Even More Disappointment

Ramadhan 9 1429

By now I should have given up on the Hitchens rant, but I keep forgetting to mention his dismal treatment of Islam. (Actually the dismal treatment of faiths is fairly non-discriminatory, to do him a kind of justice, but I suppose I regard this one as sort of my area of expertise.) I kind of expected that he might be reasonably well informed on this one, given his outspoken support for the invasion of Iraq and statements on various parts of the world that have Islam as their central belief system. What I genuinely didn't expect was comment at the level of the average sort of chap who knows nothing except what he has picked up from glancing at the Daily Mail. He appears to be aware of Karen Armstrong's useful and very basic introduction to the faith, Islam, because he cites it in one of the few footnotes to the text. (Scholarly his book is not.) However, as far as I can tell he hasn't read it. Or if he did, he didn't understand it. His errors on simple matters of fact are plentiful and egregious.

I'll mention two, both of which happen to resemble closely the kind of misrepresentations of Islam that have been characteristic of western thought through the centuries and which I thought Edward Said's Orientalism had skewered for good. The first is the lazy assertion that the Prophet (peace be upon him) was essentially a plagiarist. Hitchens seems completely unaware that Islam has never seen itself in any way as an innovative faith and that the Prophet was intensely aware of the repetitions of Judaic and Christian ideas in the Holy Qur'an. That was the whole point. It is simply impossible for a Muslim to consider the Prophet as in any way superior to other Messengers. We are expressly instructed to regard Jesus, Moses and Abraham as equals and all messages of the many thousands of prophets there have been as essentially the same.

The second is the extraordinary idea that the Prophet was a conscious fraud. By the way, this is not argued for by Hitchens but simply asserted (as a kind of joke, I think), initially in the course of a discussion of Joseph Smith of Mormon fame. Now of course this idea has been current since medieval times, finding its fullest expression in the caricature figure of Mahomet but no serious biographer of Muhammad (peace be upon him) in the world of western scholarship in modern times has suggested such a thing. So for Hitchens to revive such monstrous allegations so flippantly beggars belief. - Well, no, supposing as he does that anything approaching a religious experience is by its nature fraudulent and corrupt it does make a kind of sense.

I'm guessing there's a connection here with Salman Rushdie's portrayal of the Prophet as Mahomet in The Satanic Verses. It looks as if Hitchens has picked up what little he thinks he knows about Islam from his buddy Sir Salman. In fact, the 'issue' of the so-called 'satanic verses' themselves is the centrepoint of the contemptuous dismissal of Islam in the single short chapter devoted to the faith in God Is Not Great. But a key point of Rushdie's defence of his novel was that he was consciously using what he knew to be a wholly prejudiced view of Islam in a brilliantly ironic manner. (So brilliant that I couldn't work out how it was actually meant to be seen as ironic.) It looks as if he forgot to tell Christopher about this in their in-depth discussions of the novel.