Though Cowards Flinch

A while ago, when I read of Hossein Ali Montazeri’s death, I knew I’d want to write something eventually. The whole organisation of Shi’a Islam, specifically the Twelver denomination, fascinates me. The theology is interesting, but particularly the organisation, the methods of appointing religious leaders and so on. It’s something I can’t for the life of me put an analogy to from the plethora of Christian sects.

The theology of the religion is collegiate. Grand Ayatollahs promote scholars of Islam and related subjects to different ranks. When these scholars reach the rank of Ayatollah, they can themselves issue edicts and interpretations of Islamic texts and law. Individuals of the Shi’a religion are free to choose among these competing maraji, the sources of authority, the people to emulate.

Obviously the central Islamic texts of the Qur’an and the Hadith also play an important role, though even in texts so important as these there are interpretations and even abrogations of ‘earlier’ instructions by ‘later’ ones. The application of such scholarship to the everyday world, in the Iranian state that emerged in 1979, with Montazeri’s support, was to be overseen by religious supervisors, velayat-e faqih.

This is one of those things which most of the newspaper obituaries in liberal papers omitted to mention.

As a secularist and a liberal, I cannot but be repulsed by the support of Montazeri for an institution which gives one person power over another on the basis of religion. And while Montazeri’s support for such a thing put him ultimately on the wrong side of the forces that fought the Revolution, Montazeri at least had the decency to denounce the undemocratic nature of the regime, and its human rights abuses, to call for the legalisation of political parties and protest mass executions.

Despite having helped to create the regime, and being a senior and respected part of it until his downfall, Montazeri sought using his religious influence as an Ayatollah to strip from the regime the one cloak which it continued to use to cover its abuses: it’s claim to be an Islamic state. It reminds me of the way in which religion was wielded by all sides during the English Revolution in the 1640s: scripture was a bludgeon with which to kill and damn one’s enemies to Hell.

Not with any hint of mental reservation either, but with the full strength and fervour that human belief and faith can muster.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read Melanie Phillips’ latest blunder into the realms of extreme bigotry:

Pajamas TV features two interviews with former US security people, one described merely as having been given some kind of intel-gathering assignment by the ‘joint chiefs’ and the other described as a ‘former FBI special agent’. The first describes how, when he discovered to his alarm that there was not only no evidence that Islamic radicals were wrong in Islamic law but that there were no counter-arguments to them in that law, the US intel/law enforcement community that had instructed him just didn’t want to know.

The political point which Mad Mel is trying to make through quoting this guy, subtly as ever, is that the US and UK state organisations are hopelessly compromised in their fight against Islam by their failure to understand that there can never be negotiation with any Muslim, simply because they are Muslims. Following Islamic law means being a ‘radical Islamist’ – a basic, virulently bigotted equation.

She hedges, of course, by referring specifically to the deals between the UK and US governments and the Muslim Brotherhood. The second chap interviewed suggests how worrying it is that the counter-terrorist establishment of the US are going to ‘radical Islamists’ (i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood and other organisations alleged to be MB ‘fronts’) to ask for help in combatting…radical Islam.

Yet radical Islam is hardly a unitary phenomenon, any more than the Catholicism of Bishop Gustavo Gutierrez and that of the then-Cardinal Ratzinger are one and the same thing. But when one is prepared to repeat the allegation that unspecified Islamic radicals (presumably the ones we’re supposed to be fighting the War on Terror against) have the correct, the only, interpretation of Islamic law, well, we’re hardly in the realms of nuanced commentary and great learning.

Even the Muslim Brotherhood is reputed to represent many different trends in Islamic thought, not to mention being a Sunni organisation – rather than Shi’a, which is the largest religion in Iraq and Iran, two of our putative enemies. The very existence of someone like Montazeri throws such blanket assumptions as Phillips’ offers, about any given religion, into doubt.

Sure, Montazeri may have been a radical Islamist, and he may have supported plenty of illiberal measures, but he also spoke up about a great many and opposed the increasing tyranny of a religious faction run amok.

Additionally, though my history is not what it could be in the sphere of the Iranian Revolution, one man at the top in plush surroundings advocating a lily-livered liberalism always means there are many more on the ground, in prison awaiting execution or among the masses, advocating stiff necked, uncompromising, all out resistance, and a better lot for mankind.

Even if their views are couched in religious terminology. In fact, for precisely this reason, we can’t denude elements from within Christianity, Islam, Judaism or the other faiths of the egalitarian and revolutionary edge that can be located within each of those faiths. This is why it is so utterly preposterous for Melanie Phillips to talk as she does.

For every dictator, sanhedrin of saints and their persecutions, there is a James Naylor, a Winstanley, a Lilburne and a Trapnel. Their analogies in Catholicism would be the supporters of Gutierrez, people like Tissa Balasuriya, and those who used the Ecclesial Base Communities as organisation fractions with which to fight back against oppressive states, rather than as a means to impose theological interpretations as law against their fellow man.

Which is more than can be said for the designs of Melanie Phillips, who, were the shoe on the other foot and her brand of Christian fundamentalism in the ascendant, would probably like to make the rest of us pay the jizya to the Christian theocratic state. Perhaps this is precisely why she repeats the accusation that only the radical Islamists have the correct interpretation of Islam. Their fundamentalism is the key threat by which she justifies her own.