I suppose we should welcome the fact that, as reported in today’s Times, the 100,000 Muslim children currently in attendance at madrassas in this country are to be required to receive lessons in citizenship that are designed to encourage them to share ‘British values of justice, peace and respect’.
However, I am not altogether convinced that the means chosen to accomplish this end will be entirely up to the job, desirable though that end undoubtedly is.
According to the news report, the specially designed citizenship curriculum is to ‘highlight Koranic teachings on respect and tolerance, and emphasise the value it places on human life’.
Since the Koran is precisely what forms the inspiration and supplies the intellectual and moral license for today’s jihadis, I am not sure making it the basis for underwriting the liberal values associated with British citizenship is necessarily going to do the job that it is being called upon to do.
Indeed, making the Koran the authoritative basis for securing from young British Muslims their loyalty and commitment to the core values of this country runs the risk of making it easier rather than harder for them to be radicalised by Muslim preachers, teachers and peers, whom they may encounter in local mosque, community centre or on internet chat-rooms, and who can, with a few deft hermeneutic moves, plus appeal to the doctrine of abrogation, find within that very same text all that they need to convince any impressionable young Muslim that what it really calls for is not civility and loyalty to any non-Muslim country in which they may find themselves residing, but jihad.
I am not for one minute suggesting the Koran should not be taught to British Muslim schoolchildren, nor that it should not be drawn on when efforts are made in school to turn Muslim schoolchildren into good British citizens. What I am suggesting is that far more needs to be done than is reportedly being proposed so as to provide them with an appropriate prophylactic against their radicalisation by Muslim extremists bent upon exploiting that text for nefarious ends.
Indeed, so problematic do I find the whole idea of seeking to ground Muslim civic formation here on the Koran that I would like to suggest that perhaps it would be better to subject children receiving education at madrassas here to undertake an entirely different form of citizenship education. This would involve their having to learn about the terrible religious wars of the seventeenth century here, and about how, at that time, Scripture was invoked to support all manner of atrocities, how early Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke finally managed to defuse the politically explosive potential of the Bible by submitting it to a form of literary deconstruction that neutralised its capacity to be used for evil, and about how, as a result, and without at all opposing all or any specific form of revealed religion as such, thinkers such as these were able to demonstrate the religious need for religious freedom and toleration, and where. according to these same thinkers, the political limits of such toleration must also lie.
I would then seek to invite these schoolchildren to try and reflect on what lessons, relevant to our present day political and religious circumstances, might be drawn from this rich episode of British intellectual history.
In addition, if they are to be required to learn about the Holocaust, presently a statutory requirement in history according to the National Curriculum, I would also require that they learn about how Nazi anti-Semitism was manufactured in the cauldron of post-World War I defeated Germany and about how this intellectual and moral poison became exported to the Middle East at the end of World War Two by courtesy of escaping Nazis who settled there and who succeeded in poisoning the minds of the almost the entire region. (See Joel Fishman, 'The Big Lie and the Media War Against Israel: From Inversion of the Truth to Inversion of Reality' Jewish Political Studies Review, vol. 19, nos 1 & 2, Spring 2007)
I would also teach them how alone in Europe at the time Britain stood up to and defeated the Nazi menace and prevented it from succeeding, and how, if it had, Hitler would have out an end to all theistic religions because he regarded them all as harmful nonsense.
Hitler: ‘ The religions are all alike, no matter what they call themselves. They have certainly no future – certainly none for the Germans… The German is serious in everything he undertakes. He wants to be either a Christian or a heathen. He cannot be both… Let us leave the hair-splitting to others. Whether it’s the Old Testament or the New --- it’s all the same old Jewish swindle.…’ (Leo Stein, Hitler Came for Niemoeller: The Nazi War Against Religion, first published 1942, (Gretna, Lousiana: Pelican, 2003), Appendix A: The Voice of Destruction. Appendix A of ‘Hitler on Religion: Excerpt from The Voice of Destruction’ , pp. 242-3. Herman Rauschning, was ‘president of the Danzig senate, an intimate of Hitler’s even before he came to power, … and a frequent guest at the Eagle’s Nest where he heard Hitler makes these remarks.).
Come to think of it, as well as teaching British Muslim schoolchildren all these things as part of their education in and for citizenship here, I would wish to teach these same things to all our non-Muslim schoolchildren -- and to give some badly needed remedial lessons in these matters to not a few of our current political masters, such as Peter Hain, who seem daily ever-more willing and ready to swallow the bait of Islamo-Marxist propaganda that would portray current British Middle East foreign policy as the cause of the present threat the country faces from Islamic terrorism and who vainly hope, by sacrificing Israel as a scapegoat to this Moloch, to gain security for Britain.