Martin Amis is No Racist

In his G2 cover story on Monday, Ronan Bennett was wrong to condemn Martin Amis for his comments about Islam, argues Christopher Hitchens

Wednesday November 21, 2007
The Guardian

Ronan Bennett's clumsy tirade against Martin Amis in G2 on Monday will not have been a complete waste of space if it allows us to revisit the words "discriminate" or "discrimination". In a public quarrel that originated between two professors of English (Amis and Terry Eagleton) it ought not to be necessary to remind people that these terms are, at root, complimentary. To have a discriminating palate, for example, is to enjoy good taste. I have argued for years that the concept is absurd when applied to racists. "Discrimination" is something that they just can't manage. Indeed, it is the very thing of all things that they cannot, by definition, manage. A racist is a racist precisely because he can't distinguish between a Jew and another Jew, or an Asian or West Indian or Chechen. The "out" groups are all made up of generalised amalgams and there can be no exceptions.

Thus to accuse Martin Amis of being a racist is to say that he can't tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another. Now, a moment's thought on the part of his worst enemy would reveal that accusation to be silly and vicious, and baseless on its face. I am not writing as Amis's worst enemy. In fact, I am writing as a friend who also took issue with what he said, in unscripted conversation with a Times reporter, a short while after the ghastly assault by Muslim fanatics on our public transport system. (By the way, yes, I do think that the word "fanatic" requires that prefix in this case.) I wrote my article last autumn and it was published in the Manhattan City Journal last January, so Mr Bennett need not congratulate himself so warmly on being the only one apart from Eagleton with the nerve to raise the issue.

I grouped what Amis had said with two other statements that had been made by people I know less well. Jack Straw, a humane old social democrat from way back and a stern foe of racism, had said that he preferred his female constituents to be unveiled when they came to see him. Sam Harris, a Jewish warrior against theocracy and bigotry of all stripes, had written that it was often fascists who made the most sense when talking about immigration to Europe. The last statement had truly shocked me in the way that the Amis and Straw remarks had not, and I was therefore writing about the way in which the battle over Islamism was making good people wonder aloud about saying or thinking unpleasant or ungenerous things.

This is exactly the bull that Amis was taking by the horns. You don't have to know him, or for that matter to be an expert on Jonathan Swift, to see that the harshness Amis was canvassing was not in the least a recommendation, but rather an experiment in the limits of permissible thought. As he once wrote in another connection: "What am I to do with thoughts like these?" In that celebrated essay, he was rehearsing the idea of killing his wife and children to spare them the horror of a nuclear groundburst. Critics as literal-minded as Eagleton and Bennett would no doubt detect, in this, a buried and lurid fantasy of murder and infanticide. (By the way, when it comes to Eagletonian literal-mindedness, I have no bitterness because I am, of this infinite resource, an unintended beneficiary. In the same essay that initially attacked Amis, Eagleton also slammed me for disappointing him and not, after all, becoming the George Orwell of my generation. I have instead, he snorts, become the Evelyn Waugh! How is one to come to grips with a man so crude in his sneers that his idea of an insult is to compare me to one of the greatest novelists of the past century?)

Failing entirely to "discriminate", Bennett places criticism of Islamism on all fours with anti-semitism, hostility to the Irish, and to other xenophobic moments in our past. And yes, of course, we remember those bombs that the Jewish refugees from Russian czarism placed in our streets. We remember how (before they became good old assimilated types) they ululated praise for suicide from their synagogues, demanded the segregation of the sexes, insisted on special prayer-rooms at work, exemptions from certain laws and on the censorship of newspapers that didn't "respect" Judaism. One would have to have a capacity for fantasy of something like that order to believe in the Ronan Bennett universe of modern persecution where "those who point to the illegality of Israeli occupation are anti-semites. Those who protest against the war in Iraq are al-Qaida sympathisers and moral relativists." In which known world is that happening?

On the other hand, the world where honour killings and forced marriages happen is real, and so is the world in which mosques are distributing cassettes and DVDs calling for the murder of Jews and Hindus. (So much for precious multiculturalism.) The world where one holy book is sovereign, and only to be understood as written in one exclusive tongue. The world where djinns and devils are real, and where women are unclean and homosexuals are unspeakable, where novelists can be sentenced to death and where bombs can be left to slaughter the sort of "slags" who might go clubbing in London. And the damage that those bombs were designed to inflict was ... indiscriminate.

This is not the only manner in which Bennett gives himself away. He refers to the "Muslim dead from Iraq to Afghanistan" and conscripts them for what he imagines is his side. How dare he? Has he even begun to tot up the number of Muslims murdered by the Taliban? Or the total slaughtered in Iraq since al-Qaida began its campaign to level the Shi'a mosques? Does he think that the forces of the Northern Alliance, or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, who fight on "our" side against barbarism, are somehow inauthentic Muslims because they prefer Bush and Blair to Mullah Omar or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Something in his tone makes me suspect that this may well be his problem, just as I might have preferred him to mention that it was also the Provisional IRA, and not just the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, that left "the Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation".

Bennett may have the ghost of a point when he insists on a sharper distinction between Islam and "Islamism" but if he wants more discrimination here he must learn not to muddy the same waters himself. Does he think Muslims are a "race", or not, and if not, how can he trade down from the already vague and dubious word "Islamophobia" to the toxic accusation of "racism" itself?

I have criticised both Mark Steyn and Oriana Fallaci for writing too obsessively about demography when it comes to Muslim immigration. But whenever I criticise any reactionary religious practice, I am at once accused myself of "insulting a billion Muslims". And it's not hard to find Islamist websites that boast of a demographic conquest to come, for the votaries of the prophet. So, which is it to be? Who is supposed to dissociate what, and from whom? This is going to take all our cultural and political intelligence and, indeed, our "sensitivity". But I'm afraid the faithful will have to get used to the idea that I, too, can be "offended" and that I, too, have deep and unalterable convictions. And it is much worse than pointless, in the face of genuine worry about the spread of real bigotry and awful violence, to try to pin the accusation of prejudice on those who are honestly attempting to ventilate the question, and to clarify it.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of God is not Great: the Case Against Religion.

Amis launches scathing response to accusations of Islamophobia

The Independent

12th October 2007

Martin Amis defended himself yesterday against allegations of Islamophobia, insisting it was necessary to "build all the bridges we can" with moderate Muslims, who he said constituted the majority within the faith.

Outlining his views in a letter to The Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who on Monday wrote in an article that the author was "with the beasts" when it came to dealing with Islam, Amis denied the accusations, insisting the remarks from which she had drawn her conclusions had been "distorted" in an article written by his colleague Professor Terry Eagleton.

"It is a dull business, correcting Eagleton's distortions, but this is the work he is obliging me to do," wrote Amis in the letter, published below in full.

"The anti-Muslim measures he says I 'advocated' I merely adumbrated, not 'in an essay' ('he wrote', 'wrote Amis'– each of these is a little lie), but in a long interview with the press."

In the interview, Amis said: "The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children..."

The remarks, originally published in August 2006, resurfaced this month when Eagleton, professor of English literature at Manchester University, where Amis has recently accepted a position teaching creative writing, used the interview as the basis for an article attacking Amis's alleged argument as a means of "hounding and humiliating [Muslims] as a whole [so] they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man's law". Eagleton, one of Britain's leading Marxist academics, concluded: "There seems something mildly defective about his logic."

The academic's disdain for Amis and his ideas had an earlier airing in a new introduction to his book Ideology: An Introduction in which he described the writer's father, Kingsley, as a "racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals" – adding :"Amis fils has clearly learnt more from him than how to turn a shapely phrase."

Amis's decision yesterday to write to Alibhai-Brown follows her intervention in the bitter academic spat in her weekly column. Under the headline "Expel the Muslim fanatics who want conflict", Alibhai-Brown recalled sharing a drink with the writer at last year's Cheltenham Festival – when, she said, on the face of it they should have agreed on ways of tackling Islamic terrorism in the UK. "He has pitched himself against demonic Muslims and is at war with them too," she wrote.

However, Alibhai-Brown said, having read the remarks quoted in Eagleton's essay, farfrom occupying common ground on the issue, Amis was "with the beasts" when it came to dealing with Islam, with "the Muslim-baiters and haters, these days as likely to come from the Groucho and Garrick clubs as the nasty, secret venues used by neo-fascists." She said Amis was "another kind of threat to society".

THE LETTER...

Dear Yasmin,

Yes, I remember those drinks we had at the Cheltenham Festival last year – just the four of us, you and Mr Brown, me and Ms Fonseca. (You enjoyed a Ribena, as I recall, while I addressed myself to a powerful scotch.) That night you revealed, inter alia, that you were Shia; and, as far as I understand it, the Shia minority speaks for the more dreamy and poetic face of Islam, the more lax and capacious (tolerant, for example, of representations of the human form), the more spiritual (in the general sense of that word), as opposed to the Sunnis, whose approach is known to be stricter and more legalistic. Your Shia identity endeared you to me, and made me feel protective, because Islamism, in most of its manifestations, not only wants to kill me – it wants to kill you.

When you write that I am "with the beasts" on Islamic questions, it is because you've been listening, rather dreamily perhaps, to Professor Terry Eagleton. Now Eagleton, Yasmin, has a chair at Manchester University, where I have recently taken up an enjoyable post, and he is a man of a redundant but familiar type: an ideological relict, unable to get out of bed in the morning without the dual guidance of God and Karl Marx. More remarkably, he combines a cruising hostility with an almost neurotic indifference to truth; on the matter of checking his facts, he is, to be frank, an embarrassment to the academic profession. But his human need is simple enough: he wants attention to be paid to his self-righteousness – righteousness being his particular brand of vanity.

It is a dull business, correcting Eagleton's distortions, but this is the work he is obliging me to do. The anti-Muslim measures he says I "advocated" I merely adumbrated, not "in an essay" ("he wrote", "wrote Amis" – each of these is an untruth), but in a long interview with the press. It was a thought experiment, or a mood experiment, and the remarks were preceded by the following: "There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say... [etc, etc]." I felt that urge, for a day or two. My mood, I admit, was bleak – how I longed, Yasmin, for your soothing hand on my brow! It was, in its way, one of the bitterest moments, one of the moments of wormwood, in the strange tale that began five years earlier, in September 2001.

The press interview took place in the immediate aftermath of the foiled plot (August 2006) to obliterate 10 commercial jets with explosives put together in transit. Which would have resulted in the deaths of another 3,000 random Westerners, the majority of them women and children (these were summer flights across the North Atlantic). Human beings, born of women, caressed such thoughts in their minds.

There were two additional depressants. At least one of the alleged would-be mass murderers had taken the trouble to convert to Islam, suggesting that the exterminatory virus was about to mutate, like bird flu. And I'm sure you remember, Yasmin, that passengers on this route were suddenly forbidden to take books on the eight-hour flight – a resonant symbolic victory for the forces of ignorance, humourlessness, literalism, boredom and misery.

Anyway, the mood, the retaliatory "urge" soon evaporated, and I went back to feeling that we must, of course, build all the bridges we can between ourselves and the Muslim majority, which we know to be moderate. Moderate, and mute. The quietism is perhaps no mystery. In 15th-century Spain, not many people, I imagine, were proclaiming that the Inquisition had gone too far. The extremists, for now, have the monopoly of violence, intimidation, and self-righteousness. Meanwhile, I don't want to stripsearch you, Yasmin, or do anything else that would trouble or even momentarily surprise your dignity, or that of any other eirenic Muslim.

People like Eagleton are the nearest thing we have to the "iron mullahs": he is, in other words, a deluded flailer and stirrer. He recently did a similar job on my old mucker Sir Salman Rushdie; and the rigged-up spat ended with a helpless apology from Manchester. I don't know, or can't remember, how you felt about the knighthood. My father (also lazily and cornily defamed by Eagleton) said of his KBE: "It's not too little, but it is too late." An anachronistic award, perhaps – though one fully deserved by the author of the triumphant Shalimar the Clown. The "storm" that followed the announcement was unforeseen by everybody, including the Fourth Estate (which then hollered on about how "inevitable" it was). You see, time had advanced, in the West, since 1989. Time moves more slowly in Iran and Pakistan. As I don't need to tell you, Yasmin, there is something the matter with the Islamic clock.

You wrong your own intelligence when you write that atheism is another form of fanaticism. This notion is a philosophical non-starter. Adherence, however "moderate", to a holy book that recommends (for instance) the murder of apostates and the beating of women (on suspicion of disobedience) carries certain consequences. Whereas nothing follows from atheism. With atheism, there is no what-next.

I am off to Cheltenham tomorrow afternoon. And I hope to see you at the bar. With all best wishes to you and your husband,

Martin

The Agony of a 21st Century Muslim

"Islam is a religion that devours all that is most humane and open-minded." How has this happened? Ziauddin Sardar on the delusion and intolerance of his fellow believers. Ziauddin Sardar New Statesman Monday 17th February 2003

Islam Explained. Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated by Franklin Philip The New Press, 120pp, £9.95.

The Prophet Muhammad: a biography. Barnaby Rogerson Little, Brown, 240pp, £14.99

Believing Women in Islam: unreading patriarchal interpretations of the Koran. Asma Barlas University of Texas Press, 272pp, £16.95 pbk

It is not easy to be a Muslim. Believers like me live on the edge, constantly having to justify our very existence. As the French Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun discovered, the situation became infinitely worse after the events of 11 September 2001. Having watched the spectacle unfold on television, his daughter declared that she did not want to be a Muslim: "Muslims are bad; they killed a lot of people." The loving father explained that the attacks on America were the work of "fanatics" and "crazy people". They did not represent Islam.

But what is Islam, the children ask. So Ben Jelloun here sets out to explain Islam to his children. "Once upon a time, very, very long ago," he begins, "a little boy was born in Mecca." He traces the life of the Prophet Muhammad, describing the tenets of Islam in a simple, graceful style. Adults often assume that children are incapable of grasping the complexity of life, an assumption that has led Ben Jelloun to keep things simple. In doing so, he evades the biggest problem of all, which is the self-delusion that we Muslims have turned into a fine art, the reality that much of the agony of being a Muslim in the 21st century is self-inflicted. Ben Jelloun's simplistic but compassionate interpretation of Islam is far removed from the Islam of the Taliban or the Revolutionary Guards in Iran. It is the Islam conventionally invoked by the liberal defenders of the faith, who believe that, as Muslims, it is their duty to present a more humane, tolerant Islam.

In truth, while humane representations of Islam ease our conscience, they do little to address the problems within Islam itself. The problem with all varieties of Islam as it is practised today, not as it is envisaged by liberals, is that it has lost its humanity. Our religion has become a monster that devours all that is most humane and open-minded. Instead of retreating to an imagined liberal utopia, we Muslims need to ask some tough questions about our faith. What, for example, makes so many pious Muslims such nasty and intolerant individuals? Why is it that every time a country enforces the shariah, the so-called Islamic law, it retreats into medieval barbarity? Why do Muslims still insist on treating women as though they were an inferior race, sent to earth only to deprave and spread corruption? Not surprisingly, Ben Jelloun's children do not ask such questions. And the answers will not bring much comfort for any kind of Muslim, child or adult, liberal or otherwise.

It is easy to dismiss the followers of all the non-liberal verities of Islam as fanatics and fundamentalists. It is much harder and much more painful to see them as a natural product of what contemporary Islam has become. Their paranoia is located within Islam. All Muslims, no matter how liberal they perceive themselves to be, are in danger of becoming infected. For, at the very heart of Islam, there are four category mistakes of catastrophic proportions. (By which I mean, Muslims have elevated what is clearly human to the category of the divine.) These have transformed Islam into an authoritarian creed.

Ben Jelloun alludes to the first without realising what he is saying. "The Muslims owe their Prophet Muhammad, God's messenger, their worship and love," he tells the little girl. In this unconscious slip, Ben Jelloun reveals how Muslims perceive the Prophet. He equates the Prophet with God, for in Islam only God can be worshipped. The Koran insists, and the Prophet himself emphasised, that Muhammad was only a man. What made him human was that he could make mistakes and he was a product of his own time. But in reality, Muslims have fetishised the Prophet so much that all his human qualities have evaporated; his time and context have been transformed into eternal time.

The measure of piety for Muslims is thus how closely one imitates the Prophet's physical appearance: his beard, his clothes, the way he walked and brushed his teeth. Even the way the Prophet came to be described, his human qualities, his character, his struggles to shape a humane and just society in his particular epoch, was underplayed at the expense of superhuman attributes, such as his victories in battles against tremendous odds.

All biographies of the Prophet, from the earliest, written by Ibn Ishaq in the early eighth century, to those produced today, follow a standard formula. The story is told chronologically. We move from one battle to the next until we reach the conquest of Mecca and the death of the Prophet himself. But this is absurd; the battles of the Prophet occupied less than a month of the 63 years of his life on earth. The two most celebrated confrontations, the Battles of Badr (624) and Uhud (625), were over within a day. The other main conflict, the Battle of Trenches, never took place. And apart from one minor skirmish, no one fought during the conquest of Mecca. The Prophet simply entered the city with a large army, declared a general amnesty and forgave all his bitter enemies. Yet the standard biographies of the Prophet contain little other than fighting and conflict.

This is largely why Muslims cannot relate to the Prophet as a man struggling to do the right thing in exceptionally difficult circumstances. Instead, they relate to an abstract construction; they aim to imitate an impossible person devoid of all human attributes and virtues. In the words of the celebrated Muslim philosopher and poet Mohammad Iqbal, they want to be "superman", or a Momin, the technical term for the perfect Muslim. The quest for this status, the absolute imitation of the Prophet in every eighth-century detail, then becomes a pathological end in itself. And all forms of violence and oppression are justified to achieve the end in the name of the Prophet.

The genius of the Prophet, as Barnaby Rogerson notes, was "to transform his own religious experience, which was by its very nature highly individual, and create from it something of relevance to a whole society". It is the relevance of the Prophet's example, the spirit, the ethics, the morality that shaped his outlook and behaviour that Muslims have discarded in favour of fetishising his personality and his times.

Rogerson aims to capture the spiritual and moral framework that guided the actions of the Prophet. It is an indication of the importance of his book that the Battles of Badr and Uhud are hardly mentioned. Rogerson concentrates on the Prophet's character, and the texture of the period in which he lived. We can almost smell and feel the Arabia of the seventh century. The end product is more than enchanting: it is a closer representation of what Muslims really should be emulating.

The second category mistake concerns the shariah. Ben Jelloun tells his children that the shariah is not obligatory. The liberals can ignore it. But Asma Barlas has no such illusions. Women living in "Islamic states" do not have such luxuries. Most Muslims consider the shariah to be divine. Yet as Barlas shows, in reality there is hardly anything in the shariah that is based on the Koran and hence can be taken as divine. The Koran has remarkably few rules and regulations. Most of the Holy Book is devoted to elaborating the attributes of God and the virtues of reason. So where does the shariah come from?

The bulk of the shariah consists of the legal opinion of classical jurists. It was formulated in the Abbasid period, when Muslim history was in its expansionist phase. It incorporates the logic of Muslim imperialism of the eighth and ninth centuries. Hence the black-and-white division of the world into "the abode of Islam" and "the abode of war", the ruling on apostasy which, contrary to the unequivocal declaration of the Koran that "there is no compulsion in religion", equates apostasy with treason against the state. Or the dictate that says non-Muslims should be humiliated and cannot give evidence in a Muslim court.

It was largely men who formulated the shariah, says Barlas - good men, but firmly rooted in their time. It is not surprising that they were misogynistic. The shariah treats women and men unequally, particularly when it comes to criminal justice. By treating the testimony of women with what Barlas calls the "two-for-one formula", the shariah promotes the view, contrary to everything that the Koran teaches, that a woman is only half a man. Being a product of male perceptions, the shariah cannot distinguish between adultery, fornication and rape. As a result, victims of rape and sexual abuse can find themselves charged with a crime and sentenced to being stoned to death, an aberrant law, because the Koran does not sanction stoning to death for any crime whatsoever. Even though the Koran gives women's testimonies privilege over men's in the case of sexual offences, the shariah chooses to ignore them.

What this means in reality is that when Muslim countries apply or impose the shariah, the demand of Muslims from Algeria through Pakistan to Nigeria, the contradictions that were inherent in the formulation and evolution of this jurisprudence come to the fore. The shariah's obsession with extreme punishment generates extreme societies. That is why, wherever the shariah is imposed, Muslim societies acquire a medieval feel. We can see that in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. But this is what even the moderate elements of the Islamic movement want. The alliance of Islamic parties that took over Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province recently may describe itself as "modernist", but it is still ready to lock up women, flog thieves and stone adulterers in the name of divine justice.

The reason Muslims are so reluctant to reform the shariah, Barlas tells us in her brave and penetrating book, is that it underwrites male privilege. But it does something more: it keeps the interpretation of Islam firmly in the hands of a select group of bearded obscurantists. The Koran declares unequivocally that no one has any special privilege of interpretation. As a book of guidance, it is open to all. But Muslims have created a whole elite class of individuals who are the only ones with the right to interpret the Koran. In Shia Iran, they go under the obnoxious rubric of "clergy"; in the other, Sunni Muslim communities, they use the term "ulama", or religious scholars. The repulsive notion that only the ulama and the clergy can interpret the Koran is the third category mistake.

The individual Muslim is thus denied agency. If the shariah is a given, and only a select few can reinterpret the Koran, then most believers have nothing to do except follow what we are told. Believers thus become passive receivers rather than active seekers of truth: that is why they can tolerate such injustice and inhumanity while imagining they are carving some piece of paradise for themselves. Even the liberals have to defer to the superior knowledge of the guardians of the faith for explanation of this or that verse of the Koran. The pressing ethical questions of contemporary science on issues such as human cloning and genetic engineering can be addressed only by the ulama, who, by and large, know nothing of science or contemporary society. Oppressed women have to turn to their religious oppressors for justice. The authoritarianism that has become so intrinsic to Islam is reflected in Muslim societies themselves. How can Muslims introduce democracy to their societies when there is no democracy within their religion?

And so, to the final category mistake. Everything about Islam, we Muslims believe, is eternal. Everything that the Prophet did is eternal. The shariah is eternal. The right of the ulama to reinterpret the Koran is eternal. Indeed, Islam itself is eternal. Thus, all human problems have been solved for all time. The most common slogan among Muslims of all varieties, in every part of the world, is that "Islam has all the answers". This from a people who have forgotten how to ask questions!

What remains constant in Islam is the text of the Koran itself, its concepts providing the ethical anchor for ever-changing interpretations. Everything else is subject to change, including the reinterpretations of the Koran and life of the Prophet Muhammad. As far as the shariah is concerned, it neither works as law nor contains much that any sensible person can recognise as ethics. If the original formulators of the shariah were to visit the 21st century, they would be appalled at the injustices their opinions are propagating.

Islam cannot survive as a static faith, buried in history. It was always meant to be a dynamic world-view, adjusting to change. In reality, the shariah is nothing more than a set of principles, a framework of values that provide Muslim societies with guidance. But these sets of principles and values are not givens; they are vigorously derived from within changing contexts. As such, the shariah is a problem-solving methodology rather than law. It requires individual believers and societies to exert themselves and to reinterpret the Koran and the life of the Prophet Muhammad.

If Ben Jelloun was really interested in explaining Islam to his children, he would have addressed the problems intrinsic to how Muslims perceive their faith. For it is his children, and mine, who will inherit the inhumanity of so much that goes under the rubric of Islam today.

Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures: a Ziauddin Sardar Reader, edited by Sohail Inayatullah and Gail Boxwell, will be published on 15 March (Pluto Press, £14.99)

Howard Jacobson on Multiculturalism

TV Interview by Clive James

Howard Jackobson on Multiculturalism, Class and more.

Howard Jacobson is one of the most fearless commentators of our time. Shocking and subversively funny, he has a permanently fresh knack for breaking taboos like stale biscuits. In his novels and newspaper columns he is famous for his provocative eloquence, but the surprise is that he talks that way in real life, with an unmatched capacity to put a complex point of view in a string of elegantly formed declarative sentences. Talking in the library, he faces the hard questions about what it means to be Jewish in a purportedly multicultural Britain and in a world put out of joint by the turmoil in the Middle East.

Clive James

Australia: The Wizard of Oz

John Howard: The wizard of Oz
by Melanie Phillips

2 August 2006

To British eyes, John Howard would seem as unlikely as a bicycling banana — the phenomenon of an apparently unbeatable conservative election-winning machine.

Because the hugely popular Australian Prime Minister carries all before him, the Labour Opposition appears to be nowhere. Touring areas of North Queensland devastated by a cyclone last spring, Mr Howard was swamped by enthusiastic schoolchildren, mobbed by crowds and given a standing ovation at a public meeting.

Eat your heart out, David Cameron. While Britain’s Tory leader pursues his daring attempt to regain power after three consecutive General Election defeats by junking vast swathes of Conservative baggage, John Howard has emerged as the most successful conservative politician of modern times. And he has done so by embodying the very opposite of the image-obsessed, soundbiteladen gimmickry that now drives British politics.

For Mr Howard is the very personification of dullness. He could easily pass for an elderly country solicitor, with neither a designer trainer nor an iPod to be seen anywhere near his conventionally suited person. Not only that, but he is also a political retread, having been dumped as his party leader in 1989 before returning to the top job six years later. Yet now he is an electoral force of nature.

So how has he done it? And what lessons are there for our own Conservative Party?
In short, Mr Howard embodies the characteristics of true leadership — and these have little to do with charisma, with which it is often confused. With a record punctuated by fierce controversy, he is nevertheless trusted and admired as a result of sticking to his guns — and staying faithful to clearly understood, bedrock conservative principles and not trimming them or ditching them altogether in favour of the fashions of the day.

Since taking office in 1996, he has broken decisively with the socialist doctrines that were previously running Australia into the ground. Not for him any tiptoeing around welfare, out of terror of being depicted as heartless. He has cut taxes, restructured labour markets and presided over the longest economic boom in the country’s history, with living standards higher than any of the world’s largest economies except the U.S.

Unemployment is at a 30-year low; inflation is under control, the federal budget is solidly in surplus and net government debt has been eliminated. He has shown the same political toughness in even more contentious areas. He is a staunch ally of U.S. foreign policy, and has taken uncompromising stands on anti-terrorism laws and Muslim integration.

In 2001, his government introduced eye-wateringly tough immigration laws to stop the boat people, would-be immigrants from Indonesia who tried to enter Australia illegally by arriving in small boats and many of whom were sent to detention camps on small islands in the South Pacific while their claims were processed.

Despite enormous controversy and accusations that Mr Howard was playing the race card, the policy was popular with the public who were very concerned that Australia’s immigration policy was being abused to admit immigrants who were breaking the rules and who also did not conform to Australia’s traditions of integration.

In an era when it is fashionable to deride the very idea of the nation state as a dangerous and prejudicial anachronism, Mr Howard stands out as a leader who believes in his country and in defending its integrity. As a result of this total absence of equivocation in upholding the national interest, the public feel safer with him than with any other politician.

Just compare and contrast this with the strategy being employed by our own Conservative Party. Needing to woo the same kind of people facing the same kind of fears and insecurities, it has decided that such an approach will lose it yet another election. It has concluded that what the nation wants most of all — in an era of unprecedented insecurity — is for its leaders to be nice people.

Mr Howard, by contrast, has understood that what his nation wants most of all is to feel safe, in an orderly country that will not buckle under the pressure of moral blackmail and that will robustly stand up to threats of any kind.

That’s not all. Unlike our own politicians, Mr Howard has rolled up his sleeves and waded in to fight those trends which threaten to undermine or destroy the values of his country. Look, for example, at the difference in the approach to education. As in Britain, the multicultural rot has penetrated deep into Australian society. In Britain, schools not only teach that the Empire was racist and fail to teach the history of this country, but are now even proposing to abolish teaching the difference between right and wrong.

In Australia, Mr Howard has taken a lead in denouncing such a failure to transmit the culture of his country. He has called for a ‘root and branch’ overhaul of the way history is taught in Australian schools, and said pupils should have ’some understanding’ of British and European history, the Enlightenment and the influence of Christianity on Western civilisation. Oh — and he also wants to see pupils saluting the Australian flag at morning assembly, a practice last seen in the Sixties.

His education minister duly announced a return to the narrative form of history, free of political interpretation, and accused politically correct educators of hijacking history, presenting Australia’s past through a filter of Marxist, feminist and Green interpretations. ‘There is too much indoctrination and not enough pivotal facts and dates,’ she said.

Can you imagine our Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, saying anything like this? And if he were to do so, does anyone doubt that the entire intelligentsia would start screaming about ‘cultural imperialism’ and ‘thought control’ — and that the politicians would beat a hasty and immediate retreat?

As in Britain, Australia’s chattering classes worship at the shrines of ultra-feminism, minority rights, victim culture and all the other isms and ideologies that have steadily wrecked our own society.

Mr Howard is squaring up to this cultural ultra-Leftism — more commonly known as political correctness — and facing it down. His counterparts in Britain, by contrast, queue up to abase themselves before it. He is in tune with the people of his country because he loves it for what it is and will defend it from all attempts to hurt or undermine it, both from within and without.

What a contrast with Britain, where politicians either want to ditch their own principles for short-term gain or transform the country altogether into some ideological nirvana. The British political class is terminally unpopular. Mr Howard is feted the length and breadth of Australia. As they say across the ocean, go figure.

If our politicians really want to reverse the dangerous tide of public cynicism and disaffection with politics, they should look at Australia to see that — astounding to relate — when politicians connect with reality, they actually win elections.

Review: 'Londonistan' Melanie Phillips

August 11, 2006

How Nations Die: 'Londonistan'

The Islamoschmoozing has gone into full gear. What's the harm?
This is how nations die. Mark Steyn

Within a few hours of those arrests from the -- what was the phrase? -- "broad strata" of Canadian society, I had a little flurry of emails from radio and TV producers inviting me to toss in my two bits. But my two bits on Toronto is pretty much the same as my two bits on London and Madrid and Bali, and that's quite a mound of quarters piled up over the past five years. What's to say? The best summation is a line I first quoted in 2002, when a French oil tanker was attacked off the coast of Yemen. Back then, you'll recall, the French foreign minister was deploring American "simplisme" on a daily basis, and M. Chirac was the principal obstructionist of the neo-con-Zionist-Halliburton plan to remake the Middle East. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, France would surely be it.

But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, "We would have preferred to hit a U.S. frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels." No problem. They are all infidels. In the scheme of things, launching a plot to behead the Prime Minister of Canada would not seem to be an obvious priority. No doubt they would have preferred to behead the President of the United States. But no problem. We are all infidels.

The multicultural society posits that each of its citizens can hold a complementary portfolio of identities: one can simultaneously be Canadian and Jamaican and gay and Anglican and all these identities can exist within your corporeal form in perfect harmony. But, for most Western Muslims, Islam is their primary identity, and for a significant number thereof, it's a primary identity that exists in opposition to all others. That's merely stating the obvious. But, of course, to state the obvious is unacceptable these days, so our leaders prefer to state the absurd. I believe the old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between a New York traffic light changing to green and the first honk of a driver behind you. Today, the definition of a nanosecond is the gap between a Western terrorist incident and the press release of a Muslim lobby group warning of an impending outbreak of Islamophobia. After the London tube bombings, Angus Jung sent the Aussie pundit Tim Blair a note-perfect parody of the typical newspaper headline: "British Muslims fear repercussions over tomorrow's train bombing."

An adjective here and there, and that would serve just as well for much of the coverage by the Toronto Star and the CBC, where a stone through a mosque window is a bigger threat to the social fabric than a bombing thrice the size of the Oklahoma City explosion. "Minority-rights doctrine," writes Melanie Phillips in her new book Londonistan, "has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority." If you want to appreciate the forces at play among Western Muslims in societies enervated by multiculturalism, Londonistan is an indispensable read. "It is impossible to overstate the importance -- not just to Britain but to the global struggle against Islamist extremism -- of properly understanding and publicly challenging this moral, intellectual and philosophical inversion, which translates aggressor into victim and vice versa."

That's true -- although I wonder for how long even our decayed establishments can keep up the act. After the London bombings, the first reaction of Brian Paddick, the deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was to declare that "Islam and terrorism don't go together." After the Toronto arrests, the CSIS assistant director of operations, Luc Portelance, announced that "it is important to know that this operation in no way reflects negatively on any specific community, or ethnocultural group in Canada." Who ya gonna believe? The RCMP diversity outreach press officer or your lyin' eyes? In the old days, these chaps would have been looking for the modus operandi, patterns of behaviour. But now every little incident on the planet is apparently strictly specific unto itself: all jihad is local.

The other day, listening to an interview on America's National Public Radio with the mayor of Toronto, I was laughing so much I drove off the road. David Miller warmed up with a bit of boilerplate Islamoschmoozing: "You know, in Islam, if you kill one person, you kill everybody. It's a very peaceful religion. And they're as shocked as Torontonians are. And . . ."

Renee Montagne, the anchorette, instantly spotted the ghastly breach of PC etiquette and leapt in: "Well, they sort of are Torontonians," she pointed out.

"Sorry," gulped the mayor, hastily re-smothering Muslims within the great diversity quilt. "They're shocked as every Torontonian is . . ."

Thereafter, Ms. Montagne expressed bafflement that these allegedly alleged fellows would have wanted to commit a terrorist atrocity in what was, compared to the Great Satan next door, "a very open society, very liberal immigration policy, very good social services."

Mayor Miller agreed: "More than half of the people who live in Toronto, including myself, were not born in Canada. And I think that's why Canada works." "Although it didn't work in this case," Ms. Montagne pointed out, somewhat maliciously: "Well, we don't expect these kinds of occurrences, exactly because of our public services, because of diversity," blah, blah. Insofar as there's any relation between jihadists and "good social services," the latter seem to attract the former -- at least in the sense that Ahmed Ressam, Zac Moussaoui, the shoe-bomber, the tube bombers, etc., were all products of the Euro-Canadian welfare system.

But go ahead, pretend that these guys were upset about insufficient "social services," that they wanted to behead Stephen Harper to highlight the fact that wait times for the beheaded at the Toronto General are now up to 18 months, and they don't always reattach the right head. It's easy to scoff that a chap who can be bothered blowing up the Canadian Parliament must be insane, but, if you were a jihadist sitting in the cave back in the Hindu Kush listening to Renee Montagne and David Miller, wouldn't you conclude that they're the ones who are nuts? The Islamic Army of Aden PR guy seems by comparison to have a relatively clear-sighted grasp of reality.

Melanie Phillips makes a point that applies to Britain, Canada and beyond: "With few exceptions, politicians, Whitehall officials, senior police and intelligence officers and academic experts have failed to grasp that the problem to be confronted is not just the assembly of bombs and poison factories but what is going on inside people's heads that drives them to such acts." These are not Pushtun yak herders straight off the boat blowing up trains and buses.

They're young men, most of whom were born and all of whom were bred in London, Toronto and other Western cities. And offered the nullity of a contemporary multicultural identity they looked elsewhere -- and found the jihad. If we try to fight it as isolated outbreaks -- a suicide attack here, a beheading there -- we will never win. You have to take on the ideology and the networks that sustain it and throttle them. Does David Miller sound like a man who's up to that challenge? A reader in Quebec, John Gross, emailed me to distill the mayor's approach as: "Don't get mad, get even . . . wimpier."

Well, if Hizzoner wants to make himself a laughingstock, what's the harm? Only this -- that the more rubbish spouted by officials in the wake of these events, the more the averagely well-informed person will resent the dissembling. In that sense, Mayor Miller, M. Portelance, commissioner Paddick et al. are colluding in the delegitimizing of the state's institutions. That doesn't seem like a smart move.

One final thought: Miss Phillips is one of Britain's best-known newspaper columnists. She appears constantly on national TV and radio. No publisher has lost money on her. Yet Londonistan wound up being published first in New York, and its subsequent appearance in Britain is thanks not to Little, Brown (who published her last big book) but to a small independent imprint called Gibson Square. I don't know Miss Phillips's agent, but it's hard not to suspect that glamorous literary London decided it would prefer to keep a safe distance from this incendiary subject.

That's how nations die -- not by war or conquest, but by a thousand trivial concessions, until one day you wake up and you don't need to sign a formal instrument of surrender because you did it piecemeal. How many Muslims in Toronto sympathize with the aims of those arrested last week? Maybe we could use a book on the subject. But which Canadian house would publish it? And would the faint-hearts at Indigo-Chapters carry it?

Hate Laws: Warning from Australia

Hate Laws: Warning from Australia: Don't Legislate Against Hate

An Australian Muslim says that Victoria's laws against incitement to religious hatred have sown division, and undermined freedom of speech, thought and conscience.

Amir Butler Tuesday 16 August 2005
Spiked-online

The attempt, for the third time, to pass laws outlawing incitement to religious hatred in the UK has, once again, drawn applause from the usual quarters. It has been welcomed by some on the left who seem to view society as so irredeemably racist that only the state can protect people from each other; and it has the support of Muslims who see the law as a weapon to wield against the miasma of Islamophobia.

However, as is often the case with government attempts at social engineering, the results will not be as expected. Indeed, if the Australian experience is any guide, these laws will undermine the very freedoms they seek to protect, and bring division to the community they seek to unite.

As an Australian Muslim who supported the introduction of such laws, I now live with their unfortunate consequences. Like his Blairite counterparts, the premier of Victoria, Steve Bracks, introduced the legislation amid promises of a new era of ‘tolerance’. Two years later, it’s a strange kind of tolerance when Muslims are suing Christians, witches are suing the Salvation Army, acolytes of Aleister Crowley are suing child psychologists, and faith communities are playing an obscene game of ‘gotcha’.

At the heart of such laws lies the fallacious idea that the state can regulate human emotions. Hatred, we are assured, can be struck from the hearts of men with the stroke of a legislator’s pen. If people can only be prevented from saying hateful things, then hatred will just dissipate. This is, of course, pure fantasy. Governments might criminalise the public expression of hateful ideas, but they cannot ban the ideas themselves.

In fact, ideas draw strength from attempts to silence them. When the state criminalises hateful ideas, it gives them legitimacy. And when religious communities sue their critics, preferring the force of the law over the force of argument, it bolsters the view that the criticisms were valid. The only way to deal with extremism is to confront and expose the ideas that underpin it. This can only be achieved if those ideas can be expressed, and then exposed, in the public domain.

The law’s advocates frequently link hateful speech to hateful conduct; implying that unless laws are passed, violence against minorities will escalate. However, most people who hate something do not graduate to violence. And were they to make the quantum leap from disliking Muslims to wanting to hurt them, then there already exist ample laws to prevent both the incitement to commit crimes, and the actual crimes themselves.

One can understand why these laws are so attractive to minorities. Nobody likes to hear nasty things said about them or their faith, but the Australian experience shows that laws of this kind cause more problems than they fix. Not least of all to the very religious groups they purport to protect.

The first major case under the Victorian legislation was brought by the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV) against Catch the Fire Ministries (CTFM), a small evangelical organisation. CTFM had held a seminar in which some nasty things were said about Islam and its adherents. Some Muslims were in attendance, at the suggestion of an employee of the Equal Opportunity Commission of Victoria (the government body that polices the legislation). Understandably, they were outraged by what was said. The ICV then initiated legal action on their behalf.

For an obscure organisation with a controversial message it must have seemed too good to be true. Suddenly, CTFM had an international stage and were on the cusp of martyrdom. The ideas that had so offended the Muslims were being aired and discussed on radio, television and in print. Their audience had grown exponentially as had their importance to the public debate. Indeed, so far reaching was the interest in the case that the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs took the extraordinary step of requesting updates from the judge, so as to allow Australia’s embassy in Washington to respond to correspondence from concerned American Christians. The case had transformed a couple of evangelicals into suburban Joan of Arcs being burnt on the pyre of political correctness.

The effects of the suit were felt across the community. Small teams of Christians, armed with notepads and tape recorders, began attending Islamic lectures, recording possible transgressions that might be used as evidence in the case. Islamic bookstores were mined for nuggets of intolerance. True to its promise, the law had brought Christians and Muslims together like never before.

The court case dragged on for months as the judge listened to complex theological evidence tendered by both sides. Arguments flew back and forth about the nuances of Arabic grammar, the interpretation of various verses of the Koran, the requisite qualifications for Islamic scholarship, and the relative legitimacy of different schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Nobody, it seemed, noticed the inappropriateness of a secular court, more accustomed to matters of trade practices disputes and parking fines, presiding over a case centering on contentious theological arguments.

The judge ruled in favour of the Islamic Council, finding, among other things, that the Christian pastors had mocked Islam and not discussed the religion in ‘good faith’. The remedy was to order the two ministers to apologise by way of a court-defined statement on their website, the ministry newsletter, and by taking out four large advertisements in Victoria’s two daily newspapers. It wasn’t enough that they apologise to the individuals they offended or even the Muslim community, but rather they had to apologise to the entire society. In addition, they were ordered never to utter or publish the offending comments in public again in any Australian state or on the internet.

They refused to comply, insisting they would rather go to jail.
Recent media reports place the legal costs for this Pyrrhic victory at over $1million. With CTFM having filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, this expense will only mount. As will the emotions.

While the UK considers the passage of such laws, Australian states cannot drop the issue fast enough. After observing the Victorian experience, then Labor Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, promised to fight their introduction in his state. Speaking before parliament, Carr warned: ‘The Victorian experience spells out how anti-religious vilification can be misused…. [These] laws can undermine the very freedom they seek to protect - freedom of thought, conscience and belief.’

He has a point. If public speech is constrained to only that which doesn’t offend, then it interferes with the religious freedoms of all citizens. While the secular proponents of this law envision some sort of syncretic utopia, it is a strange religion indeed that proclaims its truth without decrying the falsehood of other faiths. For the true believer, there is nothing outside his faith except misguidance. The right to offend is therefore as intrinsic to religion as the right to evangelise.

Unlike race, a man can change his religion. It is, after all, simply a collection of deeply-held ideas about the world and how one conducts one’s affairs. As a matter of choice, not nature, it does not deserve or require the same legal protections as race or gender. If our claim to pluralism means anything, it must mean a willingness to allow all ideologies - however strange or repulsive - to compete in the free market of ideas. The defective idea will be quickly rejected, with only ideas of substance remaining competitive.

Religion is an abstract concept. This causes issues in a secular state that cannot hold an opinion as to the spiritual legitimacy of a faith. A witch, for example, is therefore entitled to the same protection from vilification as a Christian or Jew. In fact, it is not inconceivable that, with a few constitutional adjustments, even the British National Party in the UK might morph into a ‘religion’ of sorts, thereby entitled to protection under the religious hatred law.

It’s an ambiguity that hasn’t been lost on everyone. Convicted paedophile Robin Fletcher, currently serving time in a Victorian prison for drugging, raping and forcing into prostitution two 15-year-old girls, used the legislation to drag both the Salvation Army and the prison authorities to court. By supposedly linking witchcraft with ‘Satanism’ during an introductory course on Christianity, the Army was alleged to have violated Fletcher’s right to protection from religious hatred. The judge hearing the case ultimately dismissed it, but pointed out in his closing statements that the law needed reform so as to reduce its use in vexatious and frivolous lawsuits.

Catholics might soon sue those citizens of Sussex, England, who retain the tradition of burning an effigy of the Pope on Guy Fawkes’ Day. Anyone who sings ‘Remember, Remember’ is certainly fair game, particularly if they sing it to completion (‘Burn his body from his head, Then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead, Hip hip hoorah!’). And for Scientologists, angry at mocking media coverage of Tom Cruise’s recent antics, the law might give critics of the ‘Church’ the ‘auditing’ they deserve. With hundreds of thousands of registered adherents to the Jedi religion around the world, could a bad review of the latest Star Wars film be construed as inciting religious hatred? The opportunities for state-enforced tolerance are limited only by one’s imagination and sense of pettiness.

Religious hatred laws are also a useful tool for cults wishing to stifle debate or hinder exposure. In Australia, followers of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis have already initiated a lawsuit against a prominent child psychologist. Dr Reina Michaelson, a former Australian of the Year, had the temerity to quote from the group’s own Book of Law as evidence linking the group with the ritual abuse of children. Currently overseas working with victims of the Asian tsunami, she must now return to Australia to defend herself in the courts.

However, there is one case that captures the sheer ridiculousness of laws against religious hatred. Enter Ms Oliva Watts: former policeman, transsexual naturopath, and witch. In March 2003, Ms Watts decided to run for local government in the City of Casey, a community distinguished by its proliferation of Pentecostal churches. The possibility of a transsexual witch entering local government in this most Christian of communities provoked a fierce reaction. A day of prayer was called to protect the city, and councillor Rob Wilson issued a press release suggesting that a witch in the council might be a ‘concern’ for some residents of the area.

Understandably, Watts was offended. And to whom do disgruntled transsexual naturopath-witches turn for justice? The Equal Opportunity Commission, of course. It wasn’t long before Ms Watts had Wilson hauled before the courts on charges of inciting hatred against witches.

At a time when everyone has a group to protect their ‘identity rights’, witches are no exception. So into the fray stepped the Pagan Awareness Network (PAN). Fuelled by a $400 donation from the Witches Voice in America (‘NeoPagan News/Networking on the net since 1997’), PAN ran a fierce campaign: sending fire-and-brimstone letters to both the premier and attorney general of Victoria; rallying witches across the world; and publishing pamphlets rebuking the councillor for his wiccaphobia. Watts joined the Wiccan PR blitz. ‘I have never in my life done any offensive piece of magic, a curse, a hex’, she assured the Age newspaper. ‘It would be inconsistent with my beliefs.’

As the trouble brewed, the attorney general moved quickly to clarify his government’s position. ‘We [the government] govern for all Victorians - and that includes witches, magicians and sorcerers’, he declared.

Faced with the indefatigable forces of PAN and growing legal fees, councillor Wilson conceded defeat, entering an out-of-court settlement. As part of that, he was required to offer a public mea culpa, ‘for any hurt felt by Ms Watts’. By this time, Wilson had already accumulated a legal bill of $130,000 for the 14-month battle, and, adding insult to injury, the City of Casey faced an increase in its 2005 insurance premium as a result of the litigation.

It would all make a great joke, were it not now illegal to tell it.
Amir Butler is executive director of the Australian Muslim Public Affairs Committee, and has written on religious hatred laws for the Age.

Boris on Begum

Dress in Educational Establishments
March 23, 2006

Boris Johnson MP

All around us, in our courts, in the oppressive liberty-destroying Bills being rushed through Parliament, we see the disasters of multiculturalism, the system by which too many Muslims have been allowed to grow up in this country with no sense of loyalty to its institutions, and with a sense of complete apartness.

The Shabina Begum case never had anything to do with modesty

I don't know whether you caught young Shabina Begum talking on the television yesterday, but, as I studied the pictures of this exceedingly good-looking and confident young woman, I was suddenly conscious of a paradox.

Here she is, at the centre of a national media storm, and one that has been very largely whipped up by her own supporters. There goes our Shabina, batting her (rather beautiful) eyes through her visor, and thereby exciting the interest of millions of otherwise apathetic viewers, who are not only infidels but very possibly male infidels at that.

This is the 17-year-old from Luton whose dress sense and physical form are now the number one subject for conversation in every household in the country; and yet for years we have been asked to believe that the reason she wanted to vindicate her right to break school rules, and wear a tent instead of shalwar kameez, was to protect - in the word of her lawyer, Cherie Blair - her "modesty".

What total tripe. This ludicrous and lamentable case had nothing to do with "modesty". I don't believe she wore the jilbab to "regain control of her body" any more than I could hope to wear a smarter suit and thereby regain control of my own.

This case wasn't even about religion, or conscience, or the dictates of faith. At least it wasn't primarily about those things. It was about power. It was about who really runs the schools in this country, and about how far militant Islam could go in bullying the poor, cowed, gelatinous and mentally spongiform apparatus of the British state.

Until yesterday, it seemed that there was nothing to stand in the Islamists' way, from the moment on September 3, 2002, when Shabina's brother and another man turned up at her school, and told a harassed maths teacher called Mr Moore that their Shabina was going to wear the full jilbab in the name of her "modesty", and that, if they didn't jump to it, the school would be sued.

And since the school refused to knuckle under, the extremist Islamic organisation Hizb-ut-Tahrir backed a case for breach of her human rights, and soon Shabina had a starring role in the great Rocky Horror Show of British self-flagellation, featuring Cherie Blair, Matrix Chambers, assorted terrified judges and a chorus of cretinous articles by retired feminists, famous for living colourful lives in the 1970s, in which they declared that the jilbab was really rather lovely and "empowering", and that they wished they had worn one themselves.

Of course I don't really blame the Prime Minister's wife for the rubbish she spouted on Shabina's behalf. We all understand the cab rank principle for barristers. We know the size of her mortgage, and, if her firm had not trousered the £50,000 in legal aid, then someone else would have picked it up. But I do blame the Court of Appeal for its invertebrate performance, and to judge by the tremendous ruling yesterday from Lord Bingham and other Law Lords, I am not alone.

As Lord Bingham points out in his ruling, the Court of Appeal was quite wrong in its assessment of Shabina's human rights. Yes, she has the right to freedom of religion, but she could not manifest that freedom in such a way as to prejudice the school's ability to ensure discipline and order, and to run things in the way it wanted.

Even in Strasbourg, home of the European Court of Human Rights, there is a long-standing tradition of upholding the discretion of educational establishments in matters of dress - not least in several important cases defending the right of Turkish universities to ban headscarves.

How could the Court of Appeal have missed this? Is it really possible that British appeal court judges have less robust common sense than the judges of Strasbourg?

Or is it also that our judges suffer, like other parts of the British Establishment, from a certain leeriness and timorousness about Islam? I detect in the Appeal Court ruling in favour of Shabina, that was so ignominiously crushed yesterday, the same hand-wringing wetness that inspired some poor Welsh bishop to resign the editorship of his local church news after he was found to have printed a Danish-type cartoon of positively ovine inoffensiveness.

I am by no means a maximalist in all this. I would certainly not ban all Muslim attire, such as headscarves, from all state schools, not least because that would be discriminatory, unless we simultaneously banned Sikh turbans, Jewish yarmulkes, and so on.

I might add (before I am lynched by Hizb-ut-Tahrir) that my own Muslim great-grandfather was a passionate wearer of the fez, and much resented that his elegant red pillbox-and-tassel was deemed to be backward-looking and Islamicist, and banned by Kemal Ataturk, father of the modern secular Turkey.

But the demands of these men - the brother of Shabina and his friend - were outrageous. As the Law Lords have shown, Shabina's rights to freedom of religion were not infringed, because she could have taken herself to neighbouring schools that did allow the full jilbab, itself a sobering thought.

More importantly, by proposing to force the jilbabbed Shabina on the school, the men were deliberately setting out to undermine the careful compromise uniform that the school had worked out, which was approved by the Muslim Council of Great Britain.

They no doubt wanted to push the girls into a terrible game of holier-than-thou in which they competed, whether under pressure from their male relatives or not, to conceal ever greater stretches of their anatomy.

They weren't doing it for Shabina; they weren't doing it for the other female pupils; they were doing it to show that they could, and to take another yard of territory in the kulturkampf of modern Britain.

All around us, in our courts, in the oppressive liberty-destroying Bills being rushed through Parliament, we see the disasters of multiculturalism, the system by which too many Muslims have been allowed to grow up in this country with no sense of loyalty to its institutions, and with a sense of complete apartness.

In rejecting Shabina's case, the Law Lords have provided a small but important victory for good sense, for British cohesion, and for the right of teachers to run their own schools.

Never Mind the Pope: Former Archbishop of Canterbury on Islam

Christianity and Islam: Collision or Convergence?

Lord Carey of Clifton
Gregorian University, Rome
25th March 2004

I would like to begin this lecture by thanking Dr Eugene McCarthy for the privilege of being a McCarthy Visiting Professor this year at the Gregorian University. I have enjoyed the experience immensely and am grateful to the Dean, Dr. Franco Imoda, for his kindness and Fr.Bill Henn for his considerable helpfulness in so many ways.

We have been housed in a delightful cottage at the Irish College and I do want to express our gratitude also to the Dean, the staff and students of the College for way they have welcomed us so warmly. It is a great example of Irish/English relationships at their best!

The theme of my course at the Gregorian has been 'Unity and Mission'. My desire to offer a lecture on Christian-Muslim relations tonight has not only been fired by the course I have given, but also because for the last ten years or so it has been an important strand in my ministry as a Christian leader.

I need to make it plain, however, that I am not, in a technical sense, an expert on Islam or someone who is a specialist in one of its disciplines. What I can claim is that for many years I have spent a great deal of time with some of the most important names in Islam – Dr Tantawi, Hassan al-Turabi, King Hussein, Prince Hassan, King Abdullah, Professor Akbar Ahmed and many other Muslim leaders and scholars – seeking to build bridges of understanding between two great faiths.

In retirement I continue to engage in dialogue through the Alexander Declaration Process which attempts to bring Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders together in Israel and Palestine.

A second project I am involved in is a business driven initiative founded by the World Economic Forum. Together with Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia, I co-Chair the Council of 100 leaders from different professions and disciplines which has, as its aim, to strengthen links between the West and Islam.

My wife and I have also been to many Muslim countries and appreciate the strength and depth of Islam. I think I can say with some confidence that I have a reasonable idea of the challenges that Islam presents to Christianity and the West and the challenges that Islam faces today. Whether colliding faiths and cultures can find ways of living together in harmony and peace is one of the most urgent questions of our time.

To say we live in dangerous and unstable times is perhaps the understatement of the year. '911', the emergency telephone number in the United States similar to '999' in the United Kingdom or 113 here in Italy, has become the shorthand for the terror unleashed on America in 2001. Since 911 terrorist violence has shown no sign of abating.

The attempt to dismantle the al-Qaeda network and hunt down its leader, Osama bin Laden; the Iraq war and the ongoing conflict in the country; the tragedy of the bitter conflict in a land called 'holy' by three world faiths; the oft-repeated statements by leaders of many countries that violence on the scale of the Madrid atrocity must be expected by all western nations – all this and more make the subject of the lecture deeply relevant.

And at the heart of our concern is Islam; a faith, a civilisation and a culture. A faith, that is growing fast in every part of the world; a civilisation, that has contributed greatly the human family and still has much to offer; a culture, with a unique texture that appeals to millions.

However, wherever we look, Islam seems to be embroiled in conflict with other faiths and other cultures. It is in opposition to practically every other world religion- to Judaism in the Middle East; to Christianity in the West, in Nigeria, and in the Middle East; to Hinduism in India; to Buddhism, especially since the destruction of the Temples in Afghanistan.

We are presented therefore with a huge puzzle concerning Islam. Why is it associated with violence throughout the world? Is extremism so ineluctably bound up with its faith that we are at last seeing its true character? Or could it be that a fight for the soul of Islam is going on that requires another great faith, Christianity, to support and encourage the vast majority of Muslims who resist this identification of their faith with terrorism?

Undoubtedly, Islam's association with terrorism presents an enormous challenge for all seeking a peaceful, prosperous world. Listen to Samuel Huntington, one of the most important voices in these matters in recent days. In 1993 he published a controversial essay entitled The Clash of Civilisations.

His thesis was that the collapse of communism signalled the end of ideological battles of the political kind. Western capitalism was now dominant. The next battle he claimed will be the clash of cultures, with Islamic and Christian civilisations separating the world.

Scholars, writers, religious thinkers and politicians rejected this idea as flawed for historical, theological and intellectual reasons. But Huntington was unrepentant. In 1997 he published a book of the same name, modifying the thesis but retaining the underlying argument that a clash between two great cultures was inevitable.

In an extraordinary claim he insisted: "Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power".

Penetrating and disturbing - even shocking- words. Are they true to the facts? Certainly September 11 seemed to confirm his thesis that in our own day we are witnessing a clash of cultures and are dealing with two quite different world-views.
In order to go deeper into the issue allow me to ask four questions:
What are the reasons for Islam's association with terrorism and death?
What challenges does Islam itself face?

What is Islam's challenge to the West in general and Christianity in particular?
How may we move from collision to convergence in mutual understanding and respect?

ISLAM AND TERROR

To begin with, it is crucial to stress the positive before we get to the negative. Islam is the second largest religion in the world and the name means 'submission to God'. There are over one billion Muslims in the world and the vast majority are peaceful and good people just as anxious as we are to bring up their children to live in harmony with others. And, like Christianity, Islam is far from monochrome in its make-up.

It too is composed of many groups and sects and its people include secular as well as religious Muslims. Yes, they too have people who are Muslim in name only.

As J.A. Williams points out in his book The World of Islam there has always been a secular side to Islam even though the resurgence of the faith since 1970 has tended to mask this aspect.

Whether religious or nominal, it is important to recognise that the vast majority of Muslims, like Christians, are honourable and good people who hate violence and are distressed to note that they are lumped together with evil and misguided people. We should never seek to demonise them or their faith. But a fight for the soul of Islam is going on. Why is it now associated with violence and terrorism?

Let me, for the sake of brevity, approach this from a historical perspective. Although Christians and Muslims have got on very well in countries where both have settled, along with their Jewish neighbours, there have periods when both faiths have sought to expand territorially and have clashed in bloody and bitter conflict.

The Crusades are a clear example of this where attempts were made to regain former Christian lands with unfortunate consequences for both faiths. In the 16th and 17th centuries militant Islam invaded Hungary, Poland, Ukraine and even reached the gates of Vienna.

Such facts contradict the assertion by Mohammed Madhi Shams Ed-Din in an International Conference hosted by the Gregorian University in May 2000 that: 'Aggression has been Christian in all (most) great encounters and Islam's stance has always been defensive in all (most) cases'. That both Christianity as well as Islam have had such episodes of militarism should not surprise us. The facts insist that neither faith can take the high moral ground and accuse the other of using weapons of destruction.

Apart from such well-known clashes, adherents of all three world religions were able to live in peace, even though the cost of it for many Christians and Jews in some lands was to accept the position as 'protected' (Dhimmi) citizens and pay a corresponding tax.

From the 18th through to the 20th centuries the fortunes of Muslim countries took a dip for the worst. Whilst Christian countries benefited from the fruits of the Industrial Revolution much of the Middle East has lagged behind ever since.

As a young man doing my National Service in Iraq in the 50's it was understandable why so many people of my generation, looking at such societies superficially, considered Islam to be a backward looking faith, associated with backward societies, with massive problems of illiteracy and corruption.

1967, however, is viewed by many as a turning point in the minds of many Muslims. In that year the Arab nations- Syria, Egypt and Jordan – mounted a surprise attack against Israel and were humiliated in battle.

Great swathes of Arab land were taken, Sinai, Gaza and the Golan Heights in particular. From 1967 onwards Muslims began to analyse the reasons for their defeat at the hands of the Israelis.

That event, scorched in their memories proved to be a turning point. Many concluded that a return to the simplicity of Islamic faith and wholehearted adherence to the Koran was necessary. To follow the West and to emulate its ways seemed to be the road to decadence and moral decline.

From this period on reform and renewal movements begin to appear in Islam which in spite of different emphases have one common aim, that is, to restore greatness to Islam.

Despising the political passivity of conservative Islam on the one hand, and the eagerness of modernist Muslims to embrace aspects of secularism on the other, radical movements are one in their desire to re-Islamise Muslim societies and fight the encroaching secularism and materialism that they see coming from the West.

Although it is understandable to call such groups 'fundamentalist', the term, borrowed from the Christian world where it means a literal interpretation of the Bible, is inappropriate when applied to radical groups in Islam.

J.A.Williams makes a distinction between 'revivalists' whose aim is to help Muslims return to the fundamentals of Islamic faith and 'radical activists', who encourage a fight against infidels. It is more accurate to call radical activists, whose creed calls them to bring about revolution through violence, what they are – terrorists. But that is to anticipate; and we must continue to explore the reasons why such groups came into being.

If 1967 represents a real politicising of Islam in the hearts and minds of many Muslims we have to look to Saudi Arabia, the heartland of Islam, to trace one of the major sources of radical Islamic thought.

Two hundred years ago a Reform movement had swept through Saudi Arabia through the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Uniting with Muhammad Ibn Saud, a powerful chief, Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab subdued other tribes and imposed what Prof. John Esposito has described ' a puritanical form of Islam' on the people.

We should note that Wahhabi puritanism deemed it belonged to the purity of faith to destroy the sacred tombs of Mohammed and his companions in Mecca and Medina. Today, it is the Wahhabi form of Islam that is being exported to other countries and communities in Muslim lands.

Its intolerant and tyrannical beliefs lend themselves to young impressionable minds searching for certainties. The politicisation of young Saudi Muslims was completed in our own day when the impotence of Muslim countries was compared with what they regard the decadence of the West with its materialistic power. As Saudis became rich with oil, they had, to hand, financial resources to beat the West at its own game. It wasn't to be long before some of them tried.

If 1967 represented humiliation for many Muslims, 1979 is of major significance for Islam as militant forms appeared, giving some dubious credibility to the thought that violence is a tool to be used. The first provocation was the invasion of Afghanistan by Russia. Muslims world-wide were outraged.

As one Muslim friend put it to me 'Russians were not merely infidels, they were worse- they were unbelieving infidels!' Atheists and a 'house of war' was now a reality. A jihad was called and mujahidin – warriors- were called to fight a war to the death. It was, as we know, a turning point in the life of a rich, very tall young Saudi, Osama bin Laden, who used his wealth to set up camps in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.

The invasion of Afghanistan represents the radicalisation of the elite of Saudi youth. The irony was that the Americans saw leadership qualities in Osama bin Laden to undermine the Russian invasion and the United States supplied him and his comrades, now in the Al Qaeda network, with training, money, ammunition and supplies.

1979 was also of importance for the Muslim world as Shiites in Iran overturned the secular regime in a spectacular coup and formed the Iranian Islamic Republic. In 1989 another coup took place in Sudan when Col Omar al-Bashir took over control of that impoverished country and enlisted the aid of a formidable intellectual Hassan al-Turabi.

Dr Turabi, a Sorbonne-educated lawyer, a polite and polished intellectual, has a clear and unambiguous vision to impose Islam on the whole world and make Sharia law mandatory- an imposition achieved, more or less, in Sudan.

In 1994, seemingly from nowhere, a group of students living on the borders of Pakistan called the Taleban took control of Afghanistan claiming moral leadership and imposing an ultra-conservative form of Wahhabism on an impoverished country that needed an open, enlightened vision not the myopic, self-contained world of the Taliban.

In the year 2000, Osama bin Laden, now fully alienated from America and the west, announced the formation of a World Islamic Front for a Jihad against Americans and Crusaders (a euphemism for Christians).

This action may have been taken in part because of a strong sense of betrayal, as it seemed to the Afghans that the Americans had abandoned them after their sacrifices fighting the Soviets. However, the world-wide implications were very serious.

For the minority of Muslims in such movements as the World Islamic Front and the Muslim Brotherhood, the world was now divided into a veritable 'house of Islam' and 'house of war'.

For bin Laden and militants 'Jihad' now had only one meaning- a struggle to death for the soul of Islam. The alternative and basic sense of 'jihad' as a word denoting a struggle to be good and peaceful Muslims through moral and religious ways was now in danger of being lost.

On September 11 2001 the World Islamic Front struck through dedicated young men who were prepared to die with the Koran at their side shouting 'Allah is great!' guiding huge planes to destroy the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

With them died many hundreds of others who were going about their lawful and good business. Further atrocities were to follow. A few days after Sept 11, in Indonesia, 120 Muslim troops struck at a village of Chinese and Christian people at dawn shouting 'Allah is great!' killing the men and raping any women they could find.

A year after September 11 2001 came the murder of many hundreds of innocent, fun loving people in Bali, Indonesia. Madrid is but another awful episode in the unfolding drama of Islamic terrorism. The question comes with greater insistence: Is not Islam being manipulated by evil and misguided men, not only destabilising our world, but also discrediting Islam itself? Therefore, to my second question.
What are the Challenges facing Islam?

Last January I was at the World Economic Forum and appeared on the same platform as the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mohamed Mahathir who on the brink of retirement gave his sober estimate of Islam, saying that unless Islam was prepared to change it would degenerate still further.

'I find it very hard to be optimistic about Muslims in the 21st century' he said, 'Very few Muslims understand reality and they do not understand that coming to terms with globalisation is one of the greatest challenges facing them'…. 'They cannot run away' he said.

Former President Wahid of Indonesia who chaired a conference in Amman when I was speaker at the Conference on Religion and Peace expressed similar worries: 'The Muslim world is at a cross-roads. It may pursue a traditional static Islam or refashion it into a more dynamic and pluralistic world-view'.

The challenges in the opinion of such Muslim thinkers are many and varied but perhaps we might pick out four specific challenges. The first in my opinion is for Muslim societies to integrate their faith and practice in democratic institutions. Indeed, democracy will be increasingly a major challenge as more Muslim youth are educated and demand a say in the running of their countries.

Why the glaring absence of democratic governments in Muslim lands, particularly in the Middle East, we might wonder? It is said that modern Muslim experience suggests that Islam and democracy are incompatible. I see no fundamental reason why this should be so. Indeed, Turkey is an example that confirms that there is no contradiction in the idea.

However, it is uncommon. Throughout the Middle East and North Africa we find authoritarian regimes with deeply entrenched leadership, some of whom rose to power at the point of a gun and are retained in power by massive investment in security forces.

Whether they are military dictatorships or traditional sovereignties each ruler seems committed to retaining power and privilege. When forms of democracy are introduced, as in Qatar and Bahrain, they are modest in the extreme and power remains in the hands of the Emirs.

A second challenge lies in the disturbing social conditions that militate against stable civil society and undermine the values and ethics of a great faith. Demographic factors indicate that Muslim countries will be increasingly under question as time goes on unless actions are taken to deal with chronic illiteracy, spiralling population figures leading to dire unemployment and social unrest.

Giving power to the people in democratic governance is not sufficient if economic stability, universal education and human rights are not available and accessible. The absence of such conditions are factors that may precipitate revolution or fan greater resentment at Western resources and excesses.

My third observation is that theological Islam is being challenged too, to become more open to examination and criticism. Christianity and Judaism have had a long history of critical scholarship which, we must admit and acknowledge, has not been without its pain, but there have been great gains also.

In the case of Islam, Mohammed, acknowledged by all in spite of his religious greatness, to be an illiterate man, is said to have received God's word direct, word by word, from angels and scribes who recorded them later.

Thus, believers are told, because they have come direct from Allah they are not to be questioned or revised. As it happens, in the first few centuries of the Islamic era, Islamic theologians sought to meet the challenge this implied, but during the past five hundred years critical scholarship has declined leading to strong resistance to modernity.

Christian theologians and teachers, I suggest, have two important roles to play with respect to Islamic thought. First, we should encourage theological dialogue between Christianity and Islam.

In this respect may I salute the great contribution that the Inter-religious Council of the Vatican makes and in particular the work of Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald. Second, without interfering in the workings of another faith to encourage the development of rigorous scholarship in the formation of the education of Imams. A greater openness will benefit us all.

A fourth challenge facing moderate Muslims is to resist strongly the taking over of Islam by radical activists and to express strongly, on behalf of the many millions of their co-religionists, their abhorrence of violence done in the name of Allah.

We look to them to condemn suicide bombers and terrorists who use Islam as a weapon to destabilise and destroy innocent lives. Sadly, apart from a few courageous examples, very few Muslim leaders condemn, clearly and unconditionally, the evil of suicide bombers who kill innocent people.

We need to hear outright condemnation of theologies that state that suicide bombers are 'martyrs' and enter a martyrs reward. We need to hear Muslims expressing their outrage and condemning such evil.

To be sure, the stand-off between Israel and Palestine continues to be the political arena where so many of our current unrests are focussed.

Having just returned a few days ago from Jerusalem I can sympathise with those who, at best, are pessimistic of any improvement in the situation and, at worst, conclude that the polarisation is so deep that ongoing violence and many lost lives will be the bleak future of the region for many years to come.

Yet, we are talking of two great peoples who have lived together in the past; we are talking of a situation where it seems possible to arrive at a political solution if we could find a way to end the violence; we are talking about a situation where both Jew and Arab deserve justice and peace.

If Palestinians should refrain from suicide tactics, as I believe they must as a moral duty; then Jews must refrain from using their power in unjustified ways, for the same reason.

It is impossible to go through the road blocks and security checks as we did this past week-end, and on so many other previous occasions, without such experiences making outsiders realise what this does to further resentment among Palestinians who consider themselves prisoners in their own land.

The tactics that the IDF are using in state killings of suspected terrorists and Palestinian leaders like Sheikh Ahmed Yassin are unworthy of a civilised society and shames Israel.

The enormous wall, now being built, may give some temporary relief to Israelis but only alienates decent Palestinians still further. I saw graffiti on part of the wall separating Jerusalem from the West Bank which read; 'This is our Warsaw ghetto'.

Wherever power lies – whether it is state power or the power that comes from an individual targeting another with a rifle or a bomb – is, to quote Reinhold Niebuhr, 'a poison which blinds the eye of moral insight and lames the will of moral purpose'.
My third question is: What then is the challenge to the West and to Christians in particular?

There is surely a glimmer of truth in the telling remark of President Khatami of Iran who remarked that 'today's world democracies are suffering from a major vacuum which is the vacuum of spirituality'.

It is difficult to point an accusing finger at what we regard as the weaknesses of Muslim governments when spectacular economic abuse such as Enron, Worldcom and Paamalat reveal that greed, exploitation and corruption lurk in our advanced societies and shame our claim to conduct our communities in moral and wise ways.

The degree of crime and delinquency, going hand in hand with a decline in moral standards and the collapse of such institutions as marriage and the family, are reasons why the West must be reticent in claiming the high moral ground. Yes, we must own up to our shortcomings and failings and from the riches of our faith and traditions reinforce what we most value.

A second obligation is for us to strengthen western values, founded as undoubtedly they are on the Christian moral tradition and culture.

In spite of our shortcomings at least European and American civilisations are repositories of fairness and liberal values.

Democracy, as an element of these, is a beautiful and fragile flower and we should support it, value it and protect it. It allows for dissent, for freedom of expression and for rights for all. We should not give in to claims that Islamic countries are morally, spiritually and culturally superior to other civilisations and great cultures.

To give credit where credit is due, although we owe much to Islam handing on to the West many of the treasures of Greek thought, the beginnings of calculus, Aristotelian thought during the period known in the West as 'the dark ages', it is sad to relate that no great invention has come for many hundreds of years from Muslim countries.

This is a puzzle, because Muslim peoples are not bereft of brilliant minds. They have much to contribute to the human family and we look forward to the close co-operation that might make this possible.

Yes, the West has still much to be proud of and we should say so strongly. We should also encourage Muslims living in the West to be proud of it to and to say so to their brothers and sisters living elsewhere.

We should also point to the enormous contribution the West continues to make to poor Muslim countries and we should endeavour to make this better known. Recently a survey in Egypt revealed that only 6% of Egyptians viewed American favourably despite being the second largest recipient of US aid after Israel.

Most of them are unaware that American and British aid built Cairo's sewers, water supply and electrical system. Nevertheless, we should also acknowledge that the West has much to learn from Islam and value in that great tradition of faith.
But What of the relationship between church and mosque?

It is important to know what Islam stands for – its strengths and weakness. But it far more important to know some Muslims and befriend them. We shall find them that they have the same fears about us as we have of them. Most of them are good people who simply wish to be good citizens.

There is much we can admire in Islam- the simplicity of faith and devotion of worship. Islam is not a complicated faith and perhaps we have made Christianity too complicated. We can admire the devotion of the people and their desire to promote their faith. We can admire their commitment to traditional values, the family, children and peace.

But Islam is not to be feared. Muslims respect integrity and devotion too. They have no respect for Christians who take the view that all religions are the same. They know they are not. They will always respect people who stand up for their faith and are prepared to talk about it naturally.

Christians need to be more confident and argue their corner for reciprocity throughout the world. During my time as Archbishop this was my constant refrain- that the welcome we have given to Muslims in the West with the accompanying freedom to worship freely and build their mosques should be reciprocated in Muslim lands.

However, that freedom is uneven. In some Muslim lands there are strong and cordial relationships but in some others Christians have little freedom, are sometimes persecuted, are not able build their churches, or only do so after much difficulty.

Saudi Arabia will not allow Christian worship and Christian priests and ministers are not allowed to function as such in that land. Muslim leaders often tell Christians and Jews that 'there is no compulsion in religion'. This sadly is only half true. If non-Muslims are not compelled to become Muslim, Muslims are not free to choose another faith. There is, we find, some compulsion, after all.

This, then, prompts my final question: 'How may we move from collision to convergence on things we most value and share?

Professor Akbar Ahmed, one of Islam's leading scholars and Professor of Anthropology at the American University, Washington, in his most recent book: Islam Under Siege: Living dangerously in a Post-Honor World concludes by saying: 'The events of September 11 appeared to push the world toward the idea of a clash of civilisations, but they also conveyed the urgency of the call for dialogue.

The creative participation in the dialogue of civilisations, to find an internal balance between the needs and traditions of local communities and a world increasingly dominated by international corporations and political concerns, the committed search for global solutions confronting human society and the quest for a just, compassionate, and peaceful order will be the challenge human civilisation faces in the 21st century.

To meet the challenge is to fulfil God's vision; to embrace all humanity in doing so is to know God's compassion'. Heartening words indeed.

I for one do not accept that the future is one of escalating violence, deepening bitterness and a grudging dialogue between 'incompatible faiths' and cultures.
Let me proffer some pointers for discussion and reflection:

1. We must deepen inter-faith co-operation and understanding. Religion is not going to go away. We may talk of a post-modern world but certainly not post-religious.

But religion may be used for bad as well as good purposes. In the hands of evil people religion is sometimes used as a weapon to kill and to suppress as it has been, from time to time, in the long history of Christianity. But religious leaders have an important role to play alongside political leaders. There is still too little comprehension in political circle of the power of authentic faith and the possibilities of harnessing the religious imagination and energy for peace.

We must focus on root causes of unrest where religions clash and seek to heal the wounds of the past. We must confront the deep sense of injustice felt by ordinary Muslims in much of the developing world where people see the tyranny of their own leaders, the growing gap between rich and poor and what they see as the massive support of the West to regimes inimical to Islam.

Israel, as I have already said, is a serious flashpoint of unrest and America has a key role to play in healing the wounds of a land beloved to adherents of three world religions. However, Muslims do not perceive even-handedness in America's treatment of Palestinians and the Palestinian cause. Of course, Israel has a right to a homeland and above all to peace.

There can be no serious argument about that. Christians, of all people, should honour the special religious ties they have with Jewish people. That should not restrain us from recognising that Palestine, no less, demands and deserves a viable State with secure borders and an independent Government. Resolve this urgent issue and a great deal of Muslim bitterness and antagonism towards the West will in time be replaced by understanding. This longest-running conflict in modern times deserves the West's urgent attention.

2. Compassion and understanding are the only tools to handle hatred and violence. It will do us little good if the West simply believes the answer is to put an end to Osama bin Laden. Rather we must put an end to conditions, distortions and misinformation that create Osama bin Laden and his many emulators.

It is the battle of ideas we must win, not to show the many bruised and aggrieved Muslims that we are stronger and more powerful than they are. In this task Christian theologians, teachers, priests, pastors and people have a significant role to play.

Christianity has much in common with Islam and working from common moral demands, our joint commitment to family life and religious values, our agreement concerning the importance of worshipping God and teaching all people to build their lives on eternal and abiding values should give us confidence to create relationships between us that endure.

If we do not, the future will remain hazardous and threatening. As Christopher Coker says in 'Twilight of the West' as he contemplates the threat of terrorism in the modern world: 'What makes Islamic fundamentalism so dangerous ..is the appeal of science and technology in the modern Islamic imagination…there has been no smashing of machines, no repudiation of the Western sciences'. Indeed, 911 has taught us as much.

Yes, we live in dangerous times. But we live, no less, in times where good will, understanding, frankness based on respect and tolerance may yield offer an exciting future. Let us look forward to the day when we shall not talk about faiths colliding, but Islam and Christianity converging in a common desire to create a world of tolerance and peace and building communities on those shared values that make us human and capable of giving and receiving God's gift of love.