Fun and games in identifying fallacies

An e-mail arrived yesterday in response to my posting of July of this year in which I commented on the female journalist in Sudan who was facing prosecution for wearing trousers in public, the penalty for which is up to 40 lashes.

This is what my reader, whose nom de plume is Anonymous, had to say:

40 lashes for wearing pants is not Islam. Don't confuse the countries culture with the religion. Islam is practiced in many different countries. In Saudi Arabia, its illegal for women to drive (which I agree is fucking stupid) but it has nothing to with Islam...no where in the Quran does it say that women cant (sic) drive cars (that's absolutely ridiculous) but it happens. In turkey, Syria, and Lebanon women have the choice to cover or not to cover. People are people wherever you are; there are good people and there are bad people.

Apparently, I am the one who does not understand.

Au contraire, dear reader.

Your comment is full of fallacies. Let me pick through them for you.

The Fallacy of the Literal Translation

In judging Islam, according to this view, one has to pay strict attention to the actual words in the Koran. If it doesn’t specifically mention trousers then laws regarding the wearing of trousers fall into the category of a secular culture, not religion.

I have perused the Koran and I cannot find anything about high jacking airplanes and flying them into buildings, therefore, in accordance with the Literal Translation Fallacy, I must conclude that it is Saudi Arabian and Egyptian culture that drove those young men to do this.

The basic falseness with this proposition is that Islam purports to govern every single aspect of a Muslim’s life. There is no room for secular activity in a Muslim-governed society that cannot be found to have a basis in Islam. Fortunately, for Islam, there is a default position, as explained by a local prominent imam: if Islam does not specifically forbid something then it is allowed.

This brings us to this recent news item:

Egypt’s top Islamic authority defended women’s rights to wear trousers in public following a high profile court case in neighboring Sudan were women were flogged for dressing in pants, the local press reported Wednesday.

Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa said in response to a question during a public lecture that trousers covering women’s bodies are permitted, though they should be loose and not see through. He specified that “stretch” pants were in particular unacceptable.

Gomaa described the question as “strange and weird” and smiled as he responded. He is the top religious authority of Egypt and appointed by the government.

Sudan caused a stir when it flogged 10 women for wearing trousers. One woman, Lubna Hussein contested penalty and was let off with a fine for public indecency in a trial that garnered international attention.

Ever since her arrest in July, the 43-year-old Hussein used her case to draw attention to Sudan’s indecency law, which allows flogging as a punishment for any acts or clothing that is seen as offending morals. The law follows a strict interpretation of Islamic laws. Human rights campaigners criticize the law as vague.

Egypt also has vaguely worded indecency laws that can be widely applied, but women are given quite a bit of leeway in their attire. Unlike Sudan, no moral police is entrusted with implementing the law.

While the vast majority of Egyptian women wear headscarves and loose flowing robes, Western style dress, including trousers, is also quite common.

Odd that this cleric did not simply say that Islam has nothing to do with trousers and it is Sudanese culture that creates this problem. That would have been an easy out for him, but to do so would be to admit that there is some aspect of life in Sudan where the writ of Islam does not run. We can’t have that.

The Fallacy of Culture

Whenever honour killings occur in the West we are always treated to this one; it is culture not religion.

When we talk about culture in this context we mean social and legal customs pertinent to a certain political/geographic area. We pretend that culture is something divorced from religion, a kind of parallel universe that operates on its own rules.

This is not a tenable argument. When you are dealing with societies that have fallen under the influence of the Abrahamic religions for centuries their culture cannot be separated from the religious notions of morality as defined and refined by those religions. All our ideas of justice, compassion, mercy, equality, fairness, etc. find their roots in the religions that have dominated us since the Bronze Age. Here we refer to it as the Christian-Judeo tradition. Elsewhere it is simply called Islam.

And while our tradition leaves room for secular activity that may not have religious sanction or approval, Islam does not. Note that the law pertaining to the Sudanese woman is considered a morality issue.

Islam is very clear about the second class citizenship of women. They are subservient to men. They are not equal in the eyes of Allah. So it is a natural outcome that Islamic males would pass secular laws dictating how women should dress and disport themselves in public.

The Evil People Fallacy

According to this one, religion is all good and it is only evil people who cause problems. This is a fallacy that has been embraced equally by U.S. President Barack Obama and former U.S. President, George W. Bush, so it should not be surprising to find it has some currency with Anonymous.

Let’s see if we can apply this one to German National Socialism. Nazism was a good doctrine that was perverted by an evil man named Adolph Hitler. Hmmmm. No, that won’t fly. National Socialism which was rooted in racism and was an evil doctrine from the beginning. An argument could be made that it perverted many young minds to perform acts of evil that they might not have been otherwise inclined to commit.

Likewise Islam has some poisonous ideas in the bosom of its texts that inspire some people to carry out evil acts; i.e., that is, evil as we define it.

George Jonas: "Jihad rules! Jews suck!"

A lady who once worked for me as an executive assistant and who is now in her early fifties came to Canada from the Ukraine when she was two years of age. She speaks Ukrainian (poorly by her admission) and English excellently. Her mother, who has now resided in downtown Toronto for half a century, does not speak a word of English. She has never had to learn it. She lives in a largely Ukrainian neighbourhood and can get virtually any service in her native language. Occasionally when she had to see a non-Ukrainian medical specialist, her daughter would accompany her to translate.

In this part of Canada, the story of this unassimilated woman is not unique.

I mention this because for some time now there has been a hue and cry raised over the state policy of multiculturalism. We have had this in Canada as official policy since the 1970s. The anguish about multiculturalism is that there is no incentive for ethnic pockets to assimilate with the general population. Questions regarding inter-ethnic strife, human rights, and general loyalty to the country are raised within the umbrella of the multicultural policy.

However, my Ukrainian example goes back to the 1950s, long before the so-called multicultural mosaic was identified as a cultural phenomenon and then subsequently embraced by the polity as policy. I don’t believe for a second that my friend’s mother would have lived a different life whether there was a state policy regarding her culture or not, except for one that might have discriminated against her for not assimilating.

Ukrainians, for the most part, belong to the Eastern Orthodox Christian church, the remnant of the old Byzantine Empire, which, in turn, was the remnant of the eastern half of the old Roman Empire. My executive assistant used to take days off work to celebrate “Ukrainian Christmas” and “Ukrainian New Year”, which arrived later in the calendar than the national statutory holidays of Christmas and New Year.

Except for this departure, I would never have identified her culture as being religiously determined. Ukrainians have distinctive native costumes, peasant wear, which they trot out during Ukrainian cultural festivals. Generally, however, in dress and conduct they are indistinguishable from the great mass of other Canadians.

This brings me to a rather misleading column by the otherwise excellent journalist, George Jonas, in today’s National Post.

Jonas is commenting on the published e-mails that passed amongst the female relatives and friends of the famous “Toronto 18”. These are the alleged wannabe Islamic terrorists who were supposedly plotting to blow up the Toronto Stock Exchange, CSIS (Canada’s anti-terrorist organization), and storm the Parliament buildings and behead the Prime Minister.

He is struck by the fact that the hatred of the women towards Canada and some members of the Canadian community, namely homosexuals, are expressed primarily in idiomatic English.

The remarkable thing was seeing their admiration and hatred posted, not in a foreign language, not in misspelled, broken English, but in the colloquial idiom of soccer moms in Toronto's bedroom community of Mississauga.

He then extrapolates from this the following conclusion.

By offering the views of Wahhabist Islam on homosexuals in words she borrowed directly from our culture, Ms. N was demonstrating that acculturation, a much-touted remedy for the risk of fragmentation in immigrant societies, isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

I don’t want to sound to picky, but I have always considered English to be nothing more than a language, a language of convenience, if you like, when you live in a county where 90% the population converses in it and where it is an official language by law.

I never thought of it as being “culturally distinctive” such that its use by an Arab would be considered remarkable. To be sure, within the confines of the language, there are cultural markers – expressions used to describe things that would be associated with someone from Canada rather than someone from England or Australia or the United States. But that is not what Jonas is talking about.

What he is on about is how a cultural norm, in this case Arabic, survives long after someone has been swimming in the deep end of the cultural pool of Canada.

Our great-grandfathers assessed matters more accurately. They had taken it for granted that integration is a process of considerable complexity that occurs over historic time. It isn't achieved by a quick immersion in another culture, even when the immersion is … superficially complete. Our generation not only overestimated the effects of such cultural silver-plating, but tried reducing it even further by the imposition of multiculturalism.

Cultural silver-plating may not achieve much beyond teaching al-Qaeda idiomatic English anyway, but multiculturalism makes it stick even less and wear off even quicker. Cultural silver-plating may produce amusing incongruities, like jihadists with pre-nuptial agreements and Wahhabi feminists who retain their maiden names after marriage. But computer-literate fundamentalists take us no closer to a harmonious society. They only illustrate how ultra-liberal policies, slogans and practices confuse and alienate vulnerable youngsters of foreign ancestry and increase the number of our solitudes.

I don’t believe multicultural policies and practices have anything to do with alienation of these young women.

This is because they do not have a culture distinct from their religion, unlike my Ukrainian examples. Islam determines their culture, on everything from defecating rituals, to eating habits, to attitudes towards non-Muslims, and so on. I am surprised that Jonas would overlook this cultural influence and chalk up assimilation failure to the straw man of multicultural policy.

It is the religion, dear boy, and that is what you should be targeting.

Cultural jihadism

There is an excellent summary of cultural jihadism in the City Journal, An Anatomy of Surrender: Motivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia, at this site.