The Limits of Acceptability

February 11th, 2008

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Marvellous stuff from Justin on the ongoing madness.

It’s depressing that many ‘thoughtful’ commentators have been quick to pitch in with the tabloid- and blog-led (where’s your sententious libertarian commitment to free speech now?) dash to throw Williams overboard, only this time on the basis of his ‘obscurity’, his lack of ‘communication skills’ (euurggh) and so on. A particularly revolting example of this view was Andrew Brown’s piece in the Guardian on Saturday.

It is all very well for the archbishop to explain that he does not want the term “sharia” to refer to criminal punishments, but for most people that’s what the word means: something atavistic, misogynistic, cruel and foreign. It is the Death of a Princess, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the hangings in Iran and the stonings in Afghanistan. It is the law which locks up middle-aged primary teachers for allowing their classes to name a teddy bear Muhammad. To the British media a demand for sharia is a demand to “behead those who insult Islam”. A failure to understand this simple matter of modern English usage should cost someone his job.

That’s my emphasis there, placed on one of the stupidest statements it’s been my privilege to read in the official media in a long time. What Brown and the broadsheet tendency who agree with him are announcing is that, faced with a situation like this, any rational person should immediately make common cause with the most reactionary elements in the British media, affirm their underlying political agenda to the point of sacking a prominent public figure, and entrench further within public discourse the assumption that there is only one way in which Islam can acceptably be discussed.

Because this isn’t about a lack of clarity, the ‘language of the seminar room’, a failure to communicate, or any other piece of disingenuous waffle behind which lies the imagined ignorance of the proles (that most valuable of resources). It’s about that well-loved pastime of the British media, tracking down a point of view that lies just far enough outside the mainstream of what they consider acceptable discourse to be righteously carpet-bombed. You’d be hard pressed to find a speech by Arthur Scargill that could be called academic, or mired in abstraction. But what is happening to Rowan Williams is what has happened to many, many figures on the UK left. This is not misinterpretation based on a failure to read a speech, it’s misrepresentation based on political consensus. By pretending that he is defending the media by decrying the arrogance of intellectual elites, Brown and those who take his point of view are making a decisive political choice in favour of populist extremism.