by A. N. Wilson
Optimists might have discovered aspects of the Islamist phenomenon in Britain which gave grounds for hope. Most perpetrators of the atrocities, as opposed to their instigators, were young. The pessimists were right to ask why it took so long for the authorities to arrest Abu Hamza, for example, a terrible one-eyed creature with a hook for a hand, who preached murderous hatred at the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park before being arrested. The US government had accused him of membership of the Islamic army in Aden, the group responsible for bombing USS Cole in Yemen. At his mosque he received such dubious characters as Richard Reid, the ‘shoebomber’, and Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the 9/11 planners, as well as many other identified criminals. Even after the British authorities finally got round to stripping him of citizenship and deporting him to the US for trial, Hamza, though banned from preaching in the Finsbury Park mosque, was allowed to sit in an armchair blocking the pavement while his adoring congregation queued up to embrace him, and he was allowed to wow the crowds, still making inflammatory speeches in which he denounced Western politicians as corrupt homosexuals, and the Jews as criminals propping up a brigand state–of Israel. Three minutes spent by a Jewish rabbi making comparable comments about, say, Pakistan, would naturally have resulted in his arrest, and probably a riot of Muslims, expensively policed. Hamza was not finally gaoled until 2006, for inciting racial hatred and murder. By then his murderous message of hate had touched and inflamed many young fanatics. Nor was Hamza alone.7
Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal was deported to his country of origin, Jamaica, from Britain on Friday 25 May 2006 after reaching the parole date in his prison sentence. He was found guilty of three charges of soliciting the murder of Jews, Americans and Hindus and two charges of using threatening words to stir up racial hatred in 2003, and after his appeal was sentenced to seven years in prison. In 2006 John Reid told MPs that al-Faisal had influenced Jermaine Lindsay, one of the 7 July suicide bombers.8
But optimists would be entitled to wonder–what if Jermaine had grown out of the influence of Abdullah al-Faisal? What if he had fallen in love, developed a sense of irony, had a family, made friends of another religious background, or none, and found that they made him laugh? Then, surely, the threat of Hamza, al-Faisal and the whole hellish pack of them would have evaporated. While it might be true that Islamic terrorists in some parts of the world are making what they see as the only military-political gesture they can against, let us say, the State of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, or the American occupation of Baghdad, the dignity of such a position cannot logically be ascribed to young fools brought up in comfort in Dewsbury or Aylesbury. Their alienation from their fellow citizens was terrifying, but it was a psychological as much as it was a political condition. If the Palestinians were granted East Jerusalem, or the Americans withdrew from Baghdad, there would have been some other grievance which angered them–some teddy bear with a blasphemous name. If this is true, then optimists can take heart from one of the most extraordinary books to emerge from the British Muslim experience: Ed Husain’s The Islamist. Husain grew up in a Bangladeshi family in the East End of London. His father had been born in what was still British India and regretted the partition of the subcontinent after British withdrawal. Theirs was a poor but highly intelligent family and the Islam they practised was intense, spiritual and centred upon the mosque in Brick Lane which had started life as a Huguenot church and gone through a phase as a synagogue. In itself, this building was a parable of immigrant life in London over four centuries. Through the preachings of Fultholy Saheb, a sage whom he called affectionately Grandpa, Husain became something of an infant Samuel, travelling the country and learning to recite from the Koran in Arabic. All this was wholly spiritual and had nothing whatsoever to do with political extremists.
Ed Husain’s book described how he rebelled against his parents and started mixing with ‘radicalised’ Islamists, not in the purely religious Brick Lane Mosque but in the East London Mosque. Here he began to pick up the ideas and mix with the enthusiasts for the various political groups who were campaigning for the Caliphate, ‘ummah’, and so on. When Husain’s father gets to hear of it, he is appalled, wondering why, if a young man is interested in politics, he doesn’t join the Labour Party. Significantly, Husain records that after he had become radicalised, although he spouted a lot of theological nonsense inwardly he had ceased to be religious. It is only after he had gone through his student years as a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, ‘radicalising’ whatever campus he happened to be attending, that he returned to sanity. At the end of the book, he had not abandoned religion–very far from it. But he had seen through ‘Islamism’ for the fraudulent and dangerous nonsense which his Muslim father had always told him it was.9
Three things appeared to save him. One was high intelligence. You can get sucked into this sort of thing if you are clever; but if you are clever, you will eventually argue your way out of it. Secondly, love of a good woman–he fell in love while at one of his colleges, with a beautiful Muslim woman, and after they were married they travelled in the Levant (Syria) and Saudi Arabia. Their experiences of the difference between the political and religious attitudes which existed in these places was further confirmation, if any were needed, that there was a huge difference between the attentive, tolerant, spiritual Islam found at, say, the tomb of St John the Baptist in Syria, where Christian nuns pray alongside Muslims, and the closed world of Saudi. The idea of ‘ummah’ is shattered when contemplating the realities of the actual Muslims who live in Islamic countries. Thirdly, what redeemed Ed Husain was his humour, gentle but definite. Only when he goes to Syria, for example, does he realise that many devout Muslims, men and women, do not dress in the clothes deemed essentially Islamic by the East End boy-members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir. The people who dress like that are the Christians.
Husain began his book with tender memories of the Sir William Burrough primary school in Limehouse. This was a place where inspirational white teachers and classroom assistants instilled in their pupils a sense of common belonging. ‘It would take me more than a decade to understand what drove Ms Powlesland and Cherie. I was fortunate to have such marvellous teachers at such a young age. For later in life, when I doubted my affinity with Britain, those memories came rushing back.’10
As he described the rebellion against his good parents, and his attempts to distance himself from the multi-culturalism of his benign primary school, Husain drew a picture which very many Westerners would identify as quite familiar, from a psychological point of view. Extreme Islamism is a form of religious punk. Like punk, Islamism wanted to hurt, and it wanted to shock; but unlike punk it was humourless and deadly. Like punk, it was wholly aggressive, but, unlike punk, it did not possess the courage of its convictions. It used the odious trappings of hurt feelings, profound shock at a child’s exercise book adorned with a teddy bear, or uncontrollable anger at the sight of a few cartoons. Islamism kept writing itself down as a spoilt psychopathic child, but the world is afraid of psychopathic children, especially when they reveal themselves to be capable of blowing up buses and trains. Hence the ludicrous spectacle in the early twenty-first century of kowtowing to Islamist bullies. They took it further–they actually anticipated the reactions of the bullies, as when a certain local council in Britain banned the use of a calendar which depicted a pig, in case of offence to Muslims. Performances of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great were censored at the Barbican Centre in London for fear of upsetting the Muslims, though the equally offensive–indeed far more offensive–Jew of Malta by the same playwright saw occasional revivals without any riots taking place outside the theatres.
The British public, in overwhelming proportions, knew exactly what was required. To the Daily Telegraph, a good flypaper for public opinion, often truer than focus groups, wrote a correspondent with the view: ‘If the Muslim people are so upset with the ways of the west and the UK, if they dislike our laws so much why don’t they go and live in a Muslim country and be ruled under Sha
ria law? This is not a racist comment as I believe we should all tolerate each other and our beliefs, as the English people have done for over 2000 years. We have allowed Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Italians, Greeks, French, etc etc to come and live. All have integrated and accepted the British way of life, without giving up their language or religion (I am from one of these minorities) yet come the followers of Allah and all hell breaks loose. They want special treatment, their own laws and the honour to blow themselves and innocent people up.’11
28
The Return of God
We began reflecting upon our times with a reading of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. At a distance of half a century since it first made an impact upon the imagination of its readers, it still seems the most powerful work of fiction of its age. In the last decade or so, the only book which rivals it in power and imaginative range is Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials. It begins with one of the central myths of our times, the disappearing child. This motif from the World of Faerie returned over and over again in the news reports of the last half-century. Folklore throughout the world, and throughout history, has externalised the fear of losing children by making them vulnerable to the witches, Little Folk, merfolk or gods who might apprehend them, take them for seven years, sometimes for ever. In the comparatively debased form which these stories take in newspapers, the predators are always paedophiles. These figures, who at the beginning of our times were regarded as a sinister joke, especially by children themselves, who knew that there were ‘strange men’ to whom it was unsafe to speak, became–after such horrors as the Moors murders–truly nightmarish projections. The paedophile was the embodiment of everything which our society took to be evil, matched only by the racist.
Every time the newspaper told the story of a disappearing child, the bucket was lowered into the well, stirring primitive responses which have been there since our fear of separation from our parents turned into Hansel and Gretel being kidnapped in the woods, or the ‘little men’ who stole Bridget for seven years long. Philip Pullman’s trilogy began with such a theme. Children all over England are being taken by a sinister group popularly called the Gobblers–at heart, as we slowly discover, an ecclesiastical body called the General Oblation Board.
The adventures of Lyra Belacqua, the little girl allowed to grow up as a ragamuffin in a superbly archaic Oxford college, compose a rich narrative. The story takes her to the North, in the company of Gyptians–gypsy bargees whom she has befriended in Oxford–an armoured bear, an American adventurer in a hot-air balloon who seems to have flown in from the pages of Jules Verne, and some superbly sexy witches.
A central conceit to the whole myth is that fully rounded human beings have an alter ego, or soul, which is called a ‘daemon’, pronounced demon. When we are children, these daemons are constantly changing. Lyra, the heroine of the story, has a daemon called Pantalaimon. He takes many beautiful forms–a cat, a butterfly, a rat, a goldfinch–but he is always part of her. Grown-ups have fixed daemon forms. Pullman’s daemon idea was suggestive of many deep thoughts, both about human souls and about our relationship with animals. The daemon is like a soul. The bears do not have them, a fact which increases our sense of their sturdy, northern sadness. In the first volume of the trilogy, it does not become entirely clear why the Gobblers are grabbing the children. But Lyra discovers this much. When they catch the children and take them to the northern laboratory, they separate them from their daemons. They want to get their hands on elementary particles, called simply ‘dust’ in that universe. Puberty, when your daemon becomes fixed, is also the time when your relationship with dust alters. Dust gives power.
Pullman’s guiding genius is William Blake, and the General Oblation Board–the masterminds of the Gobblers–corresponds to the ‘priests in black gowns’ who bind with briars our joys and desires.
There is real Blakean lyricism in the wonderful descriptions of the Northern Lights. And the ragamuffin children of the Oxford bargees, and Lyra herself, at large in a Gormenghast version of an Oxford college, are essentially innocents; their ‘daemons’ are not sin-drenched burdens as for St Augustine, but instruments of light and joy. But though Pullman, like Blake, reworked Milton, and his angelology, in the service of his own mythological view of things, he did so in a spirit which was reflective of his age. And this is what marks Pullman off from Tolkien.
Tolkien’s assembly of myth was a massive, tragic, dark bulwark against the spirit of the age. He saw the past itself, with all its heroism and all its mythology, being obliterated by the modern. Although a religious man himself, he buried overt religious reference in the myth, which is about wider and older themes than those which separate Homer from the Christian world.
For Pullman, however, as for so many liberals at the end of our times, religion was seen as a deadly force, an enslaver of the human spirit which has risen up as a surprise monster to threaten democracy and freedom, just when we might have hoped to have seen the end of superstition. A lesser myth-maker than Tolkien, Pullman cannot resist intruding into his story the views of any contemporary liberal newspaper columnist into a tale which seems everlastingly trying to be bigger than its author’s narrow views. Hence, as the story goes on, its collapse into incoherence.
For example, at the beginning of the story we learn that no one in Lyra’s universe can be separated from their daemon, an embodiment of soul which usually takes the form of an animal. But in the Virgilian journey to the world of the dead, undertaken by Will and Lyra in volume three, Lyra does leave her daemon behind, much to her and his sorrow. Then again, the whole book is posited on the notion that the Authority (God) does not exist; but we then see the poor old Authority, a doddering, decrepit old creature being borne aloft on a bier–a sort of Titurel from Parsifal. We seem to have strayed here from the Victorian atheism which underpinned volume one to the ‘Death of God’ theology of the 1960s. There are wonderful things in Pullman’s story–the angels on both sides of the war, or tiny spy-creatures, the Gallivespians, who ride on dragonflies; a splendid American hot-air balloonist; old Oxford bargees (the Gyptians); and the ever-beguiling Mrs Coulter, Lyra’s mother, who starts as a wicked society hostess, secretly working for the church, and ends as a much more complicated figure, shaken by true maternal feeling into joining forces against religion.
Mrs Coulter’s reignited passion for Lord Asriel is matched by the truly touching love between Lyra and Will, who, because they belong to different universes, are obliged in the end to part. There were no novels written in English in the last decade of our times to match this one for range, depth and passion. Yet future generations will surely see it not merely as a great, if flawed, work of the imagination, but also as an expression of contemporary liberal angst about the growth of religious fundamentalism.
From a Western European perspective, there is surely something paradoxical in this, since throughout the half-century which we have considered in this book, the institutional Churches, and especially the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, have declined in numbers and influence. This has not been true, however, of religion when taken as a whole and viewed from a global perspective. Seen from a narrowly British perspective, Pullman might be thought to have chosen an odd moment to make the General Oblation Board, a sort of malign General Synod, into an instrument of terror. Not since St Augustine arrived in Kent in the late sixth century had the Church exercised less influence, for good or ill, upon the juvenile minds of the archipelago. Yet perhaps for this very reason, precisely because modern Europeans had become so secularised, the religious resurgence in our times seemed so alarming to the liberal mind.
‘Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty’, wrote President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran in an open letter to President George W. Bush in 2007. Similar words had been spoken by Dr Billy Graham during his missionary journey to London in 1954. The difference is that, in those days, very few influential or intelligent people, even if them
selves adherents to a religion, would have found the words credible. In Britain, as in Western Europe, institutional Christianity rapidly evaporated. The numbers of practising Catholics and Anglicans was halved. Secularism was rampant. But to take a wider global viewpoint, as our times rolled onward into other times, the President of Iran’s words were self-evidently true. When, in the early 1950s, Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, one of the greatest English novelists of our times, heard that her friend Rose Macaulay had reverted to the habit of churchgoing, she expressed her exasperation, ‘when for a lifetime she had been a perfectly sound agnostic, like everybody else’. It was something which puzzled many a liberal secularist in the opening decade of the twenty-first century who contemplated the religious frenzy which possessed the globe. Tony Blair had been a preacher on a tank.1 His successor as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, the son of the manse, quoted the Gospels in his first speech as Prime Minister to the Labour Party Conference. George Dubya was a born-again Christian. Unlike previous American Presidents, who saw their principal adversary as godless Marxism, Bush’s greatest enemies were Islamists, who turned to Mecca in prayer as often as he clumsily thumbed the Epistles of St Paul. In Nigeria, where between 1990 and 2007,20,000 people were killed in conflicts between Muslims and Christians, the Evangelical Church of West Africa doubled in number over the same period.