that you see why the conclusion follows from the premises. It is not possible to master all academic disciplines in one life, so we need contributions from different specialists. That includes the biologists and the psychologists, but sometimes their discussions of these topics are flawed because they lack a crucial tool from the philosophical toolkit. But it must be admitted that philosophers also have their blind spots and weaknesses.

You observe in your book that ‘a concerning feature of debates around sex and gender is the attempt to prevent distinctions from being made by prohibiting or redefining certain words.’ How far would you argue that sex and gender should be distinguished, and why?

In one way sex and gender should not be distinguished at all, because one of the many senses of the word ‘gender’ is simply ‘sex’. That is, ‘gender’ is sometimes just a synonym for ‘sex’; in this sense, sex and gender are the same. Because ‘gender’ has many other meanings, and to avoid confusion, I think it would be a good idea only to use the word ‘gender’ to mean sex. That is my first point.

My second point is that there are all these other things which we definitely want to distinguish from sex. For example, we want to distinguish being male from being masculine. Everyone going back to the ancient Greeks has seen that there is a distinction here. You can be a feminine male or a masculine female, and one sense of ‘gender’ is as a label for masculinity and femininity. We need to distinguish being male from being masculine, but there is absolutely no reason to use the word ‘gender’ to mark that distinction.

Another distinction we would want to make is that between being female and being a woman. There are numerous females who are neither humans nor adults, so there are females who are not women. On anyone’s view, there is a distinction here. You should not identify being female with being a woman, even if you think that all women are female. Now another sense of ‘gender’ is as a label for the categories man, woman, boy, girl. But again, it is a terrible idea to use the word ‘gender’ to mark this distinction between being female and being a woman.

Another distinction is between being female and having a female gender identity. Assuming we can make sense of the notion of ‘gender identity’ in the first place, we need to distinguish between being female and having a female gender identity, because some males can have a female gender identity, for example. Yet another sense of ‘gender’ is ‘gender identity’. But yet again, it is a bad idea to use the single word ‘gender’ to mark the distinction: we already have the phrase ‘gender identity’ and we should use that instead.

It is sometimes argued that the claim that trans people cannot change gender is incompatible with a humane (or humanist) outlook. Or that to require trans people to live in the sex which they are ‘assigned’ at birth, rather than accepting that they can change, is contrary to their human rights. Therefore, it is argued, to be ‘gender critical’ is fundamentally a right-wing, if not extremist, position, and harsh and oppressive to trans people. What would you say in response to this line of argument?

I am not a gender critical feminist, but it is not part of their position that people should not transition. And if people do transition, it is not part of the gender critical position that they should be discriminated against or their human rights should be reduced or downgraded. If you think of transitioning as it was always thought of, as a palliative measure to deal with gender dysphoria, then assuming that this actually works, at least for some people, it is hard to see what objection there could be to it, because it is an effective medical procedure to deal with a troubling psychological condition. It is not that people transition just for the hell of it or to gain access to women’s spaces. They transition because life has become unbearable living as their natal gender or natal sex.

Like many people on the side of free speech in debates of this kind, you quote from George Orwell’s 1984 in your book. You choose the part where Syme, a worker on the Newspeak dictionary, says,

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words … Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’

In your view, how far is the whole of the trans debate – or gender debate – really a battle about words?

In one way, it is not about words at all. Take the question of what a woman is. That question is not about the word ‘woman’, although of course I have asked it using the word ‘woman’. I am interested in people of a certain kind, women, not in any English words.

But in another way the trans debate is about words. Various trans activist projects concern language: if you can stop people from using various words or get them to use other words or phrases instead, then the various distinctions that the activists do not want to be made, become a lot harder to make. One example of this is the frequent replacement of ‘sex’ with ‘sex assigned at birth’. If you want to get people to stop talking about the fact that we come in male and female varieties, then one excellent way of doing it is to try and enforce a rule where you never say that someone is ‘female’, but instead that she was ‘assigned female at birth’. This has the effect of suggesting that people’s sex is a matter of some doubt or speculation – that maybe no one really knows what sex people are.

Similarly, for expressions like ‘cervix havers’ or ‘uterus havers’ – if you want to avoid the suggestion that any adult female person is a woman, then substituting ‘uterus haver’ for ‘woman’ is an effective way of doing that. Language is extremely important if you are an activist – for the reason that Orwell identified in that quotation.

Do you think that philosophers have a duty to defend words against their destruction?

They have a duty to defend established ways of making valuable distinctions. One very valuable distinction is between males and females. To the extent that people are trying to prevent others from making that distinction, philosophers, I suppose, should step in and say, ‘no, stop, that’s a bad idea’. But that is not to say that anyone will listen to us.

In your experience of academia in the US and elsewhere, how far would you say that free and open enquiry and debate are under threat in today’s environment? 

We are going through a bad patch – I do not think there is any doubt about that. But the pendulum will swing back sooner or later. There are already many signs of pushback; books seem to be coming out all the time explaining what went wrong and how we can correct things. I have a book that just came out called The Identity Trap by the Johns Hopkins political scientist Yascha Mounk, all about the origins of so-called ‘wokeness’ – which is of course closely connected to this present cultural moment and the enthusiasm for cancelling speakers and shutting down certain kinds of speech.

So there is already some momentum in the other direction, and, if history is any guide, these things come in waves and recede eventually. But that does not mean that we should just sit back and do nothing.

Do you hope that your book will help to push the pendulum back in the other direction?

I hope that in a very small way it will widen the Overton window and broaden boundaries of acceptable speech to some extent – whether people agree with the conclusions or not.

The post ‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

The recent burning of the Quran in the Swedish city of Malmo by an Iraqi refugee, Salwan Momika, has caused outrage in many Muslim countries. Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey and others have issued statements condemning the action and have asked Sweden to reconsider its laws protecting freedom of expression. There have been public protests in several cities in these countries, demanding the severance of diplomatic ties with Sweden.

Momika burnt a copy of the Quran on 3^rd September this year, as a protest against Islam. According to the Swedish newspaper, The Local, Momika claimed that his protest was against the Muslim religion, not Muslims, and that the Quran should be banned globally for causing a ‘negative impact’. In contrast, the Saudi Arabia-based Arab News implied that Momika’s act was a cynical attempt to secure his refugee status. In response to his protest, some Muslims in Sweden also attacked local police.

Media outlets in Muslim-majority countries have covered this incident, and others like it, extensively, despite their limited domestic relevance. The media in these countries frame these incidents as a wilful assault on Islam, and portray the doers as malicious. Certainly, the outrage is understandable, given the deep Muslim reverence for the Quran. On the other hand, the strongly negative spin given to these burnings could put the lives of the protesters in danger, and also cause a difficult situation for religious minorities living in the Muslim-majority countries where the articles are published.

Sweden’s Quran burning is just one of several similar acts that have occurred recently across Europe. Far-right groups in Sweden and Denmark have also burnt copies of the Quran during rallies and protests. These incidents provoke intense outrage when covered by the Muslim media. For example, when a far-right activist burnt a copy of Quran in Sweden in 2020, the media outlets in Pakistan and Iran responded with inflammatory language of their own. Whatever the ideological motivations of the different protesters in different cases, the outrage of the Muslim media has been more or less the same.

Take the Pakistani media’s coverage of the recent Quran burning in Sweden as an example. Some local media outlets in Pakistan used the word ‘Maloon’ (‘accursed’) of Momika in headlines and news content. They described his act of burning the Quran as ‘na paak’ (‘impure’) and used the words ‘be hurmati’ (‘disrespectful’) to describe what had happened to the holy book of Islam. This inflammatory language probably has its roots in Pakistan’s stringent blasphemy laws, which consider even mentioning blasphemous words or acts to be blasphemous. However, such biased reporting fosters further intolerance in the country, especially toward religious minorities, who already face grave dangers from false blasphemy allegations. Influential figures in parts of Punjab and Sindh already exploit blasphemy charges as a weapon against minorities.

For instance, Asia Bibi, a Christian woman in Pakistan, was accused of blasphemy in June 2009 after an argument with a group of Muslim women. A year later, she became the first woman sentenced to death under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. In 2020, despite the Supreme Court overturning her conviction, she was forced to flee to Canada in fear for her life. Bibi now lives there in exile with her husband and two children, while three of her children remain in Pakistan.

Bibi’s plight highlights the grave dangers faced by religious minorities under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. The sensationalised coverage of blasphemy cases by the Pakistani media further fans the flames of intolerance, as it has failed to cover these issues responsibly. The disproportionate coverage given to Quran burnings in Europe stands in stark contrast to the lack of attention by the Pakistani media towards domestic issues, such as the Christian community of Faisalabad, who lost their homes in a mob attack on 16 August this year. In that incident, a mob of hundreds attacked Faisalabad over a false blasphemy accusation against two Christian men. The mob burnt churches, looted homes and damaged the properties of people who had paid for them with their life savings.

The Pakistani media rarely highlight the human impact and the stories behind blasphemy accusations and persecuted minorities. Most of their coverage is dominated by the trials and outrage of the Muslim majority over perceived insults to Islam. They give little attention to the perspectives of freethinkers, progressives, atheists and agnostics – even if they tacitly admit their existence through accusations of the harm that such freethinkers allegedly inflict on society and Islam. The media also overlook the plight of Ahmadiyya community, who are living in constant fear in Pakistan. In this context, their extensive coverage of Momika’s Quran-burning in Sweden makes no sense. The Pakistani media’s attitude to this topic shows clearly that their agenda is to stir up intolerance and hatred at home.

Yet this is not only the case in Pakistan. The media in other Muslim countries follow the same trend. The Iranian media are an example. I tried to search news about Momika in Tehran’s Times of Iran. I found that the incident was being reported in a disturbing way. The paper reported that the Iranian government had asked Sweden to deal with Momika and other culprits or extradite them to Islamic states. In another news item, it described Momika as a member of Israel’s spy agency, and alleged that he was on a mission to deflect attention from Israeli crimes in the West Bank.

In contrast to the Tehran Times, the reporting of these incidents by Bangladesh’s Daily Star was quite balanced. It described the incident and the outrage of Muslim world about it without accusing Momika himself of anything. Its coverage of the incidents lacked vivid details about protests or retaliation. This more measured agenda-setting subtly discourages intolerant sentiments from dominating public discourse in Bangladesh. This is probably because of the more secular political environment of the country and the less stringent blasphemy laws, which together allow media organisations in Bangladesh to adopt a balanced approach in their journalism.

In Nigeria, the country with the biggest Muslim population in Africa, the media followed the line taken by the Tehran Times in their coverage of Momika. The country’s leading English newspaper, Vanguard, used words like ‘provocative’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘abominable’ and ‘heinous’ to describe his action.

This type of inflammatory rhetoric and narrative framing reinforces perceived grievances and breeds intolerance among the mass audience of these media outlets. It fuels a sense of collective outrage and offence by portraying incidents like this as intentional affronts to all Muslims, rather than as isolated acts with a specific political agenda, such as protesting against Islam (rather than aiming to attack Muslims). In contrast, the more responsible reporting from outlets like Bangladesh’s Daily Star resists overblown narratives that could incite a backlash.

These examples suggest that the media in Muslim countries face systemic disincentives that hinder responsible reporting on issues that could be considered blasphemous by local laws and society. These countries have zero tolerance for questioning religious dogma. Their journalists often internalise the biases of wider society. There also exist commercial pressures to cater to audience outrage and increase viewership by sensationalising events like the recent Quran burnings.

Despite these constraints, however, building a culture of ethical journalism remains critical. While overnight change is unrealistic, attitudes can gradually be shifted through training journalists in objective reporting, diversifying newsrooms, and cultivating connections with progressive civil society groups.

There is an urgent need for the media in Muslim countries to develop a code of conduct on reporting incidents deemed blasphemous under their laws. They need to make guidelines to ensure balanced, ethical coverage of those incidents, otherwise their hyped-up reporting will endanger lives both at home and abroad. The media have a moral responsibility to address internal biases and overblown narratives when covering such incidents. They must develop a mechanism for internal reflection on such biases, and must clarify and enforce standards to promote ethics in their coverage of these issues. Only then can they cover religious offence responsibly without compromising human rights and bringing any danger to any community locally or internationally.

Every person has the right to protest, but it should be capable of being practised within safe limits. Desecrating the Quran is a dangerous act that some people carry out to express frustration and anger towards Islam, despite the offence that it causes to Muslims. The media’s sensationalised reporting of such incidents often intensifies this danger for protesters. The media also deliberately ignores the perspective of the protester and the challenges they face afterwards.

As a result of the enormous hostility to acts of protest against Islam, whipped up by the media in Muslim-majority countries, even liberals who would theoretically support the protesters’ right to burn the Quran prefer to stay silent, so as to avoid putting their own lives in danger. Thus a culture of fear is created in which all possibility of reasonable discussion and criticism is suppressed.   

No doubt, the road to unbiased coverage upholding human rights in Muslim world will be long. But it must begin with media houses themselves taking an introspective look at how their rhetoric could prove harmful in a long run.

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The post The power of outrage appeared first on The Freethinker.

On 26 October 2018, Ireland voted to remove the archaic criminal law of blasphemy from its constitution. Almost one million people (64.85 per cent of participants) voted, in what Taoiseach Leo Varadkar called a ‘quiet revolution’, to remove the word ‘blasphemous’ from article 40.6.1.i of the Constitution. This had previously stated that ‘the publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.’

The bill to remove blasphemy was signed into law by the president later that year. However, just three years later, the Irish government are introducing a new, even more authoritarian bill that will severely limit free speech, and has the potential to criminalise modern blasphemers. Barring amendment or rejection, this bill is set to become enshrined in Irish law.

Currently being debated in the Seanad, the upper house of the Irish parliament, the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 would update and expand Ireland’s hate speech laws to include incitement to violence or hatred against persons or groups on the basis of protected characteristics, including religion, race, disability and gender. 

The bill contains many provisions that will make the average liberal or civil libertarian’s blood run cold. Under this bill, existing crimes such as assault and vandalism could lead to longer prison sentences if hatred is found to be the motive. According to Section 7, the mere possession of material that the state deems ‘hateful’ could result in citizens being sent to prison for up to five years if their actions are held to be ‘likely to incite violence or hatred’ against a person with protected characteristics. Should the bill it find its way onto the statute books, then, despite the government’s insistence that it includes a provision to ‘protect genuine freedom of expression’, there is little doubt that Ireland would become the ignominious holder of one of the most comprehensive ‘hate speech’ laws, if not the most totalitarian, in Western Europe. 

In April, the bill passed through the Dáil (Ireland’s equivalent of the House of Commons) relatively unscathed. Only 14 of the 160 Dáil members voted against the proposed amendments. Yet its provisions are comprehensive and authoritarian.

The Justice Minister Helen McEntee, who was responsible for the bill, argued that it was necessary in order to discourage the targeting of those with protected characteristics. Her comments were echoed by Pauline O’Reilly, a senator of the Green Party, who told the Seanad that restrictions on free speech were necessary to protect vulnerable people from ‘such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace’. The senator is also reported as saying, using highly emotive language, that ‘the dirty, filthy underbelly of hatred in Irish society’ necessitates ‘the restriction of freedom’.

On the face of it, these proposals may sound like a good idea. Few would oppose laws that protect the rights of individuals, especially if the individual belongs to a persecuted or marginalised group. No ordinary, sensible person would tolerate despicable acts such as racist or misogynistic violence. 

Except that words are not violence. Verbal abuse is not the same as physical abuse. According to those who support hate speech legislation, living in fear of being ‘attacked verbally’ is a restriction on one’s freedom. A rhetorical question commonly deployed by opponents of free speech in this debate is, ‘why is it acceptable to protect freedom of speech for everyone when doing so harms the right of some people, in particular, those with protected characteristics, to live in peace?’ The question is what conclusion should follow from this. Those who support the severe limitations on free speech proposed by the bill would say that it is justified by its alleged ability to protect vulnerable people’s right to ‘live in peace’. But the alternative conclusion would be that everyone has to accept a certain amount of rough-and-tumble, and that no one’s ideas are above criticism. Sometimes, words can even act as a bulwark against physical violence – against which every liberal democracy has numerous laws to protect people.

Clarification is essential when it comes to the application of laws, especially those relating to civil liberties. But tyranny likes grey areas. The bill’s current definition of hatred (clause 2(1)) is vague and tautological:

‘“Hatred” means hatred against a person or a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics or any one of those characteristics.’

This non-definition – ‘“hatred” means hatred against’ – led Thomas Pringle, the Independent TD (MP) for Donegal, to criticise the bill. He noted in a debate in the Select Committee on Justice that one ‘remarkable’ feature of the bill was that ‘hate is not defined in it’. Fundamentally, it is difficult to see how ‘hatred’ or ‘hate speech’, where it does not cross the line into existing criminal offences, such as harassment, libel, death threats or incitement to violence, could really mean anything more than ‘offensiveness’. But whatever the Merseyside police or hardline progressives might think, the idea that being offensive might be worthy of criminalisation is well beyond the current laws of either England or Ireland, and would be an extraordinarily illiberal step. 

Failure to define a crime can potentially lead to anyone being found guilty. When such vague definitions serve as the basis for a conviction, courts often have to base their sentence not only on a person’s actions but also on their beliefs. 

Consider the idea brought forward in the UK by Stella Creasy to make misogyny a ‘hate crime’. For several years the Labour MP has sought to make being motivated by misogyny an aggravating factor in criminal sentencing—with a potential prison sentence of up to seven years if it was determined that the crime was committed by someone with a hatred of women. We already have laws that deal with the most serious of misogynistic crimes, such as sexual assault and domestic abuse. Yet it is strange to think that a violent crime against a woman where the defendant was not motivated by misogyny should automatically be punished less severely than one where he or she was so motivated. If the harm done to the victim is the same in each case, there are real concerns with arguing that the law should categorise specific kinds of beliefs, when they motivate a crime, as making that crime liable to more severe punishment than it would be, had the defendant not been motivated by those kinds of beliefs.

McEntee and other supporters of the bill claim it is necessary to protect minority groups from actual verbal abuse. However a provision deeply buried in the bill indicates that its effects would reach much farther than that. Under Section 10 of the bill, the preparation or possession of material ‘likely to incite violence or hatred’ against people on account of their protected characteristics is a criminal offence punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment, when such preparation or possession is ‘with a view to the material being communicated to the public or a section of the public, whether by [the defendant] or another person’, and ‘with intent’ to incite hatred or violence or ‘being reckless’ as to whether they are incited.  In other words, if you privately possess material that might incite, not even violence, but the more nebulous response of hatred, and you are ‘reckless’ about whether hatred is incited if the material is shared publicly, then you could be guilty of a criminal offence – regardless of whether the material actually results in anyone’s being abused.

An even more chilling provision is then introduced (clause 10(3)): where the defendant is found to have possessed such material, and ‘it is reasonable to assume that the material was not intended for [his or her] personal use’, it is to be presumed ‘that the material [is] not intended for personal use’ unless he or she can prove otherwise. Thus, if the defendant is found to possess material likely to incite hatred, then, if it is reasonable to assume it was not for personal use, then they would be required to prove that it was, in order to escape conviction. In other words, this section, a little over 30 words long, effectively abolishes the presumption of innocence. The burden of proof will shift from the prosecutor to the defendant, on the grounds not of a proved intention, but of what it is ‘reasonable’ to assume the intention was.

As the ‘possession’ clause suggests, this bill, like other hate-speech laws around the world, such as Scotland’s infamous Hate Crime and Public Order Act, does not seek to protect vulnerable people from abstract definitions of hate, but rather is intended to limit what you can say or write. As such, it will curtail legitimate debate and pose a serious threat to free expression. Anything that prevents people from freely holding beliefs not sanctioned by the state, or viewed by the law as ‘dangerous’, is a threat to a free and liberal society. The idea of an informed citizenship is anathema to authoritarians.

As noble as they sound, laws against hate speech do not promote equality. They give victims an artificial sense of justice, but in reality, they do little to address the issues that have led to the supposed crime in the first place. If Irish lawmakers want to reduce prejudice against protected characteristics, they must abandon this bill and focus on education. Knowledge increases tolerance and acceptance. The irony is that this can only be achieved through the free exchange of ideas – which is exactly what this law is intended to prevent.

In The Gulag Archipelago (1973), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn points out that people are unaware that they are complicit in acts of wrongdoing because dogmatic adherence to an ideology seems to justify their actions. In the case of Ireland, an ideology of identity that promises to protect minority groups from offence is allowing its adherents to hide their illiberal behaviour under the guise of moral righteousness. 

If Ireland is to remain a free country, it is essential that this bill be rejected in its entirety. A copy of Solzhenitsyn’s book should be left on the desk of every member of parliament. 

For a bibliography of our articles on free speech and free thought, see: Free Speech in the Freethinker.

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By Western ideological standards, Cardinal Joseph Zen, the former Roman Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong, would hardly be considered a progressive. On social issues, he has previously opposed legislation extending anti-domestic violence laws to same-sex couples. On liturgical matters, he is a staunch defender of the pre-Second Vatican Council Tridentine Latin mass. At the level of Vatican ecclesiastical politics, he pals around with the likes of the late Cardinal George Pell, who aside from being doctrinally conservative, was also implicated in shielding paedophile priests in Australia.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Hong Kong pop singer, Denise Ho. So outspoken has she been about LGBT rights, at least by Asian standards, that she was once banned from performing in Malaysia over her LGBT identity. She has campaigned for gay marriage rights in Hong Kong. She once said, ‘[w]e can be openly gay as someone else can be Christian or Muslim,’ seemingly implying that homosexual and religious identities are mutually exclusive.

If Zen and Ho were in the West instead of in Hong Kong, it is likely that they would have nothing to do with one another except as adversaries. For many decades now, self-declared ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ in the West have fought never-ending culture wars over various social and identity-related issues. These include religion, rights related to sexual orientation and identity, reproductive rights, race, language, national identity (in the UK’s case, this is particularly apparent in relation to Europe) – you name it.

Political and culture-war affiliations in the West are linked increasingly with social as opposed to economic identities. Particularly in places like places like the United States and Australia, the traditional alliance between secular progressives and religious voters from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and those who emphasise economic justice over issues of personal morality, is unravelling. Centre-left political alliances have attracted less religious support.

But Zen and Ho are not in the West. Far from falling in with Western culture war faultlines, they have made common cause in the fight for democracy and autonomy in Hong Kong. Zen is an old warrior on this front, having been involved as early as 2003 in backing mass protests against China’s first, aborted attempt to impose national security laws on Hong Kong. In addition to her LGBT rights advocacy, Denise Ho became identified with Hong Kong’s democracy movement when she openly supported Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement, which involved mass protests for genuine universal suffrage.

Then came the protests of 2019. What started as mass protests against the Hong Kong government’s proposed legislation allowing for extradition to China expanded to a full-blown resistance movement for democracy and against authoritarian police brutality. As the period of the protests lengthened from days to weeks to months, the number of protesters being arrested mounted. From the outset, organisations were set up to provide various forms of assistance to those hurt or arrested by Hong Kong’s increasingly authoritarian regime.

Once such organisation was the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which was named after the date (12 June) of the first major episode of indiscriminate police brutality during the 2019 protests. According to its website, the fund provided ‘humanitarian and relevant financial support to persons who are injured, arrested, attacked or threatened with violence’; the support provided was primarily ‘legal, medical, psychological and emergency financial assistance’.

The fund was overseen by a board of trustees. Its members included Joseph Zen and Denise Ho. The fact that Zen and Ho were, by Western standards, ideological opposites on culture wars issues, did not appear to be a problem for them in co-operating on the cause of democracy in Hong Kong and resistance to authoritarian violence. In overseeing the fund, they stood together, they were arrested together, and they were convicted together.  

In the democracy movement, and the resistance to China’s authoritarian overreach in a Hong Kong that had been promised at least 50 years of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ as part of the deal in China’s resumption of sovereignty, Zen and Ho’s co-operation was not unique. Benny Tai, the initiator of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, is a devout Christian who contributed to a Chinese language anti-LGBT rights book. Yet he is currently on trial under Hong Kong’s National Security Law with LGBT rights figures such as Ray Chan and Jimmy Sham for their joint involvement in a 2020 informal primary election.

The well-known, and now also jailed, Hong Kong democracy activist, Joshua Wong, had his run-ins with his socially conservative father. Yet his father was also the one who inculcated pro-democracy ideas into him from a young age (link in Chinese), and was highly supportive of his activism. And prior to its disbandment in 2021, an umbrella organisation called the Civil Human Rights Front organised many of Hong Kong’s largest protests in favour of democracy and against the erosion of human rights. Its member organisations include a diverse assortment of religious, feminist and LGBT rights groups, as well as political parties and anti-Communist trade unions.

So what kept Zen, Ho and these various groups, whose views on issues in the Western culture wars varied wildly, working together, right up until the point when China imposed a draconian National Security Law on Hong Kong in July 2020 to crack down upon resistance? This is a question that has not really been discussed and analysed within Hong Kong itself. It was as if the fact of co-operation between these individuals and groups to resist China’s authoritarian overreach was taken as a given. Nobody made a big deal about any ‘cross-ideological grand alliances’. And yet, on further reflection, whether conceptually or as a matter of factual circumstances, these people’s and groups’ decision to put aside the culture wars and face a greater adversary together as one makes sense.

Conceptually speaking, in order to have a culture war, one needs an environment that tolerates it. This would involve the existence of, or even respect for, freedom of speech, assembly, association and conscience, as well as a democratic government obliged to take account of the strength in numbers that culture warriors claim to represent. But when these basic freedoms are under threat and are undermined by an authoritarian government, everyone, no matter what his or her opinions, is at risk. It therefore made sense for those with ideological differences in Hong Kong to work together to resist authoritarian attempts to silence them all.

The campaigners’ concerns about being silenced are justified by the facts. China has a track record of cracking down on civil society groups of all stripes. It has cracked down on both Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as on Uyghur and Hui Muslims. It has cracked down on LGBT advocacy groups. It has cracked down on civil society generally to the point of collapse. And in the case of Hong Kong, the fears of being silenced were realised. Since China’s full-scale crackdown against the city started in 2020, at least 58 civil society groups have folded, and those that remain have become muted.

China’s programme of cracking down on diversity of opinion and dissent does not stop at its own borders. It seeks to silence dissidents living abroad with surveillance and threats. Its ‘United Front’ operations in the West are little more than influence, interference and infiltration operations designed to undermine democratic processes. Its intimidation tactics have in the last year or two started escalating to the point of going after families of popularly elected Members of Parliament who have been critics of China. This has happened in places such as Britain (creating obstacles to the university applications of Iain Duncan-Smith’s children) and Canada (attempts at intimidating the family of Michael Chong MP). 

Despite the real threat that China presents to the West’s relatively free and democratic way of life, many participants in Western public debates remain consumed by their obsession with the culture wars. If anything, the tenor of the disputes appears to have deteriorated since around the mid-2010s, coinciding with the onset of Trumpism and, in the UK, the Brexit movement. What had once at least been relatively reasoned if ideological arguments over controversial issues has now descended into puerile name-calling, with terms like ‘woke’, ‘fascist’ and ‘TERF’ being bandied about almost at random. And on the question of the threat posed by China, ideological cultural warriors have used it either to go down the ethno-nationalist ‘yellow peril’ path (eg ban all overseas students from China) or to engage in insidious anti-Western whataboutery (eg dismissing atrocities against Uyghurs because Australia treated its indigenous people poorly).

These exacerbated divisions and name-calling merely play into China’s hands. Moreover, the continuation and intensification of the Western culture wars has in itself taken an authoritarian turn, in which both sides manifest a lack of tolerance and respect for opposing viewpoints. The way the China issue has played out in the context of the culture wars, with the two sides as usual adopting equally extreme positions – either in support of a racialised approach in dealing with China or in defence of its authoritarianism – is but a case in point.

This is fertile ground for China to push its anti-democratic agenda beyond its borders, such as through disinformation campaigns. The West’s ability to resist is weakened by its own internal obsessions and intolerances. And while China cannot necessarily impose itself on the West as quickly or as directly as it has done in Hong Kong, it has shown itself capable of establishing firm footholds and exercising control over apparently democratic processes. Take, for example, China’s secret funding and compromising of candidates for elected office in Canada, its disinformation campaigns about the political system in Australia, its illegal funnelling of political donations to both major parties in New Zealand, and its suppression of Hong Kong dissident protests in the UK. Activities such as these are stepping stones towards displacing the Western liberal democracy-based world order led by the US, and replacing it with a China-led authoritarian world.

There is a real risk that by the time the bickering cultural warriors realise that their freedoms and rights are being undermined by a greater force, it could be too late.

This is where the examples of Joseph Zen, Denise Ho, Benny Tai, Ray Chan, Jimmy Sham, Joshua Wong and his father, and various ideologically diverse groups in the now-defunct Hong Kong Civil Human Rights Front, are instructive for the West. Of course, it may be said that despite their refraining from fighting culture wars and standing in solidarity in resisting authoritarian China, they have suffered setback after setback. What is the point of cross-ideological solidarity if it makes no difference in the end?

Except it very probably did make a difference. China’s push to erode and ultimate destroy Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms did not just start in 2019. It had been taking place for many years under the radar, even at local community levels. By putting culture wars to one side in the face of a common threat, pro-democracy Hong Kong activists and groups with divergent views on social issues played an important role in holding the line against China, until the dam broke upon the state’s full-scale crackdown in 2020. This crackdown has been all-encompassing, ranging from mass arrests and the jailing of dissidents, to the dismantling of civil society groups, education curricula and electoral systems, to the removal of politically sensitive books from libraries, to the general silencing of all criticism of authority by ordinary people.

Hong Kong is under China’s sovereignty and is ultimately subject to its authoritarian whims. The odds were therefore stacked against Hongkongers even though they were relatively united. The situation is different for Western democracies, where China needs more time and must use less direct methods to gain influence.

Where those engaged in socio-political discourse in the West are willing to set aside their internal differences to resist China’s efforts, they stand a much better chance at keeping China’s creeping authoritarianism at bay than Hongkongers ever had. In contrast, however, for Western democratic societies that choose to continue to allow themselves to be consumed by the culture wars, China’s efforts to undermine and, potentially, control them will be left relatively unopposed. The West’s inward-looking obsession with the culture wars, or just inertia, has, for example, enabled the Chinese government to open up secret police stations in many Western countries to facilitate the intimidating of its critics there. It is only in the last year or so that they are being discovered and gradually looked into by Western governments.

For those in the West who are caught up in arguing ceaselessly about their ideological differences, trying to set all that aside and work together to resist a more nefarious force may appear difficult. But the likes of Joseph Zen and Denise Ho have shown that it can and should be done. Internal squabbles may be a tolerable or even acceptable part of political discourse when democratic ways of life are not under threat. However, they become a luxury that one can ill afford when the distraction they afford opens the door for authoritarian encroachment.

As China becomes increasingly assertive in imposing its influence and control around the world, it is high time for the voices on both sides of the culture wars to lay aside their differences and give solidarity a chance. Hong Kong has shown the world how, even in the most difficult of circumstances, solidarity between erstwhile adversaries matters when confronted by an authoritarian giant. If Hongkongers can do it, then so can those in the West.

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Introduction

An expert on human rights might seem to be an unlikely target for censorship by a British university. Yet this is what happened to Steven Greer, emeritus Professor of Human Rights at Bristol Law School and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Royal Society of Arts, in the years leading up to his retirement in 2022. As reported by the Free Speech Union and elsewhere, in October 2020, the president of the Bristol University Islamic Society (BRISOC) complained to the authorities that Greer’s module on ‘Islam, China and the Far East’, on the Human Rights in Law, Politics and Society (HRLPS) unit, was ‘Islamophobic’. In February 2021, despite being warned not to go public about a matter still under investigation, BRISOC set up an online petition that featured a photograph of the professor next to a sign saying ‘Stop Islamophobic teaching’.

In July 2021, Greer was cleared of all allegations after an independent enquiry lasting five months. Nevertheless, he claims, some of his colleagues in the Law School effectively prevented him from teaching the module again in the last of his thirty-six years there. Moreover, ‘Although the complaint [against Greer] was not upheld,’ as the university publicly admitted, the latter also ‘recognised BRISOC’s concerns and the importance of airing differing views constructively.’ Greer argues that the university’s conduct ‘sent a clear signal’ that he was ‘guilty of Islamphobia in spite of having been officially exonerated.’ His latest book, Falsely Accused of Islamophobia: My Struggle Against Academic Cancellation, which contains a full record of his ordeal, was published by Academica Press on 13 February 2023.

In January 2022, as a direct consequence of the BRISOC scandal, Greer was appointed to a non-stipendiary Visiting Research Fellowship at the Oxford Institute for British Islam, a fledgling UK charity whose stated aim is to develop ‘an authentic Islam that is rooted in and relevant to life in 21st century Britain…and which has taken on board the useful nuances and good personality of British life and culture without compromising any of the fundamentals of the faith.’ He later became OIBI’s Research Director.

I met Greer over tea in Piccadilly, London. In the interview which follows, he talks to me about the origins and course of the campaign of vilification against him, including its allegations of Islamophobia, and his response. We explore the reasons for the failure of his fellow academics and Bristol University to defend his right to responsible scholarly discussion about Islam.

Greer also looks back on his youth in Belfast during the Troubles, his early research into counter-terrorism in Northern Ireland, and his assessment of Prevent, the UK government’s controversial counter-extremism strategy after 9/11. Finally, we consider two knotty problems: how Islam can be best integrated into and accepted by modern British society, and how we in the UK can move beyond the polarising mindset of the culture wars.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

Freethinker: Do you have any religious or spiritual beliefs?

Steven Greer: I would describe myself as a freethinker – one who inclines towards classic liberal values: human rights, democracy, rule of law, and open markets with a touch of Oriental mysticism and Buddhism. I have a sense of the spiritual, if you like. But my interest in Buddhism is open-ended – it is more about contemplation and meditation. This is possible without endorsing its finer points, except perhaps for the basic ideas of impermanence and insubstantiality.

Could you tell us a bit about your background and where you grew up?

I come from Belfast and grew up in a very devout, liberal Methodist family. My parents were not very political and were uncommonly anti-sectarian. I suppose that gave me the opportunity to think for myself. I went to a state grammar school. Looking back on that, the thing I value most was that our teachers also encouraged us to think for ourselves.

Today, would you see yourself as Irish or British?

I am British-Irish or Irish-British – I have had both passports for decades. That was another thing that was unusual in my upbringing, because my father in particular always insisted that we recognised our Irish identity. It has become fashionable recently for more Protestants in Northern Ireland, and people further afield, to claim Irish citizenship, particularly because of Brexit. I was ahead of the game. However, I am proud of both my British and Irish identity, and I recognise the strengths and flaws of each. In both cases, there have been negative and positive elements.

What are your research interests?

My research was initially motivated by my experience of growing up in the Troubles, which blighted my teenage years. There were gangs roaming the streets, you could easily get caught up in fights, and you could be blown up or shot at a moment’s notice. I was very perplexed by this: why was it happening? How had I ended up in such a dysfunctional society? I yearned to find out more. I studied law at Oxford from 1976-79, but I was disappointed by it intellectually. It was very dry and limiting. Then I went to the LSE to study sociology, and then back to Belfast for a PhD in counterterrorism law.

I ended up writing a book about the ‘supergrass’ system in Northern Ireland: a series of trials in the 1980s on the evidence of informants, which was deeply controversial on both sides of the sectarian divide. It was one of the few things that, in the counter-terrorist framework, both Loyalists and Republicans vehemently objected to, partly because they were very worried about it decimating their ranks. It may well have done. But it did so in a way that was difficult to defend by any credible conception of civil liberties and the rule of law: there were not enough legal controls, there was little corroboration, and it all happened in a non-jury context.

My intention was to have a career that straddled law and sociology. But there were more jobs in academic law than sociology. I was initially obliged to teach traditional legal subjects. In the mid-1990s, however, the law school at the University of Bristol was mildly criticised in a teaching review for not having a human rights course. So I said, ‘I’ll do that.’ It was not until 2005 that I had the first opportunity to design a unit that fully coincided with my interests. This was a socio-legal or social science course, which I called ‘Human Rights in Law, Politics and Society’, and which provided a platform from which to observe global current affairs through the lens of human rights, or vice versa.

Where does the study of Islam fit into all of this?

In the post-Cold War context of 2005, in addition to western liberalism, the two biggest kids on the block were political Islam, which had been on the rise since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, plus China and the Far East. Islam, China and the Far East are ideologies or a ‘geopolitical spaces’ which offer self-conscious alternatives to Western liberalism. The fact that there was a rapidly expanding literature about human rights in all these contexts made it possible to add a module on Islam, China and the Far East to the HRLPS course, which I then taught without incident for 13 years.

The fact that I have served the University of Bristol productively and faithfully for 36 years makes my experience all the more bitter. I had some of the best students in the law school – the more reflective and more thoughtful ones who wanted to look over the legal parapet and see the lie of the land beyond. Many of them were Muslim. Nobody had any issue with the unit or module whatsoever until, almost out of the blue, the University of Bristol Islamic Society (BRISOC) decided everything I had been saying about Islam was Islamophobic.    

It is important to separate the intellectual debate about Islam and human rights from the scandal that developed. BRISOC lodged a complaint with the University in October 2020 without bringing it before any of the law school’s half a dozen or so informal mechanisms first. It was signed by the president of BRISOC, a medical student, who was ostensibly acting on behalf of anonymous students, but who had never attended my course himself.

Ultimately, after a vitriolic campaign by BRISOC on social media, and after a senior academic at the University of Bristol had investigated my conduct, in July 2021, I got a very gratifying email saying I had been completely exonerated of all charges [see a fuller account in Greer’s conversation with the Bristol Free Speech Society, and in his book].

However, I was told I was not allowed to tell anybody except my family and close friends until I, the university, and BRISOC had drafted a joint statement, which never happened. There was then the question of what I was to teach in my last year before my retirement in 2022. I wanted to deliver the topic on Islam, China and the Far East again, to prove that I had been vindicated. But two junior colleagues, who were due to take the unit over, decided to remove the module from the syllabus, precisely for the reasons the enquiry had rejected. This decision was immediately approved by the Law School. I then went on sick leave for three months because there was no way I could have gone back into the Law School with a cloud like that hanging over my reputation and integrity.

In October 2021, after BRISOC had unsuccessfully appealed against my exoneration, the University issued its final public statement, which said, ‘the complaint has not been upheld…[but] we recognise BRISOC’s concerns and the importance of airing differing views constructively.’ It also said that my course had been altered to respond to the new conveners’ ‘wish to deliver the material in a context that is both broad-reaching and respectful of sensitivities of students on the course.’ I was absolutely furious because, in spite of my exoneration, this statement made it look as if I had been let off on a technicality, and that there might have been substance to BRISOC’s complaint after all. This was not only a smear on my reputation and integrity; it compounded the risk that BRISOC’s campaign posed to my physical safety.

When my sick leave ended, the Law School and the University also declined to authorise my return to work and in fact obstructed it.

Did your two colleagues who decided to cut your module give reasons for their decision?

I was told expressly in an email that it was to avoid further complaints and to prevent ‘othering’ Muslim students. This was, of course, totally in defiance of my exoneration.

What were BRISOC’s charges against you?

They claim that everything the authoritative academic literature says about Islam, particularly about Islam and human rights – which is all I was discussing in the class – is Islamophobic.

Let me give you an example. It is universally accepted that in its early history, the Islamic faith spread very rapidly through war and conquest in the first instance, driven mostly by material motives – power and booty, basically. And then it stabilised through trade and conversion. Within a few decades of Mohammed’s death, a huge Muslim empire had been established extending from the shores of what is now Portugal to the Himalayas. BRISOC claims that to make such an observation is Islamophobic. Yet there is not a scholar or historian who knows anything about the history of Islam anywhere in the world who would dispute it. BRISOC also claims that it is Islamophobic to observe that traditional Islam does not regard men and women as truly equal. Yet, according to the Qur’an, a man can have four wives, but a woman can have only one husband. That is plainly unequal. On divorce, children also typically go to the husband, and not to the wife.

What was BRISOC’s response to these points?

They have no answer. That is precisely the point. And it graphically illustrates the current crisis of academic ‘cancel culture’: the people who want to take their opponent down through vilification and victimisation do not want to engage in debate about the substance of the issues themselves. They just want to say, ‘You are a racist, Islamophobe, transphobe, etc. – because you have said things we do not like, that we think are Islamophobic, transphobic, homophobic, and so on.’ But if you ask them to tell you why something you have said is Islamophobic, their response is, ‘We are not going to tell you – it’s just the way it is.’ There is no debate. If we had had a debate I could easily have demonstrated how ignorant BRISOC is about the history of their own faith.

What is your view about using cartoons of Mohammed as a teaching aid in a lecture theatre at a university? Have you ever done so, or would you have done so?

No. It is obviously very dangerous. There is a huge risk even if, like the unfortunate US Art history teacher Professor Erika Lopez Prater, you take great care and only show representations of Mohammed painted by a highly respected medieval Muslim scholar for devotional reasons. Professor Lopez effectively lost her job for doing so.

We seem to be in a strange situation where academics and university administrators who are not Muslim are themselves suppressing people who want to discuss Islam. How have we got into this situation?

Fear – of two kinds. One is the fear of some kind of violent reprisal. But I do not think this is the dominant one. The most prominent is the fear, on the part of university administrators, of being seen as hostile to a minority, Muslims in my case, and of losing income from students as a result. It is as brutal as that. We have not used the term ‘woke’ in our conversation yet. But that is what it is.

On the subject of ‘woke’, what is your experience of the ‘culture wars’ and ‘cancel culture’ at university?

What the University of Bristol has done to me is a classic example of ‘wokeism’ and cancel culture. It is based upon many of the classic features, for example, the attitude that ‘we must be so concerned for and so sympathetic to (certain) minorities that they can never be criticised for wrongdoing. Whatever they say, whatever complaints they have, must be taken at face value and those who have offended them must be sanctioned.’ That is exactly what happened in my case. The university’s attitude seems to have been, ‘BRISOC was offended by your teaching and although you were cleared of wrongdoing we are still going to bend over backwards to placate them, we are going to take the module off the syllabus and you are effectively going to be frozen out for the remainder of your career.’

The ‘remainder of my careeer’ happened to be a very short time span. But had I been a younger man, less well advanced in my career, it would have been much more costly for me to have taken the stand I did. In fact, I probably would not have done so. I probably would just have capitulated myself.

Whose opinion are university administrators worried about?

They seem to be most worried about the opinion of angry militants and their supporters on the illiberal or ‘regressive’ left who dominate the social sciences, humanities, law and the arts in British universities. I have seen this perspective gain currency over the course of my career. As a result, I am no longer sure where I am now myself on the political spectrum. I spent most of my adult life on the centre left. I was, for example, a member of the Labour Party for 30 years, until I left in 2013, when I saw the leftward direction the party was taking.

I think that, in British universities, there has been a drift over the past decade or more, towards greater extremism, less tolerance, a greater willingness to vilify and victimise opponents, and to regard them as enemies rather than colleagues with a different, though legitimate, point of view. When I first arrived at Bristol, most of the staff were centre left politically, but academically conservative. But without my fully realising it, the whole institution has been shifting further and further towards the left, particularly over the past decade or so. Colleagues whose views were centre-right were squeezed out of the Law School. Life was made so uncomfortable for them that they moved elsewhere.

You might have thought of the tradition of Western scholarship in all fields, humanities and sciences, as being about the disinterested pursuit of knowledge – that this should be the ideal of liberal education. How do academics today who are so far on the left reconcile their dogmatic views with this idea of disinterested scholarship? Or do they not think that such a thing exists anymore?

Since they will not engage in these debates, it is difficult to say. But I think, from reading the literature and from what I know about some of my own former colleagues who are on that wavelength, that they view ‘disinterested scholarship’ as itself an obstacle to the ‘liberation’ of those oppressed minorities whose ‘emancipation’ they seek to facilitate.

Are the academics themselves in these oppressed minorities?

Sometimes, but usually not. Typically, they are people who regard themselves as the ‘allies’ of putatively subordinate or oppressed groups, and who are trying to fight their battles for them. One of the grievances I have with this is that, quite often and quite plainly, people who belong to these so-called ‘oppressed minorities’ do not subscribe to the political profile that the ‘wokes’ want to impose upon them. The ‘wokes’ want them to be angry, hostile and aggressively asserting a sectional identity. They do not want them to integrate. And anyone who belongs to such a minority but does not subscribe to this ideology is simply regarded as a traitor to the cause.

Take my case, for example. One of the questions it raises is why it happened when it did. One of the triggers seems to have been that I am a vocal defender of the government’s Prevent counterterrorism strategy. The people who regard me as their enemy had been trying to discredit me for this reason for some time. In 2018, some colleagues from another university denounced me and one of my Bristol colleagues on twitter as racist and Islamophobic because we publicly defended Prevent. Another of my own Bristol colleagues then jumped on the bandwagon and retweeted the denunciation, adding that we were suffering from ‘white psychosis’. We complained to the Law School, arguing that it should not tolerate one of its own staff falsely denouncing other colleagues as racist and Islamophobic, and endorsing a demand that they be sacked as unfit to work at any academic institution. Nothing was done about it. The colleague in question is still in post and has, in fact, since been promoted.

Is there any evidence that the Prevent strategy has increased Islamophobia?

No. The reason is that hardly anybody knows about it. The activists are hyper-aware of it. But the general public, including Muslims, generally have not heard of it.

The other thing that has happened in academic life, which is a source of great dismay to me, is the prostituting of social science. What I mean by this is that social science has become a vehicle for prejudice. Studies are being conducted and published which have no scientific credibility. Typically, those involving surveys do not employ random sampling but are driven by a self-selected group of people who tend to share the objectives of those who have conducted the survey. So the entire exercise is constructed in a manner which confirms the prejudices of the researchers.

One of the few randomly selected surveys about public attitudes towards Prevent found, for example, that very few Muslims knew about it. That knocks on the head the claim that Prevent is turning Muslims into a suspect community, and fuelling Islamophobia.

The reasoning of the anti-Prevent movement is also a classic exercise in illogicality. The argument goes like this: ‘Prevent is Islamophobic and racist. Therefore, anyone who denies that it is Islamophobic and racist, must themselves be Islamophobic and racist.’ Any logician would tell you that this is a logical fallacy, because the premise – that ‘Prevent is Islamophobic and racist’ – is precisely what is at issue.

You could argue that there are many logical fallacies in the ‘woke’ approach.

Yes – it is based on prejudice. The tragedy is that it warps something that is actually, on a more sensible interpretation, very worthy. Like many, I am in favour of social justice, inclusivity, diversity and equity in the academy and everywhere else, but not on ‘woke’ terms. However, according to the ‘wokes’, if you have a conception of social justice that differs from theirs, you are the enemy and part of the problem, not part of the solution. Therefore, you have to be silenced, not debated with.

The Oxford Institute for British Islam is a young organisation. Could you tell us a bit about it?

The Provost and originator of the OIBI, Dr Taj Hargey, originally from South Africa, is the imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation. He wants to promote a liberal and progressive version of Islam globally, and particularly in Britain. His wife, Dr Jacqueline Woodman, is a Unitarian Christian and gynaecologist. The idea behind OIBI is to establish a think tank and research academy that can study and debate Islam in the UK and promote a liberal conception of the faith. I was originally invited to become OIBI’s first non-stipendiary visiting research fellow and later became its first Research Director.    

The profile and position Muslims have in Britain is primarily for them to determine. But those of us who are not Muslim should help them to address this challenge in a way that is positive for everybody. Muslims have the prime responsibility to deal with the issues of Islamism, jihadism and the threat of terrorism, because only they can authoritatively demonstrate their inconsistencies with any legitimate interpretation of Islam.

What is the future of Islam in Britain?

Religions can be both forces for good and for bad. The key lies in how they are interpreted and what is done with them. Islam is no exception. The message of the Oxford Institute is that Islam takes on distinctive forms according to the environment in which it is found.

Like Christianity?

Yes. Therefore the challenge for organisations like OIBI is to try to mould both Islam and its environment – a kind of autopoiesis or symbiosis. The precise details are matters for negotiation, consideration and reflection.

Muslims are here in this country to stay. They are our neighbours and friends. Nobody could seriously think, and it would be terrible if they did, that they should be expelled as Jewish people once were. The challenge is to ensure they manage to live here in a way that is decent, fair, makes them feel at home, and contributes to society in a way that we can all appreciate and understand. A particular feature of this challenge is to find ways of persuading younger Muslims that they can have an authentic Islamic faith and still be part of Western liberal democratic society.

How can we in Britain move beyond the polarisation of the culture wars?

One of the lessons I have learned from my own, very sour experience is that when people try to shut you down, you should respond by saying more, not less. But finding ways of doing so can become more difficult as a result.

See also: Daniel Sharp reviews Greer’s book.

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I write this piece about freedom of speech from the perspective of someone who has had to make difficult decisions about who can and cannot speak. As a Vice Chancellor I was accused of Islamophobia for closing an Islamic prayer room and of being soft on terror for allowing a so-called ‘hate preacher’ to speak. I had to deal with demands for safe spaces, for bans on Israelis and Holocaust deniers, and with claims that ‘academic freedom’ gave academics the right to comment on anything. I learned that dealing with freedom of speech issues is difficult and that we do not always have the right framework or language to enter into a constructive conversation.

I assume that most of those who object to certain types of speech, who demand safe spaces, run no-platforming campaigns, wish to exclude people from some countries, demand bans on particular religious speakers, or those that have certain opinions on gender and other controversial topics, do so because they honestly think that they are doing the right thing and that these speakers represent a real threat to their vision of what a better world might be. Simply saying that they (those that would ban) are wrong is unlikely to get us very far. Labelling issues as ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke’ simply adds a layer of ideological adherence.

We often speak the language of rights. With rights often come duties: my right to be safe on the road comes with a duty to drive safely and a legal constraint not to go above 70 miles per hour. What duties come with the right to freedom of speech, and whose freedom of speech should we be concerned with? Voltaire (if it was he) has set a high standard: ‘I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ According to this famous quotation, freedom of speech concerns both my right to speak, but also the equal right of those I disagree with. Perhaps Voltaire could have added, ‘and we have a duty to listen courteously to each other.’ A right to speak is not worth much if we can only speak to ourselves, or those we agree with. I would argue that, alongside the right to speak, we should set out the duty to listen and, if we disagree, a right, perhaps a duty to say that we disagree.

Speech can cause or lead to real physical and mental harm. Most pogroms, lynchings, gay-bashings and racially motivated acts of violence start with words – whether drunken words in the pub, or demagogues on a platform. However, the proposition that we should ban all critical words has many dangers of its own: repression often starts with banning words. At the outer limit, speech that directly incites violence against others should be banned: there is neither a right to incite harm, nor a duty to listen to such speech. That decision is relatively easy. However, there is speech that attacks particular lifestyles, and may lead to harm by creating a negative perception of that lifestyle. We may have a duty to listen to such speech, in order to refute it.

Ultimately I am asking a question about which leads to a better society: banning speech that I do not like, or allowing it and trying to refute it. Banning does not abolish, it merely drives the sentiments into spaces where they are not challenged and may flourish. The words of a vaccine-denier, a homophobe, a misogynist or religious fundamentalist may cause harm; however greater harm may come from banning, both by driving such speech underground where it will not be countered, and by normalising speech bans.

Tolerant debate is not an automatic part of human culture. There have only been brief windows where it has flourished during the tens of thousands of years of humankind’s existence (for example, in classical Greece and since the Enlightenment) . Those brief periods of openness have produced the greatest flowerings of our understanding of our world and universe. Such examples suggest that the onus should be on those that want to ban or stifle topics to explain and justify why it is so important and beneficial to do so, rather than on those who want to preserve a culture of free speech.

As tolerance and engagement in courteous debate do not arise spontaneously, we need to create the environment for them to develop, and limit the existence of environments which promote and encourage intolerance. That means encouraging the skills of listening and debating. The environment I was brought up in treated argument as a sport: we would argue for the sake of arguing, sometimes for a position we did not hold. The argument mattered, not the arguer. Most of those I met at university had similar backgrounds, we stayed up late arguing. We cared, we had political and social convictions, but we also loved to argue. We believed that ‘the clash of ideas brings forth truth.’ Either I won the argument, or I lost, but had learned something, changed my mind and therefore had won knowledge. Something has changed in recent years. Identities and ideas have become more closely aligned, people have identified themselves with an ideology or belief system, and critiquing someone’s ideas has become viewed as an attack on the person. More people have come to University from a wider variety of backgrounds – a good thing. Many of them have come from backgrounds where argument and exposure to a variety of ideas is not the norm, indeed backgrounds where close adherence to a particular set of beliefs is the norm and it is seen as outrageous to attack the ideas.

We cannot expect those who have come from backgrounds where the opportunities to engage in debate and play with ideas are limited, or discouraged, suddenly to embrace the challenge, particularly if they feel their very identity is under attack. I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of ‘safe spaces’ for ideas. Ideas should be tested, questioned, developed and adopted or rejected. However, I have been fortunate in growing up in a safe space where new and challenging ideas were regularly introduced, and in the mutual understanding that a challenge to my ideas was not a challenge to me.

For those who have not had that fortune perhaps we should create safe spaces, with the proviso that they are there so that people can grow out of them. A safe space should not be forever. One of the challenges for Britain’s university system is how to bring together institutions based on open critical discussion with a changed student population which has different cultural experiences and assumptions to those that have hitherto been the norm. Indeed, students from backgrounds where debate is not the norm are even challenging assumptions about the purpose of the university: is it a gateway to a qualification and job, or a time and place for testing ideas and assumptions? I think that being at university without having your ideas tested is an opportunity wasted. We cannot force people to discuss and debate. We can, however, make discussion and debate a normal part of our culture, deliberately create the opportunities for it to happen, and be explicit that when you go to university you should expect to have your ideas challenged.

When I let a ‘hate preacher’ speak it was on condition that he spoke to a meeting which any student could attend. University Islamic Societies had invited in speakers who had engaged in ‘hate speech’ behind closed doors. Other universities had banned meetings, concerned about public order and reputation. Rather than simply ban speakers, I thought it important to change the basis of the event. Any university event should be open to any student without discrimination. Members of the Islamic Society and the LGBT Society sat in the same room, heard each other’s points of view and engaged in courteous disagreement, perhaps hearing something they had never heard before, and even changing their mind. I was proud of the students, and convinced that this was a better outcome than banning, with the result that the speaker would have spoken, unchallenged, at a private meeting.

I had previously closed a prayer room down because I could not be sure that hate speech was not occurring there. Indeed, some students had been prevented from using the room because they were the ‘wrong’ sort of Muslim. Furthermore I did not see why one group of students should be privileged over other in the provision of a dedicated prayer space. Offers of a ‘multi-faith’ space were turned down and protest prayers were held in the square outside the University and my office. Both my support for speakers excluded from other Universities and my closure of a prayer room were based on principles of opening out discussion, not closing it down.

This brings me to another thorny issue: that of academic freedom. What is its purpose, and why should academics have any protections over and above the ordinary citizen – if they should? Academic freedom concerns the intellectual independence of academics and universities so that received views and wisdom can be tested, and so that new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions can be proposed without putting the proposer’s career or life in jeopardy. It does not mean using your university position to propound support for ideas which lie outside your area of expertise and then claim that you have special privilege because you are an academic. What an academic brings to a debate is knowledge and evidence. The denier of the effectiveness of a particular vaccine who uses their academic position to criticise it, when they have no more understanding of its efficacy than the well-read lay person, is merely voicing another opinion, and has no right to expect to be supported if they use the fig-leaf of ‘being an academic’ to rant. There are good reasons for questioning the ethics, efficacy, and balance of risk of some vaccines, and we all have the right to take a stance, including an uninformed one, on these issues. Academic freedom, however, is based upon taking an informed stance.

Each of the issues I have touched upon demands a much more detailed treatment and, in the spirit in which this has been written, I hope that it sparks courteous debate. I have deliberately avoided a discussion of the limits of the ‘harm principle’ or the right not to be offended, as that would have required a very different approach. I could rightly be criticised for not discussing the limits to courtesy and tolerance. If there are times when we should be intolerant of others’ attempts to limit freedoms, then we should try to be intolerant courteously. There are also times when we may need to stop being courteous; however, those limits are rarely reached. Granted, it is hard to be courteous when faced with an angry racist outside a mosque or immigrant hostel. Questions of the limits to free speech are important and difficult for a freethinker.

The conclusion is that freedom of speech is not as simple as my right to express my ideas. Perhaps we need to think more about our duty to listen to other’s ideas and how that might bring about reciprocity. We need to change the basis of the discussion if we are to progress beyond hurling our freedoms at one another. Perhaps we should be more active in promoting freedom of speech as a social good, not just an individual right. As such it leads to more prosperous, resilient societies.

The post Free speech at universities: where do we go from here? appeared first on The Freethinker.

Suppose it were reported that three baby girls had bled to death following Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in the UK.

Or that a whistleblower had reported that FGM was being carried out by British doctors, leaving girls ‘maimed for life’.

Or that a pharmacist had masqueraded as a girl’s mother in order to subject her to genital cutting but the judge had spared her prison, noting in mitigation that FGM ‘has great cultural and religious significance’ to her.

Readers would rightly be outraged by these incidents. Clearly, girls must be protected from parents who seek to surgically impose their religious or cultural views upon their daughters’ genitals. We naturally abhor these practices which violate bodily autonomy, provide no medical benefit, are rooted in misogyny and explicitly seek to constrain female sexuality.

But here’s the catch: horrors like those described above have actually happened, not to girls who have undergone FGM, but to boys, from circumcision.

Celian Noumbiwe, Angelo Ofori-Mintah, and Goodluck Caubergs were the baby boys who bled to death at the hands of their circumcisers between 2007 and 2012. Circumcision legally performed by British doctors is leaving boys ‘maimed for life’ according to the paediatric surgeon and whistleblower, Shiban Ahmed. Martina Obi-Uzom was the pharmacist entrusted with the care of an 11 month-old boy, only to have him circumcised against his parents’ wishes.

I do not write this article in the spirit of one-upmanship: I am not trying to instigate an ethical arms race between FGM and circumcision. Rather, I would like to persuade you that both practices are morally beyond the pale, and equally worthy of our disapprobation and contempt. In Finland last month, anti-FGM legislation that would have effectively treated FGM and circumcision as comparable practices stalled because a majority of lawmakers refused to accept them as comparable. This kind of failure is what happens when the two practices are treated as morally and legally distinct.

But perhaps there are important distinctions between FGM and circumcision that render them incomparable. After all, circumcision has much-vaunted health benefits. It is, surely, a safe and simple procedure that cannot in good conscience be compared to the barbarism of FGM. And FGM is steeped in patriarchal attitudes; the diminution of the female sexual experience is fundamental to its practice. Can the same be said for circumcision?

The first point can be dealt with quickly: there is not a single medical organisation worldwide that recommends the universal circumcision of newborn boys on health grounds. The much-cited 60% relative risk reduction in female-to-male HIV transmission for circumcised men sounds rather less impressive when converted to an absolute risk reduction of 1.3%. To explain: 1.18% of circumcised men across three trials became infected with HIV compared to 2.49% of controls. This can be reported either as an absolute risk reduction of 1.3% or a relative risk reduction of 60%. The fact is that, even when men are circumcised, condom use remains essential. In the US, where cultural circumcision is routine, HIV rates are higher than in the UK, where the practice remains relatively rare. And as for the so-called ‘hygiene’ argument that a circumcised penis is supposedly cleaner than one that is not, there really is a very simple solution: keep the penis clean by rinsing with water.

Let us turn now to a qualitative comparison of circumcision and FGM. Type 3 FGM, also known as infibulation, is the suturing shut of the vagina. It may also involve the removal of the clitoris. It is typically performed by medically untrained practitioners with non-sterilised equipment. Picture, by contrast, a male circumcision carried out by a doctor, in a hospital, under sterile conditions. Between the brutality of the former and the medicalisation of the latter there is, for the most part, no comparison.  

A second comparison, then: the Australian aboriginal practice of subincision, carried out under crude conditions, involves ‘slicing open the urethral passage on the underside of the penis from the scrotum to the glans, often affecting urination as well as sexual function’.  By contrast, picture a doctor, in a hospital, under sterile conditions, carrying out a form of FGM called clitoral nicking, which requires only the extraction of a single drop of blood. Again, for the most part, one of these procedures is incomparably more brutal than the other.

Clitoral nicking, however, is commonplace in Malaysia, where up to 99% of Muslim girls undergo FGM and a 2009 fatwa issued by the National Council of Islamic Religious Affairs deemed it obligatory. Ayan Hirsi Ali, an anti-FGM campaigner and herself a victim of FGM, said of the comparison: ‘I think male circumcision is worse than an incision [clitoral nicking] of the girl.’ In case you still have any doubts about the dangers of circumcision, consider the fact that four hundred South African boys died as a result of it between 2008 and 2014 and over half a million were hospitalised.

The point is this: there is a spectrum of invasiveness, harm and medicalisation in both FGM and male genital mutilation. The UK, however, rightly bans all forms of FGM under the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, which holds that ‘it is immaterial whether she [the girl in question] or any other person believes that the operation is required as a matter of custom or ritual.’ This includes those forms of FGM which, in the case of Re B and G [2015] , a British judge held were ‘less invasive’ than male circumcision. The judge also ruled that male circumcision constitutes ‘significant harm’ under the Children Act 1989.

Consider, then, the following proposition:

1. All forms of FGM are illegal in the UK
2. FGM is illegal because it is harmful
3. Some forms of FGM are less harmful than male circumcision
4. Therefore, male circumcision should be illegal

This is the irresistible legal and moral conclusion to which one is drawn. Unless, that is, you are willing to advocate for the legalisation of those forms of FGM which are less harmful than male circumcision.

In fact, that is exactly what the American Academy of Paediatrics briefly did in 2010: ‘the ritual nick [Type IV FGM] suggested by some paediatricians is not physically harmful and is much less extensive than routine newborn male genital cutting … It might be more effective if federal and state laws enabled pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ritual nick as a possible compromise to avoid greater harm.’ While it is to the AAP’s eternal shame that they ever proposed legalising ‘less harmful’ forms of FGM, one must, at least, credit the internal consistency of their argument.

* * *

It is uncontroversial that FGM is practised, at least in part, to curb female sexuality. But what of male circumcision? The Sephardic Jewish philosopher Maimonides, considered one of the foremost Torah scholars of the Middle Ages, wrote of circumcision: ‘one of its objects is to limit sexual intercourse … for there is no doubt that circumcision weakens the power of sexual excitement.’ It was, he said, ‘a means for perfecting man’s moral shortcomings. The bodily injury caused to that organ is exactly that which is desired.’

Philo of Alexandria, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, concurred: ‘of all the delights which pleasure can afford, the association of man with woman is the most exquisite, it seemed good to the lawgivers to mutilate the organ which ministers to such connections.’ For the avoidance of doubt, both of these men were in favour of circumcision.

Perhaps less well known is that circumcision was also legitimised by the medical establishment of Victorian Britain. According to historian Ronald Hyam:[1] ‘Widely believed to dampen sexual desire, circumcision was seen positively as a means of both promoting chastity and physical health.’ ‘Spermatorrhea’ – an imagined pathology supposedly caused by loss of semen through any means other than marital sex – enjoyed widespread credence. Hence why circumcision, seen as a prophylaxis against masturbation, was an important treatment.

Naturally, these ideas also migrated across the pond. John Harvey Kellogg – of Cornflakes fame –  advocated a plain diet and universal neonatal circumcision as a ‘remedy’ to masturbation. In 1894, the Maryland Medical Journal even suggested circumcision as a ‘solution’ to the racist moral panic in America surrounding the possibility of black men attacking white women: ‘the legal enforcement of the circumcision among the negro race would effectually remedy the predisposition to raping inherent in this race.’

It is only since the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s that proponents of circumcision have sought to downplay, rather than emphasise, its effects on male sexuality. But the evidence base for its harms is only growing. The NHS website includes ‘permanent reduction in sensation in the head of the penis, particularly during sex’ as a complication of circumcision. This should come as no surprise given that the foreskin is the most sensitive part of the penis to light touch and warmth. The adult male foreskin contains up to 20,000 erotogenic nerve endings and makes up to 50% of the motile skin of the penis. Circumcision leads to the keratinisation of the head of the penis, keratin being the tough structural protein which fingernails are made of, which in turn leads to desensitisation and diminished sexual pleasure.

Slowly but surely, however, the human rights community is waking up to the inconsistency of its treatment of male circumcision when compared with FGM. After all, Article 24(3) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child explicitly enshrines the right to protection from harmful traditional practices. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has said that circumcision constitutes a ‘violation of the physical integrity of children.’ It is also opposed by the Royal Dutch Medical Association and the Danish Medical Association. In 2018,  Icelandic parliamentarian Silja Dögg Gunnarsdóttir proposed a ban on circumcision, arguing that ‘[e]very individual, it doesn’t matter what sex or how old… should be able to give informed consent for a procedure that is unnecessary, irreversible and can be harmful. His body, his choice.’ Despite Icelanders supporting the bill by a 13% margin, it was abandoned after lobbyists mischaracterised it as religious discrimination.

In its 2016 concluding observations on the UK, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recommended that the government should ‘ensure that no one is subjected to unnecessary medical or surgical treatment during infancy or childhood, guarantee bodily integrity, autonomy and self-determination to children concerned.’ The Committee were referring to FGM and intersex surgery. If only they had the courage to take their recommendation to its logical conclusion, by applying it to circumcision as well.

[1] Quoted by Robert Darby in A Surgical Temptation: the demonization of the foreskin and the rise of circumcision in Britain, 2005: University of Chicago Press.

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