In my newspaper this morning..

1. The Golden Compass

I didn’t go into the religious debate (if you want to cede that there is any substance to the discussion) surrounding the film but in my local paper this morning, the editors decided to apply the usual rules of evidence and print a letter about the film from someone who had not seen the film. The writer describes herself as being 14 and in some circles that might pass for an excuse but not in my house. I also suspect parental influence in this letter which reads as follows:

I’m 14 years old and I want to bring awareness to the fact that The Golden Compass movie conceals an influential anti-Christian message.

Nothing is wrong with the author of the novel-turned-movie, Philip Pullman, expressing his beliefs.

It is when he brings down other people’s values that his work crosses the line. The unfortunate thing is that Pullman is an excellent storyteller who wrote an excellent book, but he stoops to attacking christianity. This idea is said to be in the movie as well.

I want to caution people that they could be influence negatively by reading and watching The Golden Compass.

She’s quite the sophisticated writer for a 14 year old, deflecting arrows with fairly strong praise of the author but not quite tricky enough, or still too honest, to hide the fact that she has not seen the movie that she describes. It sounds as though, though there is no certainty that she has read the book. And I am amused that a book can be considered excellent with such major caveats.

Though I think she should really know better, and her parents (pulling puppet strings or not) should teach her to only speak about things she knows (are we facing a more pernicious form of bayarding here?) but to my mind the culprit is my local newspaper letters editor. Unless they think that the letter is too obviously off the mark to bother stopping, why print something that brings only ignorance to the discussion?

2. Taslima Nasreen

The headline from Agence France-Pesse (New Delhi) reads Muslim clerics demand apology from writer.

The 45-year-old writer, who fled Bangladesh in 1994, is currently living in an undisclosed location near New Delhi after being forced to leave the eastern Indian city of Kolkata last month following violent protests.

Indian Muslims will “not tolerate the infamous authoress Taslima Nasreen on the Indian soil” unless she apologised, Syed Ahmed Bukhari, chief cleric of New Delhi’s 17th-century Jama Masjid mosque, said in a statement.

“India is a democratic nation and the constitution here neither does permit any citizen nor allow any foreign national to be irreverent to the tenets of any religion,” the cleric said.

“The entire responsibility of the consequences shall rest upon the government of India,” Bukhari warned.

The Indian government has pledged to protect Nasreen and moved her to a safe house in New Delhi last month after the protests. Nasreen said Friday that she would remove controversial passages from her autobiography “Dikhandito” (Split into Two).

But Muslim leaders in Kolkata warned they would keep up their protests if Nasreen returned to the city.

“She wants to remove the controversial paragraphs to return to the city. No one knows what she will write in her next book,” said Siddikulla Chowdhury, convenor of Milli Ittehad Parishad, an umbrella alliance of 12 Muslim groups.

The West Bengal state, where Kolkata is located, had banned “Dikhandito” in 2003 after protests by Muslims, but a court lifted the ban in 2005.

Nasreen said the controversial autobiographical passages were based on her “memories of Bangladesh in the 1980s” when secular constitutional guarantees were under attack.

Nasreen fled her homeland after being accused of blasphemy for her 1994 novel “Lajja” or “Shame,” which depicts violence against minority Hindus by Muslims in Muslim-majority Bangladesh.

The writer — who has received death threats for her work — has lived in Kolkata since 2004, after spending time in Europe and the United States. She holds a Swedish passport but has been seeking permanent residence in Hindu-majority, but officially secular, India.

So far the government, fearful of angering the nation’s 140-million Muslims, has only granted her six-month visa extensions.

You read the many absurdities for yourself but what drew my eye was the interesting interpretation of democracy by the cleric, the charge of blasphemy being used against what appear to be descriptions of historical fact (her memories), and most of all, her desired expulsion on the grounds of “no one knows what she will write in her next book”. Kind of covers most of the population I would think.

3. Us non-believers are trying really hard to be nice

This nonsense and cruelty offends religious moderates as well as is evident in the oped below from Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Dec 7, 2007 New York Times.

The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of them with 100 stripes: Let no compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day. (Koran 24:2)

In the last few weeks, in three widely publicized episodes, we have seen Islamic justice enacted in ways that should make Muslim moderates rise up in horror.

A 20-year-old woman from Qatif, Saudi Arabia, reported that she had been abducted by several men and repeatedly raped. But judges found the victim herself to be guilty. Her crime is called “mingling”: when she was abducted, she was in a car with a man not related to her by blood or marriage, and in Saudi Arabia, that is illegal. Last month, she was sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes with a bamboo cane.

Two hundred lashes are enough to kill a strong man. Women usually receive no more than 30 lashes at a time, which means that for seven weeks the “girl from Qatif,” as she’s usually described in news articles, will dread her next session with Islamic justice. When she is released, her life will certainly never return to normal: already there have been reports that her brother has tried to kill her because her “crime” has tarnished her family’s honor.

We also saw Islamic justice in action in Sudan, when a 54-year-old British teacher named Gillian Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days in jail before the government pardoned her this week; she could have faced 40 lashes. When she began a reading project with her class involving a teddy bear, Ms. Gibbons suggested the children choose a name for it. They chose Muhammad; she let them do it. This was deemed to be blasphemy.

Then there’s Taslima Nasreen, the 45-year-old Bangladeshi writer who bravely defends women’s rights in the Muslim world. Forced to flee Bangladesh, she has been living in India. But Muslim groups there want her expelled, and one has offered 500,000 rupees for her head. In August she was assaulted by Muslim militants in Hyderabad, and in recent weeks she has had to leave Calcutta and then Rajasthan. Taslima Nasreen’s visa expires next year, and she fears she will not be allowed to live in India again.

It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.

But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted — and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done?

Usually, Muslim groups like the Organization of the Islamic Conference are quick to defend any affront to the image of Islam. The organization, which represents 57 Muslim states, sent four ambassadors to the leader of my political party in the Netherlands asking him to expel me from Parliament after I gave a newspaper interview in 2003 noting that by Western standards some of the Prophet Muhammad’s behavior would be unconscionable. A few years later, Muslim ambassadors to Denmark protested the cartoons of Muhammad and demanded that their perpetrators be prosecuted.

But while the incidents in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and India have done more to damage the image of Islamic justice than a dozen cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, the organizations that lined up to protest the hideous Danish offense to Islam are quiet now.

I wish there were more Islamic moderates. For example, I would welcome some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq Ramadan. But when there is true suffering, real cruelty in the name of Islam, we hear, first, denial from all these organizations that are so concerned about Islam’s image. We hear that violence is not in the Koran, that Islam means peace, that this is a hijacking by extremists and a smear campaign and so on. But the evidence mounts up.

Islamic justice is a proud institution, one to which more than a billion people subscribe, at least in theory, and in the heart of the Islamic world it is the law of the land. But take a look at the verse above: more compelling even than the order to flog adulterers is the command that the believer show no compassion. It is this order to choose Allah above his sense of conscience and compassion that imprisons the Muslim in a mindset that is archaic and extreme.

If moderate Muslims believe there should be no compassion shown to the girl from Qatif, then what exactly makes them so moderate?

When a “moderate” Muslim’s sense of compassion and conscience collides with matters prescribed by Allah, he should choose compassion. Unless that happens much more widely, a moderate Islam will remain wishful thinking.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of the Dutch Parliament and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of “Infidel.”

That there is now more open criticism of Muslim practice by Muslims is a very good sign. The victims, mostly female, are still paying the price for an overvaluation of tradition but there is at least a slim possibility that things will improve. The fault of Western liberals has been to keep silent on the doings of other cultures, justifying it as “respectful” but as I wrote in a previous entry about slavery, sometimes you just have to force a change, even if others believe you have no right. Starting with a separation of church and state is a first good step; another one is actually taking seriously the idea of universal human rights.