Islam

Random House canceled publication of a novel purporting to depict the early life of the Prophet Muhammad and his child bride, Aisha.

Excerpts from Sherry Jones's The Jewel of Medina do not make it sound like fiction worthy of the novel's latest defender, Salman Rushdie. Denise Spellberg, an Islamic historian who reviewed the manuscript, called it "soft-core pornography," and "ugly" porn at that. Consider a first-person passage from Aisha, who, according to some traditions, married Muhammad at age 6 and had sex with him at 9:

This was the beginning of something new, something terrible. Soon I would be lying on my bed beneath him, squashed like a scarab beetle, flailing and sobbing while he slammed himself against me. He would not want to hurt me, but how could he help it? It's always painful the first time.

At the request of the Harvard Islamic Society, Harvard University has created female-only exercise hours at one of its athletic facilities, so that Muslim women don't have to work out alongside men.

The argument about how Western societies — from universities to nation-states — should accommodate their Muslim inhabitants tends, for the moment, to break down along the pre-existing left-right lines of partisan debate. The liberal administrators who granted the Harvard Islamic Society's request no doubt viewed it as an innocuous and reasonable gesture, and a case study in how multiculturalism ought to work. Critics of such accommodations, meanwhile, tend to be right-wingers fretting about creeping shari'a, and the possibility that multiculturalism's tendency to buckle under pressure from aggrieved minorities who reject its premises entirely is paving the way for the Islamification of the West.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has called the eventual adoption of some form of shari'a law for British Muslims "inevitable."

A chorus of critics has since condemned the Archbishop, the eccentric prelate some wags affectionately refer to as "the ArchDruid." But is it self-evidently true that Islamic law is incompatible with modernity, or that a liberal state can't embrace some forms of religious law? Consider India, where the formidably titled Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937 was seen as a landmark in minority rights. As in many countries, Indian family law is determined in part by religious boards -- for Christians, Parsis, Hindus, and Muslims -- that draw on and interpret faith traditions to adjudicate disputes. The system is by no means universally popular. Many Hindu chauvinists oppose Muslim personal law in an effort to denigrate a minority they see as a fifth column. Some secular liberals oppose it on grounds that a liberal state demands a uniform civil code. Then there Muslims who want to see Muslim personal law revised in response to changing social norms. And that, difficult though this may be to believe, is well within the Islamic tradition. Shari'a has historically evolved in response to local conditions and cultural traditions, and one would assume the same would be true of a shari'a for British Muslims. By bringing these practices into the light of day, by forcing the women and men who embrace Islamic law to take part in wide-ranging public discussion, we'd bring members of hidebound, isolated communities into the light of liberal modernity.

An Afghan court sentenced journalism student Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, 23, to death for downloading and distributing an article calling Muhammad a "killer and adulterer."

And US college students think they have it rough when caught downloading illegally.   By now, what rankles most about these calls for death sentences -- for naughty novels, misnamed teddy-bears, scandalous downloads -- is not just that they happen, but that the weird-beards of radical Islam have made them seem routine.  Is every act of violence and religious perversity capable of seeming normal through repetition?  How frightening to think that we might be subject to this inuring effect, if the same courts decided to enforce, say, the rules concerning slavery in the Koran.  To compensate for this creeping change in the terms of the argument, we defenders of heresy need to escalate our denunciations each time an atrocity like this is likely to happen.  Regrettably, the denunciations have instead become quieter and less impassioned instead.