17
In Europe, the riots, demonstrations, and book burnings carried out by fanatical Muslims subsequent to the Rushdie affair woke Europeans up to the consequences of the presence, in their midst, of several million people who did not espouse secular values, who even explicitly set out to defy those values. Since 1989, France and Great Britain have taken different positions on the Muslim spokesmen’s increasingly shrill demand for greater freedom in following their own customs, sometimes in defiance of the secular laws of the two countries. Muslims were urged to murder a British citizen. Scandalously, the British police did not take a single step to arrest the people concerned, those who had publicly incited Muslims to murder Rushdie. During the same period in France, the then-prime minister, Michel Rocard, clearly and firmly told the Muslims that anyone advocating murder would be arrested immediately. The British police showed themselves unresolved and feeble when Dr. Siddiqui of the Muslim Institute, in London, urged a crowd of Muslims at a public meeting not to obey British laws if they went against the sharia, the Islamic law. In France, on the other hand, a Turkish imam who had claimed that the sharia had precedence over French laws was deported within forty-eight hours! Nowhere are the different approaches more apparent than in the case of genital mutilation, sometimes known as female circumcision. In an article in the British daily, the Independent 7 July 1992, we read that: “Local authorities and social workers have turned a ‘blind eye’ to the genital mutilation of young girls among African and other Third World communities in Britain for fear of being labeled racist,” even though genital mutilation was made illegal in 1985. The article goes on to say, “Social and health service staff are also ‘nervous’ about preventing or reporting mutilation as they feel it conflicts with anti-racist policies. ‘There continues to be confusion as to what is legitimate in culture, which should be respected, and what is human rights abuse.’ ” More than ten thousand girls are said to be at risk. The year before in France in March 1991, three Malians were in court. One, Armata Keita, was charged with voluntary assault resulting in the mutilation of a child under 15; the other two, Sory and Semit Coulibaly, the parents of the children excised, were accused of abetting the crime. In a report in Le Monde, later reprinted in English in the Guardian Weekly 24 March 1991, Catherine Sviloff, a lawyer representing the Enfance et Partage association, is quoted as saying that she did not doubt the honorable intentions of those who practiced excision: “But just because one understands a ‘respectable’ motive doesn’t mean the act is necessarily justifiable. That would be the same thing as authorizing excision.” The report continues, “Sviloff therefore took the view that there was ‘room for repression’ and that failure to condemn would be tantamount to ‘condoning’ the act. Monique Antoine, representing the Planning Familial association, also stressed that an overcomprehensive attitude could result in ‘inverted racism.”
The prosecutor went on to remark: “Excision is unacceptable. To pardon such acts today is to condemn many children living on French soil and refuse them the protection of the law.” Armata Keita was sentenced to a five-year prison term and the Coulibalys were given a five-year suspended sentence and two years’ probation. The two cases raise very fundamental issues about cultural relativism, multiculturalism, equality before the law, and the dangers of fragmenting French and British society into religious and cultural ghettos, each with its own laws. What kind of society do we want to live in and create? Are we going to revert to a destructive tribalism, or remain united with allegiance to a common core of values? The rest of this chapter will look at some of these issues. It is heavily indebted to Mervyn Hiskett’s Some to Mecca Turn To Pray, Islamic Values and the Modern World (London, 1993), a work, that, I believe, should be read by every politician in the West, or indeed by anyone concerned with preserving secular values. Hiskett’s book serves the same purpose in the British context as Arthur Schlesinger’s The Disuniting of America, Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York, 1992), that is, emphasizing the dangers of “fragmentation, resegregation, and tribalization.”
Muslims In Britain and What They Want
Britain is said to have approximately one-and-a-half million Muslims, a majority from the Indian subcontinent. Most, if not all, are there of their own free will, seeking to better their economic situation. In the last fifteen years, many Muslims have made it clear that they have no intention of being assimilated into the host society; instead, it is up to the host society to change, to accord them separate rights, and separate privileges. Some of their most articulate spokesmen have spelled out what they hope to achieve. Dr Zaki Badawi,673 former Director of the Islamic Cultural Centre, London, wrote: “A proseletyzing religion cannot stand still. It can either expand or contract. Islam endeavors to expand in Britain. Islam is a universal religion. It aims at bringing its message to all comers of the earth. It hopes that one day the whole of humanity will be one Muslim community, the Umma.”
An imam, a prayer leader of Muslims, in Bradford, England, rejected all Gods other than Allah and dismissed the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as “an extreme and absurd example of the false divination of humans.” As for Britain, “it is a sick and divided nation,” and only the imposition of Islam can heal it. For him, “The implementation of Islam as a complete code of life cannot be limited to the home and to personal relationships. It is to be sought and achieved in society as a whole.” The government must be brought into line with what is appropriate for an Islamic, not a secular state. Every Muslim must “extend the sphere of Islamic influence in the world.” We notice the double standards inherent in all such Muslim demands. While the Muslims feel free to insult Christianity, they themselves go into paroxysms of rage and violence at the slightest hint of criticism of Islam, which must be “accepted uncritically as divine revelation by non-Muslims as well as by Muslims, and that this must be reflected in the structure and conduct of the state, and of society.” A report on Muslim attitudes to education in Britain, prepared by the Islamic Academy, Cambridge, and the Islamic Cultural Centre, London, makes it clear that Muslims are not happy about the secular approach to education. Muslims want to keep their basic, Islamic values, which are threatened by the values of the host community, even if it means disobeying the laws of Britain. As Hiskett justly observes:
At no point in this joint statement do the scholarly authors address the possibility that the only real way to avoid lifestyles that are “destructive of basic [Islamic] values” is not to have migrated into them in the first instance; but rather to have remained within those vast areas of the Islamic umma where the lifestyles remain consonant with these values. Muslim spokesmen, when faced with such a rejoinder, will argue that many of them—the second and third generations—have been born in the United Kingdom and that it is therefore unreasonable to propose this solution. On the contrary, the proper conclusion, so it would seem from their public statements, is that the receiving society must now change to accommodate them and not the other way round. This is surely the crux of the argument that has increasingly vexed public opinion in Britain since these Muslim immigrants have become sufficiently articulate to engage public attention.674
IMPLICATIONS OF MUSLIM DEMANDS
The implications of the Muslim demands on the wider British are enormous. Unless great vigilance is exercised, we are all likely to find British society greatly impoverished morally, and all the gains, social and moral, may well be squandered in an orgy of multicultural liberalism. Take the issue of ritual slaughter of animals. In Britain, slaughterhouses are tightly controlled by humane slaughter legislation, that is, laws whose aim is to reduce the unnecessary suffering of animals. And yet, in the words of Peter Singer675 in his classic Animal Liberation,
slaughter according to a religious ritual need not comply with the provision that the animal be stunned before being killed. Orthodox Jewish and Moslem [Muslim] dietary laws forbid the consumption of meat from an animal who is not “healthy and moving” when killed. Stunning, which is thought to cause injury prior to cutting the throat, is therefore unacceptable. The idea behind these requirements may have been to prohibit the eating of flesh from an animal who had been found sick or dead; as interpreted by the religiously orthodox today, however, the law also rules out making the animal unconscious a few seconds before it is killed. The killing is supposed to be carried out with a single cut with a sharp knife, aimed at the jugular veins and the carotid arteries. At the time this method of slaughter was laid down in Jewish law it was probably more humane than any alternative; now, however, it is less humane, under the best circumstances, than, for example, the use of the captive-bolt pistol to render an animal instantly insensible.
As Singer points out, it is absurd to think that those who attack ritual slaughter are “racists”; one does not have to be anti-Muslim to oppose what is done to animals in the name of religion.
It is time for adherents of both these religions to consider again whether the current interpretations of laws relating to slaughter are really in keeping with the spirit of religious teaching on compassion. Meanwhile, those who do not wish to eat meat slaughtered contrary to the current teachings of their religion have a simple alternative: not to eat meat at all. In making this suggestion, I am not asking more of religious believers than I ask of myself; it is only that the reasons for them to do it are stronger because of the additional suffering involved in producing the meat they eat.
The British legislation concerning slaughter was passed for ethical reasons, in other words, any method of slaughter other than that recommended by these laws was considered immoral. And in giving in to Muslim and Jewish demands for their own methods of butchering we in effect condone behavior that we have previously judged immoral. We sanction immorality because of our respect for the religion of others. Cruelty to animals is all right as long as it is religious cruelty!
Similar double standards seem to exist in our attitude to Muslim women in the West. After the Rushdie affair, several organizations were set up by Muslim women who felt threatened by fundamentalists, for example, Women Against Fundamentalism. Hannana Siddiqui, a founding member, says: “Women are being forced into arranged marriages, homelessness and denial of education. The multiculturalists fail to intervene and support these women. For them it is all part of a culture and religion which must be tolerated. And the anti-racists allow this to continue because they see the fight against racism as the central struggle.”676
Multiculturalists are incapable of critical thought, and in a deep sense are more racist than the racists they claim to fight. Instead of fighting injustice wherever it occurs, they turn a blind eye if it is black-on-black violence or Muslim-on-Muslim barbarity. Many young Muslim girls running away from home, some to escape arranged marriages, are hunted down by professional bounty hunters and returned to their families, sometimes with tragic results: The murder of the girl concerned, or her suicide, or her severe punishment from all the male members of the family. The police and even social workers turn a blind-eye in the name of multiculturalism, and hence the need for women’s organizations such as Women Against Fundamentalism. It is tragic that these British women do not feel protected by the British laws, and in a sense they are not, if the police continue to turn a blind eye.
Undoubtedly the most articulate advocate of a theocratic Islamic world order is Dr. Kalim Siddiqui, director of the Muslim Institute, London. He was one of the founding members of the so-called Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, whose aim was to “define, defend and promote the Muslim interest in Britain.” Dr. Siddiqui has written an enormous number of books and articles on Islam and its mission in the West, and the world. Constantly recurring themes are the coming Islamic global dominion, the greatness of the Ayatollah Khomeini; the need for an armed struggle; the need to eliminate all political, economic, social, cultural, and philosophical influences of the Western civilization that have penetrated the world of Islam; all the transcendent authority belongs to Allah; and the indivisible unity of religion and politics.
Scattered throughout his writings is his hatred for democracy, science, philosophy, nationalism, and free will. He has nothing but contempt for the “compromisers who have been trying to prove that Islam is compatible with their secular ambitions and western preferences.”677 and who tried to reestablish Iran as a liberal and democratic nation-state with a few cosmetic “Islamic features.” Such people “must realize that their [Western] education has equipped them to serve the political, social, economic, cultural, administrative and militarily systems that we must destroy.” Muslims must accordingly, “attack those intellectuals who are infatuated with the west and the east, and recover your ‘true identity.’... with a population of almost one billion and with infinite sources of wealth, you can defeat all the powers.”
As Hiskett points out:
As is so often the case when considering Islam, one has to concede the power of certain of its ideas. But when it comes to having these ideas advocated within our own shores, and as alternatives to our own institutions, one must then ask oneself: Which does one prefer? Western secular, pluralist institutions, imperfect as these are? Or the Islamic theocratic alternative? And if one decides in favor of one’s own institutions, warts and all, one then has to ask again: How far may the advocacy of Islamic alternatives go, before this becomes downright subversive? And at that point, what should then be done about it? Finally, do liberal, democratic politicians have the political and moral guts to do what is needed? Or will they simply give way, bit by bit and point by point, to insistent and sustained pressure from the Muslim “Parliament” and other Muslim special-interest lobbies like it?678
MULTICULTURALISM
One would have thought that education ought to have played an important part in the assimilation of the children of immigrants into mainstream British culture. But something has gone drastically wrong. Assimilation is no longer in vogue. Multiculturalism and bilingualism have been the fashion since the 1970s at least. The notion that one could produce a good little Englishman or Englishwoman out of raw immigrants is now condemned as chauvinism, racism, cultural imperialism, or cultural genocide.
But multiculturalism is based on some fundamental misconceptions. There is the erroneous and sentimental belief that all cultures, deep down, have the same values; or if these values are different, they are all equally worthy of respect. Multiculturalism, being the child of relativism, is incapable of criticizing cultures, of making cross-cultural judgements. The truth is that not all cultures have the same values, and not all values are worthy of respect. There is nothing sacrosanct about customs or cultural traditions—they can change under criticism. After all, the secularist values of the West are not much more than two hundred years old. Respect for other cultures, for values other than our own is a hallmark of a civilized attitude. But if these other values are destructive of our own cherished values, are we not justified in fighting them—by intellectual means, that is, by reason, argument, criticism, and legal means, by making sure the laws and constitution of the country are respected by all? It becomes a duty to defend those values that we would live by. Hiskett makes the point that “while religious beliefs are tolerated, religious practices and institutions may not necessarily be accorded the same freedom if they conflict with the law or constitution of the wider state.” This, unfortunately, is unacceptable to many Muslims, as we saw earlier. While, in a democracy, a Muslim has absolute freedom of personal religion, it is another matter altogether if he goes on to demand the death penalty of those of whom he does not approve; if he tries to
demand his own literary censorship across the public domain; constrain his daughter, born and educated as a British citizen, with all the rights that carries, into a distasteful marriage; slaughter his beasts in a manner the non-Muslim majority considers inhumane (the Muslims are not alone in this); require that the school curriculum omit the theory of evolution from the biology lesson because his sons and daughters attend that school; insist that the academic year be disrupted to accommodate his movable annual festivals and so on.679
THE BETRAYAL BY THE POLITICIANS
As Hiskett put it, “In Britain, at any rate, a further requirement toward controlling the extent to which the leaven of Islam spreads, to the detriment of the democratic, secularist mainstream, is greater political will and public awareness. One spur to Islamic forwardness is the short-term expediency of non-Muslim politicians trawling for Muslim votes.”680 Hiskett goes on to quote a letter from a prospective Labor parliamentary candidate, published in the British daily newspaper The Daily Telegraph of December 31, 1990:
As a nation we have extended to fundamentalist Islam a tolerance which as you rightly state (editorial, Dec 28), we would never extend to any other religious group and which is contrary to all the principles on which our freedom is based. The question must be: why have we done this? Blame can be laid squarely at the doors of both the Government and the parliamentary Labour Party and leadership; the former perhaps mostly for reasons of trade, the latter for electoral advantage.
I will leave it to Conservatives to deal with the motives of their party leadership; as one who was a Labour candidate in the last general election, I express my shame and regret at the way the Labour party has behaved in putting votes before democratic principles.
In numerous constituencies it is believed that fundamentalist Islam can manipulate the outcome of an election.
A decision must have been made that freedom of speech take second place to electoral success; that not to antagonize certain fundamentalist Moslems is more important than the life of Salman Rushdie.
The leadership has therefore kept quiet and, in doing so, has prostituted for votes the most basic principles of life and liberty.
In the event of Labour coming to power, it has put itself in danger of creating the equivalent of the Jewish vote in the United States.
Now we, in this country, are in grave danger of seeing the Labour party serving the whim of what is, though numerically a tiny section of the electorate, one that is strategically positioned and ruthless enough to utilize its influence solely to its own advantage.
I never thought I would work for more than 20 years for the principles of the Labour movement before witnessing its leadership and parliamentary party abandoning some of them so shamelessly in order to achieve ephemeral electoral success.
Michael Knowles.
The Conservative government, for reasons of trade, has equally betrayed democratic principles. In order to protect its economic interests in Saudi Arabia—in the form of arms sales worth millions of pounds by British firms—successive British governments have failed to criticize the undemocratic practices of Saudi Arabia and have even censored BBC television programs that were critical of Saudi Arabia. The various British governments have also tolerated humiliating conditions for British Christians working in Saudi Arabia who are forced to practice their religion in hiding, in sharp contrast to the freedom of worship allowed Muslims in Britain, to the extent of permitting the construction of a mosque, financed by Saudi Arabia, in the heart of London without respect for the surrounding architectural tradition.
France has also compromised with fundamentalist Iran in the interest of trade, by refusing to prosecute Iranian assassins, or by refusing to hand them over to a third country where these men were wanted for questioning in connection with certain murders of Iranian dissidents.
One can understand the reluctance of Western governments to criticize Muslim states, for reasons of realpolitik, but surely the West should be more positive in defending its democratic principles, threatened by its own Muslim minorities within its own borders.
THE BETRAYAL BY THE EDUCATORS
How can schools possibly succeed in integrating the children of immigrants when teachers are spending large parts of their time in class pointing out ethnic, racial, and religious differences among the students, and encouraging the same children and their parents in persisting in attitudes that “contradict the most basic requirements of integration”? There is no absolute separation of state and religion in Great Britain, and the law requires schools to have an act of collective worship. Under the philosophy of multiculturalism, this has resulted in the introduction of Islam and Islamic propaganda into the classroom. I believe that only the disestablishment of the Church of England and the introduction of a strictly laic educational system will lead to integration.
The laical, or state schools should thereupon maintain an attitude of courteous agnosticism to all religions (not the mealy-mouthed ‘celebratory approach’ of the multiculturalists); but should partake of none. Not only should there no longer be a requirement of collective worship; religious education of any kind—Christian, Islamic and, most importantly, multiculturalist—should be removed from the curriculum of non-denominational [i.e., nonreligious] state schools and from the National Curriculum. However, British and European history should be taught to all pupils in all state schools; and this should include a comprehensive and strictly historical account of the development of Judaeo-Christian culture, and the Celtic-Anglo-Saxon Christian heritage. It should be taught with the deliberate intention to help the children identify with this culture in its modem, largely post-Christian expression.
Laical state schools should, under no circumstances, make any concessions to Islam, or to any other religion, concerning what they teach. Thus these schools will continue to teach art, music and drama. It must be made clear to all parents, of whatever religious persuasions, that such subjects are part of the school curriculum and exceptions cannot be made.681
The Betrayal by the Intellectuals
I began the book with the betrayal of the intellectuals, and I shall end with it.
Here I shall concentrate on the undermining of confidence in Western secular values by certain Western intellectuals. Self-denigration is said to be a peculiarly English vice; but, it is in fact far more prevalent throughout the Western world than one would imagine. In an article that first appeared in the New York Times, later reprinted in The International Herald Tribune, 15 February 1994, the philosopher Richard Rorty asked “Why Can’t America’s Left Be Patriotic?” America’s left is unpatriotic:
In the name of “the politics of difference,” it refuses to rejoice in the country it inhabits. It repudiates the idea of a national identity, and the emotion of national pride.
This repudiation is the difference between traditional American pluralism and the new movement called “multiculturalism.”
Pluralism is the attempt to make America what the philosopher John Rawls calls “a social union of social unions,” a community of communities, a nation with far more room for difference than most.
Multiculturalism is turning into the attempt to keep these communities at odds with one another.
A shared national identity is an essential part of citizenship. We can take pride in our country, and still respect cultural differences. A nation “cannot reform itself unless it has an identity, rejoices in it, reflects upon it and tries to live up to it.” We might feel ashamed of our country, but the emotion of shame is only appropriate insofar as we identify with our country, feel that it is our country. At any rate, I am convinced that despite all the shortcomings of Western liberal democracy, it is far more preferable to the authoritarian, mind-numbing certitudes of Islamic theocracy. Karl Popper defends democracy and also laments the propensity of Western intellectuals to self-hatred:
Democracies have serious drawbacks. They certainly are not better than they ought to be. But corruption can occur under any kind of government. And I think that every serious student of history will agree, upon consideration, that our Western democracies are not only the most prosperous societies in history—that is important, but not so very important—but the freest, the most tolerant, and the least repressive large societies of which we have historical knowledge.... One must fight those who make so many young people unhappy by telling them that we live in a terrible world, in a kind of capitalist hell. The truth is that we live in a wonderful world, in a beautiful world, and in an astonishingly free and open society. Of course it is fashionable, it is expected, and it is almost demanded from a Western intellectual to say the opposite.682
On the world stage, too, we need to have far more confidence in our values. Judith Miller, writing in Foreign Affairs, makes the same point:
Ultimately, the triumph of militant Islam in the Middle East may say as much about the West as about the Arabs and the failure of their existing systems. Islamists, by and large, have come to power when no one is willing to oppose them at home and abroad. In any world order, Americans should not be ashamed to say that they favor pluralism, tolerance and diversity, and that they reject the notion that God is on anyone’s side.... Islamic militancy presents the West with a paradox. While liberals speak of the need for diversity with equality, Islamists see this as a sign of weakness. Liberalism tends not to teach its proponents to fight effectively. What is needed, rather, is almost a contradiction in terms: a liberal militancy, or a militant liberalism that is unapologetic and unabashed.683
The West needs to be serious about democracy, and should eschew policies that compromise principles for short-term gains at home and abroad. The rise of fascism and racism in the West is proof that not everyone in the West is enamored of democracy. Therefore, the final battle will not necessarily be between Islam and the West, but between those who value freedom and those who do not.