The New Humanist blog reports that author Sebastian Faulks has got into a spot of bother.
In an interview with The Times, our wordsmith with a disciplined pen but a careless tongue expressed the following opinion: The Quran is very disappointing from a literary point of view and lacks an ethical dimension.
Actually, so that the full horror of his words can be appreciated in context, let’s have the offending quote in full:
“Jesus, unlike Muhammad, had interesting things to say. Muhammad had nothing to say to the world other than, ‘If you don’t believe in God you will burn for ever’. … It’s a depressing book. It really is. It’s just the rantings of a schizophrenic. It’s very one-dimensional, and people talk about the beauty of the Arabic and so on, but the English translation I read was, from a literary point of view, very disappointing.”
What an absolutely appalling thing to say! Thank god he later came to his senses and retracted it in The Guardian:
“If such an overstatement is taken out of its heavily nuanced context, then pulled out of the printed article and highlighted, it can have a badly distorting effect. I blame myself more than the reporter – or whichever subeditor thought it was good idea to pull out the more undigested bits and try to make a silly season scandal … I unreservedly apologise to anyone who does feel offended by comments offered in another context.”
Now, one might be forgiven for thinking that this apology insincere and based on a fear that certain wild-eyed lunatics known to inhabit the fringes of Islamic fundamentalism might drive him into hiding or butcherhim on the street. Or worse… perhaps he feared being ‘listed’ on Islamophobia-Watch. But one may breath a sigh of relief. Faulks makes his reasoning clear in The Telegraph:
“While we Judaeo-Christians can take a lot of verbal rough-and-tumble about our human-written scriptures, I know that to Muslims the Koran is different; it is by definition beyond criticism. And if anything I said or was quoted as saying (not always the same thing) offended any Muslim sensibility, I do apologise – and without reservation.”
Having any critical opinion on the literary merits of the Quran, the far-fetched claims of Mohammed or the ethical foundations or theocracy is racism, pure and simple. If you have something along these lines on the tip of your tongue, stop. Swallow it. If you’ve already blurted it out loud, apologise. Don’t delay. Say you’re sorry. Muslims, unlike Judeo-Christians – apparently – can’t take it.
But here’s the problem. In jumping through hoops to retract perfectly reasonable and valid personal observations for fear of causing offence and (let’s be honest) being accused of racism, Faulks has lapsed into the casual racism of low-expectations. Unlike (Western) Judeo-Christian cultures who are calm and rational, he is essentially saying, the savage and excitable Muslims are incapable of behaving like us civilized Westerners.
This is precisely how the current ‘Islamophobia’ obsession is in fact a driver of – not an antidote to – a very destructive “clash of civilisations’ narrative.
“Sorry” may seem the easiest way out of this sort of controversy, but – in the long run – it makes the social landscape a lot more complicated.
