God and Primo Levi in Auschwitz

The work of Primo Levi is as important as it is moving and brilliantly written on the subjects of Auschwitz, the Holocaust and Nazism, particularly If This Is A Man and The Truce. There is nothing in human history that compares with the industrial genocide conducted with the ruthless efficiency and cruelty by the Nazis between 1943 and 1945, and so remains the keenest test of belief in God.

Levi as a “non-believer” and “secular” Jew does not deal with the question of belief in God. However, in The Drowned And The Saved, there is a remarkable passage with respect to his disbelief, and one that deserves to be quoted verbatim on this blog. For me, it is an astonishing testimony of what a coherent and intellectually honest disbelief in supernatural deities can mean, and also provides a rejoinder – if one were needed – to the claims often made by theists that, when faced with death, people will turn to a god, either in the proverbial saying that there are “no atheists in foxholes”, or perhaps when faced with a terminal illness.

Levi in The Drowned And The Saved writes of the only occasion when he was tempted to pray:

This happened in October of 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the ‘commission’ that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise, were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it (The Drowned and the Saved, 1989 Abacus edition: p118).

The 11th Februrary was the anniversary of Levi’s incarceration at Auschwitz.

Sharia law in the UK?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has quite rightly been criticised for his comments regarding the inevitably of Sharia law in the UK yesterday.

Such a comment was always going to be a red rag to a bull for the more xenophobic inclined to shout things along the lines of, if you don’t like it here, then leave, as the BBC’s Have Your Say page illustrates. Or, indeed, to prompt populist rhetoric from politicians about British laws and British values, from the Prime Minister downwards.

Perhaps the point has been missed, though. Most people only react to the headline, but not the substance of what the Archbishop was trying to say. Sharia 0- as the Archbishop recognises – invokes the ideas of Saudi justice (for example), with its beheadings, stonings, and limited legal protection for women, to say the least. However, the crux of what he was getting at is this (and it’s worth quoting at length). For as he says:

[...] my aim is only, as I have said, to tease out some of the broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state, with a few thoughts about what might be entailed in crafting a just and constructive relationship between Islamic law and the statutory law of the United Kingdom.

His point is that:

[...] there is some community of understanding between Islamic social thinking and the categories we might turn to in the non-Muslim world for the understanding of law in the most general context. There is a recognition that our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging – even if one of those sets is regarded as relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level of reality, as established by a ‘covenant’ between the divine and the human (as in Jewish and Christian thinking; once again, we are not talking about an exclusively Muslim problem). The danger arises not only when there is an assumption on the religious side that membership of the community (belonging to the umma or the Church or whatever) is the only significant category, so that participation in other kinds of socio-political arrangement is a kind of betrayal. It also occurs when secular government assumes a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity. There is a position – not at all unfamiliar in contemporary discussion – which says that to be a citizen is essentially and simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state, in such a way that any other relations, commitments or protocols of behaviour belong exclusively to the realm of the private and of individual choice. [emphasis added]

That last point is the key to what Williams was trying to say; here he has in mind the the row over not allowing Catholic adoption agencies to discriminate against homosexuals under the Sexual Orientation Regulations last year (an example he cites elsewhere).

The real point that he’s making, the one lost under all the furore over Sharia law, is not one about immigration or Muslims in particular. Rather, he seeks religious-based privileges to opt out of the secular laws in a secular country. To do so, he is trying to argue that there is more than one legal community to which one can belong, one that reflects your culture as well as the state in which you happen to reside. He claims that there needn’t be a conflict between them.

On this, he misses the point of a secular society. A secular society would not privilege any interest group – religious or otherwise – with their own legal systems and exemptions from the law. In that respect, religious groups have no more right to be taken notice of than any other pressure group, such as Greenpeace or CND. Which is why there should be no bishops in the House of Lords, nor should the Head of State should be the head of an organised religion.

At least, however, he has recognised the secular reality and has not called for a return to Christian Britain, as others have done recently (see previous posts). Unfortunately, the Archbishop has misjudged the mood of country, which is extremely reactionary on matters regarding Islam and immigration (which are more or less considered (wrongly) to be synonymous). It demonstrates the way in which the UK is unable to have an intelligent public debate with subtle nuances of argument and detail. He should have known better.