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The Last of Stalin’s Foot Soldiers

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:01:00 -0400

Eric Hobsbawm, who died this month at a grand old age of 95, was a lifelong apologist for some of the most monstrous crimes in history. Despite this, the British Establishment welcomed him to its bosom. He was professor and then president at my alma mater of Birkbeck College at the University of London. Prime Minister Tony Blair consulted him and advised the Queen to make him a Companion of Honour in 1998. His death hash produced the predictable deluge of tributes. Labour Party Member of Parliament Tristram Hunt wrote a particularly oleaginous piece for the London Daily Telegraph concluding Hobsbawm was “a great scholar and undaunted public intellectual.” Blair’s successor and the current leader of the Labour Party, Edward Miliband, mourned the loss of “an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics, and a great friend of my family.”

There are many who argue that Hobsbawm was indeed an excellent historian. Others might disagree, believing that historians need to work at the coalface of the sources, mining information and refining it into new knowledge about the past. Ironically, for such a defender of the working class, Hobsbawm rarely went near a coalface, metaphorically or literally. He was a teacher (by all accounts, quite a good one) and a synthesizer (again, a good one), but he was not noted for original research.

Leaving aside his academic achievements, Hobsbawm should have been notorious as the last of Stalin’s foot soldiers. He joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and remained loyal even after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, when many of his comrades left.

Hobsbawm has a particularly malodorous record in respect to Stalin’s purges and the Nazi/Soviet pact of 1939. He wrote a pamphlet with Raymond Williams defending Stalin’s alliance with the Nazis, thus destroying at a stroke the justification for their support of the Soviet Union as a bulwark against fascism. On the purges, Hobsbawm told the Canadian journalist (and later, politician) Michael Ignatieff in 1994 that they would have been a price worth paying for the Marxist workers’ paradise.

Eric Hobsbawm wasn’t the only Stalinist to rise high in the esteem of British academia and society. When his fellow traveler Christopher Hill died in 2003, also in his 90s, encomiums filled the newspapers. In Hill’s case there is now little doubt about his significance as a historian. He was thoroughly second-rate. He did read the primary sources relating to his favoured period of seventeenth-century England but his reconstructions were so tendentious that historians of the period no longer take them seriously. My graduate research overlapped with Hill’s work on the subject of England’s universities, so I included a passage refuting his views in my PhD dissertation. My supervisor rebuked me for flogging a dead horse.

Whereas Hobsbawm thought Stalin’s murders might be justified, Hill simply denied they ever happened. In a television interview broadcast shortly before his death, he insisted that he’d been in Russia in the 1930s and had seen no evidence for the atrocities. And it’s true. He was there. Like many contemporaries on the Left, he enjoyed a carefully supervised tour of the Soviet Union’s wonderful achievements. When Stalin died in 1953, Hill announced “He was a very great and penetrating thinker. Humanity not only in Russia but in all countries will always be deeply in his debt.” The reward for his unwavering admiration for Uncle Joe was election as Master of Balliol College, Oxford.

How did these men remain fêted throughout their lives? In large part, a popular misapprehension about communism saved them from the opprobrium they deserved. Too many people still accept the good intentions of communists to make the world a better place, even if, in practice, it all went terribly wrong. This is a fundamentally flawed analysis. At its most basic level, communism must crush freedom. It is the forcible merger of the individual into the system. It is not a utopian system that went awry, but the antithesis of much that is best about humanity. That the perpetrators of communism’s crimes thought they were acting for the greater good is no mitigation. In many ways, it made the situation worse. As C.S. Lewis observed, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive . . . those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Stalin didn’t take in everyone on the Left, especially once his crimes were manifest. George Orwell saw communism for what it was and, in Animal Farm and 1984 , gave us dreadful illustrations of its true nature. A one-time comrade of Hill and Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, became a fierce critic of Stalin while remaining on the hard left. Today, writers like Nick Cohen and Martin Amis keep alive the tradition of leftwing liberalism. And the Labour Party itself, when in government, gave no quarter during the Cold War.

So let us hope that, with Hobsbawm’s passing, we will no longer have to endure sentimental fawning over men who praised a society in which they would have been packed off to Siberia with alacrity rather than living into their nineties.

James Hannam is the author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution .

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Fakes: Jesus’ Wife, Boyfriend, and Brother’s Coffin

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:01:00 -0400

Next time Professor Karen King receives an oblong scrap of papyrus with an explosive text and an owner wanting to remain in the shadows, she will probably pass. It is now more than likely that the “Jesus had a wife” manuscript, which she sensationally unveiled in Rome a couple of weeks ago, is a fake. There is little point in repeating the arguments for forgery. Far more puzzling is how an intelligent woman like Professor King could possibly have fallen for it. The answer is a warning of the perils of confirmation bias. No one should feel that he or she would be immune.

The most egregious case of New Testament fakery was announced to the world in 1973 when Morton Smith, a scholar from Columbia University, published a book on the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark. Smith said that he found the text while working in the library of the ancient monastery of Mar Saba on the West Bank in 1958. It forms part of a letter purportedly by the third-century father St. Clement of Alexandria. It has since disappeared, but certainly existed since several other people saw it and even took photographs. It is now clear that the manuscript was a forgery, probably perpetrated by Smith himself. Again, the arguments, detailed in books such as Stephen Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax , don’t need rehearsing here.

The Secret Gospel of Mark seemed to be designed to suggest that Jesus was gay. The key lines read, “And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.” This looks carefully calibrated to be suggestive but not too revealing. (Morton Smith’s own sexuality is a matter of controversy. Almost no one of his generation was “out”; being so would have ended his career.) In any case, Smith hardly used Secret Mark in his subsequent book Jesus the Magician published five years later. This must be the only case of a scholar ignoring his own groundbreaking discovery, unless Smith felt the need to distance himself from the monster he’d created.

That didn’t stop others embracing the text with great enthusiasm. Helmut Koester and John Dominic Crossan, both among the aristocracy of liberal scholars, not only accepted that Secret Mark dates from the time of Clement of Alexandria, they even claimed it came from the pen of the Evangelist himself. Today, the Secret Gospel still has some energetic defenders, but in mainstream scholarship, it has gradually faded from sight.

If liberals were the primary dupes for Secret Mark, conservatives were cock-o-hoop over the discovery of an ancient Jewish coffin in 2002. The chalk box, strictly an ossuary for bones rather than a sarcophagus for a body, sported an Aramaic inscription “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” Was this archaeological confirmation of a key personage from the New Testament? Probably not. The box belonged to Oded Golan who found himself on trial in Jerusalem, charged with forgery. The authenticity of the box isn’t in doubt, but the Israeli Antiquities Authority has shown that the part of the inscription referring to Jesus was added later.

Although the court eventually acquitted Golan in a judicial process that lasted nearly eight years, the judge made clear this was not a verdict on the inscription itself. So proponents of the James Ossuary should not take too much comfort from the judgment. It simply meant that the proof Oded Golan himself had forged the inscription was not available at the standard required in a criminal trial.

All three of these cases illustrate the central constraint on conmen. They have to give their victims something they want. Scholars seem to be especially vulnerable because they like to see their theories vindicated. Secret Mark skilfully exploited apparent lacunae in the authentic Gospel where critical scholars had long believed something was missing. The James Ossuary, even if the inscription was entirely original, simply confirmed that Jesus had a brother called James. The Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s Letter to the Galatians are already clear on this point, not to mention the ancient Jewish historian Josephus. The only thing the ossuary did was to give believers an excuse to beat the skeptics who doubt Jesus existed at all. Fortunately for forgers, this is something that believers most fervently desire to do.

As for poor Professor King, it is likely that her publication record of feminist readings of early Christianity made her susceptible to being duped. It is even possible that a hoaxer created the “Jesus had a wife” manuscript with her in mind so that she could act as the “convincer” for a buyer deciding whether to part with hard cash. Professor King made an especially convincing convincer because she was convinced herself. In the case of the James Ossuary, renowned epigrapher André Lemaire authenticated the inscription. He too was convinced. This is an occupational hazard for senior academics (no one cares what junior professors think). In 1983, Hugh Trevor-Roper, ranking historian at Cambridge University, confirmed the authenticity of the “Hitler Diaries” for the London Sunday Times . His reputation never recovered.

In the end, it was the publicity that did for Jesus’ wife. It never pays to have too much daylight shed on a shady activity. And what can we learn from this? Only the usual lessons about gullibility. Being rational is no defense: Conmen can work with that. Being a skeptic helps, but we all have our blind spots. The best advice is to remember that if something appears too good to be true, it probably is.

James Hannam is the author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution.

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Evolution and Islam

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Professor Steve Jones is having trouble with students cutting class. This isn’t something stellar professors like Jones, who is well known in Great Britain for his popular science books and television appearances, are used to. His students aren’t skipping his lectures to stay in bed or go down to the pub. “They don’t come,” he told the London Sunday Times , “or they complain about it or they send notes or emails saying they shouldn’t have to learn this stuff.” The subject in question is evolution.

Based on the American experience, you might expect the absent students to be conservative Christians endorsing creationism. But they are not. Much of the British Evangelical intelligentsia accept Darwin’s theory wholeheartedly, and Catholics have not found a problem with it for several decades. “I had one or two slightly frisky discussions years ago with kids who belonged to fundamentalist Christian churches,” Jones told the Times . Nowadays, the creationists in Jones’ classes are Muslims. “It is a minority of students,” he says, but the minority “is definitely there and it is definitely growing.”

Jones must be mildly annoyed to have students boycott his classes. “I think if you are a creationist you are basically wrong and self-deluding,” he says, “but you are perfectly at liberty to go and study chemistry or English literature. But why study biology?”

For others, the situation is far more serious. In February last year, Dr. Usama Hasan was subjected to death threats for claiming that Darwinism is compatible with Islam. This didn’t happen in the Near East or Pakistan but in London, where Hasan used to lead Friday prayers at a Leyton mosque. Hasan, a senior lecturer at the University of Middlesex and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, had made his views clear for years. Only recently have they led to his life being threatened.

The trouble started when a Saudi cleric, Salir al-Sadlan, visited England and declared that an imam should not believe in human evolution. Shortly afterward, a group of fifty protesters disrupted a lecture Hasan was delivering at his mosque. They handed out leaflets demanding the death penalty be applied to anyone who believes in or promulgates evolution. The mosque responded by removing him from his post for fomenting discord.

Rather than risk his family’s safety, he issued a formal statement on his blog: “I do not believe that Adam, peace be upon him, had parents.” In an interview with New Scientist a few months after his ordeal, Hasan said he would now need extra security at his home for life. He is not the only Muslim academic effectively silenced. “I have had a lot of support from Muslim scientists, but they wouldn’t speak out because they knew the reaction they were likely to get. They were scared.”

Even some of the best-educated English Muslims reject evolution. One of my own acquaintances, who in online debates calls himself Zameel, is a brilliant scholar at the University of Cambridge. But even this Muslim, working at Europe’s finest seat of learning, rejects evolution. For him, it is a weapon deployed by the West against Islam. “Darwin’s main use was in removing God as an explanation in biology,” he insists, “and for this reason any effort at challenging Darwin or Darwinism is shot down [by Western scientists] without any thought, as it is a direct assault on a central Western ‘myth.’”

By rejecting Darwinism, Zameel is simply repeating a view already well established within the Islamic world. It is easy to see why it continues to gain currency in England. Imams preaching at mosques in Britain tend to be trained in Muslim countries, and many do not even speak English. This means that attitudes formed in Pakistan or the Middle East are passed to the younger generation in Europe.

Most Muslims, as Hasan told New Scientist , “are taught that evolution is wrong, unproven, and a blasphemy.” A 2005 survey of religious commitment in Muslim-majority countries by the Australian sociologist Riaz Hassan found that over half of respondents in Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Malaysia, and Egypt believed that Darwin’s theory of evolution “could not possibly be true.”

Despite their rejection of evolution, some Muslims make much of the alleged scientific accuracy of the Qur’an. In 1976, Maurice Bucaille, a French doctor who counted Anwar Sadat and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia among his patients, published The Bible, the Qur’an, and Science . In it, he made the claim that the Qu’ran is miraculously congruent with modern science. Bucaille’s book, widely read in the Islamic world, gave birth to an entire school of apologetics that celebrates the scientific content of the Qur’an. For example, “The Originator of the heavens and the earth! When he decrees a thing, he says only: ‘Be!’ And it is” (2:117) is taken as a reference to the Big Bang.

For many Muslims, this is evidence that the Qur’an is the very word of Allah. And because Allah is eternal and unchanging, the Qur’an too is believed always to have existed. The high status of the Qur’an privileges literal readings and means that, while metaphorical interpretations are possible, they usually need to find sanction within the text itself. For example, the Qur’an can be read to allow for an old Earth rather than one just six thousand years old, as a literal reading of the book of Genesis might imply, because although the Qur’an alludes to the six days of creation, it variously states that the length of these days is one thousand or even fifty thousand years. This means that young-Earth creationism has had relatively little traction among Muslims.

An old Earth supplies wiggle room for some Muslim countries to provide qualified support to evolution. In Saudi Arabian schools, Darwin’s theory is rejected outright. Biology textbooks in Pakistan, however, present evolution as a fact, albeit the books exclude humanity from the discussion entirely. The same is true for Iran, where students are taught evolution in detail and that “nearly all biologists today have accepted that Darwin’s theory can explain the diversity of life on earth,” but human evolution is conspicuous by its absence.

Muslims teach this limited view of evolution because, like the Bible, the Qur’an says that the first man was created by God (“He created man from dry clay like earthen vessels,” it says at one point, and at another “He began the creation of man from dust”). Given the literalistic way so many mainstream Muslims read their scriptures, humanity’s descent from apes is taboo, as it has been for many conservative Christians. Even in London, Usama Hasan felt compelled to offer a specific retraction on this point.

In the books for sale in English mosques, the only “biology” you are likely to find would be several creationist tracts authored by Harun Yahya. This is the pen name of the most prominent advocate of Islamic creationism in recent years, a Turkish interior designer called Adnan Oktar. His best-known work, a glossy two-volume tome called the Atlas of Creation , has been delivered free to schools across Europe and to thousands of scientists around the world.

The book illustrates hundreds of fossils, each paired with a modern-day counterpart purporting to show that the fossilized creature has not evolved in the interim. Not content with misidentifying many of the organisms pictured, the book even includes a photograph of a fishing lure labeled as a caddis fly.

Oktar’s publicity material promises an improbably large reward”ten trillion Turkish lira, roughly two trillion American dollars”for anyone who can prove Darwin’s theory to be true. He may have trouble getting his hands on that sort of money, but Oktar’s operation is undoubtedly well funded. His books are so popular that Islamic bookstores often have a special section devoted to his work. And when people can’t be persuaded to buy them, he is content simply to give them away. His disciples regularly embark on speaking tours of European countries with sizable Muslim populations, especially France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. So it is that young English Muslims are bombarded with material warning them of the dangers of Darwinism.

In contrast, the Catholic Church and many other Christians have long accepted that the ability of nature to exhibit true creativity does not impinge upon the sovereignty of God. At least since the Middle Ages, Christian theologians have taught that although God fashioned and maintains the universe, he allows it to operate through the physical laws that he ordained. This theological judgment allows us today to say that God delegates to nature a creative power that manifests itself through evolution.

The Islamic tradition envisages Allah as much more hands-on. The precise arrangement of each atom at every moment is precisely as he wills it. Evolution usurps his authority. Yet we must hope that, as Muslims become more influenced by Western thought, they will adopt the Christian view of God’s relationship to nature. Indeed, teaching students to accept evolution, including human evolution, could help them better appreciate what Pakistan has set as the national goal of its high-school biology curriculum: to “enable the students to appreciate that Allah .?.?. is the creator and sustainer of the universe.”

James Hannam is the author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution .

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Modern Science’s Christian Sources

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Back in 1978, Carl Sagan included a time line of scientific progress in his book Cosmos , showing that nothing at all happened between a.d. 415 and a.d. 1543. This barren period, he implied, was caused by the thousand-year dominance of Christianity. The “conflict thesis” of science and religion was born in the salons of ancien régime France, where philosophes like Voltaire and d’Alembert used it as a weapon against the Catholic Church. It was further developed in Victorian England by T. H. Huxley in his battle to diminish the influence of the clergy in London’s Royal Society. And it was perfected in American universities by the likes of Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, who provided the theory with intellectual ballast in his heavily annotated A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology at the end of the nineteenth century. It has been promoted in countless articles in popular magazines and elementary-school textbooks.

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