In a follow-up piece in today’s Guardian Unlimited to his important debate on Islam last week with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ed Husain laments the woeful ignorance about that religion whch he claims is displayed by her and other ex-Muslims and non-Muslims who condemn it in toto on the strength of what he argues are only certain immoderate versions of it.
In Husain's view, these critics of Islam do not appreciate its many moderate traditions whose discovery he says provided him with the Ariadne's thread by which he was able to extricate himself from intolerant Islamism.
Husain contends that, if such blanket condemnation of Islam as theirs is allowed to continue to spread unchallenged, then moderate Muslims may well end up concluding that Osama bin Laden and other Islamists are right that it is a war against Islam on which the west has embarked, not just a war against Islamist terror.
I have considerable sympathy with what Ed Husain here argues and share his concern that ill-informed blanket condemnations of Islam are not the best way in which to encourage moderate but brave Muslims like him to step forward and take on their militant co-religionists.
At the same time, it must be noted that Islam is by no means the only religion to undergo intellectual assault these days from secularist critics. For a long time the west has harboured plenty of secularists bent upon driving all manifestations of faith from the public square, and ultimately from the minds and hearts of all westerners.
Their indiscriminate animosity towards religion is well illustrated by the felt need to which Tony Blair has reportedly confessed while he was in office to conceal or at least downplay his religious faith. He will reportedly be seen saying in next week’s episode of the tv documentary series, ‘The Blair Years’:
‘It’s difficult if you talk about religious faith in our political system You talk about it in our system, and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter.’
Of far greater cause for concern, in my opinion, than blanket condemnations of Islam is the ill-advised religious education syllabus with which the QCA and Ofsted are currently in process of seeking to foist on all schoolchildren in this country, supposedly in the name of promoting diversity and respect for religious minorities.
In reality, what this syllabus does, in seeking to teach something about all the main religions practised in Britain today including secular humanism, is prevent those of its schoolchildren whose only or main exposure to religion is through what they are taught at school from being able to grasp and understand any religion. The result is to produce among them a baneful and uniform deracination in which they are deprived of any grounding in any religion and therefore the wherewithal for genuine and sympathetic rapport with adherents of any form of religious faith, even those which are moderate.
The general secularist assault on religion, especially that being inflicted by our community schools, is the true tragedy of our times. It is liable to inflict on social cohesion in Britain far greater damage than is all its present religious diversity, and than all misguided criticism of Islam. Its true victims are not British Muslims, who by and large receive their religious instruction outside of Britain’s schools. They are rather the vast majority who still consider and call themselves Christian but who have increasingly been deprived, especially by the pitiful form of religious education inflicted on them at school, of the wherewithal to understand and appreciate the faith with which they continue to identify and the potential resources it offers the country for harmonious and cohesive relations among and between all its faith communities.
It is by and large secularists, not any of the country’s religious minorities, who have championed and advocated the country's systematic de-Christianisation in the name of greater community cohesion. Why such de-Christianisation would be a calamity for community cohesion was well explained by T.S.Eliot at the end of World War Two. In a radio broadcast he made to defeated Germany, he observed:
‘The dominant force in creating a common culture … is religion… It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have – until recently – been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance…. If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it…
‘The Western World has its unity in this heritage, in Christianity and in the ancient civilisations of Greece, Rome and Israel, from which, owing to two thousand years of Christianity, we trace our descent…. [T]his unity in the common elements of culture, throughout many centuries, is the true bond between us. No political and economic organisation, however, much goodwill it commands, can supply what this culture unity gives. If we dissipate or throw away our common patrimony of culture, then all the organisation and planning of the most ingenious minds will not help us, or bring us closer together.'
Doubtless, assorted secularists, multi-culturalists and Islamists will take issue with the sentiments here expressed. This is because, for different reasons, they wish to see the end of Europe’s Christian culture. Those who don’t, while being able to sympathise with Ed Husain, will know that the real sacrificial lamb that is currently being lined up for slaughter by this motley crew is not moderate Islam, but another religion whose survival is frankly of far greater importance than it for preserving peace, tolerance and harmony in Europe.
Comments (5)
"Oh please" is not an historical argument. Eliot's--quoted by our author--is. If anything, it is a bit of an understatement. Without Roman Catholicism, there is no West, no civilisation. It mediated--in the Renaissance, rediscovered and disseminated--the best of Greece and Rome and of course was born in antiquity in both worlds, and in that of Judaism. The rest of the West--the Reformation--is a footnote to the Roman Catholic Church. Ahistorical approaches to ethics and morality can never be right.
Posted by Palladio | December 1, 2007 10:21 AM
Posted on December 1, 2007 10:21
Oh please. The notion we need religion to have a shared culture is tosh. I have no problem with Christians because their beliefs circa 2007 are for the most part harmless but please explain WHY we need make-believe entities in order to interact within a set of shared axioms? If you want to understand why civil society has decayed, it has nothing to do with religion (either positively or negatively). It is really down to the nationalisation of charity and culture, i.e. the welfare state, a system which attempts to replace civil interactions with politically derived formulae. The religion angle on social cohesion is a complete canard.
Posted by Perry de Havilland | November 30, 2007 10:55 PM
Posted on November 30, 2007 22:55
Spot on. We hear a lot about Islamphobia. But Christophobia of militant atheists like Hitchens is much more damaging to the social cohesion of British society. I teach a Religious Studies course. Now the course I reach is actually sociology of religion and sets off from a reductionist perspective - not a theological one. None the less, it is amazing to me the reaction of people when, in answer to their questions (never mine), they learn that this is one of the three courses I teach. Firstly, I see plainly by the expression on their faces that their estimation of my intellect plummets. Secondly, they immediately jump in with 'I'm actually an atheist'. Not, you might think, to prevent me attempting to 'convert' them (their existential angst is their own issue, good luck to them). But rather to proceed to prosletyse me with their own deep wisdom on the subject of godlessness. They are the ones with the missionary zeal; my only crime was to answer their question.
There IS censorship. You are not allowed to mention God in any context, not even to say 'God bless you'. Or even, 'Bless you!' (going a bit too far there).
It's the way they are so smarmy and self-righteous; so certain that you are a moron from the dark ages and they have a moral duty to enlighten you with the benefits of 21st century culture. When will they get the message that God belief is not theological but spiritual. It does not derive from existential angst but from existential possibility. You can watch the utter tripe that serves for entertainment in an age of secular mass culture on TV, the opium of the masses, a mind rotting garbage so acerbically foul you can feel it sucking out your brains. Or you can tune in to something much more elevated and contemplative. The choice is yours.
Morality proceeds from moral sentiment. Hume possessed an abundance of moral sentiment and was hurt by the suggestion that he was not a Christian; he was sceptical about miracles, the hereafter and the supernatural, but he accepted the moral inspiration of the faith.
Posted by devorgilla | November 30, 2007 10:09 PM
Posted on November 30, 2007 22:09
Whatever tradition a Muslim belongs to, he or she uses the same koran, semi-sacral lives of the prophet and the same hadith. Along with the schools of jurisprudence a ground-bed of basic beliefs common to all ( if they are to be called Muslims)can be found and these beliefs alone make Islam a rogue elephant among the world's great religions. Any assimilation to infidel ways is rejected and domination alone will suffice. Anything else would be heresy and Islam has a short sticky way of dealing with such a phenomenon. There may be moderate Muslims but there can be no moderate Islam. As for the term 'Islamophobia' it is merely a loaded term devised by Islamists in the 1990's to discredit critics of Islam.
Posted by Anonymous | November 28, 2007 1:45 AM
Posted on November 28, 2007 01:45
Extremely impressive piece, if I may say so. Brave of you to quote Eliot. There are two pieces to the puzzle of Islam which together present, I believe, a paradox the West may have to learn to live with: the first is political and social -- how to assimilate Islam; the second is cultural -- how to avoid it as completely as may be.
The second is obvious to anyone who, like Eliot, knows the West well enough to judge how little Islam has to contribute to it.
Here is David Hume on the moral and ethical implications of the Koran:
'The admirers and followers of the Alcoran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed through that wild and absurd performance. But it is to be supposed, that the Arabic words, which correspond to the English, equity, justice, temperance, meekness, charity were such as, from the constant use of that tongue, must always be taken in a good sense; and it would have argued the greatest ignorance, not of morals, but of language, to have mentioned them with any epithets, besides those of applause and approbation. But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.'
If Hume is right, moderate Islam, whatever that may be, while a relief from Islamo-facism and Islamo-terrorism, still has nothing much to offer true Christians or the West which Christianity created.
Whatever version of Islam forms the hearts and minds of the Arab teenagers outside of Paris who have wounded 77 policemen and destroyed a lot of property these last two days, the West seems so little itself--so blithely unaware of its nature and history--I expect Europe and the U. S. to remain silent, as the French have learned to be , about such riotous and murderous eruptions.
Yes, we are the barbarians now, and we put up with threat, murder, and damage out of the most shameful reasons.
As a Roman Catholic, I see signs of hope in a slowly revitalized rite and faith--the largest in Christendom. But where the true life of faith will flourish most is a question to which I have no answer.
Posted by Palladio | November 27, 2007 3:06 PM
Posted on November 27, 2007 15:06