LONDON LETTER: MAY 19th
Weather has just taken a turn for the worse after weeks of
warm sunshine, yesterday turned cold and wet. The political news is just as
gloomy and my skills at elision and denial are being tested to the full. Denial
of course gets a bad press, often justifiably so, though I also believe it can
be a necessary protective mechanism, too much bad news in one go being
impossible to digest. A gradually diminishing denial making it just about palatable.
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| Madonna Prato Bellini |
Yesterday to the National Gallery which always delivers up
something new. Struck by how ugly 16th Century baby
Jesus’s are portrayed, like old men. This presumably to suggest worldly wisdom and the man to
come. The women are all voluptuous, often displaying ample breasts, Michelangelo’s
Leda seems to border on the obese.
What is striking is the prominence of both Greek mythology and Christianity being depicted at the same time and often by the same painters. This would be inconceivable in an Islamic culture, or indeed puritan England. Blasphemous images of Greek God’s, along with nudity, apparently causing no problems for the royal courts or elites of southern Europe. Where it that some contemporary societies demonstrated as much maturity. In some respects I feel we have regressed.
What is striking is the prominence of both Greek mythology and Christianity being depicted at the same time and often by the same painters. This would be inconceivable in an Islamic culture, or indeed puritan England. Blasphemous images of Greek God’s, along with nudity, apparently causing no problems for the royal courts or elites of southern Europe. Where it that some contemporary societies demonstrated as much maturity. In some respects I feel we have regressed.
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| Leda and The swan |
Speaking of the Renaissance, there is now much talk, in the
context of Islam, of the need for a reformation, the reformation I think the
natural development of renaissance thinking. In this morning’s
Guardian the exceptionally unpleasant Mehdi Hasan, who has widely slandered
the murdered Charlie Hebbdo cartoonists, criticises just such a demand from
Ayan Hersi Ali. (In fact the piece is little more than a thinly disguised
attack on Ms Ali).[1] He
does so by accusing her and others of being ahistorical. This in a farrago of
jaw dropping ahistorical nonsense. According to Mr Hasan the reformation was
solely down to one man, Martin Luther, and that the ‘Protestant Reformation also opened the door to blood-letting on an
unprecedented, continent-wide scale. Have we forgotten the French wars of
religion? Or the English civil war?’ Attributing
the English civil war solely to the Protestant Reformation is about as
ahistorical as it gets.
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| Ayan Hersi Ali |
He does go on to acknowledge, '… reforms are of course needed
across the crisis-ridden Muslim-majority world: political, socio-economic and,
yes, religious too.[2]
Muslims need to rediscover their own heritage of pluralism, tolerance and
mutual respect.’ Well good luck with that one.
Such warm words are, of course' designed
to provide a cover of respectability to his attack on Ayan. For Mr Hasan has never
seriously explored the need for Islam to adapt to the modern world, on the
contrary he is very adept at playing a double game, saying one thing in public
and another when he thinks the spotlight shines elsewhere, as here,[3]
where he clearly demonstrates his contempt for non-Muslims. Not much ‘tolerance and mutual respect’ in this
video.
Meanwhile, in what I suppose I must call the ‘real world.’
‘Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant (ISIL) militants searched door-to-door for policemen and
pro-government fighters and threw bodies in the Euphrates River in a bloody
purge Monday after capturing the strategic city of Ramadi, their biggest
victory since overrunning much of northern and western Iraq last year. Some 500
civilians and soldiers died in the extremist killing spree since the final push
for Ramadi began Friday, authorities said.’[4]
And so how I am I to absorb this information? In truth I
cannot, but run a bath before engaging with the day.
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” T S Eliot The Four Quartets
[1]
Ayan Hersi Ali of course lives under intense police protection, with multiple
threats against her life from Islamists. Indeed her friend and collaborator Theo
Van Geogh was brutally murdered by one such fanatic, who pinned a threat TO Ayan’s
life to his chest. Has Hasan ever condemned this attack of the fact of Ayan
having to live her life under constant threat? If he has I would like to hear
of it.
[2] My
emphasis.
[3]
One suspects that if confronted he would resort to the weasel word formula of
saying his words need to be seen ‘in context.’
