I listened to the Q2 debate once through yesterday morning, and took no notes, but I remember some important details. The resolution, about being unafraid to assert the superiority of Western values, had on one side, supporting the resolution, Ibn Warraq, David Aronovitch, and Douglas Murray, and opposing it, Charles Glass, Tariq Ramadan, and William Dalrymple.
Ibn Warraq opened with a nine-minute non-stop summary of why the values of the West — a thing different from the present-day West, or parts of it — are superior to those of the non-West. Once he had finished, it was all over.
Charles Glass then came on, to deal with the situation as best he could. He was full of arch humor, but they were fallen arches, even crestfallen arches, and consequently the humor was lame, at the level of “since I am a Westerner, and so obviously superior, as you have told me” and so on. He discussed the West, a West that in his version appeared to be one rocky horror picture show after another, consisting in the main of the Spanish Inquisition, Western imperialism at its absolute worst, the mass-murder of European Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators, and, bien entendu, that most horrible of all crimes of humanity ever committed, the famous Auschwitz-sized death-camp-and-torture-chamber known as Abu Ghraib. Charles Glass apparently did not understand that these historical events had nothing to do with “Western values” and their assertion, which was the subject of the debate, and so the subject under discussion did not faze him.
Aronovitch I hardly heard, because there were other distractions, including some phone calls. But he did talk about Islam, or Islamic states and societies, that we can observe today, beginning with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Then came the serpent, Tariq Ramadan, who turned out to have lost his head. He delivered a confused mess. He insisted that he was a “European Muslim,” someone who belonged in Europe, confusing his geographical presence (yes, he is living in Europe) with an intellectual or emotional bond that he does not have, and could not have. He may live in Europe, but he is no European, and never will be. He went on and on about how so much of European civilization owed its this and its that to this or that figure whom, in Europe, “we never hear about” and “no one knows about.” It was his fantastical history, where the Renaissance and for all I know the Enlightenment and the French Revolution thrown in for good measure, really owe their existence to those wonderful Muslim thinkers whom we are unaware of, but of whom Tariq Ramadan is very aware. He told us again and again how necessary it was to have a real “dialogue” which dialogue could only take place if the insufferable Westerners would stop saying how “superior” they were — that was not quite the theme of the debate, of course — and no one interrupted to shout “but, but, isn’t Islam based on the idea of the superiority of Islam, and the right and duty of Muslims to work to spread Islam until it dominates everywhere, tearing down every conceivable barrier to its spread, and to its dominance?”
He made all kinds of remarks that, when I listen for a second time, I will try to jot down. Toward the end, he started to talk about capital punishment in the United States, and how the only way to get rid of it would be not to call for an outright ban but for a “moratorium,” and then he explained that that is why it was wrong for others to have attacked him for calling for a temporary “moratorium” on the stoning to death of women caught in adultery in Muslim lands. You had to know this, for otherwise his allusion to it remains obscure.
In general, he fell apart, and he fell apart still more, raising his voice, and yelling that he believed in “humility, humility, humility.” He convinced no one, but no doubt part of the audience, the third that voted for his side, would not have voted otherwise no matter what. They came to support what they saw as the Muslim Team, and they did.
The one who really gave himself away was the odious and stupid and remarkably ill-informed William Dalrymple. He went on and on about how, near to where “I live in Delhi” there is some spot connected to the reign of Akbar. And then he proceeded to tell everyone — thank god it has been preserved on tape, for all time — how Akbar, the “Muslim emperor,” had called together Shi’a Muslims, and Sunni Muslims, and Jains, and Christians, and even Jews from Cochin, for a colloquy. And he went on and on about how splendid Akbar was. Of course, Akbar was splendid, when he became syncretistic, when he ended the Jizyah, when he essentially stopped being a Muslim in every important way. The British historian V. A. West, in his “History of India,” notes that Akbar demanded that those in his inner circle had to abjure the Qur’an — not exactly the sign of a Muslim.
So his entire speech was all about Akbar, and he apparently did not know that Akbar, the Akbar he praised, is remembered today fondly by Hindus and despised by Muslims. And at one point he even described “Ashoka and Akbar” as Muslim leaders. Ashoka was no Muslim. Could I really have heard him say that? Not possible. No, I suppose anything is possible, especially if Dalrymple shows he has missed entirely the main point about syncretistic Akbar, has not understood the whole point of his later rule, and why he is revered by Hindus and despised by Muslims, though some may now invoke his name to show that “Muslims are tolerant.”
No, Dalrymple’s idiocy about Akbar will live on forever, on the tape made of the other evening, forever made available online with a single click, to haunt him, to mock him, to serve as proof that Dalrymple the historian of Mughal India, “internationally-acclaimed,” is unsteady when it comes to possibly the most important figure in Indian history during the entire Mughal period.
Ibn Warraq, in one of later replies, noted — too quickly, alas — that Akbar was no Muslim, and it was clear, according to observers, that Dalrymple was nervous, that he knew he was out of his depth.
And why was he “out of his depth”? Did he not know about Akbar? Never read the “Akbarnamah” of Fazl? Strange, isn’t it, that someone who has made his entire professional career out of his supposed knowledge of Mughal India, and has written all his books about Mughal India, appears to be so ignorant about Akbar, the celebrated emperor who during his reign ended the practice of demanding the payment of the Jizyah (his successor, Aurangzeb, promptly re-imposed it) and was clearly indifferent or even hostile to so much of Islam. And Dalrymple cannot claim that little is known about Akbar or his reign, for it was recorded in great detail by Fazl, and by others. Or does Dalrymple not know that, either?
Oh, did I mention that the same Dalrymple (google his name and “Jihad Watch” and “Posted by Hugh” for my many descriptions of him as an upscale Barbara Cartland, singing the life of luxe and volupté at the Mughal court, with love intrigues in the palaces, and trans-racial transgressions, and all the rest of it) a few years ago was earning all kinds of prizes and glory for his book “The Last Mughal.” For that book the claim was repeatedly made that he, Dalrymple, had come along and finally made use of the Mutiny Papers that no historian had seen or used, and until Dalrymple came along had simply been overlooked or, in some accounts, even entirely unknown. But if you read his much-overrated “The Last Mughal” you find, in the footnotes, that Dalrymple takes much, perhaps most, of what he quotes from those Mutiny Papers not directly, but from books by other, much more solid historians. He admits as much. And yet the story still makes the rounds about how William Dalrymple used a cache of papers that no one had known about. Good Christ, you”d think he was Hyde at Malahide Castle. It’s blague. Curious that his self-promoting website, the one you get to by googling his name and then clicking on a link that proudly describes itself as yielding “[t]he Home site of William Dalrymple, internationally acclaimed writer and historian” (who do you suppose wrote that?), continues the tale of the Papers That No One Knew About.
There is some extravagant praise for William Hamilton-Dalrymple by the quite similar David Gilmour. He is similar in ways that include the vicious and viciously-expressed detestation of Israel (and one suspects, a little more than just Israel). Also like Dalrymple, he has won praise from Amartya Sen, who may be world-famous and Indian, but has given no signs at all of thinking that he has a duty to find out a bit more about the texts and tenets and attitudes of Islam, and what the Muslim conquerors and rulers did in and to India. The at-times egregious Sen, one presumes, has never read K. S. Lal, or Francois Gautier, or Koenraad Elst, and would recoil at the name “Sita Ram Goel.” For Sen is an example of the Indian who becomes famous in the Great World and who wants to make sure that he can never be accused of what in India is called “communalism,” but which really means all those Hindus who are aware of their being Hindus, and aware too of what Islam did to India’s civilization of Hinduism, a way of life and thought rather than a religion as we understand it in the West. V. S. Naipaul is a lonely exception. Most Indians with Hindu backgrounds in academic posts in England and America attempt to distance themselves, ostentatiously so, from any hint of “communalism.” Part of that distancing requires them to ignore or deliberately overlook the destructive and cruel consequences (including 60-70 million murdered Hindus) of Muslim rule. It just won’t fit. And so the vague and tepid praise of Amartya Sen, which carefully does not mention the actual history which Dalrymple purports to treat, is understandable, as is that of Gilmour. But note: neither Gilmour nor Amartya Sen is a historian of India. What do the real historians of India think of the works of Indian history written by William Dalrymple? Judging by their non-presence at his site, not much. Perhaps I am being unfair — so someone set me straight. Some one please send me all the reviews in the scholarly journals that praise William Dalrymple the way that David Gilmour does, the way someone who is an “internationally acclaimed writer and historian” deserves to be praised.
Who cares if Dalrymple writes about Englishmen at a Mughal Court (“White Mughals”), the kind of stuff that may impress those who are not experts in the field, or can convince the world, by dint of repetition, that he and he alone has made use of the Mutiny Papers, that, supposedly, no one else knew about or ever used them, even though merely by looking at his footnotes one can see that Dalrymple quotes extensively from other historians who did know about them, and did use them.
Incredible. He’s now hoist by his own permanently-preserved-on-tape petard. Just click on the link, and perform that fast-forwarding act so you can be brought right up to William Dalrymple, making a fool of himself, for all historians of India, right at the Royal Geographical Society, next to the Kensington Gore.
And Tariq Ramadan will not be able to recover either. Those debating him in the future should use the knowledge of how easily he gets rattled, angry, grading into — if only there had been more time to see it happen — hysteria when he thinks he is not being given his due, by those beastly Westerners who for some reason think Europe belongs to them, when of course it belongs in the end to Tariq Ramadan and to Islam. For Islam was responsible for so much of Europe’s cultural advancement, and stands ready to work its magic on Europe yet again, thanks to those “European Muslims” such as Tariq Ramadan who apparently have a European version of the Qur’an, and a European version of the Hadith, and a thoroughly European version of the Sira, so that no one need think that their Islam, European Islam, will be anything like the Islam we see, and have seen for more than a millennium, all over Dar al-Islam.
Of course, their claque came, and determinedly voted for them, and would have, no matter what. And no doubt there was a claque of sorts among some — but by no means all — of those who voted in support of the resolution. But the lopsided two-to-one result suggests that the great middle, the undecided part of the audience that came to hear and to be persuaded, was indeed persuaded by one side and one side only — by Ibn Warraq, by David Aronovitch, by Douglas Murray.
Note, by the way, the amusing makeup of the opposing sides. Whoever selected the two teams appears to have, possibly unconsciously, to have had One of Each: one brown-skinned person who was born into Islam, preferably in the East; one English-based journalist with a name that others might perceive as “Jewish”; one upper-class Englishman with the right old school tie. Of course, there was a difference. Ibn Warraq told the truth and Tariq Ramadan was a slithering and, at times, maddened and confused liar; David Aronovitch pointed out what was happening at present, in such places as Iran, a state that tried to impose as much of the Shari”a as it could, while Charles Glass wished to keep very far from the present, except as to the putative sins of the West (Abu Ghraib! Abu Ghraib!), and tried to dwell on Islam’s presumably splendid past (“when such-and-such was happening in the Abbasid court, woad-painted savages were wandering through the woods of Surrey and Kent” or words to that effect). And then there was the suave Murray, and the rightly-unnerved, revealingly ignorant, “internationally-acclaimed” historian of Mughal India, William Dalrymple.
And a good time was had, and can continue to be had, by all — by all those, that is, who are on the right side of that “Resolved,” as of course everyone here is, or should be.