Mary Beard: a feminist for Islam?

Feminists for Islam are strange creatures. Like Queers for Palestine, they are neither fish nor fowl, though they are often very foul indeed. One can imagine these rare beings, after extinction, being commented on with whispering, quizzical solemnity by some future David Attenborough: ‘And then, when they reached their desired destination… they disappeared.’ Kind of like salmon expiring when they finally reach their happy spawning time – except we’re not allowed to eat Queers for Palestine, rendering them neither use nor ornament.

Feminists for Islam are perhaps even odder, like those weird women who write love letters to serial killers. It’s a parody of a ghastly, abusive romantic relationship – suicidal empathy turned ideology, with a soupçon of exceptionalism: ‘Oh, he’d never hurt me!’ But very few of these strange beasts get to write their love letters over several thousand words in the London Review of Books, where in October 2001, the classics professor turned TV pundit, Dame Mary Beard, wrote of the dreadful events of 9/11 that the US ‘had it coming’. ‘World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price… [for their] refusal to listen to what the “terrorists” have to say.’ She also called what al-Qaeda did an ‘extraordinary act of bravery’.

Two-thousand, nine-hundred and seventy-seven people were murdered on 9/11, including more than 400 first responders (among them 343 firefighters and paramedics) and hundreds of plane passengers. Many more have since died due to illnesses linked to toxic exposure at the site of the Twin Towers. They came from 77 different countries – truly ‘diverse’, as opposed to their 19 killers. Colm Tóibín wrote an excellent letter to the LRB about Beard’s essay:

‘Over the past 25 years in Ireland I have made a point of asking anyone who was at school with members of the IRA, the INLA, the UDA and the UVF what these people were like at the age of 10. All have agreed that each child displayed a nasty early sign of terrorism long before he had a “cause”. Had a cause not come their way, these people would have beaten their dogs or their wives and children, attacked one another at hurling matches or taken out their resentment on a long back garden. Would Mary Beard refer to these actions as “extraordinary acts of bravery”?’

As if it couldn’t get worse, AI tells me that Beard is ‘celebrated for her sharp insights, especially on Roman life, women in history and bringing classical studies into mainstream culture, making her a “national treasure”’. Of course she is. The watchwords of NT-ism are ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ – but the approved views on everything from breakfast to Brexit, penises on women to Palestine, must be held. NTs are the cuddly face of the enemy within, part of the never-ending war against anyone who dares think differently from their betters and wetters. Many are little more than peppy propagandists, there to make us swallow through the medium of sport and entertainment what we have already choked on and vomited up when it was fed to us straight. The UK National Treasure gang can easily embrace a woman who, if she saw her best female friend being ‘done’ by a member of Hamas at one end and a member of Hezbollah at the other, would probably ask the poor woman what she said to provoke them.

Beard is still writing pash-notes to Islam, but in somewhat shorter form these days, posting on X this week: ‘On the question of whether churches should be allowed to become mosques, let’s remember that the Parthenon was originally a “pagan” temple, then was converted into a Christian church, then became a mosque. This kind of conversion is not historically unusual.’

An X-er calling himself Roman Helmet Guy had a good comeback:

‘Hi, I’m Mary Beard. You should be okay with your churches becoming mosques. Why? Because the Turks once violently conquered the Greeks, then converted their churches into mosques. Were the Greeks okay with that? No, millions died to stop it. But you should be. Trust me, I’m a scholar.’

Does Beard really believe that Islam is having an entirely benign effect on British society, even without turning churches into mosques? What does she think about the status of women in Muslim enclaves? Or about ‘family voting’ (Which makes it sound so cosy, like a ‘family-size’ bag of sweets)? The rape gangs? The petulant complaints about and violent attacks on Christian street preachers? The unparalleled violence and intimidation of our tiny Jewish community? Does she have that miraculous ability, like so many of her Lady Muck type, to only take in the information she wants to take in and dismiss opposing views as simply the great unwashed being silly? Or does a tiny part of her understand that Islam conquers by force – and secretly like the idea?

I’ve reached a stage in life when the extraordinary way some people get their kicks rarely surprises me. But if there’s no masochistic kink involved, the naivety Beard displays is extraordinary in one so lengthily and expensively educated.

Even when, in 2012, she was picked on by the ghastly AA Gill, I found it hard to care, though naturally I’d normally stand up for a woman called ‘too ugly for television’ by a puppet-faced monkey-killer. Referring to Channel 4’s The Undateables, in which various disabled and disfigured people sought love, Gill opined that Beard was ‘this far from being the subject of a Channel 4 dating documentary’ and should be ‘kept away from cameras altogether’. But even to this her response was annoying, whining ‘I was a bit hurt’ and ‘I felt stunned, as if someone had punched me’. Such pearl-clutching, from someone who considered that thousands of innocent people murdered by terrorists ‘had it coming’.

I thought I knew every awful thing about Beard, but in the course of writing this, I’ve discovered a new one. In 2018, after it was reported that Oxfam employees had been sexually exploiting impoverished girls and women, Beard tweeted: ‘Of course one can’t condone the (alleged) behaviour of Oxfam staff in Haiti and elsewhere. But I do wonder how hard it must be to sustain “civilised” values in a disaster zone.’ Unsurprisingly, this led many to respond with revulsion. The wimp then posted a photograph of herself crying, complaining that, ‘I find it hard to imagine that anyone out there could possibly think that I am wanting to turn a blind eye to the abuse of women and children’.

‘I actually can’t understand what it would be to be a woman without being a feminist’, this preposterous woman once said, rather incredibly in the light of her apparent sympathy for male violence over the years. Next time you’re tempted to tweet in support of various vile men, Dame Mary, try taking a look in the mirror first. And brush your hair, while you’re at it.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.