Salaam
A comment piece
The Word "Extremism" Does not Mean Anything
The word ’extremism’ does not mean anything. I confess, abjectly, to having used it in the past. But for some years now I have been trying very hard not to do so.
To the extent that it can be said to have any meaning at all, it is ‘opinion not fashionable, not approved of by mainstream at time under discussion’.
Anyone who has been paying attention to the status of various opinions, about morality and politics, over the past 40 years, will easily be able to see that opinions which were ‘extremist’ half a century ago are now in many cases mainstream and almost obligatory, and vice versa. The issue of whether they are correct or not, or just or not, cannot be decided by how modish or unfashionable they happen to be.
So , as you study the fuss about supposedly extremist-dominated schools in Birmingham and elsewhere, please bear that in mind.
The facts about these schools are disputed and hard to pin down. The original ‘Trojan Horse’ letter on which the whole row is founded does seem, by general agreement, to have been a hoax.
Not everyone involved may be telling the whole truth. I am quite prepared to believe some of the more worrying things we have heard about what some children have been taught or told in some of the schools involved. But I am also ready to believe some of the quite impressive declarations of innocence we have also heard.
The real problem we face is that we are still, officially a country which believes in freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, and specifically in freedom of religion. Indeed, I believe these were among the Four Freedoms, so charmingly depicted by Norman Rockwell, which Franklin Roosevelt recognized as the war aims of the allies in the Second World War.
More than that, we are a society which has an established Church, the Christian Church of England, and a country in which the churches, especially the C of E and the Roman Catholics, did much to set up schools for the children of the poor. They did this when the state was more or less uninterested in doing so. Thanks to various treaties between church and state, in which the Churches were in a strong position because of the work they had done, the state conceded large freedoms to the churches, especially the freedom to continue to maintain schools in the state system, which had a religious character and which are allowed to choose many of their pupils on a religious test.
In my view the Church of England were diddled, because the promise they extracted in return for ceding control of many schools, that all state schools would have a ‘broadly Christian’ daily act of worship, and that the national faith would be taught as such in schools, has been comprehensively broken. I use the word ‘comprehensive'deliberately,. The creation of vast new American-style high schools has made it far easier for these obligations to be shelved, forgotten or bureaucratically obstructed .'We just don’t have a hall big enough. We can’t fit it in to the timetable. We don’t have the qualified teachers', etc.
I’d be very interested in a survey of how many non-RC state schools actually deal with the Christianity question. I think it would show that most pupils could get through their school careers without ever encountering anything resembling organized Christianity ,as a living faith.
Now, one of the things I really like about Muslims is that they are not having any of that. They value their faith, they believe in it, and they see it is one of their main duties in life to pass it on, undiluted, to their sons and daughters.
And, since we allow Christians to have state schools, and since we have freedom of conscience, how exactly are we to deny them the freedom to do so, now that there are so many Muslim parents and children living in our country?
I simply cannot see how, without conscious, gross and blatant injustice, this could be done.
Now, the neo-conservatives who get into the most frenzied state of mind about alleged ‘extremism’ in schools are also keen supporters of the ‘open border’ and ‘free movement of labour’ policies which have led to the establishment in this and many other European countries of large and thriving Muslim communities.
Such policies are an essential part of their belief in global free trade and the downgrading of national sovereignty to a vestige, which all their policies and actions support.
This is an odd contradiction, far too seldom challenged.
The fact is that most religious views, examined coldly by those who don’t believe in them, can be portrayed as ‘extreme’. (There's a fine illustration of this in George Macdonald Fraser’s ‘Flashman at the Charge’, in which Flashman, posing as a Sepoy, listens to a Sepoy sergeant’s incredulous, scornful translation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, one of the most beautiful stories in Christian scripture but here portrayed as a description of a more or less mad person).
I wonder how many of the firm beliefs of many of my more Calvinist or Romish friends, described in cold and unsympathetic prose, or even some of the sentiments in some quite popular hymns, could be made to seem like sinister and cultish absurdities, from which the young should be protected, with a little propaganda skill. Western atheists who bother to read Christian scripture are quite good at this sort of thing.
What also makes me pause before condemning too vigorously is that many of the Islamic opinions about or drunkenness and general sexual abandon, about which we purse our lips in horror, are more or less exactly what the average Anglican parson, Methodist minister or Roman Catholic priest would have felt (and said openly) in this country before 1914, and in some cases a good deal more recently than that.
Women in Europe and the Americas, who since the 1920s have dressed in ways that would have profoundly shocked all previous generations are amazingly unaware (as they trip merrily around the Muslim world) of how viscerally shocking their appearance and behaviour is to both men and women.
It is hard to think of any way of illustrating this, though perhaps if we started getting high-value tourism from alien planets (so high-value that we preferred not to turn it away) , whose female inhabitants wore nothing at all, or dressed as if for pornographic films, and engaged in adventurously unconventional sex in the streets and squares, we might be as shocked as much of the Arab and Muslim world is by our behaviour. We would, as they do, put up with it and pretend not to notice, but I suspect there might be moments of deep misunderstanding, even so. There would also be resentment.
These are the problems of multiculturalism, which encourages the creation of large solitudes next door to each other, of people who don’t necessarily want to integrate with each other, see no good reason to do so and often see several good reasons not to. It’s a tribute to the basic tolerance, patience and good nature of so many of those involved that we have got into such a mess, in our crowded cities, with so few open clashes.
Now, there is a special difficulty between Islam and Christianity. Islam believes that it is the final revelation, and that it has rendered previous Abrahamic religions obsolete. Christianity it is true, takes the same view of Judaism, or did so, but has now reined itself in. The old C of E Collect for Good Friday, which prayed for the conversion of ‘Jews, Turks, infidels and hereticks ’ has been quietly retired , and Pope John Paul II put a stop to similar trends in the RC Church, both by his personal diplomacy, transparently friendly to Jews and Judaism, and by movingly referring to the Jews as ‘the elder brothers of our faith’.
Islam, it seems to me, hasn’t made this adaptation and shows little sign of doing so. Suggestions that children were urged to join in chants against Christmas are perhaps the most disturbing of the claims (and I stress these are claims) about Muslim schools which have been made. It is hard to think of any Christian school, however fervent, asking it children to take part in chants dismissing Eid or Ramadan.
On the other hand, it’s no rumour that my late brother (though he allowed a plastic Christmas tree in his home) had a strong dislike of the feast, liked to sing Tom Lehrer’s mordant song about Christmas ( ‘… Drag out the Dickens, Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens, deck the halls with hunks of holly, disapproval would be folly, Brother! Here we go again! Etc etc) to anyone who would listen, and this is recorded and available on Youtube, as far as I know.
Of course the real worry is that ’extremist’ Islamist teaching will produce graduates of these schools who put into severe practice the idea that they are taught.
I know of no way of predicting this. What we know of many who have taken to real terror is that they have been initially poor adherents of the Muslim faith, often hanging around in delinquent groups, before having some sort of late revelation and suddenly turning into zealots; or that they have been disarmingly normal schoolboys, regarded as such by all who knew them, who have later rather inexplicably turned to plots and bombs. And also in some cases that they have overthrown their reason with cannabis, as I believe may well have been the case with the killers of Lee Rigby.
Anyway, English law’s quite simple, or was, and ought to be again. You’re punished for what you do, not for what you might do, or for what you think about doing, or even for what you talk about. I think that’s reasonable, because the gap between idle chatter and action is a very large one, and if people talk openly then we will have much more warning that things are brewing than if they don’t. You can’t prevent all terror, by any amount of laws, however stringent. I suspect that if you do want to detect its gestation, then freedom of speech and a willingness to tolerate ‘extremist’ political groups will make it easier to do so.
Incitement to violence is a crime, as it ought to be. But on the bogeyman pretext of terrorism, terrorism which is far more effective than it otherwise would be because both politicians and journalists so readily react and over-react to it, we have begun to whittle away such sensible rules.
The Blair creature, back in 2006, insisted on shoving a provision against ‘glorifying’ terrorism (which sounds like something out of the old USSR penal code) in to his Terrorism Act, though wise heads in the House of Lords, seeing the possible difficulties of such a law in a free country, had thrown it out by a large majority. A pity, in my view.
But in general, it seems to me that you can’t, in a free country, welcome large numbers of adherents of a certain religion, and then get alarmed and panicky because members of that religion preach doctrines which, they genuinely believe flow from their faith. Actions are one thing. Expressions of opinion are quite another. Islam's view of the world is not new to us. We encountered it in the Crusades, in our own empire, especially in India and the Middle East, in our dealings with the Ottomans. Now it is here, and in some strength. We are going to have to get used to it.
For me, as a Christian who prefers Christianity to Islam, though I necessarily find much to admire in Islam's adherents (especially an undoubted love for God, and a great deal of serious devotion, a good deal of personal and moral courage, not to mention charity) I am concerned that our approach is so secular, that we seem to think that our expensive weapons, our consumer goods and our technology make it unnecessary for us to offer any other arguments on our own behalf.
If only we would be more Christian ourselves, I think we would get on better, and we would also have more persuasive power, not perhaps to convert, but to bring about a coexistence in which Muslims more often recognized the virtues in our faith, and we recognized virtues in theirs, and both sought to emulate the best in the other.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/