What secular liberals don’t get about Islam

Whenever a public figure dares to criticise Muslims or Islam, you can bet that they will be met with two emotive responses. The first is that they will be accused of racism or ‘Islamophobia’. This option was the one taken by the UK prime minister last week when reacting to comments by the shadow justice secretary, Nick Timothy, who had described a mass act of worship in central London as an ‘act of domination’. Rather than address the substance of Timothy’s claim, Keir Starmer condemned the ‘utterly appalling’ remarks, suggesting that Kemi Badenoch and her Conservative Party had a ‘problem with Muslims’. In effect, he was smearing them as bigots.

The second response – equally evasive – is to indulge in deflective ‘whataboutery’. This was the path chosen by attorney general Lord Hermer. ‘Timothy and Badenoch’s comments beg the question – would they have a problem if I, as a Jewish man, were praying in public?’, he asked. ‘Or is it just Muslim prayer they find offensive, and contrary to “British values”?’ This line of inquiry was repeated and expanded ad nauseam, with many deeming it brilliant and original to hypothesise whether we should also be unsettled by Christians, Sikhs and Hindus engaging in mass worship on Trafalgar Square.

Of course, both responses betray an ignorance of the nature of religion. They fail to address the central concern raised by Timothy: that a variety of Islam practised in Britain today has become distinctly aggressive. The reason public displays of Christianity raise no eyebrows is because Christianity has been intrinsic to these islands for a millennium and a half, and the leaders of England’s established Church largely refrain from seeking the mass conversion of the country’s heathens. Moreover, Christianity, unlike Islam, does not divide the world into two spheres: that in which it reigns (The House of Peace) and that where it does not yet reign (The House of War). To put it more starkly, people simply aren’t worried about Christian, Jewish, Sikh or Hindu suicide bombers.

Shallow secularists are prone to make the argument that ‘You wouldn’t ban [insert other religion here]’ because they believe all religions are basically interchangeable. They have no understanding of differing religious systems or how they affect the behaviour of their adherents. As Jake Wallis Simons reminded us on spiked last week, Islam consists of many denominations, some more liberal than others. And it remains an uncomfortable truth that the Islam that prevails in Britain today is not a version that enthusiastically embraces difference. It is neither as eager to reciprocate tolerance, nor to ‘celebrate diversity’, as we might like.

This is something that lazy agnostics, timorous liberals and lofty humanists never seem to comprehend. Belligerent varieties of religions are just as dangerous as any political ideology that seeks power through domination. No ideology, sacred or profane, automatically deserves ‘respect’.

Jürgen Habermas: a free-thinker to the end

In the latter part of his life, Jürgen Habermas, the philosopher and polymath who died this month aged 96, was known in political circles as an enthusiastic champion of the European Union. This was perhaps inevitable, given that he had lived through the Nazi regime as a boy, and that like many left-wingers of the postwar generation, he believed a supranational European institution was the best way to dampen or ultimately transcend the poisonous virus of nationalism.

What was less well known was that he had become critical of the EU project in recent years. In 2015, in the midst of the Greek debt crisis, when asked by the Guardian if he agreed that his vision of a united Europe would end up actually abolishing democracy rather than saving it, he agreed. Habermas argued that EU institutions such as the European Council, European Commission and European Central Bank were pushing a programme of ‘technocratic hollowing out of democracy’, a result of their having adopted a ‘neoliberal pattern of market-deregulation policies’.

This was an argument left-wingers used to make more commonly, and less fearfully, when opposing what would become the EU. The Labour Party’s Tony Benn often said as much. So it shouldn’t surprise us that Habermas also came to express his misgivings along the same lines. It was consistent, too, with his philosophy. He consistently emphasised the need for open dialogue, rational debate and the unemotive pursuit of truth.

Lazy writing leads to lazy thinking

When faced with arguments they don’t like or can’t rebut, politicians usually seek refuge in reassuring clichés and weedy platitudes. We witnessed this in the collective response to Nick Timothy’s remarks by the Labour outrage machine, during which Keir Starmer hit the stock-phrase jackpot with his assertion that Islamic prayers in Trafalgar Square epitomised ‘the great strength of our diverse city and country’.

It is customary on these occasions to quote George Orwell, who in his 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, condemned clichés as ‘prefabricated’ phrases used as substitutes for original thought. Yet as I discovered only recently, French novelist Gustave Flaubert drew an even firmer line almost a century before Orwell. Flaubert was so obsessed by what he saw as the corruption of the French language that in his 1857 classic, Madame Bovary, he placed in italics the lazy, stale phrases and clichés uttered by the protagonists that had been debased through overuse. As one ominous passage reads: ‘Emma sought to find out exactly what was meant in real life by the words felicity, passion and rapture, which had seemed so fine on the pages of the books.’

I get a similarly unsettling sensation whenever I hear vibrant, diverse, divisive, racist, systemic, structural and hate. Such second-hand, hollowed-out language seems to signify one thing only: that its users aren’t thinking for themselves at all.