Festival of Dangerous Ideas (2)

I've been a bit rubbish over the last week with the blog; though it was reassuring to hear that it was missed, and so it's prompted me to sort it out! I'm in the penultimate week of uni and have had a couple of mini assignments due in lately so I've been very busy. I had an essay for my distance learning course - I chose one entitled "Explore the difference between the 'nation' and the 'state' with reference to a post-1945 European case study" - so I chose the United Kingdom. It was interesting to research, and especially interesting looking at the question from an English perspective. And this evening I gave a presentation in a tutorial on the causes of the rise in religious fundamentalism in the 1960s and 70s - looking at Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, USA and Israel, based largely on the work of Karen Armstrong  and also some research for an essay I wrote last month on Pakistan. And tonight Kit had a dinner party, so I got back from uni at 8.15pm and went straight to dinner!

Anyway, I've been meaning to write something about the talks from last weekend. The first was Keysar Trad, who is something of a self-appointed spokesman for Islam in Australia, on the topic "Polygamy and other Islamic values are good for Australia". It was at times painful, slightly comic but ultimately quite depressing. Firstly, he didn't talk about any other Islamic values, as the title implied. The first half of his speech was basically a list of biblical examples of polygamists (along the lines of 'well Solomon did it so it must be ok') and Qur'anic references to it; his audience, obviously, were largely white middle class liberal Australians, so he wasn't going to convince anyone with that approach. He then argued that men have a higher sex drive than women, and it 'liberates' women if there is more than one of them to satiate a man's sex drive, that there are more women than men in society; he didn't really have a decent argument against polyandry, other than referring to there being 'medical issues' associated with a woman having more than one husband, though he failed to provide any evidence to back this up, even when pressed on the issue. To argue that a large percentage of the world practise polygamy, and to imply that it is therefore justifiable, is also very weak. The Q&A session ended up with one irate middle aged woman standing up to take great offence at his talk (which was received with collective eyeball rolling and 'well what did you expect?' being muttered under breaths) - to his credit, despite receiving quite a bit of abuse, he was very polite in reply.

I was disappointed for several reasons. Firstly, many of the audience may not hear another Muslim leader (albeit one who is manifestly not representative) talk on this contentious issue, and it was a shame he was so poor in my view. I felt he conflated two issues - one, the moral justification for polygamy, and two, the issue of whether it should be legalised in Australia - two related but distinct issues. Should the state have the right to dictate on such an issue? I would have had more respect for him, I think, had he approached it from the view of saying he believed Muhammad was the perfect Muslim and he had several wives, that it has a long history in his culture and he believed it's therefore justifiable, rather than producing a flimsy rational argument for a non-Muslim, western audience. No exploration either of the very different conceptions of marriage in Christianity and Islam (e.g. the contractual, non-sacramental nature of marriage in Islam, and also the issue of love which is different for each). I would have loved to have heard from a Muslim woman on the subject, and/or a Muslim who believed monogamy was preferable. Anyway, there are my thoughts on the issue!