T he doings and “sayings” of Moses and Abraham and Jesus being so ill-founded and so

inconsistent, as well as so often immoral, one must proceed in the same spirit of inquiry to what

many believe is the last revelation: that of the Prophet Muhammad and his Koran or “recitation.”

Here again, the Angel (or Archangel) Gabriel is found at work, dictating suras, or verses, to a

person of little or no learning. Here again are stories of a Noah-like flood, and injunctions

against idol worship. Here again the Jews are the first recipients of the message and the first

both to hear it and to discard it. And here again there is a vast commentary of doubtful

anecdote about the actual doings and sayings of the Prophet, this time known as the hadith.

Islam is at once the most and the least interesting of the world’s monotheisms. It builds upon

its primitive Jewish and Christian predecessors, selecting a chunk here and a shard there, and

thus if these fall, it partly falls also. Its founding narrative likewise takes place within an

astonishingly small compass, and relates facts about extremely tedious local quarrels. None of

the original documents, such as they are, can be contrasted with any Hebrew or Greek or Latin

texts. Almost all of the tradition is oral, and all of it is in Arabic. Indeed, many authorities agree

that the Koran is only intelligible in that tongue, which is itself subject to innumerable idiomatic

and regional inflections. This would leave us, on the face of it, with the absurd and potentially

dangerous conclusion that god was a monoglot. Before me is a book, Introducing Muhammad,

written by two extremely unctuous British Muslims who are hoping to present a friendly version

of Islam to the West. Ingratiating and selective as their text may be, they insist that “as the

literal Word of God, the Koran is the Koran only in the original revealed text. A translation can

never be the Koran, that inimitable symphony, ‘the very sound of which moves men and women

to tears.’ A translation can only be an attempt to give the barest suggestion of the meaning of

words contained in the Koran. This is why all Muslims, whatever their mother tongue, always

recite the Koran in its original Arabic.” The authors go on to make some highly disobliging

observations about the Penguin translation by N. J. Dawood, which makes me glad that I have

always employed the Pickthall version but no likelier to be convinced that if I wish to become a

convert I must master another language. In my own country of birth, I am sadly aware that

there is a beautiful poetic tradition, unavailable to me because I will never know the marvelous

tongue called Gaelic. Even if god is or was an Arab (an unsafe assumption), how could he expect

to “reveal” himself by way of an illiterate person who in turn could not possibly hope to pass on

the unaltered (let alone unalterable) words?

The point may seem minor but it is not. To Muslims, the annunciation of the divine to a

person of extreme unlettered simplicity has something of the same value as the humble vessel

of the Virgin Mary has to Christians. It also possesses the same useful merit of being entirely

unverifiable, and unfalsifiable. Since Mary must be presumed to have spoken Aramaic and

Muhammad Arabic, it can I suppose be granted that god is in fact multilingual and can speakany language he chooses. (He opted in both cases to use the Archangel Gabriel as the

intermediate deliverer of his message.) However, the impressive fact remains that all religions

have staunchly resisted any attempt to translate their sacred texts into languages

“understanded of the people,” as the Cranmer prayer book phrases it. There would have been

no Protestant Reformation if it were not for the long struggle to have the Bible rendered into

the vernacular and the priestly monopoly therefore broken. Devout men like Wycliffe,

Coverdale, and Tyndale were burned alive for even attempting early translations. The Catholic

Church has never recovered from its abandonment of the mystifying Latin ritual, and the

Protestant mainstream has suffered hugely from rendering its own Bibles into more everyday

speech. Some mystical Jewish sects still insist on Hebrew and play Kabbalistic word games even

with the spaces between letters, but among most Jews, too, the supposedly unchangeable

rituals of antiquity have been abandoned. The spell of the clerical class has been broken. Only in

Islam has there been no reformation, and to this day any vernacular version of the Koran must

still be printed with an Arabic parallel text. This ought to arouse suspicion even in the slowest

mind.

Later Muslim conquests, impressive in their speed and scope and decisiveness, have lent

point to the idea that these Arabic incantations must have had something to them. But if you

allow this cheap earthly victory as a proof, you allow the same to Joshua’s blood-soaked

tribesmen or to the Christian crusaders and conquistadores. There is a further objection. All

religions take care to silence or to execute those who question them (and I choose to regard this

recurrent tendency as a sign of their weakness rather than their strength). It has, however, been

some time since Judaism and Christianity resorted openly to torture and censorship. Not only

did Islam begin by condemning all doubters to eternal fire, but it still claims the right to do so in

almost all of its dominions, and still preaches that these same dominions can and must be

extended by war. There has never been an attempt in any age to challenge or even investigate

the claims of Islam that has not been met with extremely harsh and swift repression.

Provisionally, then, one is entitled to conclude that the apparent unity and confidence of the

faith is a mask for a very deep and probably justifiable insecurity. That there are and always

have been sanguinary feuds between different schools of Islam, resulting in strictly inter-Muslim

accusations of heresy and profanity and in terrible acts of violence, naturally goes without

saying.

I have tried my best with this religion, which is as foreign to me as it is to the many millions

who will always doubt that god entrusted a nonreader (through an intermediary) with the

demanding call to “read.” As I said, I long ago acquired a copy of the Marmaduke Pickthall

translation of the Koran, which has been certified by senior sources in the ulema, or Islamic

religious authority, to be the nearest to an approximate rendition into English. I have been to

innumerable gatherings, from Friday prayers in Tehran to mosques in Damascus and Jerusalem

and Doha and Istanbul and Washington, D.C., and I can attest that “the recitation” in Arabic does

indeed have the apparent power to create bliss and also rage among those who hear it. (I have

also attended prayers in Malaysia and Indonesia and Bosnia where there is resentment, among

non-Arabic-speaking Muslims, at the privilege granted to Arabs and to Arabic, and to Arab

movements and regimes, in a religion that purports to be universal.) I have in my own home

received Sayed Hossein Khomeini, grandson of the ayatollah and a cleric from the holy city of

Qum, and carefully handed him my own copy of the Koran. He kissed it, discussed it at length

and with reverence, and for my instruction wrote in the back-flap the verses which he thought

had disproved his grandfather’s claim to clerical authority in this world, as well as overthrown

his grandfather’s claim to take the life of Salman Rushdie. Who am I to adjudicate in such a

dispute? However, the idea that the identical text can yield different commandments to

different people is quite familiar to me for other reasons. There is no need to overstate thedifficulty of understanding Islam’s alleged profundities. If one comprehends the fallacies of any

“revealed” religion, one comprehends them all.

I have only once, in twenty-five years of often heated arguments in Washington, D.C., been

threatened with actual violence. This was when I was at dinner with some staffers and

supporters of the Clinton White House. One of those present, a then well-known Democratic

pollster and fund-raiser, questioned me about my most recent trip to the Middle East. He

wanted my opinion as to why the Muslims were so “all-fired, god-damn fundamentalist.” I ran

through my repertoire of explanations, adding that it was often forgotten that Islam was a

relatively young faith, and still in the heat of its self-confidence. Not for Muslims the crisis of

self-doubt that had overtaken Western Christianity. I added that, for example, while there was

little or no evidence for the life of Jesus, the figure of the Prophet Muhammad was by contrast a

person in ascertainable history. The man changed color faster than anyone I have ever seen.

After shrieking that Jesus Christ had meant more to more people than I could ever imagine, and

that I was disgusting beyond words for speaking so casually, he drew back his foot and aimed a

kick which only his decency—conceivably his Christianity—prevented him from landing on my

shin. He then ordered his wife to join him in leaving.

I now feel that I owe him an apology, or at least half of one. Although we do know that a

person named Muhammad almost certainly existed within a fairly small bracket of time and

space, we have the same problem as we do in all the precedent cases. The accounts that relate

his deeds and words were assembled many years later and are hopelessly corrupted into

incoherence by self-interest, rumor, and illiteracy.

The tale is familiar enough even if it is new to you. Some Meccans of the seventh century

followed an Abrahamic tradition and even believed that their temple, the Kaaba, had been built

by Abraham. The temple itself—most of its original furnishings having been destroyed by later

fundamentalists, notably the Wahhabis—is said to have become depraved by idolatry.

Muhammad the son of Abdullah became one of those Hunafa who “turned away” to seek solace

elsewhere.

(The book of Isaiah also enjoins true believers to “come out” from the ungodly and be

separate.) Retiring to a desert cave on Mount Hira for the month of heat, or Ramadan, he was

“asleep or in a trance” (I am quoting Pickthall’s commentary) when he heard a voice

commanding him to read. He replied twice that he was unable to read and was thrice

commanded to do so. Eventually asking what he should read, he was further commanded in the

name of a lord who “created man from a clot of blood.” After the Angel Gabriel (who so

identified himself) had told Muhammad that he was to be Allah’s messenger, and had departed,

Muhammad confided in his wife Khadijah. On their return to Mecca she took him to meet her

cousin, an elderly man named Waraqa ibn Naufal, “who knew the Scriptures of the Jews and

Christians.” This whiskered veteran declared that the divine envoy who once visited Moses had

come again to Mount Hira. From then on, Muhammad adopted the modest title of “Slave of

Allah,” the latter word being simply the Arabic for “god.”

The only people who at first took the smallest interest in Muhammad’s claim were the greedy

guardians of the temple at Mecca, who saw it as a threat to their pilgrimage business, and the

studious Jews of Yathrib, a town two hundred miles distant, who had been for some time

proclaiming the advent of the Messiah. The first group became more threatening and the

second more friendly, as a result of which Muhammad made the journey, or hejira, to Yathrib,

which is now known as Medina. The date of the flight counts as the inauguration of the Muslim

era. But as with the arrival of the Nazarene in Jewish Palestine, which began with so many

cheerful heavenly auguries, this was all to end very badly with a realization on the part of the

Arabian Jews that they were faced with yet another disappointment, if not indeed another

impostor.According to Karen Armstrong, one of the most sympathetic—not to say apologetic

analysts of Islam, the Arabs of the time had a wounded feeling that they had been left out of

history. God had appeared to Christians and Jews, “but he had sent the Arabs no prophet and

no scripture in their own language.” Thus, though she does not put it this way, the time for

someone to have a local revelation was long overdue. And, once having had it, Muhammad was

not inclined to let it be criticized as secondhand by adherents of older faiths. The record of his

seventh-century career, like the books of the Old Testament, swiftly becomes an account of

vicious quarrels between a few hundred or sometimes a few thousand unlearned villagers and

townspeople, in which the finger of god was supposed to settle and determine the outcome of

parochial disputes. As with the primeval bloodlettings of the Sinai and Canaan, which are

likewise unattested by any independent evidence, millions of people have been held hostage

ever since by the supposedly providential character of these ugly squabbles.

There is some question as to whether Islam is a separate religion at all. It initially fulfilled a

need among Arabs for a distinctive or special creed, and is forever identified with their language

and their impressive later conquests, which, while not as striking as those of the young

Alexander of Macedonia, certainly conveyed an idea of being backed by a divine will until they

petered out at the fringes of the Balkans and the Mediterranean. But Islam when examined is

not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from

earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require. Thus, far from being “born in the

clear light of history,” as Ernest Renan so generously phrased it, Islam in its origins is just as

shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for

itself, invokes prostrate submission or “surrender” as a maxim to its adherents, and demands

deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing—absolutely nothin

—in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.

The prophet died in the year 632 of our own approximate calendar. The first account of his

life was set down a full hundred and twenty years later by Ibn Ishaq, whose original was lost

and can only be consulted through its reworked form, authored by Ibn Hisham, who died in 834.

Adding to this hearsay and obscurity, there is no agreed-upon account of how the Prophet’s

followers assembled the Koran, or of how his various sayings (some of them written down by

secretaries) became codified. And this familiar problem is further complicated—even more than

in the Christian case—by the matter of succession. Unlike Jesus, who apparently undertook to

return to earth very soon and who ( pace the absurd Dan Brown) left no known descendants,

Muhammad was a general and a politician and—though unlike Alexander of Macedonia a prolific

father—left no instruction as to who was to take up his mantle. Quarrels over the leadership

began almost as soon as he died, and so Islam had its first major schism—between the Sunni

and the Shia—before it had even established itself as a system. We need take no side in the

schism, except to point out that one at least of the schools of interpretation must be quite

mistaken. And the initial identification of Islam with an earthly caliphate, made up of

disputatious contenders for the said mantle, marked it from the very beginning as man-made.

It is said by some Muslim authorities that during the first caliphate of Abu Bakr, immediately

after Muhammad’s death, concern arose that his orally transmitted words might be forgotten.

So many Muslim soldiers had been killed in battle that the number who had the Koran safely

lodged in their memories had become alarmingly small. It was therefore decided to assemble

every living witness, together with “pieces of paper, stones, palm leaves, shoulder-blades, ribs

and bits of leather” on which sayings had been scribbled, and give them to Zaid ibn Thabit, one

of the Prophet’s former secretaries, for an authoritative collation. Once this had been done, the

believers had something like an authorized version.

If true, this would date the Koran to a time fairly close to Muhammad’s own life. But we

swiftly discover that there is no certainty or agreement about the truth of the story. Some saythat it was Ali—the fourth and not the first caliph, and the founder of Shiism—who had the idea.

Many others—the Sunni majority—assert that it was Caliph Uthman, who reigned from 644 to

656, who made the finalized decision. Told by one of his generals that soldiers from different

provinces were fighting over discrepant accounts of the Koran, Uthman ordered Zaid ibn Thabit

to bring together the various texts, unify them, and have them transcribed into one. When this

task was complete, Uthman ordered standard copies to be sent to Kufa, Basra, Damascus, and

elsewhere, with a master copy retained in Medina. Uthman thus played the canonical role that

had been taken, in the standardization and purging and censorship of the Christian Bible, by

Irenaeus and by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. The roll was called, and some texts were

declared sacred and inerrant while others became “apocryphal.” Outdoing Athanasius, Uthman

ordered that all earlier and rival editions be destroyed.

Even supposing this version of events to be correct, which would mean that no chance

existed for scholars ever to determine or even dispute what really happened in Muhammad’s

time, Uthman’s attempt to abolish disagreement was a vain one. The written Arabic language

has two features that make it difficult for an outsider to learn: it uses dots to distinguish

consonants like “b” and “t,” and in its original form it had no sign or symbol for short vowels,

which could be rendered by various dashes or comma-type marks. Vastly different readings

even of Uthman’s version were enabled by these variations. Arabic script itself was not

standardized until the later part of the ninth century, and in the meantime the undotted and

oddly voweled Koran was generating wildly different explanations of itself, as it still does. This

might not matter in the case of the Iliad, but remember that we are supposed to be talking

about the unalterable (and final) word of god. There is obviously a connection between the

sheer feebleness of this claim and the absolutely fanatical certainty with which it is advanced.

To take one instance that can hardly be called negligible, the Arabic words written on the

outside of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are different from any version that appears in the

Koran.

The situation is even more shaky and deplorable when we come to the hadith, or that vast

orally generated secondary literature which supposedly conveys the sayings and actions of

Muhammad, the tale of the Koran’s compilation, and the sayings of “the companions of the

Prophet.” Each hadith, in order to be considered authentic, must be supported in turn by an

isnad, or chain, of supposedly reliable witnesses. Many Muslims allow their attitude to everyday

life to be determined by these anecdotes: regarding dogs as unclean, for example, on the sole

ground that Muhammad is said to have done so. (My own favorite tale goes the other way: the

Prophet is said to have cut off the long sleeve of his garment rather than disturb a cat that was

slumbering on it. Cats in Muslim lands have been generally spared the awful treatment visited

on them by Christians, who have often regarded them as satanic familiars of witches.)

As one might expect, the six authorized collections of hadith, which pile hearsay upon

hearsay through the unwinding of the long spool of isnads (“A told B, who had it from C, who

learned it from D”), were put together centuries after the events they purport to describe. One

of the most famous of the six compilers, Bukhari, died 238 years after the death of Muhammad.

Bukhari is deemed unusually reliable and honest by Muslims, and seems to have deserved his

reputation in that, of the three hundred thousand attestations he accumulated in a lifetime

devoted to the project, he ruled that two hundred thousand of them were entirely valueless and

unsupported. Further exclusion of dubious traditions and questionable isnads reduced his grand

total to ten thousand hadith. You are free to believe, if you so choose, that out of this formless

mass of illiterate and half-remembered witnessing the pious Bukhari, more than two centuries

later, managed to select only the pure and undefiled ones that would bear examination.

Some of these candidates for authenticity might have been easier to sift out than others.

The Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher, to quote a recent study by Reza Aslan, was among thefirst to show that many of the hadith were no more than “verses from the Torah and the

Gospels, bits of Rabbinic sayings, ancient Persian maxims, passages of Greek philosophy, Indian

proverbs, and even an almost word-for-word reproduction of the Lord’s Prayer.” Great chunks

of more or less straight biblical quotation can be found in the hadith, including the parable of

the workers hired at the last moment, and the injunction “Let not thy left hand know what thy

right hand doeth,” the last example meaning that this piece of pointless pseudoprofundity has a

place in two sets of revealed scripture. Aslan notes that by the time of the ninth century, when

Muslim legal scholars were attempting to formulate and codify Islamic law through the process

known as ijtihad, they were obliged to separate many hadith into the following categories: “lies

told for material gain and lies told for ideological advantage.” Quite rightly, Islam effectively

disowns the idea that it is a new faith, let alone a cancellation of the earlier ones, and it uses the

prophecies of the Old Testament and the Gospels of the New like a perpetual crutch or fund, to

be leaned on or drawn upon. In return for this derivative modesty, all it asks is to be accepted as

the absolute and final revelation.

As might be expected, it contains many internal contradictions. It is often cited as saying that

“there is no compulsion in religion,” and as making reassuring noises about those of other faiths

being peoples “of the book” or “followers of an earlier revelation.” The idea of being “tolerated”

by a Muslim is as repulsive to me as the other condescensions whereby Catholic and Protestant

Christians agreed to “tolerate” one another, or extend “toleration” to Jews. The Christian world

was so awful in this respect, and for so long, that many Jews preferred to live under Ottoman

rule and submit to special taxes and other such distinctions. However, the actual Koranic

reference to Islam’s benign tolerance is qualified, because some of these same “peoples” and

“followers” may be “such of them as are bent on evil-doing.” And it takes only a short

acquaintance with the Koran and the hadith to discover other imperatives, such as the following:

Nobody who dies and finds good from Allah (in the hereafter) would wish to come back to

this world even if he were given the whole world and whatever is in it, except the martyr

who, on seeing the superiority of martyrdom, would like to come back to the world and be

killed again.

Or:

God will not forgive those who serve other gods beside Him; but he will forgive whom He

will for other sins. He that serves other gods besides God is guilty of a heinous sin.

I chose the first of these two violent excerpts (from a whole thesaurus of unsavory possible

ones) because it so perfectly negates what Socrates is reported to have said in Plato’s Apology

(to which I am coming). And I chose the second because it is such a patent and abject borrowing

from the “Ten Commandments.”

The likelihood that any of this humanly derived rhetoric is “inerrant,” let alone “final,” is

conclusively disproved not just by its innumerable contradictions and incoherencies but by the

famous episode of the Koran’s alleged “satanic verses,” out of which Salman Rushdie was later

to make a literary project. On this much-discussed occasion, Muhammad was seeking to

conciliate some leading Meccan polytheists and in due course experienced a “revelation” that

allowed them after all to continue worshipping some of the older local deities. It struck him later

that this could not be right and that he must have inadvertently been “channeled” by the devil,

who for some reason had briefly chosen to relax his habit of combating monotheists on their

own ground. (Muhammad believed devoutly not just in the devil himself but in minor desert

devils, or djinns, as well.) It was noticed even by some of his wives that the Prophet was capable

of having a “revelation” that happened to suit his short-term needs, and he was sometimes

teased about it. We are further told—on no authority that need be believed—that when he

experienced revelation in public he would sometimes be gripped by pain and experience loud

ringing in his ears. Beads of sweat would burst out on him, even on the chilliest of days. Someheartless Christian critics have suggested that he was an epileptic (though they fail to notice the

same symptoms in the seizure experienced by Paul on the road to Damascus), but there is no

need for us to speculate in this way. It is enough to rephrase David Hume’s unavoidable

question. Which is more likely—that a man should be used as a transmitter by god to deliver

some already existing revelations, or that he should utter some already existing revelations and

believe himself to be, or claim to be, ordered by god to do so? As for the pains and the noises in

the head, or the sweat, one can only regret the seeming fact that direct communication with

god is not an experience of calm, beauty, and lucidity.

The physical existence of Muhammad, however poorly attested by the hadith, is a source of

both strength and weakness for Islam. It appears to put it squarely in the world, and provides us

with plausible physical descriptions of the man himself, but it also makes the whole story earthy,

material, and gross. We may flinch a little at this mammal’s betrothal to a nine-year-old girl,

and at the keen interest he took in the pleasures of the dining table and the division of the spoils

after his many battles and numerous massacres. Above all—and here is a trap that Christianity

has mostly avoided by awarding its prophet a human body but a nonhuman nature—he was

blessed with numerous descendants and thus placed his religious posterity in a position where it

was hostage to his physical one. Nothing is more human and fallible than the dynastic or

hereditary principle, and Islam has been racked from its birth by squabbles between princelings

and pretenders, all claiming the relevant drop of original blood. If the total of those claiming

descent from the founder was added up, it would probably exceed the number of holy nails and

splinters that went to make up the thousand-foot cross on which, judging by the number of

splinter-shaped relics, Jesus was evidently martyred. As with the lineage of the isnads, a direct

kinship line with the Prophet can be established if one happens to know, and be able to pay, the

right local imam.

In the same way, Muslims still make a certain obeisance to those same “satanic verses,” and

tread the pagan polytheistic path that was laid out long before their Prophet was born. Every

year at the hajj, or annual pilgrimage, one can see them circling the cuboid Kaaba shrine in the

center of Mecca, taking care to do so seven times (“following the direction of the sun around the

earth,” as Karen Armstrong weirdly and no doubt multiculturally puts it) before kissing the black

stone set in the Kaaba’s wall. This probable meteorite, which no doubt impressed the yokels

when it first fell to earth (“the gods must be crazy: no, make that god must be crazy”), is a stop

on the way to other ancient pre-Islamic propitiations, during which pebbles must be hurled

defiantly at a rock that represents the Evil One. Animal sacrifices complete the picture. Like

many but not all of Islam’s principal sites, Mecca is closed to unbelievers, which somewhat

contradicts its claim to universality.

It is often said that Islam differs from other monotheisms in not having had a “reformation.”

This is both correct and incorrect. There are versions of Islam—most notably the Sufi, much

detested by the devout—which are principally spiritual rather than literal and which have taken

on some accretions from other faiths. And, since Islam has avoided the mistake of having an

absolute papacy capable of uttering binding edicts (hence the proliferation of conflicting fatwas

from conflicting authorities) its adherents cannot be told to cease believing what they once held

as dogma. This might be to the good, but the fact remains that Islam’s core claim—to be

unimprovable and final—is at once absurd and unalterable. Its many warring and discrepant

sects, from Ismaili to Ahmadi, all agree on this indissoluble claim.

“Reformation” has meant, for Jews and Christians, a minimal willingness to reconsider holy

writ as if it were (as Salman Rushdie so daringly proposed in his turn) something that can be

subjected to literary and textual scrutiny. The number of possible “Bibles” is now admitted to be

immense, and we know for example that the portentous Christian term “Jehovah” is a

mistranslation of the unuttered spaces between the letters of the Hebrew “Yahweh.” Yet nocomparable project has ever been undertaken in Koranic scholarship. No serious attempt has

been made to catalog the discrepancies between its various editions and manuscripts, and even

the most tentative efforts to do so have been met with almost Inquisitional rage. A critical case

in point is the work of Christoph Luxenburg, The Syriac-Aramaic Version of the Koran, published

in Berlin in the year 2000. Luxenburg coolly proposes that, far from being a monoglot screed,

the Koran is far better understood once it is conceded that many of its words are Syriac

Aramaic rather than Arabic. (His most celebrated example concerns the rewards of a “martyr”

in paradise: when retranslated and redacted the heavenly offering consists of sweet white

raisins rather than virgins.) This is the same language, and the same region, from which much of

Judaism and Christianity emerged: there can be no doubt that unfettered research would result

in the dispelling of much obscurantism. But, at the very point when Islam ought to be joining its

predecessors in subjecting itself to rereadings, there is a “soft” consensus among almost all the

religious that, because of the supposed duty of respect that we owe the faithful, this is the very

time to allow Islam to assert its claims at their own face value. Once again, faith is helping to

choke free inquiry and the emancipating consequences that it might bring.