The Veil 2

[purejuice]

Having said that the argument against veiling Islamic women must be argued in the world where God exists, leaving behind the world in which God does not exist, leaving behind the world of human rights in which any direction or proscription of women's being by Western feminists is viewed as a human rights violation and ergo, of the patriarchy, or vice versa, leaving behind the world in which whatever is enacted is either of God or an entitlement, leaving behind the cultural world in which the wearing of the veil is a Muslim Brotherhood nationalist badge of courage for the daughters of Egypt's middle class, or the imported foreign workers of France and Germany, and also leaving the world, therefore, in which nothing is right and nothing is wrong, I have to talk a little about what remains.

We have William James.

We have the Protestant reformation.

We have the troubled ethics of intervention.

It is Western. It is feminist. You may now veil your eyes and go read something else. But it's all I got, and I don't think so little of the west, or feminism, or my civic obligation to intervene when otherwise I will be complicit in someone's elses' death, to throw out the democracy with the bath water. Nor do I think so little of Muslims that I believe that there not is a world as complex as mine in the suppressed history of women in Islam, how they came to be veiled and banished from the mosques, and how it came to mean death or disfigurement to she who dares to go to school.

http://www.rawa.org/x-courses.htm

Yes, they don't disfigure girls who go to school in Morocco -- Islam is not a monolith and the king's wife, Lalla Salma, is a beautiful, unveiled, light-skinned, redhead who was the valedictorian of her college class. But only 13 per cent of her countrywomen get post-secondary education, according to one Islam-funded scholar. His statistics on literacy among women in the rest of the Islamic world are sobering, a point to which the Islamic mirror of the Protestant reformation speaks. If you can't read the Koran, or its exegesis in which women come to be veiled, the Hadith, then you have to take the God the men tell you about.

I am shamefully ignorant of Islam. About all I know is a little about its civilizing influence on Spain, the famous apotheosis of the caliphate all the young jihadis skirmish for. That civil civilization was known for its beauty, tolerance, erudition and humanity rather than for its iron imperialism. It is a true loss which we may lay squarely at the feet of the Catholic church and its imperialist, Queen Isabel the Inquisitor. I am pretty equally ignorant of the religions of the west, including the various ones I grew up in. I am not a Bible scholar, although I've read a lot of the books written by Elaine Pagels, who points to alternate Bible texts, more contemporary with Jesus, texts banned by bishop Irenaeus because they posit a different dogma of Christianity than the one we now follow as the word of God himself. It's not. It's the narrative Irenaeus chose for political reasons. Too, modern Bible scholarship has revealed a number of interesting things, for example that the bits of St. Paul in which it is claimed he ordered women to submit to men in marriage (Eph. 5: 22-33) ?* Were not written by St. Paul, but later, some say by people who could not stomach Paul's authentic preaching that real Christians -- by which I think he meant those who could, on the boddhisattva theory of Christianity, available to everyone, heal the sick and raise the dead -- had to be celibate. (Since the incarnated world is a mistake or co-eval with Satan, it is not Of God to kill or reproduce. This is a strong thread in the history of religion across space and time because it is a persisting human emotion.)

What I have instead is William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. It is about how kinds and threads of religious emotion and experience are the same across space and time. It is especially persuasive because James himself was an early psychiatrist, an inventor of Anerican pragmatism, and because he was himself an agnostic. No one has written better or more open-mindedly than James about the benefits of the religions of the world, and about their deficits. It is James who says that there are Gods worthy of worship. And Gods who are not. I know at least one of you thinks of James as a Victorian gasbag. I submit the Victorians, who grappled with Darwin, the dark Satanic mills, and living slavery, were the first real modernists and remain its shining stars. James, I submit, is among the top ten. I am not convinced that much has happened on the modernity front since then, except perhaps nuclear annihilation and genocide, which, qua apocalypse, aren't exactly modern. Get over yourself, Sartre. There is the birth control pill and the enfranchisement of some women. Ditto.

It is James who says simply God morphs over the generations. That there are barbaric Gods, the pragmatic fruits of whose worship are far behind us. That there are abiding spiritual needs, and also abiding psychoses. That there is persistent spiritual experience and anti-spiritual patriarchal religious dogma.** That there are Gods who may be judged worthy of worship, and that these will continue to exist. There are only three criteria, he says, for the pragmatic assessment of the varieties of religious experience as useful:

In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to any one to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution. Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by experiment, no matter what may be their author's neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions. Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true.

Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below.
http://www.psychwww.com/psyrelig/james/james2.htm#18

[to be continued]

__________________
* The significant contrasts between Ephesians and the letters we can confidently ascribe to Paul raise questions about the identity of the author of Ephesians. Many important terms of Ephesians are not used by Paul elsewhere (e.g., heavenly places, dividing wall, fellow citizen), and some of Paul's characteristic terms and emphases either are given new meaning (e.g., mystery, church) or are completely absent (e.g., the Jews, justify). In addition, the verbose style of Ephesians, especially the use of complex, long sentences (many of which have been divided in the NRSV), is not characteristic of Paul. Theological differences, especially Ephesians' emphasis on believers' present salvation (1.3-12, 2.4-10) and the use of household rules (5.22-6.9), are also evident.... As a result of the combined weight of these differences, many scholars hold that Ephesians was written in the late first century by a Jewish-Christian admirer of Paul who sought to apply Pauline thought to the situation of the church in his own day. A minority of scholars hold the author to be Paul, who was writing at the end of his career while imprisoned, probably in Rome; different theological emphases are attributed to developments in Paul's thinking and the particular situation addressed.

Introduction, The Letter of Paul to the Ephesians, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, pp. 320-1.

** Churches, when once established, live at second hand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case;- so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete.
Lecture 2, The Varieties of Religious Experience
http://www.psychwww.com/psyrelig/james/james3.htm

Comments

[ceciliaj.livejournal.com]

Oh I love this. There's certainly a kind of ambition in scope for people like George Eliot, Dickens, and James, that is hard to find parallels of in the 20th century.