You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen

waits until Aisha reaches puberty before making love to her. As Armstrong explains:

      Finally about a month after she had arrived in Mecca, it was decided that it was time for the wedding of Muhammad with Aisha. She was still only nine years old, so there was no wedding feast and the ceremonial was kept to a minimum … Abu Bakr had bought some fine red-striped cloth from Bahrain and this had been made into a wedding dress for her. Then they took her to her little apartment beside the mosque. There Muhammad was waiting for her, and he laughed and smiled while they decked her with jewellery and ornaments and combed her long hair. Eventually a bowl of milk was brought in and Muhammad and Aisha both drank from it. The marriage made little difference to Aisha’s life. Tabari says that she was so young that she stayed at her parents’ home and the marriage was consummated there later when she had reached puberty. Aisha went on playing with her girlfriends and her dolls.

      Tabari, the ninth-century Koranic scholar, is not in fact such a comforting source. In his collection of stories about the Prophet, he quotes Aisha as saying, ‘the Messenger of God consummated his marriage with me in my house when I was nine years old’. In other traditions he cites, he puts her age at ten. The hadith collections of Bukhari, which Sunni Muslims consider to be the most authoritative, also say that Muhammad consummated the marriage when Aisha was nine. For most of the history of Islam, there was nothing controversial about her age at the time of the wedding. Because it confirmed her virginity, it reinforced Aisha’s status among the Prophet’s wives, and gave her wishes added force in the power struggles within Islam after Muhammad’s death.

      Perhaps Jones, Armstrong and all those like them who avert their eyes from inconvenient evidence do so because they worry about Western racists, who use Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha to taunt ethnic minorities. But it is as important to worry about religious extremists who use the arguments for male supremacy, homophobia and the exploitation of women and children in holy books to justify oppression – and to notice that there is not a great deal of difference between the ideologies of the religious and the racial extremists.

      In Does God Hate Women?, their scholarly study of the links between religion and misogyny, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom criticise Armstrong by making the essential point that when sacred texts are taken to be divine instructions, you cannot allow nervousness to inhibit criticism.

      In Iran after the 1979 revolution, the Islamists reduced the minimum age of marriage for girls to nine. In 2000, under pressure from women’s rights activists, the Iranian parliament voted to raise it to fifteen. However, the Council of Guardians, an anti-democratic oversight body dominated by traditional clerics, vetoed the reform, saying that the new ruling was contrary to Islamic law. (They had the example of Ayatollah Khomeini on their side. He had availed himself of the law’s blessings and married a ten-year-old girl.) The case of Yemen is equally instructive. In 1998, the Yemeni parliament revised a law that had set the minimum age of marriage at fifteen. The new ruling allowed girls to be married much earlier, so long as they did not move in with their husbands until they had reached sexual maturity. Conservative clerics take this to mean that the consummation of a marriage can take place at the age of nine. Human-rights activists have fought to reverse this ruling, but to date they have been unsuccessful, because Islamic clerics can point to Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha to justify their views.

      ‘Although it would be a massive oversimplification to claim that Islam is the cause of these patterns,’ Benson and Stangroom conclude, ‘it is nevertheless the case that Islamic beliefs are sometimes a factor in child marriage.’ As the Iranian reformers found, religion makes the task of stopping girls becoming the possessions of older men – sometimes far older men – harder. The men can always say that religious authority is on their side. Unless religious authority is challenged, they will win.

      There are three possible challenges. The first, and to my mind the simplest, is to give up on religion. To reject communism, you do not need to know why Marx’s beliefs in the inevitability of proletarian revolution were wrong, you just need to look at the vast crimes the communists committed, and resolve to have nothing to do with the ideology behind them. Similarly, to reject religion you do not need to understand the scientific and philosophical arguments about the extreme unlikelihood of God’s existence, or go through the archaeological and literary studies which tell us that the early years of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were strikingly different from the accounts presented to believers. Knowledge of the vast crimes committed in the name of religion is once again sufficient.

      Religious reformers must try subtler strategies. They cannot abandon their faiths, therefore they take, say, the problematic lines in Leviticus, St Paul’s epistles and the Koran that license the persecution of homosexuals and try to reinterpret them.

      Leviticus says:

       Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

      The prohibition appears to leave no escape hatches, but liberal Jews and Christians must find a way out so they can continue to practise their religions without sacrificing their tolerant instincts. American Christian homosexuals made a dogged effort when they formed a group with the splendid title of the National Gay Pentecostal Alliance. (Sadly, they later changed its name.) They did their own translation of Leviticus, and came up with a new version of the prohibition:

       And a man who will lie down with a male in beds of a woman, both of them have made an abomination; dying they will die. Their blood is on them.

      They updated the language into contemporary English to produce:

       If two men engage in homosexual sex while on a woman’s bed, both have committed an abomination. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.

      It did not sound much of an improvement. But the gay Pentecostalists were undaunted. ‘Rather than forbidding male homosexuality’, they decided, Leviticus simply restricts where lovemaking may occur. According to their reading, if a bisexual man takes a gay lover into the bedroom he shares with his wife, he is committing an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. But if he sneaks him into the spare bedroom, then everything will be fine with God, although not, I imagine, with his wife.