Muslim Delusions (05/03/15)



David Aaronovitch made a good point about the very reactionary views held by large numbers of British Muslims - what we need is a robust debate not a witch hunt.

Not just because these large numbers still represent a minority of British Muslims (albeit a large one in some cases, but because it's the right thing to do there is no 'Muslim terrorist gene', as Aaronovitch says, and as the history of the world shows it took time to civilise Christianity.

The hope must be that we can all learn from this experience because who would want to spend hundreds of years overcoming another deluded mindset which insists that one particular religion, its leaders and holy books represent the literal word of God.      

These Muslim delusions are a danger to us all


By David Aaronovitch - The Times

Too many British Muslims have sympathy for the murderers of the Charlie Hebdo satirists. They need to see the light

More than a decade ago George W Bush’s defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, produced his famous catalogue of “knowns”. “There are known knowns,” he told a press conference, “things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Rumsfeld was widely ridiculed, though his argument was sound. Yet it was also incomplete. He might have added that there were things we knew that we pretended not to know and — crucial to this column — that there are things we think we know that actually we don’t.

One of the most important and perilous of the latter is the belief that we know what Muslims in the West — and specifically Britain’s 2.7 million Muslims — think, when actually we have only the vaguest idea.

This was brought home yesterday when the BBC released details of a representative poll of 1,000 British Muslims, carried out by ComRes over the past four weeks. Digging into the details was fascinating.

Few dug. Almost as soon as the first reports of the poll were being aired, observers divided into optimists and pessimists. On the sunny side of the ledger were the findings about Britishness and obeying the law. Vanishingly few Muslims expressed a feeling of disloyalty towards Britain or felt disinclined to obey its laws. Only 8 per cent had any sympathy for “those who want to fight against western interests”, and 94 per cent would report any Muslim planning an act of violence.

But every silver lining has a cloud. 24 per cent said that acts of violence against publishers of offensive cartoons could be justified; 32 per cent had “some sympathy for the motives” of the Charlie Hebdo attackers; 11 per cent believed that organisations like Charlie Hebdo “deserved” to be attacked.

A pessimist was entitled to point out that of, say, the 80,000 adult Muslims in Bradford, this could mean that between 8,000 and 21,000 were broadly understanding of the murder of cartoonists for offending their faith. Put like that it was terrifying.

In 2012 a Manchester University academic, Maria Sobolewska, investigated whether Muslims were more likely to tolerate political or religious terrorism than the general population. She found that 8 per cent of Britons could identify with acts of extreme violence in defence of animal rights or the environment — the same level as Muslims sympathising with the fight against western interests. There is no Muslim terrorist gene.

The problem, however, is that the sea in which Muslims swim is actually very different. Many do not subscribe to one of liberal society’s most important precepts — free speech. This was illustrated by the 78 per cent of Muslims who said that it was “deeply offensive to me personally” when Muhammad was depicted in any way. Only 20 per cent disagreed.

To explain the majority view the BBC interviewed a Muslim cleric — not an extremist — who led a demonstration against the Charlie Hebdo cartoons after the Paris attacks. Shaykh Tauqir Ishaq mounted a “free speech is relative, no one should be offended, it’s all hypocrisy” argument and quoted the Pope’s silly “diss my mom and I’ll punch you” line.

And then he gave himself away. When it came to suppressing offence, groups such as “the Jews”, he complained, had enjoyed “special treatment” over matters such as the Holocaust. He wasn’t pressed on this example, but what could he mean? The Holocaust most certainly can be and is discussed and (unlike the Prophet) depicted. But if you want — as certain far right-wingers and Jew-haters do — to try and argue that it didn’t happen and that the Jews exaggerated it, then people will describe your views as hateful. Is that what he was complaining about? It was deeply depressing.

The Shaykh’s disingenuousness was no more worrying than an interview with a group of Bradford businesswomen. Islamic State, said one, was not a Muslim problem because these people weren’t really Muslims. It wasn’t fair for Muslims to be singled out when no one ever called a terrorist who happened to be Christian a “Christian terrorist”. She felt continuously under attack.

Some of this borders on delusional. There are a lot of people doing a lot of bad things in the world, but there is no Christian State setting up an apocalyptic kingdom in central Europe, no Jewish equivalent of al-Shabab and no Hindu version of Boko Haram.

And yet these Muslim businesswomen represent something important. Three key groups emerged from the polling. Twenty per cent of Muslims — almost never discussed publicly — are broadly secular and liberal. Around 15 per cent are recalcitrant and insular. And more than 60 per cent are on a spectrum between the two. The job of anyone who cares about social cohesion is to help expand the area around the 20 per cent and to erode that around the 15 per cent.

British society cannot and should not compromise on its essential values. Many of our liberties were won at great cost. The abolition of gender discrimination and freedom of expression, to name but two, are as vital to the secular majority as the devotion to a deity is for religious minorities.

But in defending our beliefs we must guard against throwing up new barriers between Muslims and non-Muslims. One of the problems with the old, hated “sus” laws was that even though many street crimes were committed by young black men, it didn’t mean that all young black men were criminals. To treat them as if they were was to risk a self-fulfilling prophecy, to give them no incentive to obey the law and to make them the thing they weren’t, but what we feared they might be.

Are we repeating this error by, for example, arguing about the burka, or worrying about the hijab, shouting about halal or moaning about mosque building? By suggesting, in effect, that Muslims should take loyalty tests?

We walk a tightrope. We need to maintain what is essential about liberal democracy and we also need to avoid, by a lack of thought and knowledge, creating an alienation which would bedevil us for decades to come.

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