This week's Private Eye has an interesting (should you care about such things) item about the future of legendary Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre.  It reports that Dacre's incentive package was amended in 2010 from a five-yearly bonus to one in which he was to be paid "an additional £500,000 for each full year that he continutes working until he is 65".  We also learn that "his contract was also amended last year from a rolling one to 'the residual term until his 65th birthday on 14th November 2013'."

A big hint there that Dacre is being eased out.  The 65th birthday looks like an excuse, or a face-saving formula.  There's no reason why he shouldn't continue as editor after then, should he wish to and should his employers want him to stay on.  On the other hand, were he really ready to quit, why would he want to cling on until a symbolic retirement age? 

Assuming this account is accurate (and the evidence for the Eye's story seems quite clear), it provides some context, at least, to Dacre's kamikaze-like behaviour in recent days.  It's not clear whether or not he personally decided to run the now-notorious article about Ralph Miliband, which might otherwise have passed without much fuss, under the headline "The Man Who Hated Britain". But there's little doubt that it was he who responded to the criticism from Ed Miliband with a trenchant refusal to apologise, indeed a determination to repeat and underscore the allegations about the Labour leader's Marxist father.  And the Mail's attempt to link the story with its campaign against press regulation certainly has Dacre's fingerprints all over it.  So what is he playing at?

It could well be a case of the devil coming in great fury because he knows his time is short.  Nothing to lose, now, after all.  Better to go down all guns blazing in a fight to the death with Ed Miliband than to just slink off to his retirement home.  His departure, even if postponed until November, will (at least in his own eyes) take on the lineaments of a martyrdom.  Perhaps he believes that he can bring Miliband, or the whole regulatory process, down with him.  Or perhaps it's simply his last hurrah for the Blackshirts.  Either way, he will be enjoying his final battle.

There's a risk here, of course, which is that Dacre's behaviour will hasten the dawn of Leveson-style regulation, by increasing Miliband's determination to accept nothing less (feelings of outraged filial piety now joining his longstanding desire to muzzle newspapers like the Mail).  Already, pro-regulation campaigners scent blood: the fury with which the Mail is now being pursued is somewhat opportunistic, however genuine the anger behind it.  They will not be appeased by securing Dacre's scalp (as it will inevitably appear); the removal of their most rabid opponent will be no more than a first step.

As Roy Greenslade has it:

In truth, the whole affair has blown up in Dacre's face because of his intransigence. The Mail editor has become the centre of a story that has legs.

In the process, he has achieved the reverse of his intentions. A dignified Ed Miliband has emerged with an enhanced image. As for press regulation, he has made it infinitely more difficult for the matter to be resolved in favour of the system he favours.

But perhaps Dacre doesn't really care, and this last campaign is part of a scorched-earth policy.  There's said to be little love lost between Dacre and the man often touted as his successor, Mail on Sunday editor Geordie Greig.  Greig himself today issued an abject apology for one of his reporters gatecrashing a memorial service for Ed Miliband's uncle.  He was insistent that he had nothing to do with it (but then who did dispatch the reporter without his permission?  One of Dacre's minions?).   The subtext to Greig's grovelling is presumably to signal that the Mail under his control will be softer, gentler affair, a labrador puppy to Dacre's pitbull; and no doubt there's also a hint of panic that the scandal might cost him his long dreamed-of prize. 

Ed Miliband, meanwhile, has gone over Dacre's head to the present Lord Rothermere, demanding a thorough enquiry into the ethics of the Mail.  Such an enquiry could only satisfy by presenting the Labour leader with Dacre's head on a platter.  But if Dacre is leaving anyway, the sacrifice can only be a symbolic one.  Unless, of course, it gives Rothermere a most convenient opportunity to remake the Mail's image by loading all of its sins onto a scapegoat, who will then be cast out into the wilderness with only a vast pension to sustain him.  Or unless Dacre has raised the stakes so high that his departure now would look too much like a victory for the supposed enemies of a free press.  In which case the plans for his retirement might have to be revisited, and Rothermere (and the whole country) might be stuck with him for logner than originally expected.  Who knows?

UPDATE: The Press Gazette is reporting that Dacre is staying on for another twelve months at least, having agreed a new contract. It's not clear when he negotiated this. In any case, it puts paid to any "scorched earth" theory, but I doubt the timing is entirely coincidental. Perhaps his new lease of professional life has gone to his head.
Read the rest of this article

TalkSPORT sends Tom Holland to Bantanamo Bay

Tom Holland, bestselling historian and keen amateur cricketer (a select few may be aware that he once hit a Six) was scheduled to come on TalkSPORT this afternoon to plug a book about (and written by) his cricket team, the Authors' XI.  Yesterday he seemed quite excited at the prospect:

On the list of things I thought it improbable I would end up doing, appearing on Talksport is right up there with becoming a Grand Mufti.
— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) June 10, 2013

But it was not to be.  Last night he received an email from the producers telling him his appearance had been cancelled.  And not because listeners to the Hawksbee and Jacobs show aren't interested in cricket.  Not even because they had been warned that all Tom really wanted to do was talk about his Six (in which case one might have forgiven them).  No.  Apparently they were worried that the author of Rubicon and, more recently, In The Shadow of The Sword, was too controversial.

To all those tuning into @talksport to hear me talk about my 6 & @authorscc, I'm afraid I've been sent to Banternamo Bay
— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) June 11, 2013

In The Shadow of The Sword did cause something of a stir when it was released last year, largely because it discussed (among other things) the early days of Islam.  When a documentary based on the book, Islam: the Untold Story, was shown on Channel 4 there was even more of a fuss, with some Muslims taking issue with the film on historical grounds and others abusing the author on Twitter.  Channel 4 even cancelled a screening of the film it had arranged for journalists after taking mysterious "security advice".  But neither that, nor even the truly ominous sight of journalists like Charles Moore lining up to congratulate Holland for being "brave", sufficed to turn him into Salman Rushdie, or his book into The Satanic Verses.  He continued to tour the country promoting the book, give interviews, present afternoon history shows on Radio 4 and cheerfully debate with Muslims on Twitter, all while working on a new translation of Herodotus.  Not to mention playing cricket.

He was, it is true, briefly dropped from the Authors XI earlier this year, but the selectors quickly realised their mistake and, in any event, there was no suggestion that intimidation from outraged Muslim cricket-fans had played any part in the decision.

So why is Tom Holland suddenly such a hot potato?  Why is a radio station that once employed George Galloway as a phone-in host suddenly scared of the merest hint of controversy?  And what made them think that controversy was likely to ensue?  Holland was, after all, coming on the show to talk about cricket and was most unlikely to have even mentioned In The Shadow of The Sword (now out in paperback, and a terrific read, by the way.)

On Twitter this afternoon, Tom was bemused:

Do @talksport think if they have me on, Muslims will burn down their studio? Don't know whether to be more insulted on my behalf or Muslims'
— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) June 11, 2013

He doesn't know why TalkSPORT cancelled him.  "I think they Googled me and got into a state, worrying I might be a security risk," he speculates.   "It's utterly weird.  Beyond weird.  Comic.  I think they think they're being PC, when actually they're being the precise opposite."

Quite. If the station was acting pre-emptively to head off presumed Muslim anger, they must have a very low opinion of Muslims.  Nor does this kind of hypersensitivity do anything to further soical harmony or good community relations.  It is in fact a form of Islamophobia: irrational fear of Islam in its most basic and literal sense. 

As far as I can tell, there were no threats, or even complaints, in the run-up to Tom Holland's planned cricket-themed appearance on TalkSPORT.  But perhaps they feared a boycott, or imagined that Anjem Choudhary and his mates would picket their studios.  ("Behead Infidels who talk about Cricket!")  Or was the threat something more oblique -- maybe they envisaged EDL supporters phoning in to congratulate Holland, not on his celebrated Six, but on his "brave" stand against Islam, which of course would have been highly awkward for everyone, but hardly 9/11.

The station told me, in a somewhat noncommittal statement this afternoon, that they had been "keen to feature" the book, but when Bloomsbury put up Tom Holland they became concerned for their listeners  (why?).  Apparently there were "concerns regarding controversy around Tom Holland's previous work and so it was decided not to go ahead with the feature." Which, of course, reveals almost nothing beyond the fact that any "threat" was entirely a product of TalkSPORT's imagination.


Tom Holland's reflection: "They don't seem to be employing the sharpest knives in the cutlery drawer." Read the rest of this article

Dawkins and the Flying Horse

When religious people complain about Richard Dawkins, they generally have in mind a crude caricature of a sneering, simplistic, arrogant, complacent, rich, intolerant, unimaginative mocker of other people's beliefs. And caricature it is, to anyone who has read the man's finer books or listened to him engage in polite and respectful debate with, for example, Rowan Williams or Jonathan Sacks. (A few weeks ago I was at an event which featured the latter two and remember thinking at one point, What a shame Dawkins isn't here.)

But then Dawkins' Twitter persona is scarcely less of a caricature.

Recently, for example, he complained about his tube train being delayed because, according to an announcement, a passenger had been "taken ill". Why should a sick passenger cause a delay? he wondered. It took others to point out to him that the phrase was code for a very serious medical emergency.

Yesterday, he wondered whether it was appropriate for the New Statesman to print "as a serious journalist" articles by its former political editor Mehdi Hasan, a man who "admits to believing Muhamed flew to heaven on a winged horse." Rejecting the inevitable accusations of Islamophobia (as well as the comment by Tom Watson MP that he was "a gratuitously unpleasant man") Dawkins went on to claim that he was merely drawing attention to double standards where religious beliefs are concerned. ("Oh for goodness' sake, I didn't say Muslims can't be journalists. I questioned the credibility of a man who believes in winged horses.")

Al Buraq, the "winged horse" that carried Mohammed to heaven

According to Andrew Brown, "the real comedy comes when he lifts his face from the pie, dripping scorn and custard, to glare at the audience who can't see how very rational he is. Because there are some people who don't understand that everything Dawkins says illuminates the beauty of reason." Sunny Hundal has also leapt on board, accusing Dawkins of indulging in "a bizarre rant" and of turning into "a pathetically confused bigot".

But neither of these pieces is much more helpful than Dawkins' own Tweets in getting to the bottom of this little spat.

For clarity, and at the risk of making it all seem rather more considered than it appeared at the time, here is a tidied-up version of Dawkins' argument regarding Hasan and the winged horse. The words are his but I've changed the order somewhat and removed the names of other Twitter users who engaged him in debate.

Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed flew to heaven on a winged horse. It's true. He admitted it to me in person and now he has repeated it in print. And the New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist. Would you take seriously a man who believed in fairies at the bottom of his garden? You'd ridicule palpably absurd beliefs of any other kind. Why make an exception for religion? Why?

Conan Doyle did indeed believe in fairies. And has been rightly ridiculed for it ever since. Isaac Newton believed in various occult things. But he did not believe in a winged horse. Yes, a talking snake is as ridiculous as a winged horse. But respectable religious journalists don't believe in a talking snake.

Some people might see no problem with going to a dentist who believes in the tooth fairy. They are welcome. I would change my dentist.

Mehdi Hasan talks a remarkable amount of good sense on most issues. But he believes in a winged horse. A winged horse! The amazing paradox is that the same individual can be very sensible on most things yet believe in a winged horse.

What intrigues me is the double standard whereby we all happily ridicule daft beliefs EXCEPT when protected by the label "religion". A believes in fairies. B believes in winged horses. Criticise A and you're rational. Criticise B and you're a bigoted racist islamophobe. The people disagreeing with me think winged horse is just as absurd as I do. Someone suggests he doesn't truly believe in the winged horse but has to pretend. I'd like to believe that because he's a nice guy and good writer.

Last word: Mehdi's absurd belief in winged horse deserves ridicule. But his being a Muslim of course does not mean NS shouldn't hire him.

That "last word" reads like some kind of climbdown, given the initial complaint that "the New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist." But I don't want to waste time making the obvious point that someone can be competent in one field while holding eccentric or irrational views about something else, especially since Dawkins himself appears to have conceded it. (I'd just say that even a dentist who believed in the tooth fairy could still be a perfectly competent dentist.)

You may, though, be wondering just where this winged horse business comes from.

It's not clear to me why Dawkins' Twitter rant happened yesterday, given that the encounter which provoked it took place last year. Hasan wrote about it in the Huffington Post in December in an article the main purpose of which was to argue that religion was rational, or at least not irrational. Here's how it began:

You believe that Muhammad went to heaven on a winged horse?" That was the question posed to me by none other than Richard Dawkins a few weeks ago, in front of a 400-strong audience at the Oxford Union. I was supposed to be interviewing him for al-Jazeera but the world's best-known atheist decided to turn the tables on me.

So what did I do? I confessed. Yes, I believe in prophets and miracles. Oh, and I believe in God, too. Shame on me, eh? Faith, in the disdainful eyes of the atheist, is irredeemably irrational; to have faith, as Dawkins put it to me, is to have "belief in something without evidence". This, however, is sheer nonsense. Are we seriously expected to believe that the likes of Descartes, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Rousseau, Leibniz and Locke were all unthinking or irrational idiots?

Slight ambiguity here. Does Mehdi Hasan believed in winged horses or not? You can watch the encounter on YouTube.

"Do you believe that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse?  I'll do you the compliment of assuming that you don't."
"No I do. I believe in miracles."
"You believe that Mohammed went to heaven on a winged horse?"
"I believe in God. I believe in miracles. I believe in revelation."

Again, Hasan certainly implied that he believed in the winged horse story, but he didn't explicitly affirm it, either.  In a Tweet yesterday he finally declared that he was "not sure if I even do believe in winged horses but I do - Hot Chocolate! - believe in miracles."

To be fair to Dawkins, Hasan gave the distinct impression that he believed something that's patently ridiculous; and his attempt to make it seem all part of some wider, less obviously daft, belief in God and miracles was a bit clumsy.

It's worth asking at this point what belief in Mohammed's winged horse would actually entail. We're not talking about the general existence of Pegasus-like creatures. The existence of such a mythical beast isn't merely unsupported by scientific evidence, it would break all the laws of aerodynamics. Rather, the reference is to the significant event in Mohammed's life known as the Night Journey. In Islamic tradition, at one point in his ministry Mohammed was spirited at night to Jerusalem and thence taken on the tour of the heavens in the company of the Archangel Gabriel. In the course of the journey, which has structural similarities to that described in Dante's Paradiso, the prophet has meetings with Biblical characters including Moses and John the Baptist. The most significant part of the story, from the theological point of view, comes when Allah makes a demand that human beings pray fifty times a day. Mohammed, with a bit of help from Moses, argues that this would be a bit much, and succeeds in haggling his way down to what became the canonical Islamic practice of five prayers a day.

The story is alluded to in the Koran, but the fullest accounts are two passages in the Hadiths (the collected sayings of the Prophet, which have the status of secondary scriptures in Islam). They are fascinating in themselves. The story has features that many people would instantly recognise as shamanistic. As in a shamanic initiatory ordeal, for example, Mohammed's body is broken down and reassembled: "A golden tray full of wisdom and belief was brought to me and my body was cut open from the throat to the lower part of the abdomen and then my abdomen was washed with Zam-zam water and (my heart was) filled with wisdom and belief."

We are clearly in the realm of visionary experience. The journey takes place, by Mohammed's own account (as recorded in the Hadith) "while I was at the House in a state midway between sleep and wakefulness." The Night Journey might be described in modern terms as a lucid dream; certainly the prophet seems to have been in a state of consciousness associated with strange experiences, a state in which modern people sometimes report alien visitations or out-of-body experiences and earlier generations had encounters with hobgoblins and vampires. The commonest form of the experience is known as sleep paralysis: if it's happened to you, you know exactly what it involves. If you haven't, imagine being fully conscious while under general anaesthetic and struggling, but failing, to move.

The prophet's mode of transport, we are informed, was Al Buraq, described as a white animal, "smaller than a mule and bigger than a donkey." The texts don't explicitly say it was a horse (in fact, it seems to be smaller than a horse); they merely offer equine comparators as to the scale. However, in art Al Buraq is invariably depicted as something like a flying horse (usually with a human face, indeed, which would make Dawkins even more apoplectic, I suspect). Again, Al Buraq seems to have shamanic antecedents. Comparison might also be made with Sleipnir, the eight-hoofed horse of Odin in the Norse myths.

As should be obvious from all this, to believe in the Night Journey is not at all the same as believing in a flying horse in a literal, physical sense. Rather it is to believe that Mohammed was vouchsafed a vision of heaven, a vision that was more real than an ordinary dream, a vision that came from God and that may therefore be described as being "real". To suggest that, in his physical body, Mohammed climbed astride a physical winged horse and was carried to first from Mecca to Jerusalem and thence through the seven heavens, where he had physical encounters with physical dead prophets and was then ushured in the presence of an equally corporeal Allah, with whom he proceeded to haggle like an Arabian carpet salesman, would be absurd indeed. I don't think Mehdi Hasan actually believes that (though he's free to correct me) and I don't think any other Muslim believes that either.

To believe in the Night Journey in this literal sense would entail more than the existence of a magical horse. It would entail belief in a cosmological set-up that was disproved when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin flew to the Moon, or indeed when Galileo looked through his telescope. And if the story were literally true God himself would cease to be God and would be just another thing in the universe, sitting up there on his cloud, someone you can go and visit if he lends you his flying horse.

Dawkins is right that a belief in flying horses would not be rendered respectable or beyond by the mere fact that it features in the scriptures of a major world religion, or that it was many people's "sincerely held" belief. And there's plenty one can validly (and far more relevantly) object to in Islam, as there is in other religions. But his singling out of the flying horse story, without apparently bothering to find out what the story relates to or what believing it it actually means, is depressingly typical of his recent descent into attention-seeking superficiality. Read the rest of this article

Why Thatcher deserves a proper funeral

Two reasoned objections to the forthcoming quasi-imperial pageantry of the Thatcher funeral in today's press, coming from different places politically but reaching very similar conclusions.

In the Guardian, Martin Kettle calls the funeral's planners "foolish" and "naive" in not seeing that the Thatcher funeral "plainly risks being an avoidable public wound that disrespects the dead and that this country, in the wider sense, does not need."  She deserves a publicly funded funeral but he worries about "the symbolism of an imperial, military funeral for a civilian politician in a 21st century democracy."  He thinks it a good principle that "public funerals for politicians should be civic, restrained and unifying, rather than military, bombastic and controversial."  He suggests a precedent in the 1898 funeral of Gladstone, who lay in state but whose obsequies were a purely civilian affair: his simple coffin "was carried across the road to Westminster Abbey on a plain funeral car, with civilian bearers for a service."

Kettle blames the present Conservative-dominated government for putting on next week's potentially divisive show, but it was actually under Gordon Brown that the arrangements for Thatcher's send-off were drawn up.  She was, according to Charles Powell, offered both a lying-in-state and an RAF fly-past, but objected to the former (which might well have degenerated into a fiasco as protesters attempted to smuggle eggs and tomatoes into Westminster Hall) and thought the latter an unnecessary expense.  That's a shame.  A salute from a Vulcan bomber and a Harrier, assuming there are any still flying, would have been entirely fitting with her triumph in the Falklands.

Indeed, Kettle is surely wrong to see her, like Gladstone, as a purely civilian figure.  The Falklands war lasted only a few weeks in 1982, but it remains the defining image of her premiership.  She may not have the direct military experience of Churchill, the last prime minister buried with comparable honours in 1965, or indeed of Mountbatten, who was given a full ceremonial military funeral in 1979 after he was blown up by the IRA.  But she was in every other sense a war leader, revelling in her relationship with the military and in her own image as an Iron Lady.  And she was greatly beloved by the armed forces.

Churchill's funeral involved far more troops than will be at Thatcher's

The Telegraph's Peter Oborne objected to the plan to give Maggie a state funeral (and technical quibbles aside, this will be a state funeral) back in 2011, "even though I accept that she was a very great woman, one of the six or seven most important and admirable prime ministers to occupy Downing Street in the almost 300 years since the office was invented."  Greatness is not enough, he maintained: "State ceremonies can be very damaging unless (as with the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton) the whole nation can come together."  It would be an insult to former miners and others who failed to share in the benefits of Thatcherism to parade her body through the streets to St Paul's.

Strong arguments, repeated today.  The official nature of the funeral, and the Queen's personal attendance, "will create very serious problems," he writes.  It "marks a betrayal of one of the most essential principles of the British state: the division between the executive and ceremonial functions."  It even calls into question the Queen's political impartiality, he thinks, and there's a risk that it will "turn into a triumphalist Tory occasion that inflicts permanent damage on the monarchy and also our system of government."

What will happen next Wednesday is, undoubtedly, very unusual.  This country, historically, does not go in for grand public funerals for politicians. Gladstone got a pared-down state funeral, as did William Pitt the Younger and the ludicrous Lord Palmerston, but there were no state honours of any kind for Disraeli, Lloyd George or Clement Attlee, all Thatcher's peers in the pantheon of historically great prime ministers.  Aside from royalty, only Nelson, Wellington, Churchill and Mountbatten (who was a sort-of royal) have had the full treatment, a select group that will now include Margaret Thatcher.  She will probably be the last, though that was also said about Churchill.

Looked at in purely domestic terms, then, Thatcher's funeral looks anomalous, provocative and divisive, as well as a security nightmare.  Unlike in 1965 or 1997, the country will not come to a standstill and crowds are unlikely to line the route of the funeral procession ten deep.  There will be protesters.  I particularly dread the prospect of pre-emptive arrests, as happened before 2011's Royal Wedding when people were rounded up by police for dressing as zombies.  Nevertheless, Wednesday's pageantry will be no more than her due, and it will be an occasion rich in history.  As most people acknowledge (including Ed Miliband, in his remarkably touching and well-delivered speech in the Commons yesterday), Margaret Thatcher was for many years a dominating presence not just in British politics but on the international stage.  This is simple fact.  Her achievements, both personal and political, were astonishing; not to mark the passing of such an extraordinary figure with extraordinary ceremonies would be unimaginative, myopic and cheap.

It would also lead to head-scratching abroad.  World leaders and former world leaders will naturally wish to pay their respects one of the outstanding political figures of the second half of the twentieth century.  Reagan, Mitterand and Pope John Paul II - her deceased contemporaries  -  all had lavish funerals as befitted their international status.  Does she not deserve to rank alongside them?  To deny her a grand funeral for reasons of precedent or etiquette would be undemocratic as well as mean-spirited.  It's a shame that neither Attlee nor Lloyd George got a state funeral (most likely because they opted for a private burial instead), but these omissions are not Margaret Thatcher's fault, and they cannot be retrospectively corrected. 

When Princess Diana was killed in 1997, it was initially suggested that she be given a modest private funeral.  As the divorced wife of the Prince of Wales, she was no longer even Her Royal Highness: to grant her a state or royal funeral would be as anomalous, pedants pointed out, as to fly a union jack at half mast from the Buckingham Palace flagpole (a gesture that public opinion demanded and eventually got).  Such unimaginative arguments were soon swept aside not just by the vast upswell of public mourning but also because courtiers and ministers came to grasp the global significance of the event.  The world expected Diana to receive a proper send off and it would have undermined Britain's reputation had she not been given one.  Unlike in 1997, the country is not united in grief; nevertheless, the death of Margaret Thatcher is an event of historic moment that must be publicly marked.

That Thatcher will be the first non-royal woman to be given such honours ought to be a source of feminist pride: not only did she smash the glass ceiling in British politics and in the Conservative party, she will also now smash the glass coffin.  About time too.  One of Oborne's complaints is that honouring Thatcher is a "betrayal of one of the most essential principles of the British state: the division between the executive and ceremonial functions".   But what this really means is that only monarchs and other royal personages are worthy of being celebrated with state pomp: that no mere commoner, however distinguished or outstanding, can hope to aspire to a state funeral.  Is that a good message to send out in what Kettle calls a 21st century democracy?  It seems rather feudal to me. 

Perhaps the answer to the inevitable divisiveness of Margaret Thatcher's state funeral is to have more of them.  It's admittedly hard to see who else currently alive would qualify on the grounds of historic and international status.  Greatness seems to be in fairly short supply at the present time.  Tony Blair, an almost equally dominant and divisive figure when he was in power, sadly pales by comparison, but who knows where his reputation will stand in thirty years' time?  But then the Republic of Ireland gives state funerals to the likes of Charles Haughey and Garrett Fitzgerald. 

There are good grounds, too, for recognising contributions from outside politics.  India gave a state funeral to Mother Teresa while last year Mexico held such an event for the novelist Carlos Fuentes.  Brazil honoured Ayrton Senna in this way and will probably do the same for Pele.  I think it would be entirely appropriate for Britain to hold a state funeral for Bobby Charlton or Paul McCartney.

We live in a country that prides itself, rightly or wrongly, on the quality of our public pageantry, and on an ability (shown at last year's Olympics) to put on a good show for the world.  As the funerals of Churchill, Diana and the Queen Mother all showed, the UK knows how to orchestrate the pageantry of death before a global audience.  The funeral of Margaret Thatcher will also be a grand spectacle, watched by the entire world.  And that is something that she would surely have relished - not for any reasons of personal egotism, but for its expression of national pride and dignity. Read the rest of this article

Melvyn Bragg on Mary Mag: A cause for Concern

The BBC is showing a documentary about Mary Magdalene tomorrow lunchtime. Typical, pious, Good Friday viewing, reminding the public that Easter isn't all chocolate and bunnies but (for Christians at least) has something to do with Jesus, you might think. It's presented by Melvyn Bragg, for one thing, which is British broadcasting's ultimate stamp of intellectual seriousness. Better than Botney, even. But the loopy evangelical pressure group Christian Concern are aghast. In an "action alert" email tonight, they urge supporters to complain to the BBC about this forthcoming outrage, the timing of which they suggest is "highly inappropriate and inflammatory."

"The BBC's online complaint form only takes a few minutes to complete," they remind people. "The BBC's response will depend on what level of feedback it receives."

Because the Beeb is entirely unfamiliar with the concept of an organised write-in campaign.

"Inappropriate timing" is hard to sustain. The Gospels state that Mary Magdalene stood at the foot of the cross while Jesus was being crucified, and that she was the first person to see (or imagine she saw) the risen Christ. And those are the only definite references to her in the New Testament. So it's hard to see what would be a more appropriate time to celebrate her.

So what's so outrageous about it?

Christian Concern are disturbed by a Telegraph piece in which Milord Bragg discusses the "tantalising and elusive" evidence about Mary M, and the "fragments which increasingly hint at radical new truths about the woman who has been called the apostle to the apostles."

This is certainly over-egging the pudding. The "radical new truths" have been around for donkeys' years: a few passages in apocryphal gospels that hint at a unique closeness in the relationship between Mary and Jesus. Yes, all that Holy Blood, Holy Grail/ Dan Brown stuff that has been the stuff of speculative history and conspiracy theorising since I was a lad and probably long before. There is, Bragg offers, "one taunting scrap of record which may well lead to the conclusion that she was his wife."

Well, knock me down with an archangel's feather.

If there's anything to be aghast about, it's the fact that this utterly familiar idea, for which there is, of course, no definitive proof (nor will there ever be) is still being presented in TV documentaries and newspaper articles as new and shocking. Given that half the population of the planet seems to have read Dan Brown's poorly-written thriller, that ought to be a genuine scandal. But, of course, that isn't the scandal that Christian Concern is concerned about.

Their concerns are as follows:

1) In a broadcast at the precise time Christians are remembering his death on the cross, this programme questions the purity of Jesus.

The programme suggests that Jesus might, just possibly, have been married. To a woman. How does this "question his purity", exactly. I thought that Christian Concern approved of heterosexual marriage. Barely a day goes by without Christian Concern voicing their supposedly Christian concern about the "threat" to traditional marriage posed by the government's proposal to extend it to gay couples. Only this Tuesday they sent out a "prayer alert" urging people to pray that the US Supreme Court uphold California's ban on same-sex marriage "and that God's good pattern for marriage and family is not further corrupted."

Yet somehow God's good pattern is not good enough for the Son of God, that if Jesus had married it would have exposed him to "impurity". As Cranmer Tweeted to me earlier this evening, one might expect Roman Catholics, with their ideal of the celibate priesthood, to reason thus (though celibate Catholic bishops, like the very pure ex-Cardinal Keith O'Brien, have put themselves at the forefront of the campaign for traditional marriage). But Christian Concern is a largely Protestant outfits, and Protestants have never thought that marriage might be somehow "impure".

It's an odd objection.

2) The claims about Jesus are based on dubious scholarship... it feeds on Dan Brown's 'Da Vinci Code' hypothesis rather than taking account of sensible scholarship.

Well, they're on slightly firmer ground with this one, I suppose. The scholarship itself isn't dubious: the apocryphal gospels which imply a wife-like status for the Magdalene do exist, and to regard the statement that "he often kissed her on the [mouth]" as suggesting physical as well as spiritual intimacy is not wholly implausible. What is dubious is the notion, which no serious scholar makes, that these texts are historically reliable. But to say that is not to say definitively that Jesus was not married.

What we can say is that the mainstream Christian tradition has always assumed Jesus to have been celibate; but that there were, in the first few centuries AD, contrary ideas floating about. The Gnostic and other apocryphal gospels record some of these ideas. So while there is no real evidence that Jesus was married, there's also no direct statement in the canonical gospels that he wasn't.

How does this matter? What Christian Concern and their ilk can't abide is that, for many people, Jesus is a fascinating historical (or quasi-historical) figure about whom little is known but about whom many would like to know more. I suspect that very few people would be scandalised if proof emerged that there was a Mrs Christ. Most of us would be quite pleased, I would guess, because most of us (even including Richard Dawkins) feel quite warmly about the Jesus depicted in the gospels, and wouldn't begrudge him a little connubial happiness. The theory that Jesus was married keeps getting trotted out, in other words, not because it's scandalous but because, credible or not, it has popular resonance. It's also plausible that a church that acknowledged Jesus as married, or even gave equal prominence to his female disciples (a role which Mary Magdalene, as depicted in the New Testament, undoubtedly fulfilled) might have had fewer problems down the centuries with sexuality and the role of women.

3) It makes indefensible claims about the nature of the Bible (e.g. the process by which the books of the Bible came to be recognised and collated)

Bragg:

The Gnostic Gospels which were rejected by those who put together the authorised versions include the Gospel of Mary, found in Cairo in 1896 and widely argued to depict the character of Mary Magdalene, and, as important for her story, the Gospel of Philip – which was among the texts found by an Arab shepherd in the desert in 1945. These, like others, were excluded from the final political version of the Bible. When you read them you can understand why. Philip tells us that Christ “loved her” more than all the other disciples. In Mary’s Gospel she speaks of close and long dialogues with Christ himself. But the forces of men, later abetted by the forces of the manly state of Rome, and the masculine structure of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, were going to bring her down.

If all Christian Concern are saying is that the compilation of the canon of scripture was more than just a patriarchal plot to exclude female voices (even if that was the effect) they may have a point. But Christian Concern's idea of a "defensible" claim about the Bible is that it is the revealed Word of God, literally true in every particular, that may as well have floated down on a cloud, leather bound and written in Jacobean English. Compared with the view of scriptural fundamentalists, Bragg's "political" interpretation, simplistic caricature as it is, is rather closer to what modern scholarship has discovered.

I would however urge my few remaining readers (sorry about the patchy service of late) to bear in mind Christian Concern's valid points: that the BBC complaint form doesn't take long to fill out, and that "the BBC's response will depend on what level of feedback it receives." Read the rest of this article

Mantel on Kate: Mean but not meaningless

Thank goodness for the Daily Mail. I awoke this morning to outraged headlines about Hilary Mantel, who had apparently "launched a scathing attack" on Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, comparing her, among other things, to "a jointed doll on which rags were hung." The Mail had swiftly rounded up some people prepared to be outraged, including the boss of one of Kate's charities, in return for some free publicity. By lunchtime, David Cameron, far away in India, had "waded in", as they say, describing the comments (or at least the version of the comments that was put to him) as "completely misguided and completely wrong."

But the hive-mind of Twitter had been on the case long before, having come to the conclusion that this would be an excellent topic for today's ritual Mail-bashing. And I, meanwhile, had had a chance to look at what Mantel had actually written, and spoken, at length in the London Review of Books. Needless to say, this was no scathing attack on the former Miss Middleton. Rather, it was an discursive treatment of the public image of royal women, drawing on her extensive knowledge of history as well as a comparison between Kate and Diana. It offered some memorable vignettes, such as a function for writers at Buckingham Palace at which most of the guests tried desperately to avoid the embarrassment of having to talk to the Queen, while the servants failed to offer them a plate for used cocktail sticks. "The queen's revenge," thought Mantel, as though it were anything to do with her. There's a good line about Marie Antoinette: "one individual with limited power and influence, who focused the rays of misogyny." We also learn that a genetic condition may have been behind both Henry VIII's difficulty in fathering a healthy heir and the fact that in middle-age the once dashing monarch turned into a monster.

In discussing Kate, Mantel was talking less about the Duchess herself than about how she is fitted into media templates, "draped in a set of threadbare attributions", in the absence of any clearly-defined personality. She writes that Kate "appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen." There is indeed something curiously identikit about her public persona: a perfectly pleasant young woman, much like perfectly pleasant young women are supposed to be, with nothing exceptional about her apart perhaps from an elevated ordinariness. Even the compliments offered by the people outraged in the Mail had a bland and formulaic air, as though in confirmation rather than refutation of Mantel's essay. To the prime minister she was "bright, engaging and a fantastic ambassador for Britain." The charity boss described her as "engaging, natural and genuinely interested"; she asked "really good questions, the questions of someone who wants to learn."

What was it that Mantel said? "Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners. She looks like a nicely brought up young lady, with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ part of her vocabulary." In other words, "engaging".

The worst that can be said of Hilary Mantel is that she is as guilty of the same objectification of which she accuses the media. To her, Kate is not so much a clothes-horse or a walking womb as an illustration of the childishness and artificiality of public discourse around, and expectations of, royalty:

When her pregnancy became public she had been visiting her old school, and had picked up a hockey stick and run a few paces for the camera. BBC News devoted a discussion to whether a pregnant woman could safely put on a turn of speed while wearing high heels. It is sad to think that intelligent people could devote themselves to this topic with earnest furrowings of the brow, but that’s what discourse about royals comes to: a compulsion to comment, a discourse empty of content, mouthed rather than spoken. And in the same way one is compelled to look at them: to ask what they are made of, and is their substance the same as ours.

Which is true as far as it goes, but rather overlooks the fact that Kate herself is an entirely blameless woman, doing her best to make sense of her bizarre role in national life, "engaging" indeed, and that however bland her public persona may be she herself presumably has feelings: some of Mantel's comments seem gratuitously mean.

At the root of Mantel's problem with Kate is regret that she's not Diana. Nor is she Marie Antoinette or Anne Boleyn, both of whom, you won't need reminding, ended up losing their heads. Diana, of course, lost her own head in a more metaphorical but no less fatal manner. In comparison with such divas, Kate is too dull for this novelist's interest:

she appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture. Diana was capable of transforming herself from galumphing schoolgirl to ice queen, from wraith to Amazon. Kate seems capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation.

Diana was "fitted to be the carrier of myth," thinks Mantel: a character of archetypal power who brought with her the archaic numinousness of royalty. Kate, on the other hand, is fit to open supermarkets and carry an heir, but that's about it.

The same might be said of Henry VIII's third wife, Jane Seymour, a parallel that Mantel fails to draw explicitly, though she does mention her in passing in the second part of the essay:

No one understood what Henry saw in Jane, who was not pretty and not young. The imperial ambassador sneered that ‘no doubt she has a very fine enigme’: which is to say, secret part. We have arrived at the crux of the matter: a royal lady is a royal vagina. Along with the reverence and awe accorded to royal persons goes the conviction that the body of the monarch is public property. We are ready at any moment to rip away the veil of respect, and treat royal persons in an inhuman way, making them not more than us but less than us, not really human at all.

Which, it seems to me, is precisely what Hilary Mantel is doing to Kate.

Kate's lack of a vibrant personality may be her greatest asset. She has something of the freshly-scrubbed quality of the earliest Diana. But Diana was a 19 year old virgin when she was thrust into the spotlight. When she finally married Prince William, Kate was a whole decade older. Yet she was almost equally devoid of a past. She had spent all that time (apart from a brief hiatus) first as Official Royal Girlfriend and then as Princess-in-Waiting. There were no previous long-term relationships to complicate the picture or pique tabloid interest. Though her face and figure were already world-famous, she was almost as blank a canvass as her deceased mother-in-law had once been when she stepped out of her wedding coach.

It must be said, though, that this is just as true of Prince William, who despite a lifetime in the public eye has accumulated no visible personality quirks, has provided no fodder for the tabloids, has had no other long-term girlfriends and hasn't even ever been drunk in public. If Kate is a "shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore" - well, so is the future king, though in his case the wardrobe is entirely functional and semiotic: well-cut suits, military uniforms, black tie, the fatigues he wears when flying his helicopter. If he is spared the constant scrutiny his wife attracts for her dress (and undress) it is at the price of having no real public image at all. He is a cipher.

He is not a cipher because of his sex or royal status. His father is not a cipher: he has a sharply defined persona, both comic and tragic, that had already assumed its well-known lineaments when he was the age that William is now. The eccentric opinions, the tortured public introspection, the seemingly interminable wait to "fulfil his destiny" as king. The British royal family is not short of cartoonish personalities. Think of Prince Philip, or Harry, or Princess Anne. Prince William alone has his grandmother's aloofness and unknowability, though not her aura of alien unapproachability. In Kate, he has found a consort as bland and self-effacing as himself. No doubt this is why they get on so well (c.f. Charles and Diana.)  They are walking, talking cake decorations, which makes them probably the perfect royal couple, in a world where the function of royalty is to smile, act pleasantly and to provide some nice pictures to look at.

Hilary wonders if monarchy is "a suitable institution for a grown-up nation." I don't know, either, not because I'm unsure about the monarchy (it's silly) but because I'm far from convinced that we live in a grown-up nation. Such is the infantilised nature of our public life that it has become the preserve of the blandly inoffensive. It used to be said, following Bagehot, that the purpose of monarchy was to be decorative and the purpose of politicians was to be utilitarian and "efficient". But in those days there were politicians like Disraeli, or later Churchill, personalities far more vivid and even "decorative" than any modern royal. David Cameron is to politics what Kate and William are to royalty. He too might have been precision-engineered on a production line, and his conception of his own role closely resembles that which he ascribed to the Duchess of Cambridge: as "an ambassador for Britain." Read the rest of this article

Not the Mayan Calendar

Here's a picture of an Aztec calendar. 

To be more specific, it's the Stone of the Sun, which once stood in the heart of Tenochtitlan, the splendid Aztec capital that later became Mexico City. So precious was it that the Aztecs buried it during the siege of the city in 1521 to preserve it from the Spanish invaders.  By the time it was dug up again, during repairs to Mexico City's cathedral in 1790, the Christian rulers were sufficiently enlightened to see it for the important cultural artefact that it was.   To call it a calendar is perhaps misleading, though it does have calendrical markings.  It has been variously interpreted as a representation of the five ages through which Aztec mythology held that the world had passed, as a mappa mundi, as a political statement declaring and legitimising Aztec rule over the four corners of the world, and as a ceremonial basin or ritual altar for use during human sacrifices.  Perhaps it was all of those things.

You probably recognise the picture, because it has been endlessly reproduced these past weeks to illustrate stories about the "Mayan apocalypse".  As you will have heard by now, Friday probably marks a significant date in the Mayan calendar, the ending of the 13th Baktun, or cycle, of that calendar's Long Count.  A much-publicised New Age theory holds that the date will be marked by world-changing or apocalyptic events, though no-one seems quite sure what they will be.  As has also been widely publicised recently (so I don't need to go into it all again) the Maya, whose civilisation was based around the Yucatán peninsula and was at its height roughly during the period of the European Dark Ages, did not in fact have a prophecy of doom connected with this date.  Or any future date, so far as can be established.  The "Mayan apocalypse" is a modern myth.

Not, of course, that the world would be any more likely to end on Friday if the ancient Maya had predicted it.

Most recent reports, at least those to be found in the mainstream media, have accurately noted the non-existence of the alleged Mayan prophecy of doom.  Unfortunately, they have usually reproduced the Aztec Sun Stone as an illustration.  If you type "Mayan calendar" into Google Images, almost all the images that come up are of the Aztec stone.  Whether this is the cause of the confusion or its effect is unclear.  Both, probably.  But the result is now that this is what most people imagine a Mayan calendar to look like, even though it is neither Mayan nor, quite possibly, even a calendar.

This is what a Mayan calendar actually looks like, or at least one version of it.

You'll see the difference straight away. Most obviously, instead of the scary-looking head with the lolling tongue - so evocative of some nameless apocalypse - there's a human figure weighed down with a burden (in fact, a Mayan glyph), more suggestive of the endless, grinding repetition of days which represents the reality of time.

The Mayans and the Aztecs could not have been more different.  They were as different as the ancient Greeks and the Vikings: different in language, in culture, in mythology, in architecture, in attitude, in agricultural techniques, in politics, in artistic expression, in geographical location.  For a start, the Mayans were much older.  Early Mayan settlements cluster around what is now Soconusco in South-West Mexico, on the central American isthmus and date from as long ago as 1800 BC.  Classic Mayan civilisation, associated with spectacular ruined cities in the Yucatán, collapsed around 1000AD although the Maya themselves lived on and are still around today (as are the Nahuatl-speaking descendants of the Aztecs).  The Aztecs, meanwhile, started out as barbarian invaders from the North, who arrived in central Mexico in about the 12th century.  It wasn't until the 15th that they became the dominant power in the region: their empire was still expanding when Cortes arrived in 1519. 

Like many other barbarian invaders (including the Vikings in Northern France, aka the Normans) the Aztecs adopted some of the civilisation of the more settled cultures they came to rule over.  But in their case, it was mainly that of the Toltecs, previously the dominant people in central America, as well as the artistically-inclined Mixtecs in the South West.  There was some contact between the Aztecs and the surviving Maya, but the Maya were never Aztec subjects and by the time of the Aztec empire the days of Mayan greatness were a distant memory, or legend. 

As for the calendar, it's true that some basic principles, such as a 52-year cycles of years, were shared by most Meso-American systems; but each civilisation had its own, which differed in details, nomenclature and underlying myths.  The Mayan version was especially elaborate, involving multiple interlocking cycles including the famous Long Count whose starting date was placed at August 11, 3114 BC - a time centuries before Mayan civilisation got going.  The present "baktun" ends this Friday (or perhaps Sunday), but the Long Count itself carries on.  A far more significant date, experts say, will come on October 13, 4772, when a full cycle of twenty baktuns will be completed, though even that wasn't associated with any known apocalyptic event.  The Mayans didn't really think like that.  They seem to have enjoyed calculating dates far in the future or the past purely for the mathematical pleasure it afforded.

The Aztecs, on the other hand, did have a belief in world ages punctuated by apocalyptic events. According to Aztec myth there had been four previous ages, or "Suns", the ending of each of which was attended by great destruction and renewal.  The present age was destined similarly to end.   But this cataclysm wasn't tied to any particular date - and, in any case, the Aztecs' calendar lacked the mathematical complexity of the Mayan one.  Rather, it was seen as perennially threatening, to be warded off with daily offerings of human hearts to the gods.  Like the Romans, the Aztecs paid great attention to regularly recurring dates of good and bad omen throughout the year and the 52 year cycle.  The year One Reed was especially to be dreaded: by coincidence, it was in such a year that Cortes turned up.  But even that wasn't, exactly, a prophecy - though it is often popularly identifies as such.

Put it this way.  The Norse myths told of the day of Ragnarok, when the gods of Asgard would go into battle with the giants and Valhalla would be consumed.  The Christian calendar takes as its hinge point the supposed date for the birth of Christ.  Putting the two together and making five, a confused Mayan observer might have deduced that Ragnarok was bound to take place on 31st December 1999.  Especially if it represented a publishing opportunity. Read the rest of this article

Death of a Stalinist

Last year I was at a function most of whose attendees were, I suppose, of the political Left. At one point a sudden hush descended and a whisper ran around the auditorium that Eric Hobsbawm was there.  A few seconds later the crowds parted reverently as the nonagenarian Marxist hobbled into view.  The atmosphere was not unlike how I imagine a Papal audience or a personal appearance by the Dalai Lama; it would scarcely have been more respectful had Nelson Mandela himself walked into the room.

Hobsbawm was an icon of the Left - and the Left loves its icons, the older and more doddery the better - and enough a member of the Establishment to have been made a Companion of Honour, a particularly swanky (and exclusive) decoration sometimes given to people who believe themselves too grand for mere knighthoods.  He was much spoken of, while alive and in frequently in his presence, as Britain's greatest living historian, as the most important historian of the 20th century, as the Left's foremost intellectual and as an all-round good egg. 

His death today at the age of 95 has yielded similar encomia, not least in the Guardian.  He had  "a unique position in the country's intellectual life" wrote Martin Kettle; "one of a tiny handful of historians of any era to enjoy genuine national and world renown."  For Tristram Hunt, one could have no more generous, humane, rigorous, and involved a guide than Eric Hobsbawm".  He was "an Enlightenment giant whose passing marks a sad pulling away from the 20th century and all it entailed."  Hunt could be heard in equally misty-eyed form on Radio 4 this afternoon, waxing lyrical about Hobsbawm's encyclopaedic mind and love of jazz.

Missing from such tributes was much acknowledgement that Hobsbawm was an unrepentant communist who had in his youth had looked the other way as Stalin purged and murdered millions of his own people, who in middle age supported (albeit "with a heavy heart") the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and who in old age preferred not to mention the show trials or the gulags.  He was quite happy to distort the facts.  The Soviet empire, he claimed incredibly in 1997,  "was maintained only a limited, even minimal use of armed coercion."

At least he was consistent.  "When the fact change", said John Maynard Keynes, "I change my mind."  Hobsbawm never recanted, even after it became impossible to deny that the Soviet Union was rotten and oppressive.  Right to the end, long after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, he seems to have regarded Communism as a noble experiment that had unaccountably failed to work.   In a 1994 TV interview he told the great Canadian liberal Michael Ignatieff that Stalin's murder of twelve million of his own people would have been justified had it ushered in the communist Utopia.  The conversation is worth quoting in some detail:

Ignatieff: In 1934, millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a Communist?

Hobsbawm: ...'Probably not.'

Ignatieff: Why?

Hobsbawm: Because in a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing... The sacrifices were enormous; they were excessive by almost any standard and excessively great. But I'm looking back at it now and I'm saying that because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I'm not sure.

Ignatieff: What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?

Hobsbawm: Yes.

For Hobsbawm, Stalin's crime was that he failed.  Perhaps it did not occur to him that if a revolution can only be brought about by mass murder there must be something fundamentally wrong with it.  The end justified the means, however terrible the means might be.   Michael Gove had it right in 2008: "When I think of the millions who were killed and tortured in Marxism’s name," he wrote in the Times, "from the Polish officers shot in Katyn forest to those brave dissidents who endured the gulag, I am convinced that only when Hobsbawm weeps hot tears for a life spent serving an ideology of wickedness will he ever be worth listening to."

He never did.

It's puzzling that Hobsbawm can be described - even by ideological opponents such as Niall Ferguson - as one of the 20th century's greatest historians when he was so utterly and demonstrably wrong about the single most significant aspect of 20th century history.  I don't deny that he had many of the qualities of a great historian - intensive research, a sweeping view, a good prose style.  But he conspicuously lacked that indispensible quality of judgement for which none of the others can compensate. You read an historian, above all, to understand the past, to gain insight.  Reading Hobsbawm, one can perhaps gain an insight into how an intelligent observer might be taken in by Communism, but only by treating him as the unreliable narrator of his own history.

Writing in Prospect some years ago, Ian Buruma called Hobsbawm "a decent man who served a blood-soaked cause."  Blindness to communism's crimes or willingness to overlook them was, of course, a common failing among his contemporaries on the Left.  Idealism often and easily overcomes reality.  Stalin was in his way no less a monster than Hitler, yet his apologists have, again and again, been able to cloak themselves in a mantle of righteousness, to remain respected and even beloved.  Their hearts, it is assumed, were in the right place - an excuse never made for admirers of Hitler.  But Hobsbawm's case strikes me as especially troubling.   Naivety can scarcely serve as an excuse for an historian who possessed a legendary command of facts, a man who had what was recognised universally as a towering intellect.  His blindness can only have been wilful.  He used his powers for evil.  And history, long before he died, had already disproved him. Read the rest of this article

Mohammed in the 18th century

Given sexually explicit character of the cartoon published by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, apparently borne of a selfless desire to take some of the heat off the Americans by spreading the outrage, I thought I'd share with you one of Gibbon's footnotes - translated from the learned Latin in which the ever-cautious historian veiled it.

Perhaps the incontinence of Mahomet may be palliated by the tradition of his natural or preternatural gift. He claimed to have the sexual capacity of thirty men, and to be able to satisfy eleven women in the space of one hour...Al Jannabi records his own testimony, that he surpassed all men in conjugal vigour; and Abulfeda mentions the exclamation of Ali, who washed his body after death, "O prophet, truly your penis stretches up to heaven" (certe penis tuus caelum versus erectus est)

By "the incontinence of Mahomet", Gibbon is referring not to any urinary problems but to his sexual appetites.  Like many before and since, Gibbon was fascinated by the soap-opera character of the prophet's private life as recorded in the Hadith and other early sources.  Pious Muslims are apt to explain Mohammed's polygamy as a way of cementing alliances between tribes and providing security for widows who would otherwise have had no-one to look after them; but there are obviously more salacious interpretations of the facts.  Gibbon's study of Mohammed and the birth of Islam makes up the fiftieth chapter of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and while he says much about Mohammed the prophet, Mohammed the lawgiver and statesman and Mohammed the warrior, Mohammed the lover is awarded some of the most memorable passages.

The bachelor Gibbon offers some criticism of Mohammed's domestic arrangements.  Perhaps he was jealous.  He tells a couple of scandalous stories.  One involves Zeineb, the wife of Zeid, his ex-slave and adopted son.  The prophet  "beheld, in a loose undress, the beauty of Zeinib, and burst forth into an ejaculation of devotion and desire. The servile, or grateful, freedman understood the hint, and yielded without hesitation to the love of his benefactor."  Any scandal was avoided by a convenient revelation, courtesy of the archangel Gabriel, of a new Koranic verse.  Gabriel was equally obliging when one of Mohammed's wives found him in bed with an Egyptian slave-girl called Maiy. 

I gather these incidents were dramatised in a controversial recent film, excerpts from which can still be seen on YouTube.

Gibbon is, however, full of praise for Mohammed's fidelity to his first wife Khadija, and generally respectful, though he does suggest that later in life success may have gone to his head.   "From enthusiasm to imposture," he writes, "the step is perilous and slippery."  In a fascinating footnote with many modern resonances, he is critical of a play by Voltaire that portrayed Mohammed as a war criminal:

After the conquest of Mecca, the Mahomet of Voltaire imagines and perpetrates the most horrid crimes. The poet confesses that he is not supported by the truth of history, and can only allege, que celui qui fait la guerre à sa patrie au nom de Dieu est capable de tout [anyone who makes war on his own country in the name of God is capable of anything]. The maxim is neither charitable nor philosophic; and some reverence is surely due to the fame of heroes and the religion of nations. I am informed that the Turkish ambassador at Paris was much scandalised at the representation of this tragedy.

The ambassadorial protest is familiar, though there are no records of riots on the streets of Constantinople demanding for Voltaire to be beheaded.  Familiar, too, is the contrast between a French secularist claiming his right to artistic criticism of religion and an English liberal intellectual concerned about showing "respect".  Ironically, Voltaire's play was banned shortly after its first performance in 1742; not because of Muslim anger, but because the French censors viewed it as a veiled attack on Catholicism, which of course it was.  That wouldn't happen today. Read the rest of this article

In defending Christian England, Eric Pickles is the modern Disraeli

This is a guest post by Rev Julian Mann

Eric Pickles is clearly not ashamed to be a Conservative. In defending the public role of Christianity generally, and of the Church of England in particular, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government is upholding democratic Conservatism as it developed in the 19th Century under the leadership of Benjamin Disraeli.

Writing in Friday's Daily Telegraph, Mr Pickles could not have been clearer in articulating the Disraelian commitment to preserving the influence of the Church by law established:

Christians continue to be positively involved in public life, from the role of Anglican bishops in scrutinising legislation in the House of Lords, through the moral leadership offered by Christian leaders, to the contribution of thousands of churches and Christian charities to the social fabric of our neighbourhoods with their volunteering and sacrifice. Religion is the foundation of the modern British nation: the Reformation is entwined with British political liberty and freedoms, the King James Bible is embedded in our language and literature, and the popular celebrations of the Royal Wedding and Diamond Jubilee placed the Church side by side with our constitutional monarchy.

Disraeli may seem an odd figure to invoke in an argument about Conservatism and Christianity. He pursued a dissolute, Byronic youth and had a tendency to mendacity in his political life. It would be foolish to present him as a proto Ann Widdecombe.

But he would have been appalled at the fact that the Strictly Come Dancing star has not been elevated to the House of Lords because she has been too vociferous in upholding historic Christianity and opposing political correctness.

Disraeli was assiduous in promoting the influence of the Church of the nation. He passionately believed that a strong national Church was an essential safeguard against governmental tyranny. One of his last acts as Prime Minister was to appoint the evangelical JC Ryle to be bishop in the then new See of Liverpool in 1880.

Though he could be accused of some political manoevering in that appointment, Disraeli knew full well that Ryle would pro-actively proclaim Jesus Christ across Merseyside and appoint frontline clergy who would do the same.

Disraeli's famous 1864 saying about Darwin's theory of evolution - "Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, am on the side of the angels" - was not a scientific statement; it was a witty denunciation of the spiritual and moral aridity of atheism.

Significantly in the light of the contemporary debate, the mature Disraeli honoured the God-created institution of heterosexual marriage. In relation to the Seventh Commandment ("Thou shalt not commit adultery"), he was conspicuously unlike William Gladstone who sailed very close to the wind in that department.

With the modern party membership falling and political indifferentism prevailing amongst young people, Disraeli, if he were here now, would be thoroughly supportive of Mr Pickles's inspiring reminder of the spiritual and moral roots of Conservatism.

He would agree that Conservatives who harbour a 'whatever' attitude towards Christianity in our public life are not only ducking a vital issue for our identity and cohesion as a country; they are betraying themselves.
Julian Mann is vicar of the Parish Church of the Ascension, Oughtibridge in South Yorkshire. Read the rest of this article

Tom Holland: In the shadow of a sword?

Channel 4 said today that it had cancelled a special screening planned for this Thursday of Islam: the Untold Story, its documentary of last month written and presented by Tom Holland and based on his latest book In The Shadow of the Sword.

The whole thing is slightly mysterious, the station saying merely that the event was cancelled on "security advice". There are suggestions that Tom Holland was threatened. He was certainly the target of much abuse on Twitter in the days following the programme's broadcast. But the screening itself, which was to have been presented by Cathy Newman and featured a Q and A with the author, was a small-scale event for journalists and interested parties (including representatives of Muslim groups) and may have been intended partly as an opportunity for Holland and the programme-makers to dispel any misconceptions. It was not well-publicised; I was only aware that it was taking place because the people at Channel 4 had been kind enough to invite me along.

Whatever prompted it, the cancellation has surely caused a much bigger stir than the event itself would have done had it gone ahead. It will no doubt fortify the bullies and threat-makers in their conviction that they are able (and entitled) to intimidate anyone who questions their religious dogmas. And it may make it harder for other writers and film-makers to broach even mildly controversial subject-matter about Islamic history in future, to the intellectual detriment of Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

The last time I wrote about Tom Holland's researches into the obscure origins of Islam I said - and hoped - that suggestions that he was brave even to broach the subject were unhelpful, alarmist, even (in the literal meaning of the word) Islamophobic and, worst of all, risked becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you put it about, after all, that a book or film is "offensive" about or even critical of Islam, you are practically inviting the crazies to come out with death threats. Then there is the self-censorship that comes either from fear or from a misplaced desire to show "respect" and that results in important debates not being had, voices (both internal and external to Islam) being silenced and widely-held prejudices being reaffirmed about Islam being a uniquely intolerant religion whose followers exist in a state of constant irascibility, ever on the lookout for a new infidel or apostate on whom to rain curses and death-threats.

For a while it looked as though Tom would get away with suggesting that the traditional story of Mohammed and the birth of Islam is supported by no historical evidence and might, indeed, conceal a more complex sequence of events. Criticism of the book by Muslim intellectuals, while trenchant and in some cases savage (Ziahuddin Sardar in the New Statesman was especially uncharitable) at least seemed to acknowledge that rational debate, rather than the issuing of fatwas or the carrying-out of mob "justice", was the proper response.

The commonest charge against Holland from Muslim critics was not blasphemy but "orientalism" - the idea, popularised by the late Edward Said, that any discussion by Western academics of Islamic history or culture is by its very nature presumptuous and imperialist. In other words, the criticism was political. While accusations of orientalism are, in some ways, only a more sophisticated version of the "How dare you!" favoured by angry mobs stirred by religious passions and feelings of offence, and the attempt to close down debate scarcely more disguised (or less pernicious), they do not amount to a security risk.

Holland himself has been almost painfully concerned to stress his respectful attitude and good intentions. He has agonised in public, though robustly defending his conclusions, and on Twitter has politely, and repeatedly, responded to many of his critics. This is no surprise: he is surely one of the nicest people on Twitter. But it does make the torrent of abuse that has greeted Islam: The Untold Story all the more depressing. Unlike the book, the film concentrated on the origins of Islam. It also featured interviews with controversial scholars, notably Princeton's Patricia Crone, whose work Holland drew on in reaching his apparently radical conclusions. But it was far from bombastic. Holland is no David Starkey (Starkey on Islam - there's a suggestion for Channel 4 commissioners if you think you're hard enough).

Nevertheless, it drew well over a thousand complaints (no doubt some of them were "organised") and a strongly-worded press-release from the Ramadhan Foundation, a group that presents itself as a moderate voice for Muslim youth in Britain and claims "to promote tolerance and peaceful co-existence." Mohammed Shafiq, the organisation's chief executive, claimed that the film "makes a mockery of impartial and objective broadcasting" and "broadcast lies." He called on Channel 4 to withdraw the documentary and apologise. The statement included a paragraph that read disturbingly like a threat:

There is a desire amongst some people trying to change or discredit Islam whether its politicians, commentators or broadcasters like Channel 4. The British Muslim community will not allow Channel 4 to distort our faith and our history.

Such reactions (or that of the Muslim Council of Britain, which called Holland "a pop historian" who had a "total lack of understanding of both Islam and its Prophet") oddly combine dismissiveness with fear, as though the programme's assertions were at one and the same time obviously untrue - indeed ridiculous - yet likely to be widely believed by an ignorant and easily-led public. I find this a bit odd.

If Tom Holland is wrong, believing Muslims have nothing to fear from him. Actually, they have nothing to fear in any event, since his whole argument rests on the idea that the traditional accounts of Mohammed's life are not reliable as historical sources, dating as they do (at least in written form) to many years after the prophet's death. To say that is not to prove that they are inaccurate, merely to show that they might be inaccurate and that the creation and rapid spread of Islam might be explained in other ways. This sort of revisionist history is unlikely to be of any interest to committed believers except for use as target-practice.

The idea that the accepted story of Mohammed's career or even Islam itself will be destroyed because Tom Holland has written a book pointing out omissions in the historical record is, apart from anything else, inherently ludicrous. Christianity, after all, has quite happily coped with two centuries or more of critical scholars poring over the Gospels and finding them inadequate as historical documents. Scarcely an Easter goes by without some new revisionist TV documentary suggesting that Jesus never existed, or went to live in India, or that the Gospels were pieced together from bits of the Old Testament and bear little-or-not relation to reality. One of the most popular novels of recent years (the most popular, until 50 Shades of Grey came along) was based on the premise (not altogether ridiculous in itself) that Jesus married Mary Magdalene. Such speculations pose surprisingly little threat to the accepted Christian story, which for most people still starts in a stable at Bethlehem.

There may be no external proof that Mohammed ever lived in Mecca, or emigrated to Medina, or for any of the events of his life recorded in the Hadith and resolutely believed in by devout Muslims. But they are internally consistent, and supply a context for the Koran which would otherwise be lacking. That is enough; if not enough for historians then enough for believers. Holland's critics complain that his film "lacks balance", by which they mean that not enough time was devoted to interviews with Muslim scholars offering a more orthodox view. But that is to misunderstand the whole point of the film, which was to offer an alternative perspective. The traditional narrative - of the Meccan camel-trader turned prophet turned lawgiver turned military leader, who united the tribes of Arabia with a message that seemed to have come from thin air - is, even in the west, incredibly (and increasingly) familiar. The BBC gave it a whole three-part series last year, presented by Rageh Omaar and containing very little in the way of sceptical "balance".

In terms of the presentation of Mohammed and of Islamic history in the British media as a whole, representatives of the "Muslim community" have very little to complain about.

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Happy Birthday Caligula

Today marks the 2000th birthday of Gaius Caesar, better known as Caligula ("Little Boots"), the "mad" Roman emperor made famous in the modern world by Robert Graves and, later, Tinto Brass. As Penelope Goodman notes, this historic anniversary hasn't been marked by great celebrations or, indeed, by anything much at all, an Australian TV documentary and an article in History Today being about the sum of it. Which seems strange. Perhaps a mad emperor best known for making his horse a consul, sleeping with his sister and inspiring a 1970s porn film might not seem to be much of a cause for celebration. But while the man himself reigned for only three years and left little that could be described as a lasting legacy he remains one of relatively few personalities of the ancient world of whom most people have heard.

Of course it is the Caligula of Robert Graves, portrayed so unforgettably by John Hurt in the classic BBC adaptation, that people have heard of, rather than the Caligula of history, about whom relatively little is known and that little may be unreliable. But it's surprising that, for example, Film 4 hasn't taken the opportunity to screen the 1979 film starring Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren and John Gielgud, which would not only provide an opportunity for showing some late-night filth but also serve as a tribute to Gore Vidal, who wrote much of the screenplay.

And even in debunking the myths one still has to retell them. Take the most famous Caligula legend of all, the consular horse. It offers a compelling image of the madness of power, and also a modern political cliché: that the preferment of an unpromising candidate represents "the strangest political appointment since Caligula made his horse consul". As far as I can tell, the phrase was first used on the appointment of Tom Inskip, rather than Winston Churchill, as defence minister in 1936 (though with "most cynical" rather than "strangest") and the originator was either Churchill himself or his friend Professor Frederick Lindemann. But it has since been used many times, for example of Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's choice of running mate for the 1968 presidential election, and of John Redwood's appointment of Secretary of State for Wales.



The horse did exist. It was a famous racehorse named Incitatus. According to Suetonius,

He used to send his soldiers on the day before the games and order silence in the neighbourhood, to prevent the horse Incitatus from being disturbed. Besides a stall of marble, a manger of ivory, purple blankets and a collar of precious stones, he even gave this horse a house, a troop of slaves and furniture, for the more elegant entertainment of the guests invited in his name; and it is also said that he planned to make him consul.

That Caligula was said to be planning to make the horse Consul does not mean that he was, of course: it's more likely to have been a joke at the emperor's expense, the point perhaps being that he seemed more interested in pampering a racehorse than in the serious business of government. Or maybe it was Caligula's own joke, an ironic celebration of his autocratic power ("I could make my horse consul, and there's nothing anyone could do to stop me!") or aimed at the Senate ("My horse would make a better consul than any of you lot!"). He played a similar joke on a Senator who ostentatiously promised to give his life if the emperor recovered from an illness, hoping to rewarded for this extreme declaration of loyalty. Caligula recovered, and forced the senator to fulfil his vow. At any rate, Incitatus never did become consul, so far as anyone can establish. But sometimes fiction contains more "truth" than reality.

What Suetonius does say is alarming enough. He alleges that Gaius, whose father was the beloved general Germanicus, murdered his way to the throne, slept with all three of his sisters and demanded to be worshipped as a god. He forced the wives of senators to have sex with him, enjoyed watching prisoners being tortured to death and famously wished that the Roman people had only one neck. He was the third emperor, but the first who really experimented with the possibilities of autocratic power. Augustus was an adept politician who pretended that Rome was still a republic, while Tiberius seems to have been a reluctant despot. Caligula acted as though there were no restraints, constitutional or moral, on his behaviour, and eventually discovered that there were. He was murdered within four years by a conspiracy of senators and guards.

Being assassinated is not the best career endorsement, it is true. But the same fate befell Julius Caesar, and was later to befall Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy, without their posthumous repuations suffering too much harm.

Perhaps Caligula, too, deserves a more balanced assessment. Suetonius was writing, like all ancient authors, from the point of the elite, who observed his rock star behaviour at close hand and were forced to pay new and burdensome taxes to subsidise his extravagance. We are told that he emptied the treasury within a year, spending the money on entertainments for the masses but also on building projects such as aqueducts. Bread and circuses, but also bread and jobs. After twenty years of austerity under Tiberius, Caligula was wildly popular, and remained popular throughout his reign. So he must have been doing something right. It would be too much to suggest that he was a Robin Hood, robbing from the rich to give to the poor, but his "extravagances" were redistributive. He was a "tax and spend" emperor who managed to give at least a short term boost to the economy.

Happy birthday then to Gaius Caesar, Bootikins, mad, bad and a pioneering Keynesian.

Here's some more of John Hurt.




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Bearded

I notice that Mary Beard has a post up on the peculiar tombstone (or perhaps just pseudo-tombstone) that was one of the highlights of last week's episode of Meet The Romans. If you missed it, this remarkable stela was erected allegedly by one Calidius Eroticus, identified as an innkeeper, and features a joke about a customer who spends so much of his budget on a prostitute that he can't afford the hay for his ass. I think that's what it's about, anyway. It's a trifle obscure, unlike Calidius Eroticus's own name.

Beard translates it as "Mr Hot Sex". Does it really need translating, though? Any attempt to render the name into English can only be a diminishment, I think. This applies even more strongly to Mrs Eroticus, whose name (titter ye not!) is inscribed as "Fannia Voluptas". I'm sure the metrosexual baboon-slayer would have enjoyed that, if he's still watching.

About him, the less said the better, except that I don't really buy the assumption (which his victim clearly shares) that Gill's uncomplimentary remarks about Professor Beard's appearance were motivated merely by sexism or by his fear of intelligent and educated women. As Bryony Gordon noted, he's got a long history of making similar remarks about men. (He once likened Tony Robinson to Gollum.) Rather, he's a professional troll. Being outrageous is his gimmick, as it's Jeremy Clarkson's gimmick or (in a different journalist genre) Liz Jones'. Someone I know on Twitter tutted that Gill was "influential", which I seriously doubt. The most likely outcome of the row will have been higher ratings for Beard's show, which is all to the good. (I also note she has twice as many Twitter followers as she did a week ago.)

The other thing I would say (and I hope Mary Beard will forgive me) is that having a female presenter who doesn't look like a supermodel is a huge relief, not least because it makes it easier to concentrate on the subject being discussed. (The sexual objectification of TV historians isn't confined to women, of course. I seem to remember female critics getting very excited, back in the day, about the tight jeans and chiselled jaw of another televisual interpreter of the ancient world, Michael Wood, as he strode around the ruins of Troy. These days there's Niall Ferguson.)

Is Mary Beard now this country's top media don? There's David Starkey, of course, but he isn't really in academia these days (and his own brand of professional trollery has started to wear a bit thin.) Otherwise (ignoring, for these purposes, the scientists) her main challengers for the title are Simon Schama, grandly transatlantic and above the fray, and Ferguson, now absurdly rich and vain. By contrast Beard looks and sounds like a normal human being, the sort of person one might just bump into in Heffers on a wet afternoon.

Except that she's probably way too busy to spend much time pottering around bookshops. The long hours and unremitting grind of modern academic life is one of the principal themes of her always entertaining blog, which has now yielded a second volume of highlights entitled All In A Don's Day. It's a slightly less eclectic selection than last time, I found. This might have something to do with the blog's return to the bosom of the TLS since the Times proper disappeared behind the great Murdoch paywall. Or it may be a symptom of the current crisis in higher education, with its constant soul-searching about fees and funding, cuts and admissions policies, which have all rendered the university sector more newsworthy and controversial as well as more fraught. On the other hand, Beard's publisher apparently advised her that prospective readers would be most interested in inside information about exam-marking and Oxbridge intervews, so perhaps it's just that.

Many of Beard's complaints will find resonances outside the rarefied (or not-so-rarefied, these days) world of Oxbridge colleges or the wider world of higher education, however. She describes academic versions of some of modern Britain's chronic ailments. A professor writes a satirical article about sex with students, is taken literally and denounced as a sexist (or worse). Plagiarism has ceased to be a moral offence (cheating) and has become a nebulous "risk" to which any hapless researcher might accidentally fall victim. The administrative burden grows daily. Threaded through it all is a lament for the way that bureaucracy has increasingly interposed itself between dons and their students, as it has interposed itself between nurses and their patients, or between parents and their children's schools, or between firemen and people they might otherwise be rescuing.

But if gripes about the box-ticking nightmares of Research Excellence Assessments aren't your thing there's plenty more to tempt the fancy, from the politics of Alexander the Great's nationality obscenties to some pointed remarks about Dr Starkey. There's an amusing account of how a post about the possible revision of her college's Latin grace got turned into a "Christianity banned!" scandal in the Daily Mail, a lucid analysis of one of Catullus' more obscene remarks and thoughts about the anthropology of Christmas. I particularly enjoyed a story about how a member of the Scipio family lost an election by cracking a snobbish joke at the expense of a lower-class voter. Arrogant posh boys are nothing new in politics. Read the rest of this article