Abedi’s version of Islam belonged in fiction

As in The Handmaid’s Tale, the Manchester murderer picked and chose the bits of religion that suited him

Last week, a man called Salman Abedi killed 22 people in the name of Allah. Some would call that an indictment of Islam. They’d be wrong. It’s an indictment of man’s ability to invent religious and political fantasies to justify doing what he wants. As a character, Abedi does not belong in the Koran. He belongs in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel about an American dystopia called Gilead is now being broadcast as a TV series on Channel 4. We’re in the future. Environmental catastrophe has left most of the population infertile. A religious cult seizes power. Critics, homosexuals and the barren are persecuted; women whose ovaries still work are given to elite families to act as surrogate mothers. One of these “handmaids” is Offred, once a modern, independent woman, now forced to live as both concubine and nun.

Atwood’s novel is a superb example of literary feminism, and some see this TV show as a comment on Trump and the American religious right. That’s shallow. The idea that conservative Christians want to turn America into a medieval theme park is absurd. It also misreads Gilead, where Christian dogma is spouted incomplete. As one of the regime’s lieutenants electrocutes an insubordinate woman, she says, “Blessed are the meek, dear,” omitting to mention that the meek will inherit the Earth. The Gileadeans thus turn a promise into a threat. Jesus Christ, the man who spoke those words, is never, to my knowledge, mentioned once in Atwood’s book. A Catholic priest is executed for dissent.

So the architects of Gilead don’t follow the Bible, they plunder it. They keep the bits that reflect their prejudices but also, most importantly, their needs. The Handmaid’s Tale is a political fable – the story of what a society under enormous stress will do to save itself. It’s forgotten that the book was dedicated to Perry Miller, Atwood’s mentor at Harvard and the greatest historian of the intellectual life of the Puritans, who tried to assert control over the New World by asserting control over their women. There was a debate in colonial Boston about whether or not women should be forced to wear the veil.

The founders of Gilead, Atwood’s imaginary colony, need babies. So they turn to Genesis 30, where Rachel, the barren wife of Jacob, is so desperate for children that she invites her husband to mate with her servant, Bilhah. The Old Testament is full of the Israelites doing these strange and terrible things: if you tried to create a republic based upon what you read there, you’d create a kind of Hell. Saul is ordered to do the following to the Amalekites: “put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

Compared with that, Mohammed’s companion and first Caliph, Abu Bakr, was a paragon of enlightenment. He gave Muslims an early code of warfare that included mercy towards women, children, the elderly, livestock and even trees – a code that Abedi and other modern fanatics choose to ignore, just as the Gileadeans sidestep Judeo-christian commandments about murder and marriage.

Abedi and Gilead are also united by literalism. Most modern theologians read the books of Genesis or Samuel with a sensitivity for metaphor and context. These things might not have literally happened; even if they did, we must understand the psychological condition of the people involved. Of course, the Old Testament is bloodthirsty: it’s the story of a tribe struggling to survive. Of course, the Koran is about radical submission to God: the culture that Mohammed lived in was cruel and decadent, and his followers felt commanded to fervent resistance. It would be madness to read the Koran and assume that the conditions of 7th-century Arabia are identical to 21st-century Manchester.

But that is what the fanatic does, even as he retains enough intellectual dexterity to pick the pieces of a literal account that serve his desires best and ignore the more sobering truths. How many fanatics have been exposed as pot smokers, drunks or sex addicts? In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred’s new owner invites her to his study, where he plies her with magazines, make-up, booze. He has a psychological need to be both a master and a lover. Gilead gives him the power not only to be an upstanding citizen but also to be a hypocrite.

It’s funny how many religious fanatics want both. Some Christian televangelists have their dodgy bank accounts; the Mujahideen had their pretty dancing boys. Total power begets total freedom for the powerful.

Yes, The Handmaid’s Tale is a feminist novel, but it doesn’t so much denounce religion as inherently misogynist as denounce men for being inherently misogynist. As a man, I could take offence, but I know what we’re really like. Give us an inch and we’ll take a mile. And as a Christian, I am more than aware that a faith I take seriously yet intelligently can be putty in the hands of a demagogue.

The way to prevent future Abedis is not to drive religion from the public sphere but to explore it, interrogate it and raise everybody’s understanding of it – particularly those who believe in Islam without truly understanding what it’s all about.