The Lady in Heaven has run into trouble in earth. This independent British film tells the story of Fatima, Mohammed’s daughter, which should give you an idea about the nature of the problem.
Since I haven’t seen the film, I can’t comment on whether Fatima is portrayed sensitively enough not to excite Islamic fury. But that doesn’t matter.
Since Islam prohibits any depiction of sacred personages, no portrayal would be sensitive enough. Fury is therefore par for the course.
According to the reviews I’ve read, the film opens with the scene of a jihadist murder perpetrated by ISIS, then to segue into the seventh century. This sounds like a hint at a causative link between Islam and violence, which makes mere indignation grossly inadequate. Muslims are prepared to kill anyone who says they kill.
Add to this the blasphemy of showing Fatima, albeit with her face piously covered, and bombs, guns or machetes become an inevitable form of film criticism. The popular aphorism notwithstanding, these are much mightier than the pen or keyboard favoured by your usual reviewers.
That’s why Cineworld took the mass protests in Sheffield, Bolton and Birmingham seriously. They pulled the film after just four days “to ensure the safety” of staff and viewers.
That prudent measure gave rise to many a foray into comparative religious studies accompanied by indignant comments on the Muslims denying freedom of expression, which we deem essential and inalienable.
My sympathy is with the Muslims. For, had Islam allowed or, worse still, invited free discussion, it wouldn’t have survived a millennium and a half. And it certainly wouldn’t have survived in any Western environment, if competing freely with Christianity first and secularism second.
Islam has to rely on doctrinaire fiat enforceable by violence because it has little else to rely on. Theologically, this hodgepodge of Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Allah only knows what else, is too weak to endure by persuasion.
Look at its take on Christianity, for example. By some accounts, Mohammed spent two years at Nestorian monasteries in Syria. His treatment of Jesus Christ, as merely a prophet or perhaps a divine man, but not God, is certainly Nestorian.
This reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity, a brilliant exercise in popular Christian apologetics. Lewis relies on obvious logic to argue that Jesus could have been three different things, but one thing he definitely couldn’t have been was just a prophet.
The three things Lewis identified were Liar, Lunatic or Lord. Since throughout the Synoptic Gospels, not to mention St John’s, Jesus says he is God, those are the only three things he could have been.
If he knew he wasn’t God but still claimed he was, he was a liar. If he wasn’t God but genuinely believed he was, he was a lunatic. The only other possibility is that Jesus was exactly what he said he was, one of the three hypostases of God.
Not realising this betokens intellectual weakness, which isn’t unique to Mohammed’s view of Christ. That’s why Islam relies on exercise more than on exegesis. Essential to it is unquestioning obedience to the Koranic law and practices, while free thought is downright perilous.
That tendency intensified throughout history. During the first centuries of Islam, it was still in touch with Christianity and Judaism, moving along parallel, if not necessarily converging, lines.
However, their great philosopher Al-Ghazzali (d. 1111) argued, somewhat self-refutingly, that philosophical speculation ought to be banned. Philosophers, he maintained, got some things right, some wrong, but hoi polloi wouldn’t be able to tell which is which.
“It is therefore necessary,” he wrote, “to shut the gate so as to keep the general public from reading the book of the misguided as far as possible.”
Another great Islamic thinker, Averroes (d. 1198), Maimonides’s friend and neighbour in Córdoba, tried to fight that injunction. Averroes (Ibn Rushd, to give him his Islamic name) was one of the main links between Aristotle and medieval thought.
However, all pagan implants, and therefore Averroes, were roundly rejected by Islam and never properly incorporated into mainstream Muslim thought. Ghazzali won in the end.
Averroes exerted a much greater influence on Western thought, specifically on Christian scholasticism or, even more specifically, Thomas Aquinas and his Paris University.
The popular aphorism says that Aquinas baptised Aristotle, but what he really did was re-read Aristotle in the light of John 1:1 – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
The Greek word used there, logos, means both word and reason. Hence Christian thought could blend the Word of God with Jesus Christ – and the Divine Reason of Greek philosophers, Plato first, Aristotle second.
The fundamental Christian doctrine of free will could then absorb Greek philosophy and thereby encourage free inquiry. This later found a political expression in such notions as freedom of conscience, self-expression and speech.
That’s why Christianity created the greatest civilisation in history, one that has remained fecund for many a century. On the other hand, by choosing Al-Ghazzali over Averroes, the previously spectacular Islamic civilisation went barren once history emerged out of the Middle Ages.
The religion of Islam, however, has endured better than Christianity, and for pretty much the same reasons. For freedom of inquiry presupposes freedom of doubt. Too many avenues become open, and most people can’t choose the right one – Al-Ghazzali had a point there.
Thus Christianity got to be first doubted, then mocked, then rejected as the principal cultural dynamic. The great store of Christian thought opened its doors to the shoplifters of the Enlightenment, who grabbed Christian freedoms, carried them to their own home and expunged all evidence of their legitimate provenance.
That allowed Christian values to survive the demise of Christianity for several centuries but, as many are beginning to notice with horror, not indefinitely. Thus freedom of speech perseveres, but only selectively, as freedom of woke speech.
While Christian holdouts may resent blasphemous films about Christ, there is precious little they can do about that within our post-Christian civilisation, all too ready to commit suicide by free speech.
Such – or any other – freedoms are alien to Islam. It’s neither theological nor philosophical, but legalistic. The word ‘Islam’ literally means ‘submission’ to the law, which can be enforced by any means necessary, including violence.
That’s why Muslims are ready to kill any Westerner who blasphemes against Mohammed and his sacred entourage. That’s also why pious, which is to say good, Muslims are completely incompatible with the West. As far as we are concerned, the only good Muslims are bad Muslims.
However, they still make attempts to use our own perversions as weapons to attack us with. Hence, in addition to raising purely Muslim objections to The Lady in Heaven, dealing with its portrayal of sacred personages, the protesters also beat us with our own clubs.
Apparently, Mohammed’s under-aged wife Aisha, along with his closest acolytes Abu Bakr and Omar, are portrayed as conniving chisellers. And not only that, but they are all played by black actors. Using the logic they learned at English schools, the protesters accused the film’s makers and distributors of racism.
If you show bad black people, you are thereby saying that all black people are bad. And that’s racism, a sin that to you, Mr Englishman, is much worse than even blasphemy.
Hence the film is hit with a double whammy. First, anyone showing it should be beheaded in accordance with the Islamic scriptures. Second, that evildoer can be charged with racism in accordance with the woke scriptures. (Not necessarily in that order.)
So who says Muslims can’t absorb Western values and incorporate them into their own? They can. But the only Western values that appeal to them are perverse. That makes Islam… I better not complete this sentence for fear of decapitation.
Remember Kipling? “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…”
I do not know how widely read is your blog, but I know your stance on morality and western civilization (Christendom) has made you the target of death threats from “tolerant” people. You are brave to continue to speak up for what you feel is right, in an increasingly insane world. Thank you. “If you can keep your head…” has added meaning when put in the context of an article criticizing Islam – a most intolerant people.
There were protests when “The Last Temptation of Christ” debuted in 1988, but I do not think it was removed from a single theater. Of course, nobody was threatened with physical harm.
Well said Alexander. And, the Art world has done worse regarding Christ. I will not even mention the name of the ‘work’ by American artist and photographer Serrano, however, if it were about the Moslem ‘Prophet’ the gallery would be rubble.
One often detects a note of jealousy when Christians compare their response to blasphemy with that of the Muslims. Although it would be quite gratifying to see Eric Idle’s head on a pike.
Interestingly, John Gray says that Islamic fundamentalism and its accompanying violence is a modern phenomenon born in the West.
Times have certainly changed; when my father was at university he was gifted a rather handsome copy of the Koran (in English) by some jolly Indonesian Muslims. They were attempting to convert him from his Russell inspired atheism. Suffice to say they failed, but many a stimulating discussion was had. Lovely chaps, one and all. This was the 70’s, before the Islamo-fascists made their presence felt on the world stage.
Right. So it was Islamo-fascists who sacked Constantinople in 1453.
But you must admit that during the 20th century, Islam was not a clear and present danger. You yourself had a much more relaxed attitude towards it in the 90’s, at least that was the impression I got from one of your articles for the Salisbury Review.
I honest to God can’t remember what I wrote for The Salisbury Review in the ’90s, other than warning about the dangers of Russia (and getting a reputation as an alarmist for my trouble).
As for your point, that depends on what you see as a clear and present danger. If you mean an existential threat to our physical survival, you are probably right. But Islam presents no such threat even now — barring the possibility of Iran getting the bomb and dropping it on us or our allies.
If you mean being our enemy, trying to undermine us in every possible way, then that was the case in the twentieth and any other century. It was in the twentieth century that Turkey was on the wrong side in the First World War, and openly sympathetic to the Nazis in the Second, along with most Muslim countries. It was also during that century that the Muslims attacked our sole Middle Eastern ally, Israel, three times. The last two of those conflicts could have easily drawn in both Russia and the US, with unpredictable consequences. It was also during that century that Muslim countries invited the Soviet presence, which increased the Russians’ global ambitions and made the West strain every sinew trying to contain them.
But my main point isn’t that Islam is going to destroy us physically, but that it’s incompatible with — and hostile or at least alien to — the West in every cultural, philosophical and religious sense. Hence the larger the Islamic presence in the West, the greater the cultural and social threat.
John Gray is wrong. Islam was spread by the sword, not sermon. And it was by the sword that Muslims either conquered or terrorised Europe for 1,400 years. What is indeed a modern phenomenon is the small-scale terrorism aimed at a few people at a time. But that’s only because they lack the muscle to go on another rampage over Europe.
Most of these protesters have probably never seen the movie or ever will.