Johann Hari

And now congregation, put your hands together and give thanks, for I come bearing Good News. Britain is now the most irreligious country on earth. This island has shed superstition faster and more completely than anywhere else. Some 63 percent of us are non-believers, according to an ICM study, while 82 percent say religion is a cause of harmful division. Now, let us stand and sing our new national hymn: Jerusalem was dismantled here/ in England's green and pleasant land.

How did it happen? For centuries, religion was insulated from criticism in Britain. First its opponents were burned, then jailed, then shunned. But once there was a free marketplace of ideas, once people could finally hear both the religious arguments and the rationalist criticisms of them, the religious lost the British people. Their case was too weak, their opposition to divorce and abortion and gay people too cruel, their evidence for their claims non-existent. Once they had to rely on persuasion rather than intimidation, the story of British Christianity came to an end.

Now that only six percent of British people regularly attend a religious service, it's only natural that we should dismantle the massive amounts of tax money and state power that are automatically given to the religious to wield over the rest of us. It's a necessary process of building a secular state, where all citizens are free to make up their own minds. Yet the opposition to this sensible shift is becoming increasingly unhinged. The Church of England, bewildered by the British people choosing to leave their pews, has only one explanation: Christians are being "persecuted" and "bullied" by a movement motivated by "Christophobia." George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, says Christians are now "second class citizens" and it is only "a small step" to "a religious bar on any employment by Christians".

Really? Let's list some of the ways in which Christians, and other religious groups, are given special privileges every day. Start with the educational system. Every school in Britain is required by law to make its pupils engage every day in "an act of collective worship of a wholly or mainly Christian nature". Yes: Britain is still a nation with enforced prayer. The religious are then handed total control of 36 percent of our state-funded schools, in which to indoctrinate children into their faith alone.

These religious schools, paid for by you and me, are disfiguring Britain. I know one reason I grew up without the prejudices of some of my older relatives was because I went to school with kids from every conceivable ethnic and religious group, and I could see they were just like me. A five year old will make friends with anyone, and he'll be much less likely to believe smears against those friends for the rest of their lives. But in Britain today, that mixing is happening less and less. Increasingly, the children of Christians are sent to one side, Jews to another, Muslims to another still, and they never see each other except from the window of their parents' cars. After the race riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley in 2001, the official investigations found that faith schools were a major cause.

So why keep them? Their defenders say these schools perform better in exams - and at first glance, it seems to be true. On average, they get higher grades. But look again. A number of studies, including by the conservative think thank Civitas, have blown a hole in this claim. They have proven that faith schools systematically screen out children who will be harder to teach: children from poor families, and less bright children. Once you look at how much a school improves the pupils it actually admits, the only real measure of a school's success, it turns out faith schools do less well than other schools - which isn't surprising given they waste so much time teaching them crazy nonsense like Virgin births and Noah's Ark. The British people instinctively know all this: 64 percent want every state school to be neutral when it comes to religion.

Special rights for the religious don't stop at the school gates. They automatically get 26 unelected bishops in the House of Lords. Public broadcasters are required by law to give them large amounts of money and time to screen religious propaganda. Jews and Muslims are allowed to ignore the laws on animal cruelty and engage in the barbaric practice of slitting the throats of live animals without numbing them in order to create kosher and halal meat.

And it seems that, in crucial cases, religious figures are virtually exempted from the law. There is now overwhelming evidence that Joseph Ratzinger, the Pope, was involved for over twenty years in an international criminal conspiracy to cover up the rape of children by priests in his Church. (Check out the superb edition of the BBC's Panorama, 'Sex Crimes and the Vatican', for the evidence.) But when he arrives in Britain in September, our politicians will fawn over him, rather than dialling 999.

Given all this unearned privilege, how can Christians claim they are in fact being "persecuted"? Here are the cases they offer as "proof". A nurse called Shirley Chaplin turned up to work wearing a crucifix around her neck. Her hospital told her that they were worried the elderly and confused patients she worked with could grab at it, so they said she could pin the crucifix to her uniform instead if she liked. That's it. That's their cause celebre. Oh, and a woman called Theresa Davies who worked in a registry office, but refused to perform civil partnerships for gay couples, so... she was moved to working on reception.

In response, Carey and the CofE demand Christians be allowed to break the law requiring them to treat gay people equally when providing a service to the general public - and that any case where a Christian feels discriminated against should be judged by a special court of "sensitive" Christians. If we started allowing religious people to break basic anti-discrimination laws, where would we stop? Until 1975, the Mormon Church said black people didn't have souls. (They only changed their mind the day the Supreme Court ruled this was illegal, and God niftily appeared to their leader that morning and announced blacks were ensouled after all.) Would we let a Mormon registrar refuse to marry black people? Would it be "Mormonophobia" to object?

When Lord Chief Justice Laws, who is a Christian himself, ruled the exemptions demanded by Carey would be "irrational, divisive, and arbitrary", he threw an extraordinary tantrum and said Christians might begin to engage in "civil unrest". When I saw Carey make these threats on television, red-faced and rageful, it made me think of a nasty child in the playground who had been beating up the gay kids and spitting at the girls for years and is finally told to stop - only to start bawling that he's the one who is being picked on.

As their dusty Churches crumble because nobody wants to go there, the few remaining Christians in Britain will only become more angry and uncomprehending. Let them. We can't stop this hysterical toy-tossing stop us from turning our country into a secular democracy where everyone has the same rights, and nobody is grantedspecial rights just because they claim their ideas come from an invisible supernatural being. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a Holy Lamb of God to carve into kebabs - it's our new national dish. Amen, and hallelujah.

This article appeared in GQ magazine, where I write a monthly column. To get these articles a month in advance of this website, you can subscribe to GQ at www.gq-magazine.co.uk

 here. It's the Intelligence Squared debate from the Hay Festival.

In addition to the debate about environmentalism I'm doing at 4pm, I'll also be at the Literary Festival arguing for the arrest of the Pope at 9.45pm. Come along...

Should Britain be giving refuge to Islamic fundamentalists, while sending the men and women who have been brave enough to challenge Islamism back to their deaths? This sounds at first like a straw man question. Who would ever suggest such a policy? Who would defend it? But the facts suggest we are doing it, every day.

On the day when the Special Immigration Appeals Commission decided to allow two Pakistani men they say are al-Qa'ida members to remain in London this week, two other young people were waiting for the British police to seize them and hand them over to men who will kill them. Their "crime" is to resist Islamic fundamentalism, in the name of human rights.

Kiana Firouz is a 27-year-old woman who grew up in revolutionary Iran, and slowly realised that if she ever acted on her natural impulses – to kiss and hold and love another woman – she would be subjected to a hundred lashes. If she did it again, she would be hanged, in a public square, before a jeering mob. But Kiana believed the freedom to fall in love was more important than her own safety. She stood up in Tehran and made a film showing that there are gay people there just as there are gay people everywhere, and they deserve to live and love freely. The police began following and threatening her. She knew what had happened to other gay Iranians – a bullet, a ditch, a lynch mob – so she came to a country she associated with freedom for gay people, Britain, and appealed to us to save her life.

We refused. The Home Office told her to go back to Iran and be "discreet" about her sexuality. But the law in Iran doesn't say discreet lesbians get out of jail free. They are tortured and killed just the same.

Dr Amit is a 29-year-old Pakistani who has asked me not to use his surname, for reasons that will become clear. He grew up in the Punjab, but since he was a young child, he found the religion that was relentlessly promoted by the state and the mosque and the schools absurd. Where was the evidence for this "God"? Why should we follow "His" dictates?

In 2008, he began to write a series of articles online, criticising Islam and all religions. He knew that people are jailed and tortured and executed for critically analysing Mohammed or the Koran or the power of institutionalised Islam within Pakistan, but, again, he believed somebody had to ask these questions, or no progress would ever happen. He knew the police would come looking. So he came to a country whose philosophical and intellectual traditions of scepticism towards religion he revered, and asked us to save his life.

We refused. He was told to go back and be "discreet" in his opposition to religious fundamentalism. But his articles are there, online, for the not-so-secret police to read and torture him for. By the time you read this, he will have been forced on to a plane. He told me: "I will try to hide myself somehow – change my name, not contact anyone I knew before. Maybe then I can survive. I'm terrified."

The courts have condemned Kiana and Amit, but at the same time, they have given a reprieve to Abid Naseer and Ahmed Faraz, who they say are strong al-Qa'ida sympathisers. (Remember though: this was a Kafka-trial where the defendants were not allowed to hear the evidence against them.) The judges ruled they cannot be deported to Pakistan, because there is a serious risk they could be tortured or executed by the Pakistani authorities.

Let's leave aside the repellent double standard for a moment and, for the sake of argument, assume the courts are correct about their affiliations. It is instinctively maddening to have to allow people to remain in Britain who despise many of the great things about this country – freedom for women and gay people and freethinkers – and pine for a theocracy that negates it all.

But that does not mean it is wrong. Would you ever hand a human being over to a torturer who was waiting with a blow-torch and a pair of pliers to take them apart? I doubt it. Our government mustn't do it either. No matter how despicable a human being is, they must be protected from torture and murder. That's why we can't send them back – although we should, of course, put them before a real trial immediately if they were involved in plots to commit murders of their own.

Far from showing us to be weak in the face of Islamism, this would show true strength. The Islamists say we are an empty materialist shell of a society, a brothel that believes in nothing but our own self-gratification. What better refutation is there than to say – here's what we believe in. We believe that torture is absolutely wrong. We believe it so strongly that even you – you, who hate us, and want to kill us – are protected from it.

This approach is far more effective than the neoconservative screeching for the water-board and the B-47. When I interviewed the growing movement of young Muslims in Britain who had been jihadis and trainee suicide bombers but have recanted and are now arguing for democratic values, I was struck by one thing. Every time we behaved like actors in an Osama Bin Laden rant-tape – by torturing and killing civilians in illegal wars – they became convinced he was right and resolved to kill us back. But when we refused to play to that script, doubt crept in.

To give one example of many, Majid Nawaz was in prison for being part of a hardcore Islamist plot to try to topple the governments of Egypt and Pakistan and seize its nukes – but when Amnesty International campaigned to protect him from torture, he realised the "Infidel" were rescuing him, because we have strong moral principles of our own. Now he is one of the most articulate campaigning enemies of Islamism. Of course, few Islamists will recant – but they are stripped of some of their most powerful recruiting tools and intellectual reinforcements when we sincerely oppose torture and murder.

So, yes, Naseer and Faraz should be kept safe from torturers and tried here because it is the right thing to do, and because it shows why the liberal way – if we follow it, instead of Bushite lunacies – is far better than their way.

But if we are going to protect them, how can we possibly not protect the people who are brave enough to stand up in Iran and Pakistan to denounce everything Islamist thugs try to force on innocent people? This isn't just about basic humanity. It is in our interests, too. There is a battle of ideas going on in Muslim societies between fundamentalists, and sane people who are happy to live alongside people who are different. At first, voices for secularism will be intimidated and small and scattered, as they were in the history of our country. But over time they will prick holes in fundamentalist certainties and bleed them. The more the fundamentalists are challenged – by their own countrymen, in their own language – the safer we become.

Brave, bold voices like Kiana's and Amit's do more to undermine Islamic fundamentalism than a thousand bomber-planes that only vindicate the Bin Laden narrative for so many. By sending these remarkable dissidents to die, we aren't only betraying them – we are endangering ourselves.

In last week's Spectator, a blogger called James Delingpole wrote an article claiming I somehow support gay-hating Islamists, or make excuses for them. I wrote this letter as a response:

In his most recent column, James Delingpole suggests that "even as the wall is pushed on top of" me by anti-gay Islamists, I "will be squealing with [my] last breath that it's all the fault of Western imperialism and white heterosexist Islamophobia." 

I found this slightly odd, since I am so critical of Islamic fundamentalists that I have received a substantial number of death threats from them. I worked undercover at the Finsbury Park mosque after 9/11 to expose Islamists; I have debunked Hizb ut Tahrir as a bunch of theocratic fascists on live television; and after I wrote an article criticising the 'Prophet' Mohammed for having sex with a pre-pubescent girl when he was 53 years old, there was a three-day riot by over 3000 people in Calcutta calling for me to be imprisoned or killed. At no point did I blame "Islamophobia" for this lunatic behaviour. On the contrary: I was highly critical of the people who put this case.

Out of interest, what risks has James Delingpole ever taken to oppose Islamic fundamentalism?

 ...by clicking here. We argued about inequality, arresting the Pope, and more. The audio of the Cambridge debate will follow soon too.

In the election campaign here in Britain, there is a big blood-splattered hole we are all supposed to ignore. We are at war. It is a war that 64 percent of Brits believe is "unwinnable" and should end now. It is a war that has killed 281 British people and an untold, uncounted number of Afghan civilians. It is a war that costs £4.5bn a year. It is a war to keep Hamid Karzai in power - even though he announced last week: "I swear I am going to join the Taliban." Yet the three biggest political parties are shouting their slogans over the hole as if it does not exist.

So what are they refusing to see? Hamid Karzai was picked by the US and British governments as the Afghan leader most likely to serve their interests, and his regime exists solely because of massive military support from them. Yet - in a sign of how Afghan opinion has tipped after eight years of war - even he now speaks with rage against them. He says the US and Britain's planned military assault on Kandahar this summer must not go ahead because the local population strongly oppose it. He warns there is "a fine line between resistance and revolt" and soon "this revolt will turn into a resistance and I will join it."

Now Karzai is following his own script, the authors of this war have dropped all pretence that they wanted an independent democratic government in Afghanistan. For example, Rudi Giuliani, who was one of the leading neoconservatives making the case for invasion, just said: "Karzai's there because of us, he's our creation, we put him there... I'm not sure we want to engage in the fiction that we're dealing with a democratically elected [leader]... that'd be a major fiction." He said that now Karzai fleetingly follows his people's demands rather than ours, there "might be grounds for shooting" him, and "we need to think about what comes after." He then added, with no irony: "This guy's a thug."

So - we are currently sending young people to kill and die in order to prop up a sort-of-kinda-elected President who (like his people) opposes almost all our actions and is threatening to defect to The Enemy. You might think that is worth discussing. Yet when Afghanistan comes up in this election, the sole subject of complaint is that our helicopters don't work as well as they should.

Why would Karzai, and so many Afghans, and Brits like me, turn like this, after welcoming the toppling of the vile Taliban in 2001? Here's a moment that distils why. Last month, General Stanley McCrystal, the NATO commander, was talking about how he guards the massive military convoys that move through the country. He said: "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat."

That wasn't considered a story. It didn't dominate the headlines. It was considered a normal thing to say. But imagine somebody bragging that he had shot "an amazing number" of British people, but "none has ever proven to be a threat." How would we react? Ah, the main political parties say, but all these complications and casualties are worth it, because there is a wider driving purpose to the war. They say we must stay for one reason: to fight jihadism. If we don't fight them there, we'll have to fight them here. If we don't deprive them of bases, they'll be hitting our places.

At first glance, this may sound persuasive. But look closer. Al Qaeda's attacks don't originate in these "bases", and don't require them: 9/11 was plotted in Hamburg and Florida; 7/7 was planned out in Yorkshire. Anything that could be done in a cave in Torah Borah could be done on a mountaintop in Yemen or a moor outside Manchester: it's highly mobile. If we charge in with Bazookas to conquer one of these places, they simply move to another - and goad us to follow. General Jim Jones, Barack Obama's National Security Advisor, says there are just 100 foreign jihadis in the whole of Afghanistan. They've simply packed up and gone elsewhere. So who are we fighting there? The CIA says they are "a tribal, localised insurgency" who "see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power" and have "no goals" outside the country.

But while the war is catching or killing very few jihadis, it is creating a huge number of them. After every bombing and every massacre, there is a swelling pools of relatives who scream at the camera that they now want to become suicide bombers. Those tapes are beamed back to Britain - where they are used to radicalize young Muslims. I have interviewed dozens of ex-jihadis - and they almost all named those videos as a key point in pushing them over from repellent religious bigotry into overtly planning violence. The 7/7 bombers themselves named it; the Detroit pantsbomber was howling about Afghanistan as he tried to detonate his scrotum.

If you really loathe and oppose jihadism, you have to soberly assess the best way to erode its power over time. Charging around with a blowtorch isn't putting out the fire. Indeed, the jihadists say quite clearly that they want the war to continue for as long as possible. Osama Bin Laden brags that it gives him extra recruits and will "bankrupt" the West.

The other arguments that used to be used to justify the war have become a polite after-cough. Women's rights? My friend Malalai Joya is the most popularly elected woman in Afghanistan. She has been expelled from the parliament and silenced in the media for pointing out that "things have not improved for women," because the occupiers have "transferred power to fundamentalist warlords who are just like the Taliban."

The defenders of the war are reduced to chanting "Back Our Boys!" To use the troops as rhetorical human shields to shut down democratic debate about whether they should carry on killing and dying is the worst insult to the soldiers I know. If the only way to Back Our Boys was to demand they stay on an unwinnable battlefield, no disastrous war would ever have been stopped, and we would still be fighting East of Suez. If you really want to back our boys, get them out of the crosshairs and into their homes.

You may think I'm wrong about all this. I respect that - but don't you at least think this should be part of the election debate? Don't you think you should be presented with a choice? Why has it been left to the small, unfairly marginalized Green Party to speak for 64 percent of the public on this?

In Israel earlier this year, the former Labour MP Lorna Fitzsimons reassured the massed ranks of the Israeli establishment that growing British disgust at the military occupation of Palestinian lands was nothing to worry about because "public opinion does not influence foreign policy in Britain. Foreign policy is an elite issue." She was saying - don't worry; Britain isn't a real democracy - its foreign policy serves the interests of geopolitics and corporations and elites, not those messy, fickle, inconvenient majorities. It's a view that spreads far beyond our policies towards Israel/Palestine. In a fascinating leaked CIA report on European public opinion, they say they are "counting on public apathy about Afghanistan" and boast that so far leaders have been "enabled... to ignore voters". They are worried the charge into Kandahar could cause disgust, but the British election will be over by then.

This muffled cry from the caves of Kandahar is a useful counter-point to this election. It reminds us that, while the small differences between the main parties at election time do matter, they often aren't the primary force that transforms the country. Almost every civilising change in Britain - from feminism to worker's rights to opposing bad wars - came from ordinary citizens banding together and demanding it all year, every year, whether there was an election or not, no matter how unlikely it seemed, until they prevailed. The British ambassador to Afghanistan Mark Sedwill says we will be there "for a generation" more. If you want to prove him wrong, then you have to demand it publicly - long after the terribly limited ballot papers are gathered into a fake middle and tossed away.

 ...by clicking here, here and here. (It's in three parts; later in the show we discuss the British election and the war in Afghanistan.)

John Lennon urged us: "Imagine there's no heaven/ It's easy if you try/ No hell below us/ Above us only sky ..." Yet Americans aren't turning to Lennonism any faster than Leninism. Today, 81 percent say they believe in heaven—an increase of 10 percent since a decade ago. Of those, 71 percent say it is "an actual place." Indeed, 43 percent believe their pets—cats, rats, and snakes—are headed into the hereafter with them to be stroked for eternity. America's branch of heaven is crammed full, even as the European and Asian wings are long since dissolved by the brisk winds of reason and skepticism.

So why can't Americans get over the Pearly Gates? Newsweek's religion correspondent, Lisa Miller, has written a fascinating millenniums-long history of the idea of heaven, spliced with some surprisingly mediocre reporting on present-day believers. At its core is a (very politely administered) slap to the American consensus. The heaven you think you're headed to—a reunion with your lost relatives in the light—is a very recent invention, only a little older than Goldman Sachs. Most of the believers in heaven across most of history would find it unrecognizable.

Heaven is constantly shifting shape because it is a history of subconscious human longings. Show me your heaven, and I'll show you what's lacking in your life. The desert-dwellers who wrote the Bible and the Quran lived in thirst—so their heavens were forever running with rivers and fountains and springs. African-American slaves believed they were headed for a heaven where "the first would be last, and the last would be first"—so they would be the free men dominating white slaves. Today's Islamist suicide-bombers live in a society starved of sex, so their heaven is a 72-virgin gang-bang. Emily Dickinson wrote: " 'Heaven'—is what I cannot Reach!/ The Apple on the Tree—/ Provided it do hopeless—hang—/ That—"Heaven" is—to Me!"

To read the rest of this article over at Slate, click here.

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What can make tens of millions of people – who are in their daily lives peaceful and compassionate and caring – suddenly want to physically dismember a man for drawing a cartoon, or make excuses for an international criminal conspiracy to protect child-rapists? Not reason. Not evidence. No. But it can happen when people choose their polar opposite – religion. In the past week we have seen two examples of how people can begin to behave in bizarre ways when they decide it is a good thing to abandon any commitment to fact and instead act on faith. It has led some to regard people accused of the attempted murders of the Mohamed cartoonists as victims, and to demand "respect" for the Pope, when he should be in a police station being quizzed about his role in covering up and thereby enabling the rape of children.

In 2005, 12 men in a small secular European democracy decided to draw a quasi-mythical figure who has been dead for 1400 years. They were trying to make a point. They knew that in many Muslim cultures, it is considered offensive to draw Mohamed. But they have a culture too – a European culture that believes it is important to be allowed to mock and tease and ridicule religion. It is because Europeans have been doing this for centuries now that we can no longer be tyrannised into feeling bad about perfectly natural impulses, like masturbation, or pre-marital sex, or homosexuality. When priests offer those old arguments, we now laugh in their faces – a great liberating moment. It will be a shining day for Muslims when they can do the same.

Some of the cartoons were witty. Some were stupid. One seemed to suggest Muslims are inherently violent – an obnoxious and false idea. If you disagree with the drawings, you should write a letter, or draw a better cartoon, this time mocking the cartoonists. But some people did not react this way. Instead, Islamist plots to hunt the artists down and slaughter them began. Earlier this year, a man with an axe smashed into one of their houses, and very nearly killed the cartoonist in front of his small grand-daughter.

This week, another plot to murder them seems to have been exposed, this time allegedly spanning Ireland and the United States, and many people who consider themselves humanitarians or liberals have rushed forward to offer condemnation – of the cartoonists. One otherwise liberal newspaper ran an article saying that since the cartoonists had engaged in an "aggressive act" and shown "prejudice... against religion per se", so it stated menacingly that no doubt "someone else is out there waiting for an opportunity to strike again".

Let's state some principles that – if religion wasn't involved – would be so obvious it would seem ludicrous to have to say them out loud. Drawing a cartoon is not an act of aggression. Trying to kill somebody with an axe is. There is no moral equivalence between peacefully expressing your disagreement with an idea – any idea – and trying to kill somebody for it. Yet we have to say this because we have allowed religious people to claim their ideas belong to a different, exalted category, and it is abusive or violent merely to verbally question them. Nobody says I should "respect" conservatism or communism and keep my opposition to them to myself – but that's exactly what is routinely said about Islam or Christianity or Buddhism. What's the difference?

This enforced "respect" is a creeping vine. It soon extends beyond religious ideas to religious institutions – even when they commit the worst crimes imaginable. It is now an indisputable fact that the Catholic Church systematically covered up the rape of children across the globe, and knowingly, consciously put paedophiles in charge of more kids. Joseph Ratzinger – who claims to be "infallible" – was at the heart of this policy for decades.

Here's what we are sure of. By 1962, it was becoming clear to the Vatican that a significant number of its priests were raping children. Rather than root it out, they issued a secret order called "Crimen Sollicitationis"' ordering bishops to swear the victims to secrecy and move the offending priest on to another parish. This of course meant they raped more children there, and on and on, in parish after parish. Yes, these were different times, but the Vatican knew then that what it was doing was terribly wrong: that's why it was done in the utmost secrecy.

It has emerged this week that when Ratzinger was Archbishop of Munich in the 1980s, one of his paedophile priests was "reassigned" in this way. He claims he didn't know. Yet a few years later he was put in charge of the Vatican's response to this kind of abuse and demanded every case had to be referred directly to him for 20 years. What happened on his watch, with every case going to his desk? Precisely this pattern, again and again. The BBC's Panorama studied one of many such cases. Father Tarcisio Spricigo was first accused of child abuse in 1991, in Brazil. He was moved by the Vatican four times, wrecking the lives of children at every stop. He was only caught in 2005 by the police, before he could be moved on once more. He had written in his diary about the kind of victims he sought: "Age: 7, 8, 9, 10. Social condition: Poor. Family condition: preferably a son without a father. How to attract them: guitar lessons, choir, altar boy." It happened all over the world, wherever the Catholic Church had outposts.

Far from changing this paedophile-protecting model, Ratzinger reinforced it. In 2001 he issued a strict secret order demanding that charges of child-rape should be investigated by the Church "in the most secretive way... restrained by a perpetual silence... and everyone... is to observe the strictest secret." Since it was leaked, Ratzinger claims – bizarrely – that these requirements didn't prevent bishops from approaching the police. Even many people employed by the Vatican at the time say this is wrong. Father Tom Doyle, who was a Vatican lawyer working on these cases, says it "is an explicit written policy to cover up cases of child sexual abuse and to punish those who would call attention to these crimes... Nowhere in any of these documents does it say anything about helping the victims. The only thing it does say is they can impose fear on the victims, and punish [them], for disclosing what happened." Doyle was soon fired.

Imagine if this happened at The Independent. Imagine I discovered there was a paedophile ring running our crèche, and the Editor issued a stern order that it should be investigated internally with "the strictest secrecy". Imagine he merely shuffled the paedophiles to work in another crèche at another newspaper, and I agreed, and made the kids sign a pledge of secrecy. We would both – rightly – go to prison. Yet because the word "religion" is whispered, the rules change. Suddenly, otherwise good people who wouldn't dream of covering up a paedophile ring in their workplace think it would be an insult to them to follow one wherever it leads in their Church. They would find this behaviour unthinkable without the irrational barrier of faith standing between them and reality.

Yes, I understand some people feel sad when they see a figure they were taught as a child to revere – whether Prophet or Pope – being subjected to rational examination, or mockery, or criminal investigation. But everyone has ideas they hold precious. Only you, the religious, demand to be protected from debate or scrutiny that might discomfort you. The fact you believe an invisible supernatural being approves of – or even commands – your behaviour doesn't mean it deserves more respect, or sensitive handling. It means it deserves less. If you base your behaviour on such a preposterous fantasy, you should expect to be checked by criticism and mockery. You need it.

If you can't bear to hear your religious figures criticised – if you think Ratzinger is somehow above the law, or Mohamed should be defended with an axe – a sane society should have only one sentence for you. Tell it to the judge.

You can watch an hour-long debate between me and a representative of the racist, misogynistic, homophobic party Hizb ut Tahrir on the Islam Channel by clicking here. (I was not gentle with them.)

You can now read my interview with Britain's ex-jihadis in Polish. There's also some fascinating comments on the article by my friend Andrew Sullivan here and here, and a reflection on it by the fantastic Glenn Greenwald here and here.

Ever since I started meeting jihadis, I have been struck by one thing – their Britishness. I am from the East End of London, and at some point in the past decade I became used to hearing a hoarse and angry whisper of jihadism on the streets where I live. Bearded young men stand outside the library calling for "The Rule of God" and "Death to Democracy".

In the mosques across the city, I hear a fringe of young men talk dreamily of flocking to Afghanistan to "resist". Yet this whisper never has an immigrant accent. It shares my pronunciations, my cultural references, and my national anthem. Beneath the beards and the burqas, there is an English voice.

The East End is a cramped grey maze of council estates, squashed between the glistening palaces of the City to one side and the glass towers of Docklands to the other. You can feel the financial elites staring across at each other, indifferent to this concrete lump of poverty dumped in-between by the forgotten tides of history. This place has always been the swirling first stop for immigrants to this country like my father – a place where new arrivals can huddle together as they adjust to the cold rain and lukewarm liberalism of Britain.

The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh, or India, or Somalia say they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. They have come here to work and raise their children in stability and escape people like them. No: these Islamists are British-born. They make up 7 per cent of the British Muslim population, according to a Populous poll (with the other 93 percent of Muslims disagreeing). Ever since the 7/7 suicide bombings, carried out by young Englishmen against London, the British have been squinting at this minority of the minority and trying to figure out how we incubated a very English jihadism.

But every attempt I have made up to now to get into their heads – including talking to Islamists for weeks at their most notorious London hub, Finsbury Park mosque, immediately after 9/11 – left me feeling like a journalistic failure. These young men speak to outsiders in a dense and impenetrable code of Koranic quotes and surly jibes at both the foreign policy crimes of our Government and the freedom of women and gays. Any attempt to dig into their psychology – to ask honestly how this swirl of thoughts led them to believe suicide bombing their own city is right – is always met with a resistant sneer, and yet more opaque recitations from the Koran. Their message is simple: we don't do psychology or sociology. We do Allah, and Allah alone. Why do you have this particular reading of the Koran, when most Muslims don't? Because we are right, and they are infidel. Full stop. It was an investigatory dead end.

But then, a year ago, I began to hear about a fragile new movement that could just hold the answers we journalists have failed to find up to now. A wave of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad.

Seventeen former radical Islamists have "come out" in the past 12 months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tell me the reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be the key to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism? I have spent three months exploring their world and befriending their leading figures. Their story sprawls from forgotten English seaside towns to the jails of Egypt's dictatorship and the icy mountains of Afghanistan – and back again.

I. The Imam

My journey began when, sitting in one of the grotty greasy spoon cafés that fill the East End, I heard a young woman in hijab mention that the imam of one of the local mosques was a jihadi who had fought in Afghanistan, but is now facing death threats from the very men he once fought alongside. His "crime"? To renounce his past and call for "a secular Islam".

After a series of phone calls, Usama Hassan cautiously agrees to talk. I meet him outside his little mosque in Leyton. It sits in the middle of a run-down sprawl of pound stores ("Everything only £1!!!"), halal kebab shops, and boarded-up windows at the edge of the East End.

Usama is a big, broad bear of a man in a black blazer and wire-rimmed glasses. He greets me with a hefty handshake; he has a rolled-up newspaper under his arm. He takes me upstairs to a pale-green prayer room. This building was once a factory, then a cinema; now, with Saudi money, it is a Wahabi mosque. Men are kneeling silently towards Mecca, rising and bending in reverential waves. "On Fridays, there are Islamists who stand outside and warn worshippers that their prayers won't count if they are led by me," he says as we squat in the corner, "because I'm supposedly an apostate. A fake imam." He looks away. "I get phone calls late at night. Threats. It's painful. You see, I was like them once."

And so Usama begins to tell me his story. He arrived in Tottenham in North London in the mid- 1970s, when he was five years old. His Pakistani father was sent here by the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs, which aims to spread its puritan desert strain of Islam to every nation. His family led a locked-down life, trying to adhere to Saudi principles in a semi-detached house in the English suburbs. "We weren't allowed music or TV or any contact with the opposite sex," he says. "We were very sheltered. I didn't go out a great deal." By the age of 10, he had memorised every word of the Koran in its original Arabic.

He had a strong sense of the Britain beyond his walls – the Britain where I was growing up – as a hostile, violent place. "You have to understand – it was the time of the Tottenham riots. It felt violent in the streets," he says. "I got used to expecting white people to use the Paki word. We used to have a fear of skinheads the whole time."

But Usama was offered a scholarship to the heart of the English elite – the City of London Boys' School, where he could practice cricket at Lord's. He bonded with the Jews at the school as outsiders and supporters of Tottenham Hotspur football team. He still speaks like the public schoolboy he was – in long, confident sentences.

Some berobed men are staring at us, so he takes me down to the mosque's office. "At that time, being a Muslim meant being an Islamist. It was taken for granted," he says. So when he was 13, he joined an Islamic fundamentalist organisation called Jimas. At big sociable conferences every weekend, they were told: you don't feel at home in Britain, but you can't go "home" to a country you have never visited. So we have a third identity for you – a pan-national Islamism that knows no boundaries and can envelop you entirely.

It sounds familiar. This is the identity I hear shouted by young Islamists throughout the East End: I might sound like you, but I am nothing like you. I am Other. I belong elsewhere – in a place that does not yet exist, but that I will create, with my fists and my fury.

Jimas told their members they were part of a persecuted billion, being blown up and locked down across the world. "It was a bit like a gang," he says. "And we had a strong sense of being under siege. It was all a conspiracy against Islam, and we were the guardians of Islam. That's how we saw ourselves ... A lot of my friends would wear the army boots, and carry knives." I realise now that for a nebbish intellectual boy, it must have felt intoxicating to be told he was part of a military movement that would inevitably conquer history.

For his summer vacation in 1990 – as a break from studying physics at Cambridge University – he went to wage jihad on the battlefields of Afghanistan. He arrived with two friends from Jimas at an Arab-run training camp in the mountains of Kunar in Eastern Afghanistan. It was a sparse collection of tents and weapons left behind by the CIA in the snow and blood. They spent the days running up and down mountains learning how to fire Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. "When you fire a Kalashnikov, it echoes all around the mountain," he says. "After this boring life, you feel the adrenaline pumping."

The Arab fighters wore four layers of clothes and still shivered. They had never seen snow before, so every now and then, they would lay down their weapons to have a long, gleeful snow-fight. Once they had all learned how to kill, they were taken to the front line to shell the communist hold-outs. "One of the shells landed very close to us, about 100ft away." He fired in retaliation. "I hope we never killed anybody," he says quickly.

Usama tells his story fluently and fast, and rides over these difficult moments – a killing – like a speed-bump. He thought an earthly paradise would rise from the rubble he was creating – and remake the world in its image. "The expectation was that Afghanistan would become this dream Islamic state," he adds, "which would then spread all over the world." He returned to Cambridge University determined to convert as many of his fellow Muslim students as possible to Wahabism. "It was relatively easy to persuade them," he says. "People were looking for group identity. They were very confused: what does it mean to live as a Muslim in society like this? We had easy answers. Go back to the original sources, and [follow it] literally."

At the centre of this vision was the need to rebuild the caliphate – the Islamic state under sharia law persisted from the time of Mohamed until 1924. "It was a very dreamy, romantic idea," he says. "If anybody asked questions about how it would work, we would just say – the people that will make it happen will be so saintly, they will make the right decisions." It was the old promise of the revolutionary down the ages: there would be a single revolutionary heave in which all political conflict would dissolve forever, and a conflict-free paradise would be born.

Usama's job was to persuade people to go to fight in Afghanistan and, from the mid-1990s, Bosnia. He was one of the best – and he says, again very fast, that one of his successes was to radicalise Omar Sheikh, the man now on death row in Pakistan for beheading Daniel Pearl. "I set him off on his path to Jihad," he says. He looks a little excited, and a little appalled. The first thing he remembers about Sheikh – who he met at a Jimas study circle – is the fresh lemonade he made in his university rooms. "It was delicious. And we drank and drank. My first impression of him was that he was a clean-shaven, well-educated British public schoolboy. A lovely bloke."

Sheikh was furious about the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia, and demanded the study group lay down their Koranic debates and act. Usama told him: "If you're really serious, you can go and fight. I know people who have gone and fought. I can introduce you to them." And so his journey to torturing and murdering a Jewish journalist – simply because he was a Jew – began.

Usama doesn't want to talk about him any more: he changes the subject, and I have to bring him back to it. "Nothing is proved against him. He's fighting extradition," he says, after a long pause. "But ... " He has an awkward smile. An embarrassed smile. He quickly carries on speaking, ushering us away from Daniel Pearl.

People come in and out of the mosque office, and Usama lowers his voice a little. He says that as he was persuading young men to go and kill, he noticed something disconcerting: the Afghan mujahedin he had fought for were not building a paradise on earth after all. Instead, they were merrily slaying each other. "This great, glorious Islamic revolution – it didn't happen, at all ... they just killed each other."

As he watched the news of the Luxor massacre in Egypt or Hamas suicide-bombings of pizzerias in Tel Aviv, "It just became more and more difficult to justify that." He found himself thinking about the Jewish friends he had made at school. "They were just like me – human beings. And we had a lot in common. The dietary laws, and the identity issues, and the fear of racism." As he heard the growing Islamist chants at demonstrations – "The Jews are the enemy of God," they yelled – something, he says, began to sag inside him.

The stifled language Usama is using to describe his past reminds me of a recovering alcoholic trying to piece together his fragmented memories and understand who he was. When he talks about anti-Semitism, he is clearly ashamed; he giggles almost randomly, looks away, and looks back at me with a puckered, disgusted look.

We have talked enough; we arrange to meet again. The second time I see him, in a café, he seems more guarded, as if he revealed too much. He shifts the conversation onto theology – the area where, I discover, every ex-jihadi feels happiest. He says the 7/7 bombings detonated a theological bomb in his mind: "How could this be justified? I began to wonder if parts of the Koran are actually metaphor, and parts of the Koran were actually just revealed for their time: seventh-century Arabia."

Once the foundation stone of literalism was broken, he had to remake the concepts that had led him to Islamism one-by-one. "Jihad has many levels in Islam – you have the internal struggle to be the best person you can be. But all we had been taught is military jihad. Today I regard any kind of campaigning for truth, for justice, as a type of Jihad." He signed up to the pacifist Movement for the Abolition of War. He redefined martyrdom as anybody who died in an honourable cause. "There were martyrs on 9/11," he says. "They were the firefighters – not the hijackers."

He says he found himself making arguments he once thought unthinkable – like arguing that women should be allowed to show their hair in public. Jihadi websites run by his old friends started to declare him an apostate, a crime that under their interpretation of sharia is punishable by death.

There have been demands that he should be ousted from the mosque, but his father is its founder and chief imam, so he is protected for now. He says – leaning forward, his voice losing its public school composure – that the threats have only made him more sure of the need for reform. He has started to call for Muslims to abandon the "medieval interpretation of the sharia" that calls for the killing of apostates and homosexuals. He has said there should be a two-state solution in the Middle East. He has reached the conclusion that evolution is "a scientific fact".

And for the first time in his life, Usama has begun to allow himself to listen to music. "I was taught to believe it shouldn't be allowed. But now, I listen on the car radio." I ask him what music he likes, and he lets out a high-pitched giggle. "You'll get me killed!" he says. "Everything in the charts." He gives me some names, but then calls later and asks me not to print them: "That would be a step too far."

As the threats against him rattle across the internet, I like to think of this as my last image of Usama – a 39-year-old man slowly slipping off the Puritan chains in which he has been bound and finally, in his fourth decade, beginning to dance, as he is circled by the angry ghosts of his younger self.

II. The Prisoner

The most famous former Islamist fanatic in Britain is Maajid Nawaz – a high-cheekboned 31-year-old who walks with a self-confident strut. I make an appointment with him through his personal assistant, and he strides into the hotel lobby where we have arranged to meet in an immaculate and expensive suit. He seems to blend perfectly into the multi-ethnic overclass who use expensive hotels like this as their base; I have to remind myself with a jolt that, not so long ago, he was caught up in a murder in London, helped to plot a coup in nuclear-tipped Pakistan, and served three years in the most notorious prison in Egypt.

Maajid begins to tell me his story as if he is delivering a PowerPoint presentation. He has offered it before, and he will offer it again; it is his job now. He has distilled it into a script. When I try to poke beneath it with questions, he seems irritated, and returns to the comfortable form of words he has established as soon as he can.

His journey towards Islamism began, he says, at the sandy edge of Essex, in the dilapidated coastal town of Southend-on-Sea. It is an old, elegant Victorian resort town drooping under a century of disrepair, reduced to a smattering of tatty arcades and a long, neglected pier that reaches into a filthy sea. Maajid's parents were mildly prosperous first-generation immigrants from Pakistan. "My upbringing was completely liberal from the start," he says. "In fact, I didn't even have a Muslim identity." He went to mosque only once, when he was 11, and an imam hit him with a stick for speaking too loudly.

Asian families were a rarity there in the 1980s, but he had a large group of white friends and felt no different to them. Yet when Maajid turned 14, a strange political shift was taking place in Southend. It began – for him, at least – one evening when Maajid, his brother and his friends were at the funfair, leaping on and off the rides and eating candy floss. A group of young skinheads spotted them and started making Nazi salutes and shouting "Seig Heil".

Maajid and his mates "ran the hell out of there", but a white van pulled up and seven skinheads piled out, wielding machetes. They cornered Maajid and one of his white friends. To his astonishment, they turned to the friend and stabbed him repeatedly with a carving knife, shrieking: "Traitor! Traitor! Race traitor!" They drove off, leaving Maajid covered in his friend's blood.

The story of what happened next is buried in yellowing cuts from the local newspapers. A pack of unemployed young men who had been kicking around on Southend's beaches had joined the Neo-Nazi group Combat 18, named after Adolf Hitler's initials: A is "1" in the alphabet, H is "8". They targeted Maajid's friends one by one for befriending a "Paki". Over the next two years, three of his friends were stabbed, and one was smashed up with a hammer. Maajid began to distance himself from his white friends, out of guilt. He drifted instead towards a group of young black people who were also being terrorised by Combat 18. They would meet at house parties and marinate themselves in hip-hop, Public Enemy, and cannabis fumes. He says: "Feeling totally rejected by mainstream society, we were looking for an alternative identity, and we found the perfect, cool, fashionable identity through listening to hip-hop and speeches by Malcolm X."

One day, his brother came home bearing a sheath of leaflets saying Muslims were being massacred all over the world, from India to Bosnia to Southend. He had stumbled on a stall in the High Street manned by a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). They said he would never be accepted in irreparably corrupt, decadent and racist Britain: Combat 18 were the snarl hidden behind every net curtain. Western society was merely a purgatory for Muslims, and the only escape could be to migrate to a renewed and perfect caliphate somewhere in Arabia. He joined up that day.

Maajid climbed the ranks of HT fast, because – with his easy eloquence – he was especially good at recruiting new members. After a year, they sent him to live in London and conquer a sixth form college. Newham College is a sprawling glass-and-concrete school for 16- to 19-year-olds in the most depressed slab of London. There, Maajid found himself in a majority-Muslim environment for the first time. "I was like somebody who has been craving chocolate for a long time who ends up in Belgium. I thought: these are my people. I knew exactly how to manipulate their grievances. And I did it. We took over that college."

We are served tea by the kind of effusive waitress who works in high-end London hotels. Maajid does not acknowledge her. He says it was "unbelievably easy" to recruit young Muslims to Islamism at that time. He would start with lectures that "broke down the concepts they had been told they should hold dear – like freedom and democracy", he says. It was only in the second or third talk, once humanism lay in rhetorical rubble, that he would announce: "God is in a better position to set those limits than you are, because you'd always contradict yourself, being an imperfect human." So then he would announce: "Let me tell you what God says."

When Maajid enrolled, there were hardly any girls wearing headscarves; by the time he was thrown out a year later, most of them were. The stand-alones were jeered at and harassed.

Maajid was elected President of the college's student union and he was prickling with a Messianic sense of mission. He saw Newham College as a microcosm of the changes that were swelling in the world. "It literally felt revolutionary. We had taken over the campus, and that we were soon to take over the world ... We really believed the caliphate would be established any day soon." On the school's open day for prospective pupils and parents, they staged a massive prayer demonstration. Dozens of them stood in the main hall, yelling to Allah for vengeance. "We wanted to show the parents that if you're sending your kids here, these are the people in charge," he says.

I ask if anybody was arguing for a more liberal form of Islam. Maajid laughs. "Absolutely not. No way. In fact, the only people who were young that were articulating any form of Islam were the Islamists."

The only substantial push-back came from rival religious groups – especially students with a Nigerian Christian background, known universally as "the blacks". There was a racist hysteria that they were muggers and rapists and "somebody had to stand up to them", Maajid says. "Along came us, these crusading Islamists, who didn't give a shit. We'd stand in front of them and say – we don't fear death, we don't fear you, we only fear God." Allah was in their gang, and they were invincible. Young jihadis from outside the college started to hang around there, to defend the Muslims from "the Christian niggers". A tall, aggressive recruit from Brixton called Saeed Nur was appointed as their "bodyguard". He intimidated everyone into silence.

The news reports from the time confirm what happened next. One afternoon, a row broke over the use of the college pool table, as Maajid stood watching. A Nigerian student wanted to push the Muslims off it, and began making derogatory remarks about Islam. Somebody called Saeed to "sort him out". As soon as he arrived, the Nigerian student pulled out a knife – and Saeed produced a Samurai blade and thrust it straight into the boy's chest. As he fell, the other Muslim students set on him with hammers and knives and pool cues. They beat him to death.

How did he feel about the victim? Did he think about his family? He prods the questions away with a grunt. Maajid says he felt "indifferent" to the victim, but was pleased "the Muslims prevailed in the end". He adds: "We were heroes in HT ranks." And he is back to his story. He doesn't want to retrieve his emotions.

He was expelled, and spent the next few years ascending the ranks of HT, while pretending to study at various colleges. But he wanted to be at the heart of the jihad – and in 1999 he found a way. Abdel Kalim Zaloom, the global leader of HT, issued a command from his hidden base somewhere in the Middle East. Pakistan had just unveiled its nuclear weapons to the world. Zaloom wanted them to seize Pakistan, so when the caliphate came it would be nuclear-tipped. Maajid enrolled at Punjab University as a cover – and jetted off to the country his parents had left a lifetime ago.

In the sprawling slum-strewn chaos of Karachi, Maajid found "the first crack in my ideological armour ... I thought – oh, my God. I had idealised Muslim societies, but the people here know less about Islam than we do. And look at how disorganised it is."

He met with a slew of junior Pakistani army officers who had been training at Sandhurst, Britain's elite officer training academy. "They seemed like quite decent, amiable chaps, who believed in our ideology," he says. They had been recruited by other members to HT, "and I told them to rise up the ranks of the army, and when we had an opportunity, to mount a coup and declare the caliphate in Pakistan."

And then, in the strangely bland CEO-speak these ex-Islamists often lapse into, he adds enthusiastically: "It was a very exciting project. We thought it would happen in the medium-term."

Maajid won't be drawn – not now, and not in our later conversations – on the details of this coup plot. Perhaps this is because he is worried about compromising his ability to visit Pakistan. The Pakistani military spokesmen say it's a lie. The officers were, Maajid says, quietly arrested by Pervez Musharraf's government in 2003, and are currently in prison. Maajid decided to move on to Egypt, and arrived to study in Alexandria on 10 September 2001. When he saw the news from New York City, he felt – that word again – "indifferent". HT technically opposed the attacks, on the grounds they were carried out by private individuals rather than by the army of a renewed caliphate. But Maajid says "There was a huge wave of internal sympathy for [Bin Laden], because he's an ideological comrade, isn't he?"

He started to recruit other students, as he had done so many times before. But it was harder. "Everyone hated the [unelected] government [of Hosni Mubarak], and the US for backing it," he says. But there was an inhibiting sympathy for the victims of 9/11 – until the Bush administration began to respond with Guantanamo Bay and bombs. "That made it much easier. After that, I could persuade people a lot faster."

Then, at 3am one morning, a cadre of soldiers smashed into Maajid's bedroom bearing machine guns and grenades. He was taken, blindfolded and bound, to an underground bunker below the state security offices in Cairo. There were around 50 other men penned in. For three days, he kneeled, and heard the men around him being tortured with electric cattle prods.

"I thought, 'This is something I have been mentally preparing for, for a long time. I knew this day would come,'" he says. On the third day, the guards dragged him into an interrogation room with another British HT member. They punched him in the face and whacked him with batons. They produced the cattle prod. Maajid told them they wouldn't dare to torture a British citizen. "So they took the cattle prod and began electrocuting my friend in front of my eyes."

The British Embassy called looking for its citizens. The interrogation stopped suddenly, and transferred them to prison. Maajid felt no gratitude. "All I thought was – why did it take them three days to find us? They obviously didn't care about the rights of Muslims." He laughs now – a cold laugh, at his former self.

In Mazratora Prison, Maajid was held in solitary confinement for thee months. It was a bare cell with no bed, no light, and no toilet: just a concrete box. Then he was taken out suddenly and told his trial for "propagation by speech and writing for any banned organisation" was beginning in the Supreme State Emergency Court. But Maajid's Islamist convictions were about to be challenged from two unexpected directions – the men who murdered Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Amnesty International.

HT abandoned Maajid as a "fallen soldier" and barely spoke of him or his case. But when his family were finally allowed to see him, they told him he had a new defender. Although they abhorred his political views, Amnesty International said he had a right to free speech and to peacefully express his views, and publicised his case.

"I was just amazed," Maajid says. "We'd always seen Amnesty as the soft power tools of colonialism. So, when Amnesty, despite knowing that we hated them, adopted us, I felt – maybe these democratic values aren't always hypocritical. Maybe some people take them seriously ... it was the beginning of my serious doubts."

For the duration of the trial, he was placed in a cramped cell with 40 of Egypt's most famous political prisoners. There were row after row of beds with only a thin crack between them to inch through. Maajid was thrilled to discover two of the men who had conspired to murder Anwar Sadat – Omar Bayoumi and Dr Tauriq al Sawah – had recently been moved to this dank cell. "This is like meeting Che Guevara – these great forerunners and ideologues who I can now get the benefit of learning from," he says. But "they were very fatherly, and they had been spending all these years studying and learning. And they told me I had got my theology wrong".

After more than 20 years in prison, they had reconsidered their views. They told him he was false to believe there was one definitive, literal way to read the Koran. As they told it, in traditional Islam there were many differing interpretations of sharia, from conservative to liberal – yet there had been consensus around once principle: it was never to be enforced by a central authority. Sharia was a voluntary code, not a state law. "It was always left for people to decide for themselves which interpretation they wanted to follow," he says.

These one-time assassins taught Maajid that the idea of using state power to force your interpretation of sharia on everyone was a new and un-Islamic idea, smelted by the Wahabis only a century ago. They had made the mistake of muddling up the enduringly relevant decisions Mohamed made as a spiritual leader with those he made as a political ruler, which he intended to be specific to their time and place.

Maajid's ideology crumbled. "I realised that the idea of enforcing sharia is not consistent with Islam as it's been practised from the beginning. In other words, Islam has always been secular, and I had been totally ignorant of the fact." But he says he found this epiphany excruciating. "I knew if I followed these thoughts wherever they would lead," he says, "I would go from being HT's poster boy to being their fallen angel."

His trial was finally ending with the inevitable verdict: guilty. When he emerged from Mazratora Prison into the damp half-light of Britain, he was dazed. HT hailed him as a hero. "After four years of ignoring me, they wanted me to be their rock star ... I was asked if I wanted to be the leader." But in March 2007, he sent out a mass email saying he was resigning from HT, threw away his mobile, and went home to Southend.

He spent a long summer eating his mother's cooking, watching television, and seeing the school friends he had shunned more than a decade before. "It amazed me. These were ordinary British guys and they knew what I had become – that I had hated Britain. And yet when they saw me, they showed me such warmth," he says. "They remembered me as I was. They didn't care what I had done. They had time for me."

In September 2007, Maajid appeared on Newsnight – the BBC's flagship current affairs show – to announce that he recanted not just HT, but Islamism itself. "What I taught has not only damaged British society, it has damaged the world," he said.

With a small band of other ex-Islamists, Maajid decided to set up an organisation dedicated to promoting liberal Islam and rebutting Islamism. They named in the Quilliam Foundation after William Abdullah Quilliam, an English businessman who converted to Islam in the late 19th century and set up the first British mosque. They are taking the organisational skills and evangelical fervour of HT, and turning it against them. They are also taking nearly £1m from the British government – the only way, Maajid says, to do their work effectively.

The last time I speak to Maajid he is on the refugee-strewn North-West frontier of Pakistan, touring the country's universities. He is lecturing to huge audiences about his own experiences, and arguing against literalism in Islam. The massed ranks of the neo-Taliban are not far away. "People here and in Britain keep saying – we've been waiting for something like this for such a long time," he says over the telephone. "They're so happy people are starting to speak out. They're terrified to do it themselves, but this emboldens them."

A large audience of young Muslims is waiting for him. Maajid says assertively: "You know, back when I was an Islamist, I thought our ideology was like communism – and I still do. That makes me optimistic. Because what happened to communism? It was discredited as an idea. It lost. Who joins the Communist Party today?" I can hear the audience applaud him as he walks onto the stage, and with that, Maajid hangs up.

III. Lost in liberalism

As the summer arrives and London begins to swelter, I sit with most of the "out" ex-jihadis in a slew of Starbucks across the city. We sip iced lattes and discuss how, not long ago, they tried to destroy Western civilisation.

They have different backgrounds: one is a Yorkshire girl with Hindu parents, another is a Northern boy whose father was a Conservative ultra-Thatcherite. Yet they are startlingly similar: they have all retained the humourless intensity of their pasts. And when they describe their Islamist former selves, they are distant and cold, as if describing a rather unpleasant acquaintance they did not entirely understand.

They wreath their stories in clouds of pointless detail: they talk for hours about the intricacies of seventh-century Meccan society, or the fine distinctions in the hierarchy of HT, willing you to understand it. It's a way of avoiding answering the hardest question – why? But from their scattered stories, I can trace something that seems genuinely new: an ex-jihadi way of looking at the world, that carries lessons about how to stop Western Muslims sinking into jihadism.

As children and teenagers, the ex-jihadis felt Britain was a valueless vacuum, where they were floating free of any identity.

Ed Husain, a former leader of HT, says: "On a basic level, we didn't know who we were. People need a sense of feeling part of a group – but who was our group?" They were lost in liberalism, beached between two unreachable identities – their parents', and their country's. They knew nothing of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or the other places they were constantly told to "go home" to by racists.

Yet they felt equally shut out of British or democratic identity. From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of "Go back where you came from!" But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn't want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as "the funny foreign child", and told to "explain their customs" to the class. It patronised them into alienation.

"Nobody ever said – you're equal to us, you're one of us, and we'll hold you to the same standards," says Husain. "Nobody had the courage to stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When people like us at [Newham] College were holding events against women and against gay people, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?"

Without an identity, they created their own. It was fierce and pure and violent, and it admitted no doubt.

To my surprise, the ex-jihadis said their rage about Western foreign policy – which was real, and burning – emerged only after their identity crises, and as a result of it. They identified with the story of oppressed Muslims abroad because it seemed to mirror the oppressive disorientation they felt in their own minds. Usman Raja, a bluff, buff boxer who begged to become a suicide bomber in the mid-1990s, tells me: "Your inner life is chaotic and you feel under threat the whole time. And then you're told by Islamists that life for Muslims everywhere is chaotic and under threat. It becomes bigger than you. It's about the world – and that's an amazing relief. The answer isn't inside your confused self. It's out there in the world."

But once they had made that leap to identify with the Umma – the global Muslim community – they got angrier the more abusive our foreign policy came. Every one of them said the Bush administration's response to 9/11 – from Guantanamo to Iraq – made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world. Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser, tells me: "You'd see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?"

But the converse was – they stressed – also true. When they saw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: "How could we demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?" asks Hadiya.

Britain's foreign policy also helped tug them towards Islamism in another way. Once these teenagers decided to go looking for a harder, tougher Islamist identity, they found a well-oiled state machine waiting to feed it. Usman Raja says: "Saudi literature is everywhere in Britain, and it's free. When I started exploring my Muslim identity, when I was looking for something more, all the books were Saudi. In the bookshops, in the libraries. All of them. Back when I was fighting, I could go and get a car, open the boot up, and get it filled up with free literature from the Saudis, saying exactly what I believed. Who can compete with that?"

He says the Saudi message is particularly comforting to disorientated young Muslims in the West. "It tells you – you're in this state of sin. But the sin doesn't belong to you, it's not your fault – it's Western society's fault. It isn't your fault that you're sinning, because the girl had the miniskirt on. It wasn't you. It's not your fault that you're drug dealing. The music, your peers, the people around you – it's their fault."

Just as their journeys into the jihad were strikingly similar, so were their journeys out. All of them said doubt began to seep in because they couldn't shake certain basic realities from their minds. The first and plainest was that ordinary Westerners were not the evil, Muslim-hating cardboard kaffir presented by the Wahabis. Usman, for one, finally stopped wanting to be a suicide bomber because of the kindness of an old white man.

Usman's mother had moved in next door to an elderly man called Tony, who was known in the neighbourhood as a spiteful, nasty grump. One day, Usman was teaching his little brother to box in the garden when he noticed the old man watching him from across the fence. "I used to box when I was in the Navy," he said. He started to give them tips and before long, he was building a boxing ring in their shed.

Tony died not long before 9/11, and Usman was sent to help clear out his belongings. In Tony's closet, he found a present wrapped and ready for his little brother's birthday: a pair of boxing gloves. "And I thought – that is humanity right there. That's an aspect of the divine that's in every human being. How can I want to kill people like him? How can I call him kaffir?"

Many of the ex-Islamists discovered they couldn't ignore the fact that whenever Islamists won a military victory, they didn't build a paradise, but hell.

At the same time, they began to balk at the mechanistic nature of Wahabism. Usman says he had become a "papier-mâché Muslim", defining his faith entirely by his actions, while being empty inside. "Wahabis are great at painting themselves [an Islamic] green on the outside, but when it comes to that internal aspect, it's not there. You pray five times a day, but why? Because God's told you to pray five times a day. You pay your charity – why? Because God's told you to pay your charity. This God of yours is telling you a lot. And why does he tell you to do that? Because if you don't do it, you'll end up in a fire. It's all based on being frightened. There's nothing to nourish you."

They had to go looking for other Islams – and often they found it in the more mystical school of the Sufis. "Wahabi Islam is totally sensory: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth," Usman says. "It lays out a strict set of rules to be followed here on earth, every moment of the day. Sufi Islam teaches instead that the realm of Allah is wholly separate and spiritual and nothing to do with the shadow-play of mere mortals. It is accessible only through a sense of mystery and transcendence." In this new Sufi Islam, Usman found something he had never known before: a sense of calm.

Ed Husain insists: "There are a lot of Muslims who agree with us. A lot. But they're frightened. They see what's happened to us – the hassle, the slander, the death threats – and they think: it's not worth it. But you know what? When I first spoke out, I was alone. I had no idea that, a year on, there would be this number of people speaking out, and many more who are just offering resources and support. Once a truth is spoken, it takes on its own life."

IV. Not Strawberry Season

Anjem Choudhary waves his hand angrily through the air, and says that in the world he wants to create, the people I have been interviewing will be put to death. "They are apostates. I don't consider [them] to be Muslim in any sense of the word," he says. "Everybody knows the punishment for apostasy." My facial muscles must involuntarily react, because he leans forward and asks suspiciously: "Are you Jewish?"

Anjem is one of the last of the famous Islamists from the 1990s still walking London's streets, free and furious. A decade ago, this city hosted a stream of fanatical Muslims who kept cropping up in the tabloid press as semi-comic pantomime villains. But gradually, one by one, they have been deported or arrested, leaving Anjem as their final public face. He has said the Pope and the Mohamed cartoonists should be executed, and has lauded the 7/7 bombers as "the Fantastic Four".

I wanted to see what the people the ex-jihadis have left behind make of them – and to sense if they are seen as a real threat. Anjem suggests meeting me in the Desert Rose Café in Leyton, not far from Usama's mosque. The 41-year-old lives here on social security benefits, paid for by a populace he believes should – in large measure – be lashed, stoned or burned in the hellfires. A long beard covers his chubby face, and long white robes cover his swollen form. I was surprised he agreed to meet me. He rarely speaks to print journalists. The last time he did, he stormed out, accusing the reporter of being a paedophile.

He immediately launches into a lecture about how the ex-Islamists are all liars and charlatans. They are "government bandits, set up by them and funded by them to do their dirty work within the [Muslim] community ... They were never actually practising! They were ignorant of Islam."

When I read him statements by ex-Islamists, he spits: "This is heresy ... The Muslim must submit to the sharia in all of his life. If I start to say things like, 'I don't believe the sharia needs to be implemented,' then that's tantamount to denying the message of Mohamed ... To say that any part of the Koran is not relevant nowadays is a clear statement of apostasy."

Taking any part of the Koran as metaphor will, he warns, cause the text to turn to dust in their hands. "I can't pick and choose what I like from the scripture. This is not strawberry season, where you can pick your own strawberries. You abide by whatever Allah brought in the final revelation with the example of the Prophet. And if there's something that you don't like, then you need to correct your own emotions and desires to make sure they're in line with the sharia."

He describes what is going to happen to them with a grin: "After they've been burnt, their skin will be recreated, and they will suffer the same punishment again and again and again."

I wondered if Anjem's biography fitted with that of the ex-jihadis' – or was there something different about them all along? Anjem says he was born in Welling in South-East London in 1967, where his father was a Pakistani immigrant who ran a market stall. He first realised the One and Eternal Truth when, one day in the early 1990s, he happened to hear a lecture at a local mosque by the Syrian-born Islamist Omar Bakri. Until then, Anjem had been living a life of sin as a young trainee lawyer, known to his friends as Andy. The British tabloids have exposed that he had sex with white women and dropped LSD.

But as he tells it, in the flames of Bakri's rhetoric, Andy was burned away, and Anjem was born. "Yeah, obviously, I had a period where I was not practising ... I have no shame at all in saying that I didn't always use to be like this. And I have great thanks to Allah that he guided me."

Yes, I say – but you would whip and lash and execute the person you were 20 years ago. His eyes flare. He pushes back his chair, half-rising to leave. "What I used to be like and what I used to say before isn't under discussion. If you're going to continue to ask about that, then I'll just stop the interview."

He then launches into half an hour of theological gobbledegook, where any question I try to interject is waved aside with a sneer. He has no interest in persuasion: with dull Torquemada eyes, he advocates the execution of anyone who disagrees. Is he scared of the ex-jihadis and their arguments? He is certainly angry with them – but he is so angry at everyone that it is hard to tell what this means.

He begins to ask – jabbing his finger – what my alternative is. "In the United States, bestiality is legal in the privacy of your own home," he says. Paedophiles are rampant, with the Man-Boy Love Association on the brink of success. Compare that with the 1,300-year long caliphate. In all those years, he says, "there were only 60 rapes".

Do you really believe that if people are not suppressed by a tyrant-God, they will become paedophiles and start fucking animals? Are you so rotten inside? Does Anjum fear Andy that much?

He stares at me, flat and emotionless now. "That is your last question," he says. And as I leave and look back at him through the glass, jabbering on his phone and daydreaming of annihilation, I realise how far all my interviewees – and new friends – have travelled.

They have burned in this fire of certainty. They have felt it consume all doubt and incinerate all self-analysis. And they dared, at last, to let it go. Are they freakish exceptions – or the beginning of a great unclenching of the jihadi fist?

This article appears in the Independent

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Gdy tylko zacząłem czytać ten krzyk przeciwko marnowaniu życia kobiet, znowu poczułem zapach twarzy Szahzny — a raczej tego, co z niej zostało. Kiedy spotkałem ją, była w szpitalu w Bangladeszu, a jej twarz była masą zwęglonego mięsa: skóra, miękka tkanka policzków i kości pod nimi zostały wypalone. Nosa nie było, zastąpiły go dwie kloszowe dziury. Wargi wisiały na podbródku jak stopiony wosk. Jej lewa powieka nie mogła się zamknąć i strumyk łez powoli i bez przerwy spływał po jej ranach. Szahnaz miała 21 lat i jej mąż właśnie oblał jej twarz kwasem.

Jej „przestępstwo"? Upierała się przy kontynuowaniu studiów — kochała naukę i poezję — a jej mąż chciał, żeby miała dzieci. Jej zapach przypominał wczorajszą potrawę z grilla, zostawioną na deszczu.

Dzisiaj w dużych częściach świata to Szahnaz zostałaby uznana za winną, nie zaś jej mąż. Dla nich kobieta istnieje, by być posłuszną maszyną produkującą niemowlęta, a jeśli odmawia, można ją bezkarnie bić, gwałcić lub palić. Publicysta „New York Timesa" Nicholas Kristof i jego chińsko-amerykańska żona Sheryl WuDunn napisali płomienną pracę, demaskującą to ujarzmienie — oraz mapę drogową do równości.

Zaczynają od nadzwyczajnego faktu, który pokazuje, jak głęboko idzie znęcanie się. Dzisiaj brakuje ponad 100 milionów kobiet. Zniknęły. W normalnych okolicznościach kobiety żyją dłużej od mężczyzn — ale Chiny mają 107 mężczyzn na każde 100 kobiet w całej populacji, Indie mają 108, a Pakistan ma 111. Gdzie się podziały te wszystkie kobiety? Zostały zabite lub pozwolono im umrzeć. Opieka lekarska jest często zarezerwowana dla chłopców, podczas gdy przemoc wobec kobiet to rutyna. Więcej dziewczynek zostaje zabitych w każdym dziesięcioleciu w tym „kobietobójstwie" niż we wszystkich ludobójstwach XX wieku. W tym roku „zniknie" kolejne 2 miliony dziewczynek.

Ale to nie jest uważane za „wiadomość". Podczas gdy słusznie podnosiliśmy ryk na apartheid rasowy, zachowujemy się tak, jak gdyby apartheid płci był naturalnym, nieodwołalnym faktem. Z absolutnie właściwym koktajlem Mołotowa w postaci doniesień z terenu i raportów nauk społecznych Kristof i WuDunn wysadzają to tabu w powietrze. Pytają: co zrobilibyśmy, gdybyśmy wierzyli, że kobiety są równymi istotami ludzkimi, z równym prawem decydowania o własnym życiu jak mężczyźni? Jak zmieniłby się nasz ogląd świata?

Zaczęlibyśmy od poparcia tych milionów kobiet, które się bronią. To nie jest tylko opowieść o ofiarach; jest to przede wszystkim opowieść o bohaterkach. Mukhtar Mai jest 37-letnią kobietą, urodzoną w chłopskiej rodzinie w południowym Pendżabie w Pakistanie. Nigdy nie posyłano jej do szkoły, ponieważ w jej rejonie nie było szkół dla dziewczynek. Po co dziewczynkom umiejętność czytania? W lipcu 2002 roku członkowie klanu o wyższym statusie porwali jej młodszego brata i zbiorowo go zgwałcili. W celu ukrycia tej zbrodni oskarżyli go o zgwałcenie jednej z „ich" dziewcząt. Rada plemienna wysłuchała sprawy i stwierdziła, że jest on winny — oraz zarządziła, że w ramach kary, jego siostra, Mukhtar, ma zostać zbiorowo zgwałcona.

Po tym, jak zaciągnięto ją do stodoły i czterech mężczyzn zgwałciło ją po kolei, Mukhtar miała się zabić, żeby oczyścić rodzinę z „hańby". Jak to sama tłumaczy: „Oni wiedzą, że dla kobiety poniżonej w ten sposób, nie ma innego wyjścia jak samobójstwo. Nie muszą nawet używać broni. Zabija ją gwałt".

Ale Mukhtar zrobiła coś, czego kobieta nie ma robić: poszła na policję i zażądała sprawiedliwości. Co niezwykłe, policja aresztowała napastników. Dyktator Pakistanu Pervez Muszaraf usłyszał o tej sprawie i przysłał jej 8300 dolarów odszkodowania. Użyła tych pieniędzy, żeby wybudować szkołę dla dziewczynek, mówiąc, że jest to jedyny sposób na zapoczątkowanie zmiany postaw, które doprowadziły do zgwałcenia jej. Kiedy jednak zaczęła mówić głośno — mówić, że gwałt jest stałym problemem na wiejskich obszarach Pakistanu — Muszarraf oznajmił, że „przynosi wstyd" Pakistanowi i rozkazał tajnym służbom, by ją uciszyły. Odmówiła — umieszczono ją więc w areszcie domowym, a potem zbiry Muszarrafa ją porwały.

Także wówczas Mukhtar nie poddała się. Udało jej się zawiadomić swoich zwolenników — i zapewnili oni jej uwolnienie. Jej kampania działa. Jak piszą Kristof i Wu-Dunn: „Gwałt nie jest już dłużej bezkarnym sportem i wydaje się, że liczba wypadków znacznie zmalała w Pendżabie". Dzięki niej tysiące dziewczynek chodzi do szkoły, a dziesiątki tysięcy nie zostanie już zgwałconych.

Jest to napełniająca pokorą historia w książce pełnej opowieści napełniających pokorą. Niepiśmienna kobieta z wioski, gdzie diabeł ma młode, przeciwstawiła się prezydentowi kraju i jego służbie bezpieczeństwa w imię najbardziej podstawowej wartości ludzkiej — równości — i wygrała. To zmusza do pytania: co ja zrobiłem/zrobiłam, skoro w porównaniu z tymi przeszkodami, które miała Mukhtar, nie miałem/miałam niemal żadnych?

Być może brzmi to przygnębiająco. Ale jest wręcz odwrotnie: książka Kristofa i WuDunn wzmacnia czytelnika. Pokazuje, że chociaż istnieje góra mizoginii, na którą trzeba się wdrapać, jest ona zdobywana przez jedną kobietę po drugiej, dzień za dniem. Autorzy nieustannie pokazują czytelnikom praktyczne rzeczy, które można zrobić, od datków dla najlepszych organizacji charytatywnych do wolontariatu w szkołach Mukhtar w Pakistanie.

Zabierają czytelnika w wielką podróż po wszystkich problemach, które ignoruje się, bo ignoruje się kobiety. Na przykład — kto słyszał o fistułach? To jest dzisiejszy trąd, powodujący, że dwa miliony kobiet żyje i umiera jak pogardzane wyrzutki — a jednak problem jest niemal nieznany. Kiedy poród jest długi i trudny, bez żadnej pomocy lekarskiej, dopływ krwi do pochwy, pęcherza i odbytu może zostać odcięty. Tkanki umierają i robi się dziura. Przez tę dziurę kał i mocz wypływają nieustającym strumykiem przez resztę jej życia. Ponieważ śmierdzi, odrzuca ją mąż i społeczność i musi żyć na ulicach, grzebiąc po śmietnikach.

W każdym afrykańskim mieście widać kobiety z fistułą, wędrujące bez celu, z głowami pochylonymi ze wstydem. To są najsmutniejsi ludzie, jakich kiedykolwiek spotkałem. Ten problem jest jednak bardzo łatwo wyleczyć. W 90 procentach przypadków operacja kosztująca 300 dolarów likwiduje fistułę. Fistułę można zwalczyć, gdybyśmy tylko w wystarczającym stopniu cenili kobiety. Kiedyś na Manhattanie był szpital zajmujący się fistułami. Teraz jest to Waldorf-Astoria.

A co z niewolnictwem kobiet w burdelach, które jest teraz dużo większe niż transatlantycki handel niewolnikami u swojego szczytu? Około trzy i pół miliona kobiet jest dzisiaj uwięzionych, nafaszerowanych narkotykami i gwałconych za gotówkę. Ta brutalizacja kobiet nie musi dziać się dzisiaj, tak jak zniewolenie Afrykanów nie musiało dziać się w XVIII wieku. Jak piszą autorzy: „Istnieją narzędzia do zlikwidowania współczesnego niewolnictwa, brakuje jednak woli politycznej. To zaś musi być punktem wyjściowym każdego ruchu abolicjonistycznego". Międzynarodowa presja — rozpoczęta przez działania zwykłych obywateli — działa.

W książce, która jest niemal arcydziełem nowoczesnego dziennikarstwa, smutne jest to, że Kristof pozwolił zdyskredytowanej sprawie ze swoich artykułów powrócić na jej strony. Od dawna broni on sweatshops — zakładów wyzyskujących siłę roboczą — gdzie z definicji kobiety zmuszone są do pracy daleko przekraczającej osiem godzin i za grosze. Powtarza, co pisał juz wcześniej, że: "Sweatshops dają kobietom zachętę… Kobiety i dziewczęta nadal garną się masami do takich fabryk, bo jest to lepsze niż całodzienna praca motyką na polu we wsi… Zamiast potępiać sweatshops powinniśmy tu na Zachodzie wspierać produkcję przemysłową w biednych krajach".

Ale Kristof z pewnością wie, że jest to fałszywy wybór między biednymi kobietami zmuszonymi do obrabiania pól motyką, a tymiż kobietami pracującymi w fabrykach w niebezpiecznych warunkach. Jest trzecia — i lepsza — droga. Działacze przeciwni sweatshops — których stanowczo beszta — chcą, by wszystkie fabryki wszędzie przestrzegały pewnych minimalnych standardów: żadnego bicia, określona liczba godzin pracy, zasady bezpieczeństwa. Wtedy nie będą już sweatshops, będą fabrykami.

W odpowiedzi na ten argument Kristof zawsze odpowiada, że każdy kraj, który narzuca przestrzeganie podstawowych ludzkich warunków pracy w sweatshops, traci swój udział w handlu na rzecz kraju, który tego nie robi, a cierpią na tym kobiety. Jest to jednak ignorowanie oczywistej prawdy: ludzie działający przeciwko sweatshops chcą, by te reguły zostały zaprowadzone wszędzie. Nie powinno być żadnych klauzul umożliwiających wymknięcie się im i żadnych miejsc, dokąd mogłyby pójść międzynarodowe korporacje, żeby tanio wykorzystywać kobiety za kilka dodatkowych groszy zysku. Biorąc pod uwagę jego autentyczną odrazę wobec znęcania się nad kobietami, jest zdumiewające, że udziela on poparcia znęcaniu się w tej postaci — i to jeszcze jako rodzaj feminizmu!

W tej książce jest jeszcze jedna, subtelniejsza skaza. Dziennikarska formuła Kristofa jest wyraźna: znajduje on indywidualne bohaterki w krajach ignorowanych przez Stany Zjednoczone, które równocześnie uosabiają problem i walkę z nim. Próbuje następnie wpłynąć na amerykańską opinię publiczną i przez to na władze rządowe. Jest to skuteczne — ale używa tego tylko wtedy, kiedy ofiary znajdują się na marginesie większych celów amerykańskiej władzy. Rząd USA nie jest zainteresowany w utrzymywaniu handlu kobietami ani fistuł, więc jest stosunkowo łatwo zdobyć jego poparcie w próbach wyplenienia tego.

Formuła ta słabnie jednak, kiedy chodzi o przestępstwa wynikające z działania Stanów Zjednoczonych, nie zaś z zaniechania. Jednym z najgorszych dla kobiet miejsc na świecie jest Arabia Saudyjska, gdzie kobieta może pójść do więzienia za próbę prowadzenia samochodu lub zostać wychłostana za to, że ją zgwałcono. Najgorszym miejscem jest chyba Afganistan, gdzie — poza potiomkinowskimi kulisami Kabulu - kobiety są niemal nieodmiennie uwięzione w swoich domach i traktowane jak własność/bydło w prywatnych lennach watażków.

Niemniej chłoszcząca kobiety Arabia Saudyjska jest najbliższym sojusznikiem USA w tym regionie (wraz z Izraelem), a miażdżący kobiety Afganistan jest okupowany przez Stany Zjednoczone. Sprzedaje się prawa kobiet za ropę naftową, doraźne korzyści militarne i twardą geopolitykę. Obywatele USA ponoszą za to największą odpowiedzialność, bo to ich rząd to robi — ale Kristof i WuDunn nie koncentrują się na tych miejscach, szybko prześlizgując się nad nimi. Ich krytyka słabego reżimu Muszarrafa jest najbliższa jakiegokolwiek potępienia sojusznika Stanów Zjednoczonych, ale krytykowano go już szeroko w kręgach elity USA i następnie porzucono na rzecz elastyczniejszej marionetki. Zakładanie, że rząd USA mógłby bez trudu stać się uzbrojoną w broń nuklearną Amnesty International, gdyby tylko jego obywatele bardziej stanowczo tego żądali, jest niebezpiecznie naiwne. Ignoruje to masywne zmiany strukturalne, które musiałyby tam zajść — jak na przykład wyzwolenie się z uzależnienia Ameryki od ropy naftowej — zanim Stany Zjednoczone mogłyby konsekwentnie popierać prawa kobiet na całym świecie.

Mimo tych skaz jednak książka Half the Sky (Połowa nieba) — zatytułowana tak od chińskiego przysłowia: „Kobiety podtrzymują połowę nieba" — pozostaje elektryzującym manifestem, krzyczącym o wolność setek milionów istot ludzkich. Niemniej wielu ludzi, którzy powinni kupić tę książkę i popierać opisane w niej kobiety, hamuje obawa, że byłby to „imperializm kulturowy". Czyż inne traktowanie kobiet nie należy do ich kultury? Kim my jesteśmy, żeby ich osądzać?

Jest to historyczny analfabetyzm. Kultury potrafią się zmieniać. W Massachusetts palenie czarownic należało do „kultury"; w Alabamie niewolnictwo czarnych ludzi należało do „kultury". Sto lat temu Chiny były najgorszym miejsce na świecie dla kobiet. Ich stopy wiązano w wykoślawione, krwawe kikuty. Często nie miały nawet imion, po prostu nazywano kobietę „córka nr 4". Mimo wszystkich swoich wad Chiny pozostawiły zakrwawione bandaże daleko za sobą. „Gdyby kultura była niezmienna - mówią otwarcie autorzy — Sheryl kuśtykałaby dziś na siedmiocentymetrowych stópkach".

Ten argument wpada jeszcze głębiej w „Przepaść Nędznych Wymówek dla Bierności", kiedy rozmawia się z samymi kobietami. Nie należało do kultury Szahnaz palenie sobie twarzy kwasem ani do kultury Mukhtar poddanie się zbiorowemu gwałtowi. Nie — to była kultura ich ciemiężców. Niewolnicy nie kochają swoich łańcuchów; kobiety nie kochają swego podporządkowania. W tych kulturach istnieje konflikt — i musimy wybrać, którą stronę poprzemy, albo przesiedzieć bezczynnie, kiedy odbywa się ta wielka walka o prawa człowieka w naszych czasach.

Tłumaczenie: Małgorzata Koraszewska

Wanneer werd de collectieve walging tegenover de mode-industrie vervangen door waardering? Sinds wanneer geven zelfs progressieven en feministen er niet meer op af, maar staan ze mee te dringen om te zien wat er op de catwalk gebeurt? When did that die?

In Londen gaat deze week de Fashion Week van start, een etalage voor de nieuwe (design)kleren van de keizer, gemaakt van zilverpapier, veren of rubber. Een paar jaar geleden werd ik backstage gestuurd om verslag uit te brengen van het evenement. Om te herstellen van wat ik daar zag, moest ik achteraf een paar Weken Zonder Mode voor mezelf inbouwen. Voor het eerst kreeg ik - gedwongen - inkijk in de industrie die zoveel vriendinnen van me ziek maakt.

Aan het eind van de catwalk stond een schare jonge vrouwen die eruit zagen alsof ze elk moment konden flauwvallen. Op foto's zien mannequins er zorgwekkend mager uit, maar in (amper) levenden lijve zien ze er gewoonweg uitgemergeld uit. De enige plek waar ik zulke mensen gezien had, was toen ik verslag uitbracht van de hongersnood in Afrika. Deze geraamtes van kraakbeen en bot werden besmeurd met cosmetica, in een kledingontwerp gewurmd dat gemaakt leek van vuilniszakken en de catwalk op gestuurd, om daar toegejuicht te worden door mensen zoals Kate Moss en Hugh Grant. Toen ze terug kwamen gestrompeld, zagen ze er verzwakt en futloos uit. Leunend tegen de muur leek het alsof ze best aan het infuus gingen.

De modewereld maakt twee soorten slachtoffers. De eerste soort zijn de vrouwen die heel eventjes gebruikt worden als model en dan weer van de hand worden gedaan. Ze zitten gemiddeld 25 procent onder het gewicht van een normale, gezonde vrouw. We weten hoe ze dat doen, want vele ex-modellen hebben het verteld: ze hongeren zichzelf uit. Ze leven wekenlang op water en sla. Als ze onder een Body Mass Index van 12 zitten, beginnen ze hun eigen spieren en weefsel te verteren. In de voorbije jaren zijn verscheidene modellen dood gevallen door uithongering nadat ze succes hadden geoogst op modeshows.

50 miljoen slachtoffers

Maar er is een bredere kring van slachtoffers, die veel verder reikt dan de catwalks. Het zijn de gewone vrouwen die elke dag bestookt worden met die hoogst kunstmatige beelden van 'schoonheid', en die daarop reageren door zichzelf als afstotelijk te beschouwen of door zich zelf uit te hongeren. Uit onderzoek aan Harvard bleek dat 80 procent van de vrouwen niet tevreden is over het eigen lichaam. Slechts één procent is 'volstrekt tevreden'.

Mannen daarentegen zijn overwegend tevreden over hun uiterlijk: het maatschappelijke schoonheidsideaal voor mannen gaat heel breed, en kan variëren van de 79-jarige Sean Connery tot de 20-jarige James Corden.

We hebben momenteel te maken met een epidemie van vrouwelijke anorexie en boulimie, met 50 miljoen slachtoffers in de VS en Europa. Hoeveel vrouwen kent u die helemaal tevreden zijn over hun lichaam?

De mode-industrie promoot die ziekelijke kijk koudweg en met veel plezier. De recente documentaire The September Issue - die volgde op de productie van het grootste nummer van de American Vogue van het jaar - was om één reden spraakmakend. Anna Wintour, de hoofdredactrice van het magazine en de machtigste vrouw in de mode, is een frêle en norse dame die weinig plezier in haar leven lijkt te hebben. Als ze pit toont, dan is het om wreed te zijn tegen de mensen rondom haar. Geconfronteerd met de foto van een graatmagere vrouw, merkt ze op dat ze zwanger lijkt. Geconfronteerd met een man met een buik reageert ze met ongeloof, alsof vet een stuitende onvolkomenheid van het menselijke genoom is.

Ze promoot het gebruik van bont en trekt zich niets aan van het wrede lot dat dieren daarvoor moeten ondergaan. Ze promoot griezelig dunne mannequins - trekt ze zich niets aan van de wreedheid tegen de vrouw die dat impliceert?

Haar depressie werkt aanstekelijk en druipt van de pagina's van Vogue. Een onderzoek van de American Psychological Association stelde vast dat 70 procent van de vrouwen zich na 3 minuten bladeren in een modeblad "neerslachtig, schuldig en beschaamd" voelt. Vogue en consorten zijn verboden in de meeste klinieken voor mensen met een eetstoornis omdat het de patiënten doet hervallen. Het magazine heeft gewone vrouwen reële schade berokkend. Het introduceerde de trend van de graatmagere modellen met Twiggy in 1965, en het populariseerde het nepidee van 'cellulitis' in 1973; daarvoor werd dat beschouwd als een normale vrouwelijke huid.

Maar daardoor ontstaat de evidente paradox: als het vrouwen zo'n slecht gevoel geeft, waarom kopen ze die boekjes dan? Deze zomer ontstond er commotie nadat het magazine Glamour een piepklein buikje toonde bij model Lizzie Miller. Ze had een choquerend maatje 40, wat nog altijd een pak slanker is dan het gemiddelde maatje 44. Maar als modebladen consequent normale vrouwen tonen, dan dalen de verkoopscijfers. Vrouwen hebben een masochistisch trekje dat hen naar die ziekelijke beelden zuigt. Maar waarom is dat zo? De beste verklaring staat te lezen in The Beauty Myth, de klassieker uit 1991 van de feministe Naomi Wolf. Ze voert aan dat het verkeerd is te geloven in een objectieve norm voor schoonheid. De Maori vinden dat er niets mooier is dan een dikke vulva. De Padoung zijn gek op vrouwen met hangborsten. In de vijftiende eeuw waren dikke vrouwen waren zelfs in. Ons schoonheidsideaal wijzigt, en hangt af van de manier waarop we willen dat vrouwen eruitzien.

Wolf wijst op een opmerkelijk gegeven omtrent de wijzigende trends in de modewereld. Elke keer als vrouwen sterker worden in de echte wereld worden mannequins - onze collectieve kijk op absolute schoonheid - zwakker en magerder. In de jaren 1910 hadden mooie vrouwen zachte, ronde heupen, dijen en buik, de natuurlijke vormen van de meeste vrouwen. In de jaren twintig, toen vrouwen stemrecht kregen, werden de criteria voor schoonheid strakker. Plotseling werden mannequins magerder en zwak en begonnen vrouwen zichzelf uit te hongeren. Toen in de jaren zestig het feminisme opkwam, werden de modellen slanker en slanker. Vandaag breken vrouwen door het glazen plafond, maar zijn uitgemergelde modellen wél de norm.

Wat kan daar de reden voor zijn? Duizenden jaren lang werden vrouwen onderdrukt, maar nu hebben ze in een paar generaties tijd gigantische emancipatorische stappen gezet. Maar de oude, patriarchale overtuigingen zijn diepgeworteld in ons cultureel DNA, zowel bij vrouwen als bij mannen. Wolf denkt dat vrouwen "zich schuldig voelen en bezorgd zijn over onze eigen emancipatie - latente vrees dat we misschien te ver zijn gegaan". Die obsessie voor slankheid is "een collectieve reactionaire hallucinatie van zowel mannen als vrouwen, die verdwaasd en gedesoriënteerd zijn door de snelheid waarmee de relaties tussen de seksen veranderd zijn". Vrouwen hebben de gevangenis van de keuken ingeruild voor de gevangenis van het onbereikbare lichaam, alsof het belachelijk is om vrouw te zijn zonder een juk te dragen. Hoe machtiger een vrouw is, hoe groter de kans dat ze boulimie heeft.

Wandelende vraagtekens

Op een dag zullen we met evenveel onbegrip terugkijken op de tijd toen vrouwen graatmager wilden zijn als op de tijd toen Chinese vrouwen hun voeten inbonden. Maar hoe geraken we ooit zover? Het is een probleem dat diep ingebakken zit in ons onderbewustzijn, en zoals bij alle problemen van het onderbewustzijn moet het aan de oppervlakte gebracht worden. Wolf zegt dat anorectische en boulimische vrouwen "wandelende vraagtekens zijn die scholen, universiteiten en iedereen van ons smeken om duidelijk te zeggen: dit is onaanvaardbaar. Dit is onduldbaar. Hier bij ons hongeren we vrouwen niet uit. We waarderen ze."

Ze heeft gelijk. We moeten mensen publiekelijk aan de schandpaal nagelen die ziekelijke neigingen bij vrouwen promoten omdat ze zogezegd cool en glossy en adembenemend zijn. Genoeg daarvan. Vrouwen mogen in hun onderbewustzijn niet het gevoel opgedrongen krijgen dat ze zich slecht moeten voelen omdat ze gelijkheid eisen. Uithongering is niet de Siamese tweeling van succes voor vrouwen. Veel meer mannen en vrouwen moeten zeggen: het is genoeg geweest. Deze industrie is ziek, en dom, en fout, en als we ermee te maken krijgen, dan zullen we onze minachting tonen. Kan dat alstublieft en vogue worden en in Vogue verschijnen?

Vrouwen hebben de gevangenis van de keuken ingeruild voor de gevangenis van het onbereikbare lichaam, alsof het belachelijk is om vrouw te zijn zonder een juk te dragen. Hoe machtiger een vrouw is, hoe groter de kans dat ze boulimie heeft

Ich muss Ihnen etwas beichten. Mein Onkel ist ein Cyborg und meine Tante ist eines von Frankensteins Monstern, zusammengesetzt aus Körperteilen verschiedener Menschen. Sie würden das nicht erkennen, wenn Sie sie nur ansehen – sie arbeiten bei Woolworth und sehen sich Coronation Street an – aber es ist wahr. Oh, und ich, lieber Leser, bin ein erheblich verbesserter Übermensch, der gegenüber Krankheiten immun ist, die Millionen von deiner Art töten.

Nein, ich bin nicht verrückt geworden. Ich weise einfach nur darauf hin, wie medizinische Fortschritte, die, zunächst als Sci-Fi-Verrücktheiten angesehen, bald als wunderbar und lebensspendend erkannt wurden. Mein Onkel hat einen Herzschrittmacher, der aus ihm eine lebende Mischung aus Mensch und Maschine macht. Halten Sie die Maschine an und er fällt tot um. Meine Tante ist nur wegen einer Herzverpflanzung hier. Und ich erhielt Immunität gegenüber einem halben Dutzend tödlicher Krankheiten durch Impfung.

Jede einzelne dieser lebensrettenden Technologien wurde anfangs von Bio-Konservativen angegriffen – mit den Religiösen an der Spitze – als man sie zuerst einführte. Man tat dies auf der Grundlage, dass sie „unnatürlich“ und „unmoralisch“ wären. Die Apostel des Aberglaubens hätten es beinahe geschafft, sie im Kindbett zu ersticken.

Ich erwähne dieses Thema jetzt, weil letzte Woche eine Maus gut gebrüllt hat – und einen neuen Kampf auslöste zwischen den Verteidigern des medizinischen Fortschritts und seiner Feinde. Wissenschaftler in Ohio haben Mighty Mouse erschaffen. Er rennt wie ein olympischer Athlet, lebt viel länger als seine Geschwister und vögelt bis zum Umfallen. (Gerüchte, laut denen er sich mit Jodie Marsh trifft, sind noch nicht bestätigt). Es gelang ihnen, indem sie ein einziges Gen im Mausembryo veränderten.

Während meiner Lebzeit werden wir uns wahrscheinlich mit ähnlichen Technologien auseinandersetzen müssen, die eine erhebliche Verbesserung des menschlichen Lebens ermöglichen. Es wird immer einfacher für Wissenschaftler, die Gene in der ersten Zelle eines menschlichen Embryos zu verändern – und somit in jeder Zelle des Kindes, welches aus ihr entsteht und dessen Kinder, Enkelkinder und so weiter, bis in die Unendlichkeit. Neue IVF-Technologien machen es einfacher, sie zu implantieren. Der langsame Prozess der natürlichen Selektion wird bald von einem schnelleren Prozess ersetzt werden, dem der absichtlich gewählten Selektion.

Die Möglichkeiten sind atemberaubend: Um nur eine zu nennen, arbeitet Professor David Balitmore in Kalifornien gerade daran, menschliche Zellen so zu verändern, dass sie gegenüber HIV und Krebs resistent werden. Professor Gregory Stock hat darüber geschrieben, genetische „Ergänzungen“ in jeden Embryo einzubauen, die sie intelligenter, schneller und langlebiger machen.

Jedoch wird diese Debatte von den Extremen entführt. Es gibt eine kalifornische Gruppe von Wissenschaftlern, die sich selbst „Transhumanisten“ nennt, deren großes Ziel darin besteht, diese Technologie zu verwenden, um eine neue, übermenschliche Art zu erschaffen. Max More, einer ihrer Anführer, schrieb in einem Brief an „Mutter Natur“: „Wir sind gewiss dankbar dafür, was du aus uns gemacht hast. Du hast zweifellos das Beste getan, was du konntest. Dennoch, mit allem nötigen Respekt, müssen wir doch sagen, dass du in vielerlei Hinsicht schlechte Arbeit geleistet hast mit dem menschlichen Körperbau. Du hast uns angreifbar gemacht für Krankheiten und Schäden. Du zwingst uns zu sterben und zu altern – gerade dann, wenn wir Weisheit erringen... Wir haben uns entschlossen, dass es an der Zeit ist, den menschlichen Körperbau zu verbessern.“ Der Wissenschaftler Ramez Naam fügt hinzu: „Wir sind die künftigen Eltern von neuen und unvorstellbaren Wesen.“

Die Gegner dieser neuen Technologien haben sich darauf fixiert, die Transhumanisten zu bekämpfen. Der Schriftsteller Francis Fukyama – der in George Bushs Rat für Bioethik tätig ist – forderte einen Halt für praktisch die gesamte Forschung und verlangte zu erfahren: „Sollten wir uns in etwas Überlegenes verwandeln, welche Rechte werden jene verbesserten Wesen dann verlangen?“

Aber diese Ströme sich aufheizender und sofort wieder abkühlender Übertreibungen sind kein Weg, das zu verstehen. Anstatt uns in einem Streit über die Frage zu verlieren, ob wir eine neue Art erschaffen wollen oder nicht, müssen wir unsere Debatte umgestalten. Unser Ziel sollte darin bestehen, Menschen gesünder, intelligenter und langlebiger zu machen und hierfür jede uns zur Verfügung stehende Technologie zu verwenden. Sollte das Endergebnis darin bestehen, dass wir uns so weit entwickeln, um uns Post-Humanoide nennen zu können – und auf unseren aktuellen Stand zurückblicken wie wir heute auf Affen zurückblicken – dann ist das schön, aber es sollte nicht unser Ziel sein.

Wenn man es so sieht, dann wird deutlich, dass die Transhumanisten exzentrisch sein mögen, ihre Gegner jedoch schlimmer sind, weil sie versuchen, lebensrettende Behandlungen aufzuhalten, nur weil sie nicht mit ihren primitiven Ängsten vereinbar sind.

Fukyama und seine Bio-Konservativen bestehen darauf, dass es unentbehrlich ist, die menschliche Keimbahn in ihrer aktuellen Form zu belassen, weil sie unser festes und ewiges menschliches Wesen widerspiegelt. Hantieren Sie damit herum und Sie machen sich am Kern unseres Seins zu schaffen. Aber diese Clique sollte Plato weglegen und Darwin zur Hand nehmen, so dass Sie erkennen, dass es kein feststehendes „wir“ gibt. Die menschliche Keimbahn entwickelt und verändert sich stetig und wird dies immer tun. Richard Dawkins bietet uns eine elegante Metapher an, die das erklärt. Stellen Sie sich eine Frau vor, die heute lebt, und die mit ihrer Tochter an der Küste Afrikas Händchen hält. Jene hält wiederum die Hand ihrer Mutter fest, und sie hält die Hand ihrer Mutter fest, und so weiter, man hält Händchen bis in die ferne Vergangenheit. Wenn jede Frau einen Meter benötigt, dann fallen nur 300 Meilen an – kaum ein Zahn in Afrikas Küste – bevor diese Menschenkette unseren Affenvorfahren erreicht. An welcher Stelle in dieser Kette erscheint auf einmal dieses mystische menschliche „Wesen“?

Sicherlich könnte jede Frau in der Kette gedacht haben – wie Fukyama – dass die Evolution schon weit genug voran geschritten ist, danke auch, und könnte damit aufhören. Wie Professor John Harris bemerkt: „Ich persönlich bin zufrieden damit, dass unser Affenvorfahre entweder nicht die Macht oder die Fantasie besaß... um sich auf unsere Kosten zu erhalten.“

Die menschliche Keimbahn wird sich weiterentwickeln. Die Frage ist nur: Möchten Sie, dass diese Veränderungen gefährlich und zufällig sind, oder dass sie uns in das verwandeln, was wir sein möchten?

Die Bio-Konservativen sagen, dass es einen Unterschied zwischen „Behandlung“ und „Verbesserung“ gibt. Erstere passt die Menschen wieder der Norm an und letztere macht sie „besser als gesund“. Das ist eine etwas geschwindelte Unterscheidung: Als man mich gegen Gelbfieber impfte, hatte ich die Krankheit gar nicht. Ich wurde verbessert. Aber selbst, wenn Sie diese Argumentation akzeptieren würden – na und? Wenn Sie herausfänden, dass Sie Ihre Eltern viel schlauer und langlebiger per Mausklick (oder Gequieke) hätten machen können und sich dagegen entschieden, wären Sie dann nicht wütend?

Trotz allem ist eine der Sorgen der Bio-Konservativen legitim – auch wenn ihre Lösung Blödsinn ist. Einige von ihnen befürchten, dass, wie in H.G. Wells Roman „Die Zeitmaschine“, sich die Menschheit in zwei Teile spalten wird – die verbesserte Oberschicht und die „natürlichen“ Menschen, die man als Bürger zweiter Klasse zurücklässt. Das ist eine echte Gefahr – aber die Lösung kann kein Blankoverbot sein. Heute haben Menschen im Westen Zugriff auf Proteinasehemmer und Impfstoffe, während sie Millionen in Afrika verwehrt sind. Wir antworten nicht, indem wir die Behandlungen hier verbieten, sondern indem wir sie nach dort erweitern. Genauso können wir nicht auf die Verbesserung des Menschen mit einer Art genetischen Stalinismus reagieren, der jeden per Regierungsdekret auf die niedrigste Ebene herabsetzt, um so Gleichheit zu garantieren. Unterstützen wir die Forschung – dann lasst uns die Forschunsergebnisse verbreiten.

In einem Jahrhundert wird eine Generation schlauerer, gesünderer Menschen mit dem selben verständnislosen Abscheu auf die Bio-Technikfeinde zurückblicken, die sie in ihrer Entwicklung aufhalten wollten, wie wir heute heute auf den Mob zurückblicken, der Galileos Teleskop zerbrach. Lasst Mighty Mouse laufen – er flitzt geradewegs in eine bessere Welt.

Übersetzung: Andreas Müller

El síndrome Slumdog Millionaire sigue presente, recordándonos cuán regocijante puede ser la ficción cuando los novelistas abandonan sus cuartos de seminario y se zambullen en el mundo real. El escritor indio Aravind Adiga ganó el Booker Prize el año pasado por The White Tiger (El tigre blanco), la historia de un pibe indio de la calle que asciende a la riqueza... bueno, mejor no contar cómo lo hace. Ahora lo siguió con Between The Assassinations (Entre los asesinatos), una armada de historias cortas sobre una típica ciudad india que, mediante gran esfuerzo, se alza de la pobreza al poder... al menos para algunos. Adiga se ha vuelto grande ignorando el cliché del consejo dado a todos los escritores jóvenes, que se ha convertido en dogma: escribí de lo que conocés. El proviene de una típica familia rica de India, rodeada de sirvientes a quienes se trata como si fueran invisibles. Es tan talentoso que podría haber hecho interesante a ese mundo, por un momento y en su pequeño modo. Podría haber hecho lo que demasiados novelistas ingleses y estadounidenses están haciendo, y con un estilo aún más exquisito.

En lugar de eso, Adiga eligió escribir sobre lo que no conocía, saliendo a descubrirlo como un periodista. Between The Assassinations entra en las cabezas del panorama de los indios del siglo XXI, desde los pibes ricos tirando bombas al sistema de castas, pasando por mujeres quedándose ciegas en casas de vapor y conductores de rickshaws destrozándose los tendones mientras pedalean lentamente. Aprendió de sus vidas saliendo a la calle y escribiendo sobre lo que encontraba. Es un regreso a los grandes escritores realistas del siglo XIX, cuando la ficción capturaba los momentos tectónicos que alteraban el mundo mostrando cómo cambiaban los caracteres de cada hombre y mujer, uno por uno. Es Charles Dickens en un call center; George Eliot agregando crédito a su teléfono celular.

A través de personajes bien observados, quedan claras algunas transformaciones de este tiempo. Para nombrar sólo una, el cambio del poder del Oeste al Este toma forma humana, de modo que puede ser perfectamente entendido. El narrador de The White Tiger le escribe al premier chino Wen Jiabao: “No gaste su dinero en esos libros norteamericanos. Son tan del pasado. Yo soy el mañana. Este es el siglo del hombre amarillo y el hombre marrón. Usted y yo”. Aun así, mientras esperan por este nuevo mundo, Adiga muestra cómo la mayoría de los indios sigue trajinando, a sólo un traspié más de la indigencia. Como dice otro de sus personajes: “El rico puede cometer errores una y otra vez. Nosotros sólo cometemos uno y estamos listos”.

Hubo un tiempo en el que parecía natural –incluso obvio– que los novelistas se metieran en sus sociedades y las describieran. Como dice el megavendedor Tom Wolfe: “Dickens, Dostoievski, Balzac, Zola y Sinclair Lewis asumieron que el novelista debe ir más allá de su experiencia personal y meterse en la sociedad como un reportero”. Dickens se metía constantemente en el “gran horno” de la noche londinense para dar testimonio de su eterna agitación. Emile Zola fue a las minas de carbón de Anzin para capturar ese oscuro, polvoriento mundo en Germinal. John Steinbeck compró un viejo camión y lo condujo para vivir en los campos de squatters, y le dio nacimiento a Las uvas de la ira. Graham Greene rastreó las dictaduras del Caribe y Latinoamérica antes de escribir novelas sobre ellas. George Orwell y Ernest Hemingway fueron a la Guerra Civil Española antes de cristalizar sus obras maestras sobre el tema. Hacer de reporteros no sofocó sus imaginaciones, más bien las fertilizó.

A pesar de ello, hay muchos jóvenes y talentosos novelistas que parecen pensar que lo real, el abrumador mundo externo a sus estudios, es un tema vulgar, que debe ser dejado a los periodistas o a series de TV como The Wire. Prefieren escribir libros que rumian sobre lo epistemológicamente difícil que es para “La Novela” describir el mundo, o retraerse a narraciones del pasado lejano, o concentrarse en interminables historias de adulterio en la clase media. Ocasionalmente hacen un gran trabajo, pero dan ganas de sumergirlos en una protesta por el remate de casas, una visita al campamento de protesta por el cambio climático, la escena de clubes o cualquier otra cosa real y viva, para darles combustible a sus talentos.

Gracias a críticos como Lionel Trilling y George Steiner, en los años ’50 se volvió popular decir que la novela realista era una forma muerta, que formaba parte de la aburrida pared de ladrillos del siglo XIX. El mundo es ahora demasiado rápido, demasiado caótico para ser capturado de esa manera. Pero ¿qué puede haber más rápido y caótico que una ciudad india en el nacimiento de la Era del Este, donde un esqueleto conduce un rickshaw en el que viaja un gordo que manda felices mensajes de texto a Nueva York? Adiga hace parecer que la novela realista fue diseñada precisamente para describir esta yuxtaposición, en sólo un día. Cuando está escrita con habilidad, la novela realista es siempre... real.

Wolfe, uno de los grandes campeones de la novela periodística, advirtió una década atrás: “La novela estadounidense está muriendo no de obsolescencia, sino de anorexia. Necesita comida. Necesita novelistas con gran apetito y ardiente sed por Estados Unidos, como está el país justo ahora”. Decía que debería ser “una revolución no en el contenido, sino en la forma”. Lo mismo puede decirse de la ficción de un mundo más amplio. No es que no existan otros grandes tipos de ficción: hay autores enormes como Jorge Luis Borges y Philip K. Dick, a los que uno no se imagina metiéndose en una mina con una libreta de notas. Pero Adiga viene a recordar que la gran novela realista tiene suficiente adrenalina para insuflar a millones de lectores. Fue el Premio Booker más vendedor de los últimos años, porque no es un abstruso experimento literario: está vivo.

Hay muchos escritores de peso en el Oeste que aún actúan bajo este impulso reportero, de Dave Eggers a Monica Ali e Irving Welsh, pero no los suficientes. ¿No hubiera ido Greene a la Zona Verde de Bagdad? ¿No iría Hemingway a Helmand, en Afganistán, y Orwell a Burma, o al menos a los pueblos abandonados del norte de Inglaterra? ¿Cuántas grandes novelas no se están escribiendo, porque los novelistas no se sienten urgidos a hacer estos viajes dentro de la realidad?

„Nie jestem pewna, ile dni będę jeszcze żyła". — mówi cicho Malalai Joya. Regionalni watażkowie, którzy tworzą nowy, „demokratyczny" rząd w Afganistanie, od lat wysyłają kule i bomby, żeby zabić tę drobną, 30-letnią kobietę z obozu dla uchodźców — i wydaje się, że z każdą próbą są bliżej celu. Jej wrogowie mówią o niej „chodzący trup kobiety". "Ale ja nie boję się śmierci, boję się milczenia w obliczu niesprawiedliwości — mówi Malalai. — Jestem młoda i chcę żyć. Ale do tych, którzy chcą wyeliminować mój głos, mówię: 'Jestem gotowa, gdzie i kiedy uderzycie. Możecie ściąć kwiat, ale nic nie powstrzyma wiosny'".

Historia Malalai Joya wywraca wszystko, co mówiono nam o Afganistanie, do góry nogami. W oficjalnej retoryce jest ona tym wszystkim, o co walczymy. Oto młoda afgańska kobieta, która założyła tajną, podziemną szkołę dla dziewczynek w czasach talibów i — kiedy ich wygnano - zrzuciła burkę, kandydowała do parlamentu i rzuciła wyzwanie religijnym fundamentalistom.

Mówi ona jednak: „Wasze rządy sypnęły piaskiem w oczy świata. Nie powiedziano wam prawdy. Sytuacja jest obecnie równie katastrofalna dla kobiet, jak była pod rządami talibów. Wasze rządy zastąpiły rządy talibów fundamentalistycznym reżimem regionalnych watażków. Za to giną wasi żołnierze". Zamiast wyzwolenia, grozi jej śmierć.

Historia Joya jest historią innego Afganistanu — Afganistanu zza burki i zza haseł propagandy.

I. „Jesteśmy stróżami naszych sióstr"
Spotkałem Joyę w mieszkaniu w Londynie, gdzie na tydzień zatrzymała się u swoich zwolenników, żeby mówić o swojej książce — ale także tutaj jej pobyt musi być utrzymywany w tajemnicy i przemieszcza się z jednego bezpiecznego domu do drugiego. Powiedziano mi, bym nikomu nie ujawnił miejsca jej pobytu. Stoi w przedpokoju, niska i szczupła, z rozpuszczonymi włosami i wita się solidnym uściskiem dłoni. Kiedy jednak nasz fotograf robi jej zdjęcie, zaczyna po dziewczęcemu chichotać: żałoba wyryta na jej bladej twarzy znika i śmieje się radośnie. „Nie mogę się do tego przyzwyczaić!" — mówi.

Potem, kiedy siadamy, żeby porozmawiać o historii jej życia, ból znowu powraca na twarz. Widać ściągnięte mięśnie i zaciśnięte pięści.

Joya miała cztery dni, kiedy Związek Radziecki najechał Afganistan. Tego dnia jej ojciec porzucił studia i poszedł walczyć z komunistyczną armią najeźdźców; zniknął w górach. Joya mówi: „Od tej chwili znaliśmy tylko wojnę".

Jej najwcześniejsze wspomnienie, to trzymanie się nogi matki, kiedy policjanci przetrząsali dom w poszukiwaniu wskazówek, gdzie może ukrywać się jej ojciec. Jej niepiśmienna matka próbowała, najlepiej jak umiała, utrzymać przy życiu rodzinę składającą się z dziesięciorga dzieci. Kiedy policja stała się zbyt agresywna, zabrała dzieci do obozu dla uchodźców przy granicy z Iranem. W tych brudnych miastach namiotów, leżących na starym Szlaku Jedwabnym, Afgańczycy kulili się razem, a rząd irański traktował ich jak obywateli drugiej kategorii. W nocy dzikie zwierzęta potrafiły zabłąkać się do obozu i atakować dzieci w namiotach. Tam dostali informację, że ojciec Joyi wpadł na minę — żył, ale stracił nogę.

W irańskich obozach nie było szkół, zaś matka Joyi była zdecydowana dać swoim córkom wykształcenie, którego sama nigdy nie otrzymała. Uciekli więc znowu do obozu w zachodnim Pakistanie. Tam Joya nauczyła się czytać — i odmieniła się. „Powiedz mi, co czytasz, a powiem ci, kim jesteś" — mówi. Od dwunastego roku życia pochłaniała każdą książkę, jaką mogła — od perskiej poezji, sztuk Bertolda Brechta po mowy Martina Lutra Kinga. Zaczęła uczyć starsze kobiety w obozie czytania i pisania, w tym własną matkę.

Wkrótce odkryła, że uwielbia nauczanie — i, kiedy skończyła 16 lat, organizacja charytatywna o nazwie „Organizacja Wspierania Zdolności Afgańskich Kobiet" (OPAWC) złożyła jej śmiałą propozycję: żeby poszła do Afganistanu i założyła tajną szkołę dla dziewczynek, pod nosem talibów.

Zabrała więc trochę ubrań i kilka książek, została przeszmuglowana przez granicę — i zaczęły się „najlepsze dni mojego życia". Nienawidziła przymusu noszenia burki, molestowania na ulicach przez wszechobecną policję „obyczajową" oraz nieustannej groźny wykrycia i egzekucji. Mówi jednak, że było warto to robić dla tych małych dziewczynek. „Za każdym razem, kiedy nowa dziewczynka dołączała do klasy, był to triumf — mówi, uśmiechając się szeroko. — Nie ma lepszego uczucia".

Raz za razem o włos unikała złapania. Pewnego razu uczyła klasę dziewczynek w piwnicy prywatnego domu, kiedy pani domu nagle krzyknęła: „Talibowie, talibowie!". Joya opowiada: „Kazałam moim uczennicom położyć się na podłodze i zachować całkowite milczenie. Słyszałyśmy kroki nad głowami i czekałyśmy bardzo długo". Wiele razy zwykli ludzie, mężczyźni i kobiety, anonimowi nieznajomi, pomagali jej, wysyłając policję w złym kierunku. Joya dodaje: „Codziennie w Afganistanie, także teraz, setki, jeśli nie tysiące zwykłych kobiet wykonuje te małe gesty wzajemnej solidarności. Jesteśmy stróżami naszych sióstr".

Organizacji charytatywnej działalność Joyi tak zaimponowała, że wybrała ją na swojego dyrektora. Joya postanowiła zorganizować klinikę dla ubogich kobiet. Było to tuż przed atakami 11 września 2001 roku. Kiedy rozpoczęła się amerykańska inwazja, talibowie uciekli, ale spadały bomby. „Wielu ludzi zginęło niepotrzebnie, tak jak w tragedii 11 września" — mówi Joya. — „Huk był przerażający, dzieci zatykały uszy, krzyczały i płakały. Podnosił się dym i kurz i pozostawał w powietrzu po każdej zrzuconej bombie".

Gdy tylko talibowie wycofali się, zastąpili ich regionalni watażkowie, którzy wcześniej rządzili Afganistanem. Joya mówi, że w tym momencie „zrozumiałam, że prawa kobiet zostały całkowicie zdradzone… Większość ludzi na Zachodzie uwierzyła, że nietolerancja i brutalność wobec kobiet w Afganistanie rozpoczęły się wraz z reżimem talibów. Ale to kłamstwo. Wiele z najgorszych potworności popełnili fundamentalistyczni mudżahedini podczas wojny domowej w latach 1992-1996. Wprowadzili oni prawa uciskające kobiety, stosowane potem przez talibów — a teraz wrócili do władzy, wspierani przez Stany Zjednoczone. Natychmiast wrócili do dawnego zwyczaju używania gwałtu jako kary dla wrogów i nagrody dla swoich wojowników".

Regionalni watażkowie od tego czasu rządzą Afganistanem, dodaje. Podczas gdy „pokazowy parlament stworzono w Kabulu na benefis USA", rzeczywista władza "jest w rękach fundamentalistów, którzy rządzą wszędzie poza Kabulem". Jako przykład podaje nazwisko byłego gubernatora Heratu, Ismaila Khana. Założył on własne oddziały „obyczajowe", które terroryzowały kobiety i rozbijały wideo i kasety muzyczne. Miał „prywatną milicję, prywatne więzienia". Konstytucja Afganistanu nie ma znaczenia na rządzonych przez watażków terenach.

Joya odkryła, co to znaczy, kiedy zaczęła budowę kliniki i miejscowy watażka oznajmił, że na to nie pozwala, ponieważ jest ona kobietą i krytykiem fundamentalizmu. Zrobiła to i tak i postanowiła walczyć z fundamentalistami przez kandydowanie do Loja Dżirga (rada starszyzny plemiennej) i uczestniczyć w pisaniu nowej konstytucji Afganistanu. Poparcie dla dziewczyny, która chciała wybudować klinikę, było ogromne i została wybrana. „Okazało się, że moją misją będzie ujawnienie od środka prawdziwej natury Dżirgi".

II"Nigdy już nie będę bezpieczna"
Po przejściu do sali obrad Loja Dżirga (obok kamer międzynarodowej grupy dziennikarzy), pierwszą rzeczą, którą Joya zobaczyła, był „długi rząd najgorszych gwałcicieli praw człowieka, jakich nasz kraj kiedykolwiek zaznał — regionalnych watażków, przestępców wojennych i faszystów".

Widziała mężczyzn, którzy zaprosili do kraju Osamę bin Ladena, mężczyzn, którzy wprowadzili mizoginistyczne prawa, przestrzegane później przez talibów, mężczyzn, którzy masakrowali afgańskich cywilów. Jedni dostali się tam przez zastraszenie wyborców, inni przez oszustwa wyborcze, a jeszcze inni byli po prostu wyznaczeni przez Hamida Karzaia, byłego naftowca, zainstalowanego przez armię USA do rządzenia krajem. Przypomniało jej się stare porzekadło afgańskie: „To ten sam osioł z nowym siodłem".

Przez moment, kiedy ci starzy mordercy zaczęli wygłaszać długie przemowy, gratulując sobie nastania demokracji, Joya była zaniepokojona. Potem jednak: „przypomniałam sobie ucisk, jak spotyka nas, kobiety, w moim kraju i mój niepokój wyparował, zamienił się w gniew".

Kiedy przyszła jej kolej, wstała, spojrzała na tych unurzanych we krwi watażków, którzy siedzieli wokół niej i zaczęła mówić: „Dlaczego pozwalamy tutaj na obecność przestępców? To oni są odpowiedzialni za tę sytuację (...) To oni zamienili nasz kraj w centrum narodowych i międzynarodowych wojen. Są oni najbardziej anty-kobiecym elementem w naszym społeczeństwie, to oni doprowadzili nasz kraj do takiego stanu i mają zamiar zrobić to znowu (...)Powinni stanąć przed sądami krajowymi i międzynarodowymi".

Ci watażkowie — którzy chlubią się, że są twardymi chłopami — nie mogli dać sobie rady ze szczupłą kobietą, mówiącą prawdę. Zaczęli krzyczeć i wyć, nazywając ją „prostytutką" i „niewierną", i rzucać w nią butelkami. Jeden próbował uderzyć ją w twarz. Odcięli jej mikrofon i Dżirga zamieniła się w miejsce zamieszek.

„Od tej chwili — mówi Joya — nigdy już nie będę bezpieczna… Dla fundamentalistów kobieta jest pół-człowiekiem, przeznaczonym tylko do wypełniania każdego życzenia i żądzy mężczyzny, do rodzenia dzieci i harówki w domu. Nie mogli uwierzyć, że młoda kobieta zrywała maski z ich twarzy na oczach ludu Afganistanu".

Fundamentalistyczny motłoch pojawił się kilka godzin później przed jej mieszkaniem, oznajmiając, że przyszli ją zgwałcić i zlinczować. Natychmiast dano jej uzbrojoną straż — nie chciała jednak ochrony ze strony wojsk amerykańskich i upierała się, że mają to być afgańscy oficerowie.

Jej przemowa została ogłoszona na całym świecie — i przyjęta wiwatami w Afganistanie. Zalały ją wyrazy poparcia od ludzi z jej kraju, zachwyconych, że ktoś wreszcie przemówił głośno. Pewna nędzarska wioska zebrała pieniądze, żeby wysłać delegata setki kilometrów przez cały kraj, który miał jej powiedzieć, jak są zachwyceni.

Bardzo starą kobietę przywieziono na rozklekotanej taczce i powiedziała Joyi, że straciła dwóch synów — jednego zabili Sowieci, drugiego fundamentaliści. Powiedziała: „Mam niemal 100 lat i umieram. Kiedy usłyszałam o tobie i o tym, co powiedziałaś, wiedziałam, że muszę cię spotkać. Niech cię Bóg osłania, moja droga".

Dała Joyi swoją złotą obrączkę, jedyną cenną rzecz, jaką miała, i powiedziała: „Musisz to przyjąć! Wycierpiałam w życiu tak wiele i moim ostatnim życzeniem jest, byś zaakceptowała ten dar ode mnie".

Ale wojska USA i NATO poinstruowały Joyę, że musi okazywać innym delegatom „uprzejmość i szacunek". Kiedy ambasador USA Zalmay Khalizad powiedział to, odpowiedziała: „Jeśli ci przestępcy zgwałcili twoją matkę, córkę lub babkę, albo zabili siedmiu twoich synów, już nie mówiąc o zniszczeniu wszystkich moralnych i materialnych skarbów twojego kraju, jakich słów użyłbyś, mówiąc do nich, które nadal byłyby uprzejme i pełne szacunku?"

Pochyla się do przodu i cytuje Brechta: „Ten, kto nie zna prawdy, jest tylko głupcem. Ten, kto zna prawdę i nazywa ją kłamstwem, jest przestępcą".

Próby zamordowania jej zaczęły się od snajpera — i nie zatrzymały od tamtego czasu. Z zaciśniętymi pięściami mówi jednak wyraźnie: „Chcę, by ci watażkowie wiedzieli, że się ich nie boję".

Kandydowała wiec do parlamentu — i wygrała przytłaczającą większością głosów. „Chciałam wrócić i stanąć twarzą w twarz z tymi, którzy zrujnowali mój kraj - wyjaśnia — byłam zdecydowana zawsze stać prosto i nigdy więcej nie ugiąć się przed ich groźbami".

III „W każdym kącie jest morderca"
Pierwszego dnia Joya patrzyła na nowy parlament Afganistanu i myślała: „W każdym kącie jest morderca, marionetka, przestępca, wielki handlarz narkotykami, faszysta. To nie jest demokracja. Jestem tu jednym z bardzo niewielu ludzi, którzy naprawdę zostali wybrani". Swoje pierwsze wystąpienie na forum parlamentu zaczęła słowami: „Składam kondolencje ludowi Afganistanu…"

Zanim mogła kontynuować, watażkowie zaczęli krzyczeć, że ją zgwałcą i zabiją. Jeden z nich, Abdul Sayyaf, wykrzyczał jej te groźby prosto w twarz. Joya spojrzała mu w oczy i powiedziała: „Nie jesteśmy w dolinie Paghman [region, którym Sayyaf rządzi], proszę się opanować".

Zapytałem, czy się bała i potrząsa przecząco głową. „Nigdy się nie boję, kiedy mówię prawdę" . Zaczęła mówić bardzo szybko: „Czuję się naprawdę uhonorowana, że szkalują mnie i grożą mi dzicy mężczyźni, którzy skazali nasz kraj na takie nieszczęścia. Czuję się dumna, że chociaż nie mam żadnej prywatnej armii, żadnych pieniędzy, ani poparcia żadnego mocarstwa, ci brutalni despoci boją się mnie i konspirują, żeby mnie usunąć".

Joya mówi, że dla zwykłych Afgańczyków nie ma żadnej różnicy między talibami i równie fundamentalistycznymi watażkami. "Która grupa ma etykietkę 'terrorysta', a która 'fundamentalista', zależy od tego, jak jest użyteczna dla celów USA - mówi. — Są dwie strony, które terroryzują kobiety, ale anty-amerykańska strona to 'terroryści', a pro-amerykańska strona to 'bohaterzy'".

Karzai rządzi tylko za zezwoleniem watażków. Jest on „bezwstydną marionetką" i zwycięży w wyborach prezydenckich w przyszłym miesiącu, ponieważ „jeszcze nie przestał pracować dla swoich panów: USA i watażków… W tym momencie naszej historii jedyni ludzie, którzy mogą służyć jako prezydenci, to ci, których wybrał rząd USA i mafia, trzymająca władzę w naszym kraju".

Kiedy tylko traci nadzieję w parlamencie, spotyka się ze zwykłymi afgańskimi kobietami — i wraca do walki. Opowiada mi o 16-latce ze swojego okręgu wyborczego, Rahelli, która uciekła do sierocińca, założonego przy pomocy Joyi. „Jej wuj postanowił wydać ją za mąż za swojego syna, narkomana. Była przerażona. Oczywiście więc przyjęliśmy ją, kształciliśmy, pomogliśmy". Pewnego dnia pojawił się wuj, przeprosił, mówiąc, że zrozumiał swój błąd. Poprosił, by na weekend wróciła do domu, żeby spotkać się z rodziną. Joya zgodziła się — a kiedy Rahella wróciła do wioski, zmuszono ją do małżeństwa i wywieziono do innej części Afganistanu. Dowiedzieli się, że sześć miesięcy później oblała się benzyną i spaliła żywcem.

W ciągu ostatnich pięciu lat w całym Afganistanie była epidemia samospaleń kobiet. „Setki afgańskich kobiet, które spaliły się, nie tylko popełniały samobójstwo, żeby uciec od udręki, ale wołały o sprawiedliwość".

Nie pozwolono jej jednak poruszyć tych kwestii w rzekomo demokratycznym parlamencie. Fundamentalistyczni watażkowie, którzy nie mogli pokonać Joyi przy urnie wyborczej ani jej zabić, znaleźli nowy sposób na uciszenie jej. Im więcej mówiła, tym bardziej byli wściekli. Nawoływała do świeckiego Afganistanu: „Religia jest sprawą prywatną, niezwiązaną z kwestiami politycznymi i z rządem (...) Prawdziwi muzułmanie nie potrzebują, by przywódcy polityczni prowadzili ich do islamu". Joya potępia nowe prawo, głoszące amnestię za wszystkie zbrodnie wojenne popełnione w Afganistanie w ciągu ostatnich 30 lat. Mówi: „Wy, kryminaliści, po prostu dajecie sobie prawo uniknięcia więzienia". Tak więc członkowie parlamentu po prostu wykluczyli ją z parlamentu.

Było to nielegalne i niedemokratyczne — ale prezydent Hamid Karzai zatwierdził tę decyzję. „Teraz kryminalni watażkowie nie są kwestionowani w parlamencie - mówi Joya. — Czy to jest demokracja?"

Tu, na Zachodzie, wepchnięto nam „stek kłamstw" o tym, jaki jest dzisiejszy Afganistan. „Media są 'wolne' tylko, jeśli nie krytykują watażków i funkcjonariuszy" — pisze Joya w swojej książce Raising My Voice. Jako przykład podaje konkretnego regionalnego watażkę: „Jeśli napiszesz o nim cokolwiek, następnego dnia będziesz torturowany lub zabity przez watażków Sojuszu Północnego". Mitem jest twierdzenie, że dziewczynki mogą teraz chodzić do szkoły poza Kabulem. „Tylko pięć procent dziewczynek — według ONZ-u — może kształcić się do klasy 12".

I jest „fałszerstwem" mówienie, że kultura afgańska jest z natury mizoginiczna. „W latach 1950. narastał w Afganistanie ruch kobiet, które demonstrowały i walczyły o swoje prawa. Mam tutaj artykuł — mówi, przeglądając swoje notatki — z 'The New York Times' z 1959 roku. Tutaj! Tytuł brzmi: 'Afgańskie kobiety znoszą zasłonę'. Rozwijaliśmy otwartą kulturę dla kobiet, a potem obce wojny i najazdy zdławiły to wszystko. Jeśli odzyskamy niepodległość, możemy znowu zacząć tę walkę".

Wielu przyjaciół namawia ją do opuszczenia kraju zanim poszczęści się któremuś z chętnych morderców. Joya mówi jednak: „Nie mogę wyjechać, kiedy wszyscy biedni ludzie, których kocham, żyją w niebezpieczeństwie i nędzy. Nie pojadę szukać lepszego i bezpieczniejszego miejsca dla siebie, kiedy oni płoną w piekle". Przepraszając za swój angielski — który naprawdę jest znakomity — znowu cytuje Brechta: „Ci, którzy walczą, często przegrywają, ale ci, którzy nie walczą, już przegrali".

Dzisiaj walczy poza parlamentem o demokrację. Mówi jednak, że każdy afgański demokrata jest „złapany w pułapkę między dwoma wrogami. Są siły okupacyjne, które z nieba zrzucają bomby kasetowe i zubożony uran, a na ziemi są fundamentalistyczni watażkowie i talibowie, z własną bronią". Chce pomóc narastającemu ruchowi zwyczajnych Afgańczyków, którzy znajdują się pomiędzy tymi dwoma siłami i sprzeciwiają się jednym i drugim. „Z wycofaniem się jednego wroga — sił okupacyjnych — łatwiej będzie walczyć z tymi wewnętrznymi, fundamentalistycznymi wrogami".

Gdyby była prezydentem Afganistanu, zaczęłaby od przekazania wszystkich przestępców wojennych Międzynarodowemu Trybunałowi Sprawiedliwości w Hadze. „Każdy, kto morduje moje siostry i braci, powinien być ukarany — mówi — od talibów po regionalnych watażków i George’a W. Busha". Następnie poprosiłaby wszystkie wojska okupacyjne o natychmiastowe opuszczenie kraju. Mówi, że niesłuszne jest twierdzenie, iż Afganistan po prostu pogrąży się w takim wypadku w wojnie domowej. „A co z wojną domową teraz? Dzisiaj giną ludzie — popełnia się wiele, wiele przestępstw wojennych. Im dłużej obce wojska pozostaną w Afganistanie, tym gorsza dla Afgańczyków będzie ewentualna wojna domowa".

Afgańskie społeczeństwo, dodaje, jest po jej stronie. Niedawny sondaż opinii pokazał, że 60 procent Afgańczyków chce natychmiastowego wycofania NATO. Joya mówi, że wielu ludzi w Afganistanie miało wielkie nadzieje wobec Baracka Obamy - „ale w rzeczywistości intensyfikuje on politykę George’a Busha… Wiem, że jego wybór ma wielką symboliczną wartość dla walki Afroamerykanów o równe prawa, a jest to walka, którą podziwiam i szanuję. Ale dla świata nie jest istotne, czy prezydent jest czarny, czy biały; istotne są jego działania. Nie możesz jeść symbolizmu".

Joya mówi, że siłą napędową polityki USA jest geopolityka, nie zaś osobowość prezydenta. „Afganistan leży w sercu Azji, jest więc bardzo ważnym miejscem dla baz militarnych — żeby mogli łatwo kontrolować handel z innymi mocarstwami azjatyckimi, takimi jak Chiny, Rosja, Iran i tak dalej".

„Ale to może się zmienić w Ameryce", dodaje. Jest teraz pełna pasji, mówi podniesionym głosem. „Mówię Obamie — w moim rejonie 150 ludzi zostało zabitych przez wojska USA w jednym incydencie. Gdyby twoja rodzina była tam, czy wysłałbyś jeszcze więcej wojska, jeszcze więcej bomb? Twój rząd wydaje 18 milionów dolarów, żeby zbudować w Bagramie drugie więzienie jak Guantanamo. Gdyby mogli tam zamknąć twoją córkę, czy budowałbyś je? Mówię Obamie — zmień kurs, bo inaczej jutro ludzie będą cię nazywali drugim Bushem".

IV „Trudno być silną przez cały czas"
„Niedobrze jest pokazać słabość moim wrogom, ale trudno jest być silną przez cały czas" — mówi Joya z westchnieniem i przesuwa ręką po włosach. Mówi tak stanowczo — z tak nadzwyczajną odwagą — że łatwo jest zapomnieć, iż była zaledwie dziewczynką, kiedy zaczęła walczyć z fundamentalizmem. Nigdy nie mogła być nastolatką. Z jej twarzy znika zajadła koncentracja i wygląda na trochę zagubioną. "Tak, moja matka jest ze mnie dumna, ale wiesz, jakie są matki — one się martwią. Kiedy mówię z nią przez telefon, jej pierwsze i ostatnie zdania zawsze brzmią 'Bądź ostrożna'".

Dwa lata temu Joya w tajemnicy wyszła za mąż. Nie może publicznie podać nazwiska swojego męża, bo go zabiją. Trzeba było sprawdzać bukiety na jej ślub, czy nie zawierały bomb. Mówi tylko, że spotkali się na konferencji prasowej „i on popiera wszystko, co robię". Nie widziała go od dwóch miesięcy. „Spotykamy się w bezpiecznych domach naszych zwolenników. Nie mogę spać w tym samym domu dwie noce pod rząd. Co wieczór jest inny dom".

Skąd bierze się taka odwaga? Zachowuje się tak, jakby odpowiedź była oczywista - twierdzi, że każdy by to zrobił. Ale nie robią. Być może bierze się z jej przekonania, że walka jest długa, a ludzkie życie krótkie, możemy więc popchnąć naszą sprawę kilka centymetrów do przodu, wiedząc, że inni podejmą pałeczkę. „Kiedy umrę, przyjdą inni. Jestem tego pewna".

Z pewnością ma silne poczucie przynależności do długiej historii walczących o wolność Afgańczyków. „Moi rodzice wybrali moje imię za Malalai z Maiwand. Była to młoda kobieta, która w 1880 roku poszła na front w drugiej wojnie angielsko-afgańskiej, żeby pielęgnować rannych. Kiedy bojownicy byli bliscy załamania się, chwyciła flagę afgańską i sama poprowadziła ludzi do walki. Padła, ale Brytyjczycy odnieśli druzgocącą klęskę i w końcu zostali wygnani".

Podczas kampanii wyborczej sama wybrała sobie inne nazwisko, żeby chronić tożsamość swojej rodziny. „Przyjęłam nazwisko od Sarwara Joya, afgańskiego poety i konstytucjonalisty. Spędził on 24 lata w więzieniu i został w końcu zabity, bo nie chciał wyrzec się zasad demokratycznych… W Afganistanie mamy powiedzenie: prawda jest jak słońce. Kiedy wschodzi, nikt nie może go zablokować ani ukryć".

Malalai Joya wie, że może zostać zabita każdego dnia w nowo wyzwolonym Watażko-stanie. Obejmuje mnie na pożegnanie i mówi: „Musimy być w kontakcie". Zastanawiam się jednak ponuro, czy kiedykolwiek jeszcze się spotkamy. Być może wyczuwa to, bo nagle nalega, bym jeszcze raz spojrzał na ostatni akapit jej pamiętników Raising My Voice. „Ja naprawdę tak czuję" — mówi. Czytam więc: „Gdybym zginęła, a ty postanowisz kontynuować moją pracę, jesteś zaproszona do odwiedzania mojego grobu. Nalej na niego trochę wody i krzyknij trzy razy. Chcę usłyszeć twój głos." Patrzę jej w twarz i daje mi najodważniejszy uśmiech, jaki kiedykolwiek widziałem.

Tłumaczenie: Małgorzata Koraszewska

After all the arguments for subordinating women have been shown to be self-serving lies, what are misogynists left with? They have only one feeble argument that is still deferred to and shown undeserving respect across the world, even by people who should know better: “God told me to. I have to treat women as lesser beings, because it is inscribed in my Holy Book.”

Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom are the editors of Butterflies and Wheels, the best atheist site on the web. In Does God Hate Women? they forensically dismantle the last respectable misogyny. They argue: “What would otherwise look like stark bullying is very often made respectable and holy by a putative religious law or aphorism or scriptural quotation . . . They worship a God who is a male who gangs up with other males against women. They worship a thug.”

Every major religion’s texts were written at a time when women were regarded as little better than talking cattle. Their words and commands reflect this, plainly and bluntly. This book starts with a panoramic sweep across the world, showing – with archetypal cases – how every religion has groups today thumping women down with its Holy Book.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

Tłumaczenie: Małgorzata Koraszewska

Kiedy już pokaże się, że wszystkie argumenty na rzecz podporządkowania kobiet są wyrachowanymi kłamstwami, co pozostaje mizoginistom? Pozostaje im tylko jeden marny argument, któremu ludzie na całym świecie ulegają i okazują niezasłużony szacunek, także ludzie, którzy powinni wiedzieć lepiej: „Bóg mi tak powiedział. Muszę traktować kobiety jak niższe istoty, bo tak jest napisane w mojej Świętej Księdze”.

Ophelia Benson i Jeremy Stangroom są wydawcami Butterflies and Wheels , najlepszej witryny ateistycznej w sieci. W książce Czy Bóg nienawidzi kobiet? w sposób zabójczy demontują tę ostatnią, szanowaną mizoginię. Piszą oni: „To, co inaczej wyglądałoby na wielkie znęcanie się, często uzyskuje szacowność i świętość dzięki rzekomym prawom religijnym, aforyzmom lub cytatom z pism świętych (…) Czczą oni Boga, który jest mężczyzną i który zmawia się z innymi mężczyznami przeciwko kobietom. Czczą oprycha”.

Wszystkie teksty głównych religii napisano w czasach, kiedy kobiety uważano za coś niewiele lepszego od mówiącego bydła. Ich słowa i nakazy odzwierciedlają to wyraźnie i otwarcie. Książka Benson i Stangrooma zaczyna się od panoramicznego oglądu całego świata i pokazuje – na klasycznych przykładach – jak dzisiaj każda religia ma grupy walące w kobiety swoją Świętą Księgą.

W stanie Zafara w północnej Nigerii ciężarna 13-letnia dziewczynka Bariya Ibrahim otrzymała w 2001 roku 180 batów, po tym jak jej ojciec stręczył ją klientom. Prokurator generalny powiedział: „Takie jest prawo Allaha, nie musimy się więc o nic martwić”. W Jerozolimie ultra ortodoksyjni Żydzi ustanowili „policję skromności”, która terroryzuje młode kobiety rozmawiające z mężczyznami lub pokazujące normalne części swoich ciał. Włamują się do ich domów, jeśli widziane są z mężczyznami; każą im siedzieć z tyłu w autobusach, z daleka od mężczyzn; a także, w jednym niedawnym przypadku, oblali kwasem twarz 14-letniej dziewczynki.

Na obszarach Indii, na których nadal dominuje ortodoksyjny hinduizm, wdowa powinna popełnić samobójstwo, kiedy umiera jej mąż lub odizolować się w aśramie. Siedemdziesięcioletnia kobieta, Radha Rani Biswas, uciekła i żebrze teraz na ulicach Vrindavan. Mówi ona: „Mój syn mi powiedział: ‘Jesteś stara. Kto cię będzie karmił? Idź sobie’. Co miałam zrobić? Mój ból jest bezgraniczny”. I tak ciągnie się katalog boskiej mizoginii, przechodząc przez katolicyzm, mormonizm i inne religie. Benson i Stangroom piszą: „Religia niekoniecznie zapoczątkowuje idee o podporządkowaniu kobiet, ale nadaje im aurę słuszności i czyni je ‘świętymi’, a więc każda ich krytyka powoduje oburzenie”.

Autorzy metodycznie omawiają wymówki oferowane dla tych jawnych pogwałceń praw człowieka przez ludzi religijnych i ich apologetów.

Pierwszą – szczególnie ukochaną przez Watykan i islamistów – jest to, że kobiety nie są traktowane gorzej, a tylko „inaczej”. Twierdzą oni, że uwięzienie kobiety w domu zgodne jest z jej specjalną „godnością”. Jest to jednak nadużycie języka. Jak zauważają autorzy: „Trwałe przypisanie do ograniczonej i mniejszej roli w świecie, nie jest tym, co normalnie rozumie się przez ‘godność’ (…) Niewielkie rozmiary, intymność i bliskie związki w domu są cenne, ale nie wtedy, kiedy jest się na stałe do nich przypisaną”.

Religijni mizoginiści twierdzą następnie, że sprzeciwianie się takiemu łamaniu praw człowieka jest „rasistowskie” lub „imperialistyczne”. Beztrosko ignorują — bardzo głośne — protesty kobiet przeciwko takiemu traktowaniu w tych kulturach. Nie protestują one przeciwko uwięzieniu we własnych domach, okaleczeniu swoich genitaliów lub byciu kamieniowane za stosunki seksualne dlatego, że tak im powiedział biały człowiek. Benson i Stangroom dobrze to formułują: „Wielokulturowość z definicji czyni fetysz z kultur, a jest niemal niemożliwe zrobienie tego bez traktowania ich jako monolity. Gdy tylko przyznajesz, że we wszystkich kulturach istnieje wewnętrzna różnica zdań i nonkonformizm, cała idea chronienia danej kultury i poważania jej załamuje się w niekoherencji.”.

Wtedy pojawiają się łagodniejsi, milsi apologeci religii. Mówią oni, że mizoginiści po prostu źle interpretują święte teksty, które w rzeczywistości mówią o miłości, współczuciu i dobroci. Autorzy książki wskazują jednak, że z pewnością nie chodzi tu o Boga z tekstów, które nakazują swoim wyznawcom popełniać masowe morderstwa, włącznie z zabijaniem kobiet i dzieci, i wyraźnie stwierdzają, że kobiety są gorszymi istotami.

Tak więc, aby bronić swojego Boga, apologeci często muszą kłamać na temat tego, co On i Jego Prorocy „mówią” w swoich tekstach. Na przykład Cherie Blair twierdziła podczas wykładu: „Nie jest powiedziane w Koranie, że mężowie mogą bić swoje żony”. Ale to jest powiedziane zupełnie wyraźnie. Koran stwierdza: „Jeśli obawiasz się arogancji ze strony swoich żon, przypomnij im [o nauczaniu Boga], potem zignoruj je idąc do łóżka, a potem uderz je”.

Karen Armstrong – jedna z najbardziej upartych obrończyń przesądu – wielokrotnie twierdziła, że Mahomet był wyzwolicielem kobiet. Niemniej, jak wyjaśnione jest w Hadis (wypowiedzi Mahometa i opowieści o jego życiu) poślubił on małe dziecko, a kiedy dostał dwie niewolnice, brzydką oddał przyjacielowi, a piękną Maryam zatrzymał dla własnych uciech seksualnych. Dziwny to model emancypacji kobiet: spać z dziećmi i niewolnicami.

We wszystkich religiach są ludzie, którym udało się – dzięki teologicznym wygibasom – porzucić dosłowne odczytywanie tekstu i wynaleźć mniej obrzydliwego w Boga, by w niego wierzyć. Nie do ateisty należy powiedzenie, że jedna z tych grup ma rację, a druga się myli, bo uważamy, że obie się mylą. Możemy zauważyć, że im mniej dosłowna wiara człowieka, tym łatwiej żyć obok niego, ale możemy dyskredytować dosłowne traktowanie świętych ksiąg i wspierać reformy tylko wtedy, kiedy będziemy uczciwi w kwestii sformułowań tych ksiąg, zamiast samych prób zmiękczania wierzących.

Benson i Stangroom, wystrzeliwszy tę salwę długości książki, pozostawiają religijną nienawiść kobiet w ruinie. Każdy, kto nie ma umysłu przyćmionego przesądami, dojdzie do wniosku, że taka bigoteria nie zasługuje ani na szacunek, ani na poważanie. Nie zasługuje na broniące ją dzisiaj tabu wobec wypowiedzi krytycznych. Zasługuje na coś przeciwnego: pogardę – i nieustępliwy, twardy sprzeciw.

Just click here (it's the last twenty minutes of the podcast) or here.

This is the age of the conspiracy theory. In the interstices of the internet, no global event happens by accident – or as it seems at first glance – any more. While the truth is slowly getting its boots on, a paranoid counter-narrative is broadbanded across the world in a flash. We can all offer a list of conspiracies we have been told in a confidential whisper, backed up by a blizzard of small incongruent questions that are scraped together to make a fantastical answer. The 9/11 massacres were the Bush Administration’s Reichstag fire, carried out by the CIA to provide a pretext for invading the Middle East. The 2004 tsunami was caused by secret Israeli nuclear tests. Diana was killed for carrying a Muslim foetus. And on, and on, into the shadows.

The journalist David Aaronovitch has been “obsessed” by conspiracy theories, he writes, since an intelligent, likeable young man he was working with told him a few years ago that the 1969 moon landings were faked by NASA in a TV studio. All of Aaronovitch’s common sense responses – why wouldn’t any of the thousands of people needed for such a hoax have gone public by now? – were met by that weary conspiracists’ nod. The lack of evidence, he was told, is simply more proof of how devious the conspiracists are. They can hide anything. They can kill anyone.

In his weighty, gloriously readable new book, he traces how these “voodoo histories” began – and where they could be leading us.

He begins with an admission that will disarm the moderate conspiracists. Quoting the writer Robin Ramsay, he says: “By far the most significant factor in the recent rise of conspiracy theories is the existence of real conspiracies.” We know that the Vatican really did cover up the rape of children – so many more people suspect they are covering up the “true lineage” of Christ. We know that President Lyndon Johnson really did fake the 1965 Gulf of Tonkin “attack” to give himself a pretext to start bombing North Vietnam – so many more people suspect the Roosevelt or Bush II administrations did the same.

Yet real conspiracies are, he notes, “dogged by failure and discovery.” Richard Nixon couldn’t even “wipe a few incriminating tapes” without being caught out. In open societies, you can’t keep the thousands of people you need for a big conspiracy quiet for long. He defines a conspiracy theory – as opposed to a real conspiracy – neatly: it is “the attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended.”

He takes as the archetype of conspiracy theories the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In the shattered Europe that staggered out of the First World War, a document began to circulate offering an overarching explanation for how this evil happened – and how it could be expunged from the face of the earth. It was an eighty page booklet that claimed to be the leaked memo of a meeting of “the Elders of Zion” – a group of senior Jews that met once a decade in a graveyard in Prague to plot the destruction of existing societies and their replacement with a Jewish-run empire.

Aaraonovitch begins each chapter about conspiracies by describing the theory vividly, as if it were true. He then shows how it was invented. The Protocols were in fact cobbled together by the Russian secret police, who plagiarised it from a novel published back in 1868. But a rubble-strewn Europe was eager for a scapegoat – and they latched onto the Jews. Even now, a thousand facts later, the anti-Semitic smears refuse to die: Aaronovitch follows them from the trenches of Europe to the cable channels of Iran.

He traces over a dozen other conspiracy theories in the same way, from the Moscow Show Trials to the World Trade Centre. Each time, conspiracy theories emerge at a time of confusion and trauma, to allow people to fit terrible new events into their existing world-view. The Bolsheviks couldn’t accept that their way of running a society produced famine and catastrophe – so they preferred to believe in a vast conspiracy of Trotskyist “wreckers” plotting to bring it down from within, and they tortured their comrades into “confessing” to it. It offered, Aaronovitch says, “a painless explanation for massive failure… If it were true, then the great problems of state socialism could be solved by rooting out the plotters.” So many people across the world were invested in believing that the Soviet Union offered a better world that they preferred to something – anything – but the truth.

Whenever a big event happens, we all have an intuitive expectation that it will have a big cause. So when, say, a President is shot, it seems impossibly empty for the cause to be one lone and lonely lunatic – but it is almost always the case. Ronald Reagan really was shot by a man who wanted to impress Jodie Foster; and John Kennedy really was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.

We know Oswald’s motive. He was a lonely and troubled kid who, as Aaronovitch puts it, “defected to Russia in 1961 hoping to discover a better form of society – and discovered instead the Soviet Union.” When he returned to America, he was bitter and angry, and determined that the only solution left was to tear down all forms of authority. He wanted to build an anarchistic society “without any centralized state whatsoever.” All the endless theories that he couldn’t have done it melt on examination. Take the nonsense of the “magic bullet”: Aaronovitch talks the reader through how it has been shown by scientists studying the Zapruder footage to be not just possible but highly probable that Oswald’s shots were responsible.

Conspiracy theories are theology disguised as investigation: no facts can permeate their certain stories about the world. Aaronovitch gives the example of the Irish film-maker Shane O’Sullivan, who claimed to have spotted in the footage of the Bobby Kennedy assassination senior three CIA agents mulling menacingly. He investigated the backgrounds of these CIA operatives and built an elaborate theory about why he was killed by them. The documentary was shown by the BBC and released in cinemas.

Then a small flaw emerged – the men in the footage turned out to be watch salesmen who were having a conference in the hotel that night. Oh, and one of the CIA agents he accused of committing the murder had in fact died of a heart-attack six years earlier. O’Sullivan didn’t miss a beat. He said the watch salesmen must be other CIA stooges, because their company was chaired by a former advisor to Lyndon Johnson. And they must have stolen the dead agent’s identity. Obviously. The theory – the CIA killed Kennedy – was an a priori belief; the facts will always slot into it somewhere.

When Korey Rowe, the producer of the huge 9/11 conspiracy “documentary” Loose Change, was challenged about the huge number of blatant factual errors in the film, he replied: “We know there are errors in the documentary, and we’ve actually left them in there so that people can discredit us and do the research for themselves.”

When a conspiracy theory is finally, fatally debunked, its adherents often simply fall silent and find another target. Aaraonovitch offers the case of Hilda Murrell, a 78 year old British woman who murdered in 1984 when she was in the middle of invest8igating the threat a nuclear power station posed to public safety. The case became a cause celebre – there were three plays, a novel, and several documentaries detailing the “cover up.” And then in 2003 – when the case was largely forgotten – the police used new DNA technologies on the old evidence. It led them to a 37 year old labourer with a long criminal record, who claimed that – although he was at the scene – it was his brother who killed her. He is now serving a life sentence for murder.

Aaronovitch fillets conspiracy theories brilliantly – but ultimately for the wrong reason. He complains they “eventually add up to an idea of the world in which the authorities, including those who we elect, are systematically corrupt and untruthful.” In the place of excessive incredulity, he offers an unnecessary credulity. Some of the fiercest critics of conspiracy theories have been the very writers who are boldest and best at exposing real conspiracies – I.F. Stone, Noam Chomsky, and George Monbiot, for example. They know that by swallowing any old anti-government nonsense, activists waste their energy – and fail to expose real crimes by governments. You can be equally sceptical of authority and scornful of empty conspiracy theories: there is no contradiction.

Indeed, it is this flaw that leads Aaronovitch to leave a hole in his otherwise-compelling book. ‘Voodoo Histories’ purports to be an account of how conspiracy theories shape history – but it leaves out the most history-scarring conspiracy theory of our age. The Bush administration concocted a story that Saddam Hussein’s agents had met with 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. In order to get “proof”, we now know they tortured captured Islamists into “confessing.” On the basis of this conspiracy theory, a war was launched.

Yet Aaronovitch doesn’t peer into this theory – or even mention it. He supported the war, and it would have added an extra layer of depth if he had admitted that he too fell for a conspiracy theory, as we all do sometimes, and teased out the reasons why. Instead, he charges off to condemn the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker for claiming Dr David Kelley was murdered for his views on Iraq – a theory that is ridiculous, but has harmed nobody.

Aaronovitch returns to form in his conclusion. He argues that we keep returning so obsessively to conspiracy theories because they are, paradoxically, reassuring. “Paranoia”, he writes, “is actually the sticking plaster we fix to an altogether more painful wound”: the knowledge that life is chaotic and random and nobody is in charge. Drive into a wall, and you will die, even if you are a Princess. Get shot by a maniac, and your story will end, even if you are a President. Sit in a tower in Manhattan when a plane hits, and you will burn, no matter how rich you are. We can all be killed in a second, for nothing, by next-to-nothing. Faced with this fact, it is actually more soothing to fantasize that there is a force ordering the universe and controlling it all – even if that force is demonic. As Susan Sontag said: “I envy paranoids. They actually feel someone is paying attention to them.”

Let us now put our hands together and pray. O God, we gather here today to ask you to free our schoolchildren from being forced to go through this charade every day. As you know, O Lord, because You see all, British law requires every schoolchild to participate in "an act of collective worship" every 24 hours. Irrespective of what the child thinks or believes, they are shepherded into a hall, silenced, and forced to pray – or pretend to.

If they refuse to bow their heads to You, they are punished. This happened to me, because I protested that there is no evidence whatsoever that You exist, and plenty of proof that shows the texts describing You are filled with falsehoods. When I pointed this out, I was told to stop being "blasphemous" and threatened with detention. "Shut up and pray," a teacher told me on one occasion. Are you proud, O Lord?

Forcing children to take part in religious worship every day is a law worthy of a theocracy, not a liberal democracy where 70 per cent of adults never attend a religious ceremony. That's why the Association of Teachers and Lecturers – one of the teachers' unions – has recently moved to ask the Government to stop forcing its members to take part in this practice.

Why does this anachronism persist in this blessedly irreligious country? For all their whining that they are "persecuted", the religious minority in Britain are in fact accorded remarkable privileges. They are given a bench-full of unelected positions in the legislature, protection from criticism in the law, and vast amounts of public money to indoctrinate children into their belief systems in every school in the land.

I can understand why the unelected, faltering religious institutions cling to this law so tightly. When it comes to "faith", if you don't get people young, you probably won't ever get them. Very few people are, as adults, persuaded of the idea that (say) a Messiah was born to a virgin and managed to bend the laws of physics, or that we should revere a man who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year-old girl. You can usually only persuade people of this when they are very young – a time when their critical and rational faculties have not yet been developed – and hope it becomes a rock in their psychological make-up they dare not pull out.

But why do the rest of us allow this fervent 5 per cent of the population to force the rest of our kids to follow their superstitions? Parents can withdraw their children if they choose – but that often means separating the child in an embarrassing way from her friends and exposing them to criticisms from the school, so only 1 per cent do it. Most don't even know it is an option.

More importantly still, why is worship forced on 99 per cent of children without their own consent or even asking what they think? As the author Richard Dawkins has pointed out many times, there are no "Christian children" or "Muslim children". I was classed as "Christian" because my mother is vaguely culturally Christian, although at every opportunity I protested that I didn't believe any of it. Children are not born with these beliefs, as they are born with a particular pigmentation or height or eye colour. Indeed, if you watch children being taught about religion, you will see most of them instinctively laugh and ask perfectly sensible sceptical questions that are swatted away – or punished – by religious instructors.

I am genuinely surprised that no moderate religious people have, to my knowledge, joined the campaign to stop this compelled prayer. What pleasure or pride can you possibly feel in knowing that children are compelled to worship your God? Why are you silent?

The prayer-enforcers offer a few arguments in their defence. At first, they claim it instils "moral values" in children. The scientist Gregory S Paul produced a detailed study in 2005 to find out if rates of murder and rape went up as levels of religion went down. He found the exact opposite. On detailed international comparisons, the more religious a country is, the more likely you are to be stabbed or raped there. There isn't necessarily a causal relationship – but it blasts a bloody hole in this claim.

Of course, if you actually followed the morality explicitly commanded by the Bible, Torah and Koran, you would kill adulterers, gay people, apostates, and disobedient children and be sent to prison. Thankfully, the vast majority of religious believers long since decided to disregard much of "God's word", because it is manifestly appalling, and read it metaphorically. But you have to strip away an awful lot of the texts as metaphor before you get to a few bland lessons about being nice to each other. Can't we get the lessons about niceness from somewhere else, without the bogus metaphysics and endless injunctions to kill our friends?

Once the morality defence dissolves, the religious switch tack, and claim that children indoctrinated into religion perform better academically. As "proof", they point to the fact that faith schools perform somewhat better on league tables. It's true – but look a little deeper.

There have been two detailed studies of this, by the conservative think tank Civitas, and the Welsh Assembly. They found faith schools get better results for one simple reason: they use selection to cream off highly motivated children of the wealthy and weed out difficult, poor or unmotivated students who would require more work. Once you take into account their "better" intakes, faith schools actually underperform academically by 5 per cent (and that's before you factor in all the other problems they cause).

I am absolutely not saying that schools should teach children to be atheists. No. Schools should take no position on religion. They should be neutral, and equip children with the thinking skills – asking for evidence, and knowing how to analyse it rationally – that will enable them to make up their own minds, when they wish, beyond the school gates. How can a religious person object to that, without admitting that open-minded, evidence-seeking adults would see through their claims in a second?

And so, O Lord, I ask you – and the British Government – to set our children free, at last, from being forced to worship You. Amen – and hallelujah

The first witch I ever met was 14 years old and shivering. Clarice was brought before me—tiny, frozen, and swaddled in a wide white cardigan—in a church in the wreckage and rubble of the Congo war, as irrefutable proof of the cause of the catastrophe unfolding all around us. Her priest, Papa Enoch Boonga, explained before a gravely nodding congregation that the girl had been possessed by Satan, who would drag everyone around her into the abyss until he and his Armies of Evil were starved, burned, and whipped out of her.

In a dull, blank rote, Clarice told me how she had let the demons enter her at the age of 12. One night, her late grandmother had appeared before her, at the end of her bed, and offered her a biscuit to eat. She promised Clarice that if she only swallowed it, she would become more powerful. But it was a trick. As soon as she ate it, she was betrothed to Satan and forced to do his work on earth. He forced her to jinx her father, making it impossible for him to get a job. Satan forced her to kill her little sister by giving her a deadly fever.

Clarice had at first denied her intimacy with the devil, Papa Enoch told me disapprovingly. She protested it wasn't true. But he finally made her "admit" it, through a process of starvation and torture. I asked Clarice softly whether she really believed she had done all these things. "Yes," she said. "I do."

To read the rest of this article, click here to see it at Slate.

Chi immaginava che nel 2009, i governi del mondo avrebbero dichiarato una nuova Guerra ai Pirati? Mentre leggete questo, la Marina Reale Britannica - appoggiata dalle navi di più di due dozzine di paesi, dagli USA alla Cina - sta navigando nelle acque somale per combattere degli uomini che ancora raffiguriamo come furfanti della pantomima del pappagallo sulla spalla. Presto combatteranno le navi somale ed anche inseguiranno i pirati sulla terraferma, in uno dei più disintegrati paesi sulla terra.

Ma dietro le stranezze da linguaggio dei pirati di questa storia, vi è uno scandalo non rivelato. La gente che i nostri governi etichettano come "una delle grandi minacce dei nostri tempi" hanno una storia straordinaria da raccontare - e qualche buon diritto dalla loro parte.

I pirati non sono mai stati affatto quel che pensiamo siano. Durante l'"età d'oro della pirateria" - dal 1650 al 1730 - l'idea del pirata come rapinatore insensato e selvaggio che oggi persiste è stata creata dal governo britannico in un grande sforzo di propaganda. Molte persone comuni la ritenevano falsa: i pirati erano spesso liberati con la forza dalla forca da folle sostenitrici. Perché? Cosa potevano capire che noi non possiamo?

Nel suo libro "Furfanti di tutti i paesi", lo storico Marcus Rediker studia attentamente le testimonianze per scoprirlo. Se allora diventavi un mercante o un marinaio - strappato dalle banchine dell'East End di Londra, giovane ed affamato - finivi in un inferno di legno galleggiante. Lavoravi tutte le ore su una nave ristretta e mezza affamata e se rallentavi il ritmo per un secondo, l'onnipotente capitano ti avrebbe frustato con il gatto a nove code. Se ti rilassavi regolarmente, potevi essere gettato in mare. Ed alla fine di mesi o anni di questo, eri spesso truffato sui tuoi salari.

I pirati sono state le prime persone a ribellarsi contro questo mondo. Si sono ammutinati contro i loro tirannici capitani - e hanno creato un modo diverso di operare sui mari. Una volta che avevano una nave, i pirati eleggevano i loro capitani e prendevano tutte le loro decisioni collettivamente. Suddividevano le loro ricompense in ciò che Rediker chiama "uno dei progetti più egualitari per la disposizione delle risorse che si trovi in qualsiasi luogo nel 18° secolo".

Comprendevano persino schiavi africani fuggiti e vivevano con loro come pari. I pirati dimostravano "piuttosto chiaramente" - e sovversivamente - che le navi non dovevano essere dirette nella maniera brutale ed oppressiva della marina mercantile e della marina reale". E' per questo che erano popolari, nonostante fossero dei ladri improduttivi.

Le parole di un pirata dell'età perduta - un giovane britannico di nome William Scott - dovrebbero risonare in questa nuova età della pirateria. Giusto prima di essere impiccato a Charleston, Sud Carolina, disse: "Quello che ho fatto è stato di impedire a me stesso di perire. Sono stato costretto ad entrare nella pirateria per vivere".

Nel 1991, il governo della Somalia - nel Corno d'Africa - crollò. Da allora i suoi 9 milioni di abitanti barcollano nell'inedia - e molte delle forze più ignobili del mondo occidentale hanno visto questo come una grande opportunità per rubare la riserva alimentare del paese e per scaricare i nostri residui radioattivi nei loro mari.

Si: residui radioattivi. Appena il governo era finito, delle misteriose navi europee cominciarono ad apparire al largo delle coste della Somalia, a scaricare grandi serbatoi nell'oceano. La popolazione costiera ad ammalarsi. Al principio soffrivano di strane infiammazioni della pelle, nausea e bambini deformi. Quindi, dopo lo tsunami del 2005, centinaia dei barili scaricati e sgocciolanti si depositarono sulla spiaggia. La gente cominciò a soffrire di malattie causate dall'irradiamento e più di 300 morirono.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, l'inviato dell'ONU in Somalia, mi racconta: "Qualcuno sta scaricando qui materiale nucleare. Vi sono anche piombo e metalli pesanti come cadmio e mercurio - dite voi". Molto di questo è rintracciabile agli ospedali ed alle fabbriche europee, che pare lo passino alla mafia italiana perché lo "sistemi" a buon prezzo. Quando ho chiesto a Ould-Abdallah cosa stessero facendo su questo i governi europei, ha affermato con un sospiro: "Nulla. Non vi sono state nessuna rimozione, nessun risarcimento e nessuna prevenzione".

Allo stesso tempo, altre navi europee depredano i mari della Somalia della loro maggiore risorsa: il pesce. Abbiamo distrutto le nostre riserve di pesce con il sovrasfruttamento - ed ora siamo passati alle loro. Oltre $300 milioni di valore di tonno, gamberetti, aragoste ed altri animali marini vengono rubati ogni anno da grandi pescherecci che assalgono illegalmente i non protetti mari della Somalia.

I pescatori locali hanno perduto improvvisamente i loro mezzi di sussistenza e stanno soffrendo la fame. Mohammed Hussein, un pescatore della città di Marka, 100 km a sud di Mogadiscio, ha raccontato alla Reuters: "Se non si fa niente, presto non vi sarà molto pesce rimasto nelle nostre acque costiere".

Questo è il contesto del quale sono emersi gli uomini che chiamiamo "pirati". Tutti concordano che erano dei comuni pescatori somali che al principio hanno preso i motoscafi per cercare di dissuadere i trasportatori ed i pescherecci, o almeno levare su di essi una "tassa". Chiamano se stessi la Guardia Costiera Volontaria della Somalia - e non è difficile capire perché.

In una surreale intervista telefonica, uno dei leader dei pirati, Sugule Ali, ha dichiarato che il loro motivo era "fermare la pesca e lo scarico illegali nelle nostre acque ... Non ci consideriamo banditi del mare. Consideriamo che i banditi del mare siano quelli che pescano e scaricano illegalmente nei nostri mari e gettano immondizia nei nostri mari e portano armi nei nostri mari". William Scott comprenderebbe queste parole.

Non, questo non rende giustificabile la presa di ostaggi e, si, alcuni sono chiaramente soltanto dei banditi - specialmente quelli che hanno ritardato il traffico delle vettovaglie del Programma Mondiale Alimentare. Ma i "pirati" hanno l'appoggio schiacciante della popolazione locale per una ragione. Il sito di notizie somalo indipendente WardherNews ha condotto la migliore ricerca che abbiamo su quello che pensano i somali comuni - e ha scoperto che il 70% "appoggiava fortemente la pirateria come una forma di difesa nazionale delle acque territoriali del paese".

In America, durante la guerra rivoluzionaria, George Washington ed i padri fondatori dell'America pagavano dei pirati per proteggere le acque territoriali americane, perché non avevano nessuna marina o guardia costiera proprie. La maggior parte degli americani li appoggiava. E' così differente?

Ci aspettavamo che i somali affamati stessero fermi passivamente sulle loro spiagge, a remare con la pagaia nei nostri rifiuti nucleari e a guardarci portar via il loro pesce da mangiare nei ristoranti di Londra, Parigi e Roma? Non abbiamo agito per quei crimini - ma quando alcuni dei pescatori hanno reagito scompigliando il corridoio di transito per il 20% del rifornimento petrolifero mondiale, abbiamo cominciato a strillare dei "cattivi". Se vogliamo veramente occuparci della pirateria, dobbiamo fermarne la causa alla radice - i nostri crimini - prima di mandare le cannoniere ad estirpare i criminali della Somalia.

La storia della guerra alla pirateria del 2009 è stata riassunta nel modo migliore da un altro pirata, che visse e morì nel quarto secolo A.C. Fu catturato e portato da Alessandro Magno, che chiese di sapere "cosa intendesse prendendo possesso del mare". Il pirata sorrise e rispose: "Quel che tu intendi prendendo l'intera terra: ma poiché io lo compio con una piccola nave, vengo chiamato un ladro, mentre tu, che lo fai con una grande flotta, sei chiamato un imperatore".

Ancora una volta, oggi entrano in porto le nostre grandi flotte imperiali - ma chi è il rapinatore?

Johann Hari

Poscritto: Alcuni commentatori sembrano stupefatti dal fatto che entrambe lo scarico di rifiuti tossici ed il furto del pesce stiano avvenendo nello stesso luogo - non renderebbe questo contaminato il pesce? Di fatto, la linea costiera della Somalia è estesa, si allunga per 3.300 km (più di 2.000 miglia). Immaginate quanto sarebbe facile - senza nessuna guardia costiera o esercito - rubare pesce dalla Florida e scaricare rifiuti nucleari in California e vi farete un'idea. Questi fatti stanno avvenendo in posti diversi ma con lo stesso spaventoso effetto: morte per i locali e stimolo alla pirateria. Non vi è nessuna contraddizione.

For weeks now, we have all been talking about whether Madonna should be allowed to adopt a Malawian child – and discreetly ignoring the on-going adoption scandal here, right in front of us. In Britain, thousands of black children are being left unloved in our atrocious care system, when there are parents outside who desperately want them. The parents have one ‘flaw’ – they are white.

We have a system of racial Apartheid in our adoption system that would be illegal in any other area of British life. Adoption agencies have ruled that ethnic minority children must be placed with parents who “understand their culture”, and if no such parents are available, it’s better to keep them in care. As a result, while 93 percent of white kids are adopted within three years, only 73 percent of black children are. The kids left behind are scarred all through their lives: children in care are far more likely to go to prison than to university.

How does a child’s skin pigmentation mark them out as belonging to a different “culture”? Do I have a different culture to my black friends and neighbours? Do you? This is BNP logic – applied by people in the adoption agencies who apparently believe they are being liberal and caring. In reality, we are all part of one complex, richly intertwined culture, and our rainbow of skin colours should make no difference, except to racists.

Yet the adoption agencies claim that black children raised by loving white parents will be “confused.” Barack Obama was raised primarily by his white grandparents. Is he confused? Brian Belo, the sweet and gentle winner of Big Brother in 2007, was raised by loving white adopted parents. Is he confused?

Back in 1996, Bill Clinton banned the delaying of adoptions in order to racially profile parents. Is it beyond the British adoption agencies to do the same? I believe this logic applies internationally too. I have been thinking about adopting a child for a long time, especially after I stumbled across an orphanage in the Congo when reporting on the war there. Hundreds of tiny scarred children with distended bellies waddled around alone and traumatised. The lone woman who ran the orphanage told me she was delighted to have been able to construct a new building. I congratulated her – until she told me it was their morgue.

Does anybody think those children are better off left there to die, than with loving parents – in Britain, or anywhere else – who happen to have a different skin colour? Wouldn’t even Madonna be better? Of course it needs to be tightly regulated – but carving up the world’s children according to ‘race’ and nationality and saying they have to stick to their own kind isn’t progress; it’s a nasty form of regression.

In Britain, we have come a long way in opening up the adoption system in the past few years. Gay parents are now accepted as offering loving, accepting homes, as we should be. Yet we still allow a set of adoption guidelines that could have been drafted by Hendrik Verwoerd, the founder of Apartheid. It is time our adoption agencies discovered their Nelson Mandela.

This article was accompanied by some shorter boxes by me on other subjects...

Box I

I must stop eavesdropping on other Londoners’ conversations on the bus. On Tuesday, I heard two women confidently jabbering that Jade Goody’s illness was “just a publicity stunt” and “all for the money.” I leaned over and said, as politely as I could, “You do realise she’s dead, and buried?” One woman tutted; the other said, “That’s what they want us to think.” Do they think she will rise like Lazarus next week to claim a £500,000 back-from-the-dead Hello magazine splash? Don’t listen on buses; it’ll addle your brain.

Box II

There is nothing more boring than people who talk about their mobile phones, but mine has turned on me, and I must yelp. My mobile – my constant companion, my umbilical chord, my love – has turned out to be a prude. It will memorize any new word that comes along – excerpt swear words. It simply refuses to store them, as if it is a primary school teacher trying to clean up my language. Why? I’ve had to get used to my friends texting back: ‘What is a ‘ducking aunt’ and what’s so wrong with it?’

Box III

I have a dilemma. Every time one of the gorgeous, perfect little musicals from the tiny Menier Chocolate Factory transfers to the West End, I wonder – should I see it again? The startling thing about the Chocolate Factory is that you can see every flicker of emotion on the performers’ faces: you are virtually sitting on their laps. It means they can make musicals more subtle, more still, less showy – perfect for the complex works of Stephen Sondheim like ‘A Little Night Music.’ But can it transfer to a big stage? At the Menier, seeing Maureen Lipman perform a three minute song while sitting perfectly still in a wheelchair is magical; from three miles back in the Gods, will it simply look static and blank?

There is one particular type of bad argument that has always existed, but it has now spread like tar over the world-wide web, and is seeping into the pubs, coffee shops and opinion columns everywhere. It is known as ‘what-aboutery’ – and there was a particularly ripe example of it in response to one of my articles last week.

As a rhetorical trick, it is simple. Anyone can do it, and we are all tempted sometimes. When you have lost an argument – when you can’t justify your case, and it is crumbling in your hands – you snap back: “But what about x?”

You then raise a totally different subject, and try to get everybody to focus on it – hoping it will distract attention from your own deflated case.

So whenever I report on, say, atrocities committed by Israel, I am bombarded with e-mails saying: “But what about the bad things done by Muslims? Why do you never talk about them?” Whenever I report on the atrocities committed by Islamists, I am bombarded with e-mails saying: “But what about Israel? Why do you never write about the terrible things they do?” And so it goes on, whatever the subject, in an endless international shifting of blame, united in the cry: “What about them! Talk about them instead!”

This argument is almost always disingenuous. How do I know? Because when you write back and explain that, why, I do actually criticize Islamists/Israel/the US/China/whoever-you-have-picked-out-randomly, and here are the articles where I do it, nobody ever writes back and says: fair enough; you consistently condemn human rights abuses, no matter who commits them. No. They scrape around for another “what about.” What about Tibet? What about Sri Lanka? What about North Korea? This list never ends, as the other side tries to draw your attention further and further from what you were discussing.

HufPo readers have just seen a classic example. Last week I reported from Dubai, pointing out that this glittering city was built on what Human Rights Watch calls “slavery” – bitterly poor people who are conned into going there and forced to stay by a medieval dictatorship. Amongst others, I interviewed an Emirati man called Sultan al-Qassemi who passionately defended this system, saying that it is absolutely right that these workers are blasted with water cannons, arrested, and deported if they try to strike against their slavery-style conditions.

He did not react to my article by responding to the many criticisms I made of Dubai. He can’t. He knows they are true. Instead he wrote a post for HufPo asking: But what about Britain? He listed many things wrong with Britain – homelessness, detention without trial, the abuse of trafficked workers – and cried: talk about them instead!

As it happens, I have criticized all these things about Britain myself, in the British press, and in publications across the world. The difference is – Sultan doesn’t oppose the appalling things about his own country. He cheers them on – and all he can do to distract from this shameful fact is to try to change the subject.

The best way to respond to what-aboutery is to state a simple truth. Say it slowly: there can be more than one bad thing in the world. You can oppose American atrocities, and Chinese atrocities. You can be critical of Israel, and of Islamism. You can condemn Dubai’s system of slavery, and the fact people are detained without trial in Britain. You can stand independent of governments – including your own – and criticize anyone who chooses to abuse human rights. The world is not divided into a Block of Light, and a Block of Darkness; you don’t have to pick a tribe and defend its every action.

So whenever you hear the cry “But what about…!”, you can reply: what about we ignore this crude attempt to change the subject, and focus on the subject in hand?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here.