identity

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Identity crisis

As more people define themselves by their spiritual beliefs, there are controversial plans to introduce legislation to curb incitement to religious hatred. Philip Pullman asks if the law will distinguish between a rational analysis of theology and a call for violence, while Monica Ali, Philip Hensher and Salman Rushdie consider the threat to free speech

Philip Pullman, Monica Ali, Philip Hensher and Salman Rushdie
Saturday November 19, 2005
The Guardian



Is the proposed "religious hatred" bill a bad idea? Of course it is. Of course it should be opposed. That’s my instinctive reaction. But in trying to think about why I react like that, I’ve found myself wondering more and more about the question of "identity", because that seems to be at the heart of the problem. Is our "identity" a function of what we do, or what we are, or both?

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It seems to me that:

1. What we are is not in our control, but what we do is.

2. On the other hand, and simultaneously, what we do depends on what we are (on what we have to do it with), and what we are can be modified by what we do.

3. What we do is morally significant. What we are is not.

4. With respect to the past: it’s important to some of us to know that our ancestors came from this or that part of the world, to know a little of the history of our family, to feel a connection with a landscape, or a language, or a climate, or an artistic form of _expression, or a religion that our ancestors knew as theirs.

5. With respect to the present: it’s important for each of us to feel that we belong somewhere or with some group that is like ourselves in some way. We need to be free to live in a place and among people where we feel at home, and not in exile, or under threat.

6. Praise or blame, virtue or guilt, apply to our actions, not to our ancestry or to our membership of this group or that.

7. Belief or faith is partly the result of temperament. I may be temperamentally inclined to scepticism, you to belief in supernatural forces. As far as the temperamental component of our beliefs is concerned, I am not to be praised or blamed for my scepticism, nor you for your faith.

8. It’s when we act on a belief that praise or blame comes in. That is where the temperamental component of religion ends and the moral component begins.

Britain is still officially a Christian country. The Christian church, or to be more accurate, the Anglican part of it, is closely involved in the great rituals of public life, such as coronations and state funerals; prayers are said before parliamentary sessions; bishops of the Church of England sit by right in the House of Lords; there is a blasphemy law that protects the Christian religion; the heir to the throne is not allowed to marry a Catholic.

For a long time now, the kind of religion the Church of England (or of Scotland, or in Wales, or of Ireland) embodies has been a mild, tolerant, broad-minded sort. There have been zealots, but they have tended to leave and form their own sects, not to occupy the parish pulpits or episcopal thrones. The tendency of the established religion has been liberal, worldly, inclusive. But this involved a certain amount of not-speaking-about-things. For example, there have always been clergy who had homosexual feelings, but while these remained unspoken about ("don’t ask, don’t tell"), it never became an issue of public discussion, denunciation, exposure, justification, confession, condemnation, punishment, and so on.

That particular matter has become painfully inflamed in recent years, and now looks as if it might split the Anglican communion in two. The zealous faction has been feeling its power, and is beginning to exercise it, and it’s partly over this "identity" business: the stress on being, rather than on doing. Canon Jeffrey John was prevented from becoming Bishop of Reading because although he lived a celibate life, it was what he was that mattered, not what he did. If you "are" homosexual, then even if you live an entirely celibate life, you will still be tainted and abominable and unfit to belong to the clergy. In the concise and unambiguous words of a poster brandished by an American preacher in a recent photograph, "God hates fags".

In some ways this attitude is a development of the Reformation emphasis on justification by faith. It didn’t matter what good works you did: it was only when you made the commitment of faith that you were able to receive the divine grace of forgiveness and healing that made you righteous, and then you were utterly changed. Hence the modern American phenomenon of being born again: to be born again is not just to change your behaviour. It’s to have a new "identity", to leave the old sinful one behind, to be someone different.

At its extreme, it can lead to a sort of cognitive dissonance, when people claim an inner "identity" that has nothing to do with their actions: "Yes, I murdered my wife and children, but I’m a good person." The lawyer of a Texas boy scout leader recently found guilty on a child pornography charge was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "I’ve got to tell you, this is a good man."

So "being", in the eyes of many people, apparently has its own moral quality, which may be good or bad, but which is resistant to any form of change except the miraculous (being born again). "Being" trumps "doing".

It’s hard to convey the sheer bafflement and distaste I feel for this attitude towards "identity". I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike "identity", must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. Literally vulgar: from vulgus. It’s crowd-thought.

Of course, someone might choose to wear a single kind of "identity" as a badge - perhaps a badge of difference, perhaps one of solidarity. If you’re being discriminated against for one of the multifarious aspects of your complex entirety, then it makes every kind of sense to join with others in the same position, and deliberately and publicly adopt that "identity" ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever). But "identity" claims are not free of consequences. They narrow as well as strengthen.

For myself, I like it best when I have no such simple and public "identity". I don’t know what I "am", and I don’t especially want to. But I know full well that I am free to feel anonymous and invisible, which I like feeling, even if deludedly, only because I am white and male and reasonably affluent. I look like the people who have the power; I don’t stand out in a crowd; I have never been stopped by the police. Other people have less of that sort of freedom than I do.

Now: what does it mean to say "I am a Muslim"? Is it the same sort of thing as saying "I am a Jew" or "I am a Sikh"? Not quite, because being a Jew or a Sikh is a matter of race as well as of belief, according to the law as it stands.

Is it the same sort of thing as saying "I am a Catholic"? It might be more like that, because saying you are Muslim or Catholic says nothing about your ethnic origin. But it isn’t quite like that, because you can choose to leave the Catholic church without facing a penalty on earth, though you might go to hell when you die. If you choose to stop being a Muslim, you are an apostate and, depending on where you live, liable to severe punishment, which might include the death penalty. So being a Muslim is partly a matter of choice and partly one of coercion. If you are born into a Muslim family and brought up in that faith, you will not be able to leave it as easily as a child born into a Catholic family can leave the Church.

However, the latter child is likely to retain Catholic habits of thought long after they cease to believe in God, especially if the Jesuits had charge of their first seven years.

So it’s all very complicated.

Then there’s another kind of complication. Apparently more and more British people of Asian descent are choosing nowadays to identify themselves by their faith rather than by their ethnic or geographical origin. I can see why they do - (5), above. But is saying "I am a Muslim" or "I am a Hindu" the same sort of thing as saying "I am British"? Is it the same sort of thing as saying "I am Asian" or "I am black"? Is it saying "This is what I do", or "This is what I am"?

Because one of the consequences of this is that if someone’s primary "identity", according to their own definition, consists of what their religion is, then Home Office Minister Fiona Mactaggart’s claim about the religious hatred bill doesn’t hold up. She has said that the proposed law won’t prevent the criticism of religion, because it’s merely designed to stop us inciting others to hate particular people.

But to criticise the religion of someone who makes that religion the primary marker of their identity will be, specifically, to criticise them. It will be criticising what they are, not what they do. And if it comes to the courts, will the law be capable of distinguishing between a rational analysis of theology and an incitement to brutal violence? Home Office Minister Hazel Blears doesn’t think it will: she has said that she can’t predict how the courts will act. Better safe than sorry, is the implication.

The inevitable consequence for literature - as many others have pointed out - will be that publishing decisions will increasingly be made not by editors, as they used to be; nor by accountants, as they now are; but by lawyers. And my learned friends will be throwing the pall of their caution over the theatre as well, to the impoverishment of all of us.

I’d better say why I would like to be free to criticise religion, and think about its effects on society, without fear of prosecution. Religion is something that human beings do. Like art, it’s a phenomenon that has characterised every society we know about. Thanks partly to the Enlightenment, it’s been possible in the past couple of hundred years or so to consider religions dispassionately, to look at their historical development, to examine their social effects, to appreciate the art they inspire, to question the philosophical implications of their claims to truth, and so on.

It’s easier for someone who is not a zealous believer to do this. Those who are passionate adherents of their faith, who are willing to kill and die for it, are less likely to take a wide and considered view of the subject. And the fact that religion makes people willing to do these extreme things is one of the reasons we need to examine it. Something in the nature of religious conviction gives believers the chance to experience sharp and intoxicating tastes; those inclined to it can become addicted to the gamey tang of the absolute, the pungency of righteousness, the furtive sexiness of intolerance. Religion grants us these malign sensations more strongly and more deeply than any other human phenomenon.

And it’s religion that allows otherwise intelligent people to discard the fundamental methods of science and to teach "creationism" to schoolchildren. It’s in the name of religious law that vile and grotesque punishments (mutilations and stonings) are carried out in parts of Africa and the Middle East today, as they were in Europe (torture, burning at the stake) only a few hundred years ago. And in the US especially, it’s religion that’s called in to justify the rapacity of the giant corporations that despoil the environment, by saying that there is no shortage of resources in God’s earth, and in any case it doesn’t matter if the earth is ravaged beyond repair, because all the good people are going to be whisked up to heaven in the Rapture. That sort of religion is aesthetically nauseating, intellectually toxic, and ethically squalid, and I can think of few activities more valuable than saying so loudly and clearly.

Fiona Mactaggart claims that nothing in the Bill would prevent us from doing that. I think she’s wrong, because the tide of religion is coming in again. This government, led by a weak man who is attracted to power, has sensed a gathering strength in the religious lobby, and is anxious to appease it. The way they use the word "faith" is interesting, and typical of this mood: it used to be a noun. Now it’s an adjective ("faith schools", "faith communities") and it carries the implication "good, admirable, worthy of approval". Everything in the temper of the times suggests that religion is getting stronger and more influential, and that those who are most zealous about it will want more and more privileges, and that this government will give in to them.

Well, I think we should resist this tendency stoutly. I think that to make things fair and level we should begin by abolishing the special protection the blasphemy law now gives to the Church of England - and I don’t mean extending it to other religions: I mean abolishing it altogether. We might usefully continue with disestablishment, even if this deprives our future King Charles of the title "Defender of the Faith"; but since he’s said that in any case he would rather be known as "Defender of faith", he would be free to call himself that, though he’d have to do it as a private individual rather than as head of state. We might go on to consider the place of religion in the House of Lords. I’m not against giving some sort of representation to special interest groups, but if the Christians are going to be there, so should the Jews and Sikhs and Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists and Zoroastrians and pagans and humanists.

But I think there must be something genuine behind this idea of identity, even if "identity" is a coarse and inaccurate parody encumbered with half-examined baggage, and with misunderstanding, resentment and hostility trailing behind it.

True identity is surely a matter both of what we are and of what we do. It must include everything we inherit from our remotest ancestors in the way of our physical body and our animal instincts: the ones we know about and the ones that operate too deeply for us to be conscious of. It must include our physical appearance, the colour of our skin, the shape of our eyes, and so on. It must include everything we know about the history of our family and our nation, though I don’t see how it can include the things of this sort of which we are not aware. It must include the language we speak and our consciousness of belonging to a group that speaks the same language, and the same variety of that language, and if we can use more than one variety (standard English as well as a regional dialect) then it must include that fact as well. It must include our own educational history, and our place in the economic life of the community around us; it must take account of the amount of choice we have in the matter of spending money. Can we afford a bowl of rice? Can we afford a new car? They are matters of identity. Unless we use cash, we can’t buy anything without proving who we are. Our tastes in food, and entertainment, and fashion are matters of identity too; so are our talents and our interests and our opinions on politics.

Furthermore, to some extent we can shape our identity by the way we behave. Trustworthiness, kindness, industriousness and the like are acquired characteristics: we can make ourselves trustworthy, kindly, and hard-working by being so. It takes time and effort, of course, not a miracle. But identity is what we do as well as what we are.

And identity, as opposed to "identity", will of course include religion. But a religious identity will be a matter of almost infinite subtlety - a matter of different degrees of belief in different aspects of a creed; or believing something passionately when young, but less urgently when old - or the opposite; or assenting to the moral teaching while withholding full credence in the supernatural - or cleaving to both; or responding with delight and warmth to the aesthetic elements of religious ritual while being ignorant of the theological, or being indifferent to the aesthetic and fiercely doctrinaire about the theological - or neither; or finding more comfort in the memory of childhood worship than in the prospect of a life after death, or vice versa; or being more conscious of the threat of hell than of the promise of heaven, or being more concerned with doing good on earth than either; and so on, in a dynamic complexity of influence and inclination, of knowledge and emotion that would be impossible to describe in full, and that is constantly changing and evolving - because of what we do as well as what we are. That is more like what I think a religious identity might be, and it would still be only part of the whole. The pity of religious identity-claims, like any other, is that they mutilate this wholeness so brutally.

So I think we should be free to examine the matter of religion, and criticise it, in both senses of "criticise" - to examine it as a literary critic examines a book, evaluating its merits and strengths as well as its weaknesses, tracing influences, seeing patterns of imagery and rhetoric; and to condemn its propensity for liberating, empowering, and justifying the worst qualities of human nature.

In the course of doing that we need to distinguish between (7) and (8) above, and we need to remind those who claim that their "identity" is primarily religious that no identity-claim comes free of consequences. The consequence of this one for those who make it of themselves is that they must put up with the criticism of religion.

A moral onus
Monica Ali

There is something deeply compelling about arguments that nobody should be persecuted for their faith. Belonging to any religious group should not turn you into a second-class citizen. Muslims are too often at the bottom of the pile, and they have lobbied hardest for this new provision.

Looking back over the decades at the evolution of laws on hate crimes, equal opportunity and discrimination, it seems fitting - a natural next step - to close the "legal loopholes" where religious affiliation is concerned. But though I feel passionately that certain groups in our society are disadvantaged and that more should be done to help them, and though I am instinctively drawn to anything that purports to banish harassment and discrimination, this draft law is anything but enlightened.

What’s the problem here? I think there are many but I want to set them out in three broad areas. The first concerns the differences between race and religion as far as free speech is concerned. It is not in the faintest way plausible to vilify a particular race and to claim that no harm is intended towards members, individually or collectively, of that racial group.

Religions, on the other hand, are sets of ideas and beliefs. They should not be privileged over any other set of notions. I am not bound to respect the idea that I may be reincarnated as an insect or a donkey or that Jesus is the son of God or anything else that I regard as mumbo-jumbo. Indeed, if there are aspects and practices of a religion that conflict with my own notions and beliefs (of fairness and justice and so on) then the moral onus is on me to speak up against them. If I loathe the fact that Islam has been used to deny the right of women in Saudi Arabia to vote then I ought to say so.

My second area of difficulty concerns the broad sweep, vagueness and general impracticality of the law as it is currently written. The bill says that an offence will be deemed to have been committed if "having regard to all the likely circumstances the words, behaviour or material ... are likely to be heard or seen by any person in whom they are ... likely to stir up religious hatred".

Good grief! What does this mean? Who is going to decide which circumstances are relevant and whether or not it is "likely" that hatred will be "stirred up"? Going back to my previous example, if I say that I loathe the way Islam is practised in Saudi Arabia because it denies the democratic rights of women, what are the relevant circumstances of my utterance? Are they that I also believe that Muslims should be free from arbitrary arrest and detention, that the underachievement of Muslims within our educational system should be urgently addressed, and that the French were wrong to ban the wearing of the hijab within schools? Or are the relevant or "likely" circumstances that in Britain today hostility against Muslims is on the increase, that any strongly worded criticism is going to inflame those feelings still further and that someone who already has deep-seated prejudice and hatred towards Muslims is "likely" to have that existing hatred thus "stirred up"?

Perhaps that sounds a little far-fetched. But when I add a reminder that Polly Toynbee, a serious commentator and longstanding equal-rights campaigner, was recently labelled as Islamophobe of the Year at an award ceremony run by an Islamic group, it sounds nothing of the sort.

Finally, just how efficacious would the law be in bringing about harmony? All the evidence suggests not at all. Supporters point out that in 1987, Northern Ireland introduced a local law against incitement to religious hatred. It seems strange that they would even bring that up. Hate-speech laws in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands have not resulted in a decrease in insults directed towards Jews, Muslims, Turks, African immigrants or other minorities. In fact there has been growth in support for the extreme right in those countries.

Even if the evidence had pointed the other way, I find I could not sign up. For, as Rahila Gupta of Southall Black Sisters has pointed out, it would not only be the artistic community paying the price. Whose voices will be silenced, she asks? Writers and so on, certainly, "but also the more vulnerable groups within religious communities, like women, who may find the newly strengthened group rights weaken their own position". Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti wrote about a rape in a Sikh temple, a gurdwara. Her play deals with sexual abuse within a religious community and this is a real issue. Less highly charged but no less real is the way women find they "cannot leave oppressive homes because of the stranglehold of culture, religion and enforced mediation by religious leaders".

The price of putting this kind of curb on freedom of _expression may seem like loose change to some; to others it is a king’s ransom. It must be wholeheartedly opposed.

Responsible free speech?
Philip Hensher

The Home Officer Minister initially in charge of the religious hatred legislation currently proceeding through Parliament has said that "wordsmiths" must write and speak with "responsibility". Free speech must be used responsibly. Everyone must understand that. Who decides if speech is being used responsibly? Why, the authorities. Home Office ministers. The rule of law. The authorities in the United States will decide whether protest is a responsible use of free speech. So will the authorities in Iran, who have their own views on responsibility. The necrocracy of North Korea would find absolutely nothing to quarrel with in the notion that speech must be exercised responsibly. Nor would any Chinese regime of the past 50 years. Responsibility is in the eye of the government, the church, the Roi Soleil, the Spanish Inquisition and, no doubt, Ivan the Terrible.

Free speech, we generally accept, is subject to reasonable restriction. Criminal libel or racist abuse, for instance, are not generally permitted. The case for "responsible" exercise of free speech, however, is not talking about reasonable restriction; it is different from a parallel exercise taking place at the same time, to draw the lines of "reasonable restriction" more tightly. What talk of "responsibility" does is to insist on restrictions that are universally appropriate. A statement may be perfectly legal, and yet - from this point of view - deplorable because "irresponsible".

It is absolutely clear that, in most of these cases, the case for "responsible" free speech is not being made to those who use their power or authority to damage the speechless and the powerless. There might be a case for saying that a powerful newspaper, a government minister, ministers of the church, should not use their voices irresponsibly against those who have no power of response. For instance, it might justifiably be said that the British newspaper which published a story, on no evidence at all, that asylum seekers were killing and eating wild swans was abusing its authority.

Similarly, we might deplore, on the grounds of "responsibility", the lie spread, without any medical evidence, by the Roman Catholic church in Africa, that the use of condoms is useless against the transmission of HIV. Such bodies, perhaps, do have a duty to consider the weight of their voices, and exercise their right of free speech responsibly. But that is not what is meant here. In almost all cases, what is being addressed is the free and reckless criticism of governments, of religions, of authority of all kinds. The argument that individuals have, individually, a duty to exercise free speech "responsibly" is not, despite claims, a strengthening of the status of free speech. It is an attack on the idea itself.

The progress of free speech has been advanced over the centuries, not just by calm, rational argument, but by excess and irresponsibility. Those who, with increasing noise, are insisting that free speech can only be permitted when it is used "responsibly", are prescribing across the board a range of _expression and a range of agreed opinions. That is not free speech at all. If we want to hang on to the free speech of individuals, we must personally insist on continuing the noble and long history of irresponsibility.

Playing with fire
Salman Rushdie

I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me. Religion was a part of my subject, of course; for a novelist from the Indian subcontinent, where the supernatural and the mundane coexist in the streets and are considered as being of the same order of reality, how could it not have been? But in my opinion I also had many other, larger, tastier fish to fry. Nevertheless, when the attack came, I had to confront what was confronting me, and to decide what I wanted to stand up for in the face of what so vociferously, repressively and violently stood against me. At that time it was often difficult to persuade people that the attack on The Satanic Verses was part of a broader, global assault on writers, artists and fundamental freedoms. The aggressors in that matter, by which I mean the novel’s opponents, who threatened booksellers and publishers, falsified the contents of the text they disliked, and vilified its author, nevertheless presented themselves as the injured parties, and such was the desire to appease religious sentiment even then that in spite of the murder of a translator in Japan and the shooting of a publisher in Norway there was widespread acceptance of that topsy-turvy view. In spite of all the public calls for violence to be done, not a single person - in Britain or anywhere else - was arrested or charged with any offence. I revisit these bad old days with extreme reluctance, but I do so because now, 16 years later, religion is coming after us all, and even though most of us probably feel, as I once did, that we have other, more important concerns, we are all going to have to confront the challenge. If we fail, this particular fish may end up frying us.

People have always turned to religion for the answers to the two great questions of life: where did we come from? And how shall we live? But on the question of origins, all religions are simply wrong. No, the universe wasn’t created in six days by a superforce that rested on the seventh. Nor was it churned into being by a sky-god with a giant churn. And on the social question, the simple truth is that wherever religions, with their narrow moralities, get into society’s driving seat, tyranny results. The Inquisition results. Or the Taliban.

And yet religions continue to insist that they provide special access to ethical truths, and consequently deserve special treatment and protection. And they continue to emerge from the world of private life, where they belong, like so many other things that are acceptable when done in private between consenting adults but unacceptable in the town square, and to bid for power.

In today’s United States, for example, it’s possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office. But a professed atheist wouldn’t stand a popcorn’s chance in hell. According to Jacques Delors, ex-president of the European Commission, "The clash between those who believe and those who don’t believe will be a dominant aspect of relations between the US and Europe in the coming years." In Europe, the bombing of a railway station in Madrid and the murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh are being seen as warnings that the secular principles that underlie any humanist democracy need to be defended and reinforced. Even before these atrocities occurred, the French decision to ban religious attire such as Islamic headscarves had the support of the entire political spectrum. Islamist demands for segregated classes and prayer breaks were also rejected. Few Europeans today call themselves religious (just 21%, according to a recent study); most Americans do (59%, according to the Pew Forum). The Enlightenment, in Europe, represented an escape from the power of religion to place limiting points on thought; in America, it represented an escape into the religious freedom of the New World - a move towards faith rather than away from it. Many Europeans now view the American combination of religion and nationalism as frightening.

The exception to European secularism can be found in Britain, or at least in the government of the devoutly Christian and increasingly authoritarian Tony Blair, which tried to steamroller Parliament into passing a law against "incitement to religious hatred" before the May 2005 general election, in a cynical vote-getting attempt to placate British Muslim spokesmen, in whose eyes just about any critique of Islam is offensive. Lawyers, journalists and a long list of public figures warned that such a law would dramatically hinder free speech and fail to meet its objective - that religious disturbances would increase rather than diminish.

New Labour is playing with the fire of communal politics, and in consequence we may all be burned.

· Extracts from essays in Free _Expression is No Offence, published by English Pen and Penguin on December 1