Poking a hornets’ nest with a stick

Historian Tom Holland gave the inaugural Christopher Hitchens Lecture at the Hay Festival yesterday. From the Times (£):

The taboo of not speaking about the prophet Muhammad has to be broken to deradicalise jihadists, an acclaimed author, historian and film-maker said yesterday.

Tom Holland, who produced Islam: the Untold Story for Channel 4, said that the “moral perfection” of Muhammad had to be questioned and that to do so required non-Muslims to break the “unspoken blasphemy taboo that has taken hold in the West”.

Holland, who was giving the inaugural Christopher Hitchens Lecture at the Hay Festival, said that in the past 30 years the “one thing that people seem to have learnt is that to question the moral perfection of Muhammad is akin to poking a hornets’ nest with a stick”.

Muslims seem to take more offence at insults to Muhammad than at insults directed at God, he said.

Holland said that this silence from non-Muslims allowed Islamic State to draw inspiration from the Prophet’s example, despite Muhammad’s actions remaining largely unexamined.

The destruction by Isis of antiquities was drawn from Muhammad’s destruction of idols in Mecca, while the taking of slaves by jihadists was inspired by Muhammad having a slave girl as a concubine, Holland said.

He added that the “sanction for what they do is within the various biographies and traditions associated with the Prophet . . . when beheading an infidel seems to have been enshrined within what every jihadi aspires to do, it is surely not irrelevant that Muhammad owned a sword that can be translated as the ‘cleaver of vertebrae’.

“Not examining these claims [about Muhammad] leaves free those who want to put the most hostile spin on it. Jihadists cannot possibly be deradicalised unless the prophet is deradicalised as well,” he said.

Holland said that it was dangerous of politicians to argue that atrocities committed by Muslims were nothing to do with Islam. He said the British government’s deradicalisation policy was based on this. “Jihadists see themselves as models of righteous behaviour doing God’s will. They see themselves as following the example of Muhammad,” he said. “The Koran is absolutely explicit about this, ‘In the messenger of God you have a beautiful example, an example to follow’.”

After the lecture Holland said that unlike Hitchens he “admired the traditions of monotheism”, but said: “I just think there are certain things within them that have turned septic and there are aspects of Islam that are highly septic and need to be drained. But we can’t do that unless we acknowledge there is a problem.”

He admitted to apprehension about having delivered a provocative lecture, but said he did not think there would be a backlash. “People talk about Islamophobia; the real Islamophobia thing is to assume that if you say anything that might be controversial or upsetting to Muslims, they might come and kill you,” he said. “So I am operating on the presumption that that won’t happen.”

 Update: here's a video of Holland's lecture.

Comments

[JTF]

He is a likeable, brave and honest man. I sincerely hope that his presumption is correct.

[TDK]

An expanded essay based upon the lecture is in the Sunday Times Review Section for 31st. You got the main points in your post except for this

"Returning to an appreciation of Muhammad’s role that is mystical rather than legalistic, and cosmic rather than earthbound, should do much to facilitate the emergence of an Islam that is both true to its own traditions and compatible with western norms."

"At the moment, the notion that Muslim beliefs are as historically conditioned as any other ideology inherited from the past is seen by most Muslims as highly threatening — but in the long run this will surely change. Recognising that the stories told about Muhammad are largely fictions bred of a particular context and period should facilitate the emergence, over the course of the next century, of a clearly western form of Islam."

On the one hand I desperately want him to be proved right, but on the other, I'm reasonably confident that someone claiming the core texts of Islam are allegorical rather than literal truths, is not going to be greeted with enthusiasm. Surely the current fundamentalism is driven by the fear of modernity. "It's all true" is a defence driven by the realisation that if some stories are rejected then the rest is open to challenge. No one confident that God will punish blasphemers in the afterlife would be so concerned to dish out earthly punishment.