Murray:
The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault.
In
France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world
it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the
name of Mohammed have “nothing to do with Islam.” It was said by George W. Bush
after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last
month. It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists cut off the
head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when “Jihadi John” cut off the head of aid
worker Alan Henning in the “Islamic State” and when Islamic extremists attacked
a Kenyan mall, separated the Muslims from the Christians and shot the latter in
the head. It was what President François Hollande said after the massacre of
journalists and Jews in Paris in January. And it is all that most politicians
will be able to come out with again after the latest atrocities in Paris.
All
these leaders are wrong. In private, they and their senior advisers often
concede that they are telling a lie. The most sympathetic explanation is that
they are telling a “noble lie,” provoked by a fear that we — the general public
— are a lynch mob in waiting. “Noble” or not, this lie is a mistake. First,
because the general public do not rely on politicians for their information and
can perfectly well read articles and books about Islam for themselves.
Secondly, because the lie helps no one understand the threat we face. Thirdly,
because it takes any heat off Muslims to deal with the bad traditions in their
own religion. And fourthly, because unless mainstream politicians address these
matters then one day perhaps the public will overtake their politicians to a
truly alarming extent.
If
politicians are so worried about this secondary “backlash” problem then they
would do well to remind us not to blame the jihadists’ actions on our peaceful
compatriots and then deal with the primary problem — radical Islam — in order
that no secondary, reactionary problem will ever grow.
Yet
today our political class fuels both cause and nascent effect. Because the
truth is there for all to see. To claim that people who punish people by
killing them for blaspheming Islam while shouting “Allah is greatest” has “nothing
to do with Islam” is madness. Because the violence of the Islamists is,
truthfully, only to do with Islam: the worst version of Islam, certainly, but
Islam nonetheless.
In
January a chink was broken in this wall of disinformation when Sajid Javid, the
only Muslim-born member of the British cabinet, and one of its brightest hopes,
dipped a toe into this water. After the Charlie
Hebdo attacks, he told the BBC: “The lazy answer would be to say that this
has got nothing whatsoever to do with Islam or Muslims and that should be the
end of that. That would be lazy and wrong.” Sadly, he proceeded to utter the
second most lazy thing one can say: “These people are using Islam, taking a
peaceful religion and using it as a tool to carry out their activities.”
Here we
land at the centre of the problem — a centre we have spent the last decade and
a half trying to avoid: Islam is not a peaceful religion. No religion is, but
Islam is especially not. Nor is it, as some ill-informed people say, solely a
religion of war. There are many peaceful verses in the Quran which — luckily
for us — the majority of Muslims live by. But it is, by no means, only a
religion of peace.
I say
this not because I hate Islam, nor do I have any special animus against
Muslims, but simply because this is the verifiable truth based on the texts.
Until we accept that we will never defeat the violence, we risk encouraging
whole populations to take against all of Islam and abandon all those Muslims
who are trying desperately to modernise, reform and de-literalise their faith.
And — most importantly — we will give up our own traditions of free speech and
historical inquiry and allow one religion to have an unbelievable advantage in
the free marketplace of ideas.
It is
not surprising that politicians have tried to avoid this debate by spinning a
lie. The world would be an infinitely safer place if the historical Mohammed
had behaved more like Buddha or Jesus. But he did not and an increasing number
of people — Muslim and non-Muslim — have been able to learn this for themselves
in recent years. But the light of modern critical inquiry which has begun to
fall on Islam is a process which is already proving incredibly painful.
The “cartoon
wars” — which began when the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten
published a set of cartoons in 2005 — are part of that. But as Flemming Rose,
the man who commissioned those cartoons, said when I sat down with him earlier
this year, there remains a deep ignorance in the West about what people like
the Charlie Hebdo murderers wish to
achieve. And we keep ducking it. As Rose said, “I wish we had addressed all
this nine years ago.”
Contra
the political leaders, the Charlie Hebdo
murderers and the latest Paris attackers were not lunatics without motive, but
highly motivated extremists intent on enforcing their Islamic ideas on
21st-century Europe. If you do not know the ideology — perverted or plausible
though it may be — you can neither understand nor prevent such attacks. Nor,
without knowing some Islamic history, could you understand why — whether in
Mumbai or Paris — the Islamists always target the Jews.
Of
course, some people are willing to give up a few of our rights. There seems, as
Rose says in his book on the Danish cartoons affair, The Tyranny of Silence, some presumption that a diverse society
requires greater limitations on speech, whereas of course the more diverse the
society, the more diverse you are going to have to see your speech be. It is
not just cartoons, but a whole system of inquiry which is being shut down in
the West by way of hard intimidation and soft claims of offence-taking. The result
is that, in contemporary Europe, Islam receives not an undue amount of
criticism but a free ride which is unfair to all other religions. The night
after the Charlie Hebdo atrocities I was pre-recording a Radio 4 programme. My
fellow discussant was a very nice Muslim man who works to “de-radicalise”
extremists. We agreed on nearly everything. But at some point he said that one
reason Muslims shouldn’t react to such cartoons is that Mohammed never objected
to critics.
There
may be some positive things to be said about Mohammed, but I thought this was
pushing things too far and mentioned just one occasion when Mohammed didn’t
welcome a critic. Asma bint Marwan was a female poetess who mocked the “Prophet”
and who, as a result, Mohammed had killed. It is in the texts. It is not a
problem for me. But I can understand why it is a problem for decent Muslims.
The moment I said this, my Muslim colleague went berserk. How dare I say this?
I replied that it was in the Hadith and had a respectable chain of transmission
(an important debate). He said it was a fabrication which he would not allow to
stand. The upshot was that he refused to continue unless all mention of this
was wiped from the recording. The BBC team agreed and I was left trying to find
another way to express the same point. The broadcast had this “offensive” fact
left out.
I
cannot imagine another religious discussion where this would happen, but it is
perfectly normal when discussing Islam. On that occasion I chose one case, but
I could have chosen many others, such as the hundreds of Jews Mohammed beheaded
with his own hand. Again, that’s in the mainstream Islamic sources. I haven’t
made it up. It used to be a problem for Muslims to rationalise, but now there
are people trying to imitate such behaviour in our societies it has become a
problem for all of us, and I don’t see why people in the free world should have
to lie about what we read in historical texts.
We may
all share a wish that these traditions were not there but they are and they
look set to have serious consequences for us all. We might all agree that the
history of Christianity has hardly been un-bloody. But is it not worth asking
whether the history of Christianity would have been more bloody or less bloody
if, instead of telling his followers to “turn the other cheek,” Jesus had
called (even once) for his disciples to “slay” non–believers and chop off their
heads?
This is
a problem with Islam — one that Muslims are going to have to work through. They
could do so by a process which forces them to take their foundational texts
less literally, or by an intellectually acceptable process of cherry-picking
verses. Or prominent clerics could unite to declare the extremists non-Muslim.
But there isn’t much hope of this happening. Last month, al-Azhar University in
Cairo declared that although ISIS members are terrorists they cannot be
described as heretics.
We have
spent 15 years pretending things about Islam, a complex religion with competing
interpretations. It is true that most Muslims live their lives peacefully. But
a sizeable portion (around 15 per cent and more in most surveys) follow a far
more radical version. The remainder are sitting on a religion which is, in many
of its current forms, a deeply unstable component. That has always been a
problem for reformist Muslims. But the results of ongoing mass immigration to
the West at the same time as a worldwide return to Islamic literalism means
that this is now a problem for all of us. To stand even a chance of dealing
with it, we are going to have to wake up to it and acknowledge it for what it
is.
