The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis

A Muslim has been convicted of child cruelty over a religious ritual. Should a secular state interfere in such practices?
A.C. Grayling

Along the borders between modern secular society and the religious traditions that beyond which it has evolved, are periodic flashes of conflict. Recent frictions have occurred over religious objections to stem cell research, and requests by Roman Catholic adoption agencies to opt out of discrimination laws because they do not wish to serve homosexuals.

Now in a Manchester courtroom a Shia Muslim has been found guilty of child cruelty because he made two teenage boys take part in a self-flagellation ritual using a whip made of knife blades. Syed Mustafa Zaidi’s defence was that this is a traditional ceremony commemorating the death of Hussein, Muhammad’s grandson, at the massacre of Karbala in AD680.

On the day of Ashura some devotees whip their own backs with bunched knives known as zanjirs; others beat their chests rhythmically with their hands. Sunni Muslims and some Shia condemn the ritual as barbaric. But it would be a mistake to think it exceptional in religion generally. Christianity and Hinduism can offer examples that make zanjir self-flagellation look like a haircut.

In the Hindu festival of Thaipusam a ritual known as kavadi is performed. It ranges from carrying heavy weights uphill to piercing the body, face and tongue with skewers, or dangling from meat hooks passed through the back and legs. “The greater the pain,” one text says, “the greater the god-earned merit.”

In the festival for the goddess Draupathi believers walk on red-hot coals as an act of devotion or penance. Descriptions claim that devotees feel nothing, having entered a trance-like state; which would seem somewhat to reduce both the devotional and penitential value.

The idea of “mortification of the flesh” - literally putting the flesh to death - has been an aspect of Christianity from the beginning. Christianity’ s first scriptures, the letters of St Paul, are the source for its ascetic tradition. Romans viii, 13 says: “If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die; but if ye live through the Spirit to mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” More explicitly Colossians iii, 5 registers the fears about sex (and food) for which death-bound “flesh” is a euphemism: “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.”

As a result Christianity has a permanent tradition of mortification, ranging from self-denial, wearing hairshirts and chains, fasting and self-flagellation all the way to self-castration. The “desert fathers” lived eremitic lives, anticipating the self-denying existences of monks and nuns whose vows of celibacy and poverty abnegate normal humanity in the hope of pleasures to come, not only greater but everlasting.

The only “religion of the book” that does not contain ritual traditions of self-inflicted suffering is Judaism, although it requires male genital mutilation in the form of circumcision. Sackcloth, ashes and fasting are the norm for penitents; punishments, which are biblically plentiful and savage, are mostly inflicted by the deity.

Studies of self-inflicted suffering in religious observance suggest that it has two main purposes. One is the hope of rooting out sexual desire or some other physical appetite, thereby achieving purity and self-mastery, and thus merit. The other, much the main purpose, is to induce an ecstatic or transcendent state often interpreted by believers as contact with the divine. Self-harming is thus allied to ritual drug-taking as in peyote cactus consumption in Mexico, and dancing as with the Whirling Dervish sufis of Islam.

The connection with drugs and dance takes the inducing of transcendent states of mind beyond religion and into human practice at large. Drugs and dancing are a commonplace of the clubbing scene every night of the week - though the divine encounters sought there are not noticeably religious.

Elective suffering is the staple of sado-masochistic sexuality. The mission statement of the “alternative” movement Only Flesh, based in Columbus, Ohio, reads “Only Flesh is a group of piercers and tattoo artists that formed a group dedicated to combining body modification (flesh pulls, brandings, cuttings, object suspension, piercing), flesh suspension and performance art to shock, arouse and entertain.”

There is even a Church of Body Modification in the US, which practises everything from tattooing to hanging from meat hooks “to promote growth in body, mind and soul” on an “interfaith” basis.

The existence of organisations such as these, and the phenomenon of sado-masochistic sexuality generally, raises two questions. The first concerns the limits of society’s right to interfere with what people consent to do to or with their own bodies in private. British society, through the courts, reaffirmed the idea that those limits are generous ones in the recent Max Mosley case.

And the clincher is: what applies to Max Mosley applies to Shia Muslims. The Crown Prosecution Service made it clear that the prosecution of Zaidi was about child cruelty, not religious rituals.

But that raises the second question. We do not like children being involved in either Mosley-like or religious activities of elective suffering, one reason being that we do not think they are in a position to give properly free and informed consent. This, in turn, raises the question of what else children should be protected from in the way of religious practice, or even doctrine: for psychological effects are every bit as real as physical ones.

One might think that teaching six-year-olds the Calvinistic dread of eternal torment in hellfire is as harmful as flagellation - the youths in the Manchester case began their self-flagellation in Pakistan at that age. But what about teaching children false or weird beliefs as fact?

Once one begins to ponder where these lines should be drawn, one has begun to ponder again that border between modern secular society and religion. In my view, leaving adults to do what they like in private - providing it does not harm the unconsenting - is the right course, but that includes acquiring religion too. Leave the children out of it, both the believing and flagellating, until they can make a free and informed decision for themselves.

A.C. Grayling is professor in philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London

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