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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 17, 2008
Witchcraft
It was twenty years ago -- I know this by the chance surfacing of some old bloc-notes -- that I made a prediction about what would happen in twenty years. I do not claim abnormal abilities in the prognostic art, and moreover, my memory is also imperfect. For I cannot quite recall what inspired the prediction. You know how it goes: you don’t write things down in your notebook that you don’t think you could ever forget. Then twenty years happens.So, on to my prediction. It was, “If x is happening now, in twenty years we’ll be having witchcraft trials.” The prediction was too pessimistic. I have consulted the Canadian legal record, and not one trial for witchcraft has come to light. And the trials of Ezra Levant and others before various Canadian “human rights tribunals” -- see ezralevant.com for the latest outrages -- provide no exceptions. For while the victims of these kangaroo courts could theoretically be charged with witchcraft (there is no statutory limitation on the charges they may bring), I would give them perhaps another decade before they try that one on. Verily, the only witchcraft trial in the news this last week was one recently completed in Saudi Arabia. An illiterate woman (she had to “sign” her confession with a fingerprint, after the usual beatings by religious police) was to be executed for the crime of witchcraft under Shariah law. She had, I gather, the requisite four male accusers, so her conviction was slam-dunk. (One of them said she had cast a spell that made him impotent.) The case was at first successfully appealed, but the appeal then thrown over on grounds that letting a witch live would endanger the souls of Arabian Muslims. Her name is Fawza Falih, and pray for her. My reader may think that trying people for witchcraft is a joke “in this day and age,” but the prospect of beheading is not funny for the person who must endure it. The last Saudi execution for witchcraft, of which I can find a record in world media, was performed in late October. An Egyptian man was condemned, for witchcraft and on two other charges: a lesser one of adultery (far more serious for the woman), and a larger one of desecrating the Koran (by carrying a copy of it into a bathroom). According to Human Rights Watch in New York, who do some good work despite their unfortunate name, the execution of a male witch (or warlock) is an oddity in Saudi Arabia. Most of those convicted are women. Shariah, as the learned (Anglican) Archbishop of Canterbury was instructing us recently, in the course of advocating the formal introduction of some form of it into Britain, is not a fixed system of law. There is no written code. It is something that is interpreted by Islamic scholars, in light of any one of five schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, alone. Yet all descend from the Koran, and commonly accepted Hadiths, so there is a family resemblance between Shariah as practised in Saudi Arabia and in, say, Indonesia. Still, there is no guessing what form may be introduced into a modern Western country. Many Islamic scholars agree that Shariah should recognize the customs of the locality; others insist the whole point of Shariah is to change those customs until they are made to resemble those of desert Arabia in the 7th century A.D. For a mind rendered batty by postmodern liberalism (or, “gliberalism” as I call it), that means there is nothing to worry about. The form of Shariah we are likely to get, once the “principle” of “multiculturalism” has fully prevailed, is sure to be some “nice” kind, and not like all the other kinds. Perhaps another decade or two before we have witchcraft trials in Canada. And who knows whether they will be conducted under the supervision of wise Islamic scholars? For the concept of witchcraft is hardly unnatural to the mindset that has brought us “political correctness,” and for all we know the trials will be conducted by human rights commissioners. For centuries, through the “Dark” and “Middle” Ages, the Catholic Church struggled to eradicate the pagan belief in witches from pre-Christian Europe, only to have witchcraft proceedings explode again, at the time of the Reformation. We no longer appreciate what comes out on the table when free, rational thought is pushed under it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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