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First Confession

Page 35

by Chris Patten


  How much does the imminence of death terrify us? The very idea of propinquity should not, I suppose, be part of the question. Death is always imminent, as Somerset Maugham reminded us in one of his most absorbing stories. A Baghdad merchant sends his servant to market. The servant returns terrified. Death had jostled him in the crowded marketplace. The servant borrows his master’s horse so he can take refuge for the night in Samarra, well away from Death. The merchant then goes down to the market and scolds Death for making a threatening gesture at his servant. ‘It wasn’t threatening,’ replies Death. ‘I was just surprised to see him in Baghdad because I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’

  My mother died of a heart attack in her sleep, my stepfather too. My father died of a heart attack as well, but after a car crash. They were not very old and would not have expected their appointments in Samarra. Now, if I wake in the night from time to time with chest pains, I first reach for the indigestion tablets; when they work I know that my own appointment is not yet due. It worries me, but I don’t panic. I suppose this is partly because of my lifetime’s comfort blanket. As a Christian, I believe in an afterlife. I admire the bravery of those who do not have this to sustain them, who may have allowed, even encouraged, their rational faculties to shred this hopeful mystery. It has been my solace from childhood to old age. So, though not at all Welsh, I sing with gusto:

  When I tread the verge of Jordan

  Bid my anxious fears subside,

  Death of death and hell’s destruction

  Land me safe on Canaan’s side.

  And this is a part of my identity – a fundamental part – which does make me and others who believe in the same thing different. We believe in the Christian promise, that life is not the end of the story. So we all die, a universally shared experience, but not everyone thinks: ‘That’s it then.’

  I have friends who cannot comprehend how I can possibly hold this view with a child-like acceptance of its comprehensive authority. One of the reasons for their disbelief is their contention that it is so totally at odds with much of what I say, write and have done about identity and violence. After all, they argue, religion itself has been a major cause of war, violence and suffering. They point particularly at the great monotheist religions of the Book – Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Have they not been primary reasons for violence? Well, yes and no, but mostly no.

  In the agrarian communities and civilizations before these religions took hold of the imaginations and lives of so many, violence was systemic. When the Hebrews began to tell their tale, Cain the farmer killed Abel the herdsman. As it happens, herdsmen were historically the enemies of farmers, and sometimes suffered the consequences. Jesus was born during a period of Jewish uprisings following Herod’s death, as the Pax Romana was brutally enforced by violence. The Roman Empire was built and maintained by the sword. But Jesus preached forgiveness and turning the other cheek. Of course that does not seem to be reflected later in the launching of the Crusades, which was the first cause of the sense of victimhood felt among Muslims at the hands of the West. But knightly ideals (going beyond Christian virtues) mixed with northern European testosterone also played their part, alongside religion, in bringing about this assault on a civilization that in many respects had surpassed Western Christendom. It had of course also set out over several centuries to conquer not just the outposts of Christendom but its heartland as well. That other crusade in the thirteenth century (against the Albigensians), in the Languedoc, a part of France I know well, was as much about the assertion of temporal authority as the stamping out of heresy. So religion may sometimes be a contributory factor in war and violence, but it is rarely the only or the primary motor. Even the Thirty Years War, which devastated Europe and appeared to pit Catholics against Protestants, was far more complicated than that. Catholic generals fought for Protestants against Catholics, and the reverse was also true.

  Moreover, what do we learn from the secular age beginning perhaps with the French Revolution? Did attacks on organized religion – beginning in the 1790s, and continuing into the slaughter and imprisonment of its adherents by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century – show the peaceful side of mankind’s nature? The industrialization of violence against humanity outdid in wickedness and brutality anything that happened in the days when Christian life fell woefully short of what Christians and other religious groups purported to believe. When the twentieth century turned out to be just as bad as Nietzsche had predicted, was this because God was alive or because He was dead? Or was it because humanity’s moral compass was engulfed by events, by economic change, by technology and by societal breakdown? Yet it is certainly true that the gullible can always be persuaded that their own religion is their principal defining characteristic and is under assault, and that the only acceptable response is counter-attack and the search for vengeance.

  Religious fundamentalists are often blamed for violence, but fundamentalist sentiment in the monotheist religions does not necessarily incubate or lead to it. Fundamentalists usually feel threatened by the world around them. It crowds in on their efforts to practise their religion with the concentrated purity which they deem essential. Modern technology brings challenges to their way of life but it also links them to fellow believers. Christian fundamentalism in the United States has thrived on its use of television and social media. Generally, the world outside, however, becomes ‘the other’, the enemy. Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalists always appear to be frightened and defensive. Science assaults their religious certainties: for example, evolutionary theory and modern physics, not only in the case of Christians. They are intolerant of other religious opinions. I once went to a Southern Baptist church in Texas to feel the power of a really hot sermon at scalding temperature. The pastor did not disappoint. Jews and Muslims came from the pits of hell. Catholics were led astray by Satan. I was not sure whether the Catholic fate was better or worse than Jewish and Muslim origins. Fundamentalists like that pastor take their intellectual sustenance from the simplest and often the crudest religious texts. Fundamentalist Christians are unlikely to pay much attention to St Matthew’s Gospel and its account of the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus preaches about forgiveness and generosity of spirit. (Indeed one Baptist who endorsed Donald Trump was quite explicit about not supporting any candidate who was offering ‘Sermon on the Mount’ policies.) They seize instead on the Book of Revelation with its apocalyptic prophecy, and its rejection of attempts to make accommodations with the rest of society. Jewish fundamentalists turn first to the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy with its strict laying down of the law, and do not spend much time studying the rabbinical teaching that examining holy texts should lead to charity. Muslim fundamentalists ignore the calls in the Qur’an for tolerance and peace and focus on texts that justify violence. For all these fundamentalists the enemy is anyone who stands outside or disagrees with their own vision of the true faith.

  Christian fundamentalists, especially in the United States, are usually strong supporters not just of the safe existence of the state of Israel – a proposition that many of us would readily accept – but of the most aggressive extension of Israel’s borders. They interpret the Bible as telling us that Jesus will return to earth, the second coming, once the Jews have all returned to Israel. There will at this point be a great battle at Armageddon or, to use its modern, local name, Megiddo, a town in northern Israel. The battle will pitch Christians against the Anti-Christ. It is not clear where the Palestinians will be at this time, nor for that matter the Jews. Since the assumption is that they will ultimately accept Jesus as their saviour, maybe they will be locked in the struggle against the Anti-Christ. But this story unhappily ends without Jews; they all have to become Christians, according to the fundamentalists. The Christian right has played a part in steadily subordinating American policy making on the Middle East to increasingly right-wing Israeli interests and opinions.

  Muslim fundamentalists used to cite Israel and P
alestine as principal drivers of their violent extremism. I think this is usually more a pretext than a cause. Many Arab countries have been less generous to Palestinians than they should have been. But can we say that Muslims, whose fundamentalism came later than that of Christians, are inherently more violent than Christians, or is it really a matter of them having experienced a more bruising introduction to modernity?

  Amin Maalouf, novelist and analyst of identity politics, wrote a book over thirty years ago examining the crusades through Arab eyes. Paradoxically, he argued that the failure of the crusades marked the beginning of the ascent of Western civilization and the death knell of the civilized Arab world partly because of the divisions opened up during the fighting between Turkish military commanders and Arab civilians, between Sunni and Shia. But the memory of the crusades still left its mark centuries later. When a Turk, Mehmet Ali Aǧca, tried to shoot the Pope in 1981, he wrote: ‘I have decided to kill John Paul II, supreme commander of the Crusades.’ Western imperialism in due course helped to further brutalize Muslim attitudes to the West in the Arab world, and in more recent days the West has usually seemed – at least until the so-called Arab Spring – to be on the side of Arab autocrats. ‘The war on God, on his message and on the Muslims’ is often said to have begun with the Sykes–Picot agreement of 1916. Britain and France divided Arab lands between them and in the following year the Balfour Declaration urged the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This appeared to be the beginning of a Christian–Jewish alliance against Muslims. It was followed by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and then (so it is claimed) decades in which the Christian–Jewish alliance used weak and compliant Arab rulers, the United Nations, multinational companies and the media to surround and strangle Islam.

  The sense of a shameful suffocation was armed with more dangerous weapons by events in Afghanistan (during the 1980s) and then Iraq (from 2003 to 2011) and Syria (after 2011). I recall, as Britain’s Development Minister, visiting Peshawar near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan in 1987. I went with the British ambassador to one of the camps for Afghan refugees from the war with Soviet forces in their country. A large number of very fierce men greeted us by firing their Kalashnikovs into the air. The West (principally the United States) was arming the tribes who were fighting and defeating Soviet troops. The ambassador sagely observed that Afghanistan was being flooded by weapons and that the conflict was sucking in sympathetic Muslims from elsewhere. Sooner or later, he opined, the Soviets would have to withdraw, humiliated. Afghanistan would be left with guns, rockets, warlords and opium. The world would be left with a lot of young Afghans, Saudis and Egyptians radicalized in the fight against these godless Russians. ‘I don’t know who they will fight next,’ he said. ‘But I doubt they will become doctors and architects.’ The ambassador’s insights proved all too accurate, and Western policy made things worse. After the terrible Al-Qaeda terrorist assault on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 came the ‘war of choice’ in Iraq, the changes of regime in Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa, the destruction of Syria, and the stand-off between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran with their proxy governments, armed factions, terrorists and bandits – throughout the region. Metastasized from all this is the Islamic State organization Daesh, bringing unimaginable horror to the lands of the world’s first great civilization.

  Is what these gangsters do a manifestation or expression of Islam? Do they cut heads off, bury men and women alive, drown them in municipal swimming pools and throw them off tall buildings because of their religion, or because of some more ghoulish, psychopathic sense of who they are and what they think they should be doing? Why are they willing to risk dying to bomb or burn down a cinema, mosque or church? Why do they run the gauntlet of drones and airborne attack? Why do they fight regular armed forces? They have no real defined and negotiable political aim. They do not seek national independence or a proper nation state of their own with its factories, power plants, a new capital, parade grounds, tanks, warplanes and platoons of well-drilled Muslim soldiers. The satisfaction they crave is to see others suffer and die, to see them humiliated, to know that they caused the humiliation, that they had the power in that moment to do it. They want to know that they can summon destruction ‘on the wings of avenging angels’, set the heavens ablaze engulfed in flames, destroy and then destroy some more. Vengeance, they tell themselves, is what Allah wants for His believers. That is what is really meant by divine justice: revenge for the West’s cruel dominion; revenge for the unfairness of modern history; revenge for cultural assault; revenge for poverty when others are rich; revenge for a crummy job in a crummy flat in a crummy suburb in a Western city; revenge for not being anyone much or anyone special. They believe this is revenge ordained by a God who wishes it for each one of them, but this is not religion: it is the release of the basest impulses of humankind, the perversion of religion and humanity. As Karen Armstrong points out, ‘IS [Islamic State] is no more authentically Islamic than the British National Party is typically British or the Ku Klux Klan genuinely Christian.’ She reminds us that before their journey, two wannabe jihadis who left the UK for Syria in May 2014 ordered Islam for Dummies from Amazon: a cooked-up identity if ever there was one, but utterly deadly for all that.

  For plural democracies in Western Europe and North America, the greatest worry is how these sentiments can be harboured by young Muslims in our own communities, sentiments so strongly held – or found – after years or a whole young lifetime in our countries, that they leave to participate in the slaughter of Syria, or stay home to slaughter their neighbours. What have we got wrong? Is there really no easy way of sharing a Western home with Muslims?

  The fact that we even ask the question is partly caused by the seeming normality of some of the terrorists. They often appear well-integrated, and sometimes not very Muslim. The four young men who killed over fifty people in London in 2005 with bombs planted on public transport included three who, while of Pakistani heritage, had been born in Britain. They would have seemed to any outside observer to be well-integrated into British society, without giving up their identity as Muslims. One, for example, was a highly regarded teaching assistant at a primary school; another was a sports science graduate. Two of them were married with children. They may have been radicalized by local mosques, by madrassas and other contacts on the trips three of them made back to Pakistan. Was there more that their own British society should have done to help develop their resistance to the poisonous teachings which presumably converted them to evil? How did they become so alienated from their community? Looking at other terrorist identities, including some in France, it is clear that young Muslim culture does not always follow Muslim social or moral teaching. Smoking, drinking, promiscuity, both hetero- and homosexual, were parts of the lifestyle of several of these murderers. In some of these cases there was also obviously a deep strain of economic and social alienation, very apparent if you ever drive through any of the social housing high-rise suburbs of Paris or other French cities.

  There are about 2.7 million Muslims in Britain, about 4.5 per cent of the population. It is difficult to get accurate figures for France because government policy since the nineteenth century has not allowed official statistics to distinguish between people on the grounds of race or religion. A Pew survey puts the figure at 4.7 million rising to 6.9 million in 2030; other estimates give higher figures, estimating that up to 11 per cent of the population may be Muslim already, the majority from North Africa and the Middle East. In Britain, Pakistan and Bangladesh are the principal originating countries for this diaspora. A significantly higher Muslim population in France has created greater social and political problems with a recent satirical novel, Submission by Michel Houellebecq, predicting the election of a Muslim president and government in 2022, supported by the traditional much-weakened parties of the left and right in order to shut the National Front out of government. There is just about sufficient plausibility to Houellebecq’s description of the steady cur
tailment of civil liberties and the introduction of legalized polygamy, highly unlikely though it is, to make the book extremely unsettling. It underlines the crisis of liberal values in Western Europe, the lack of a self-confident assertion of our civic pluralism and solidarity.

  This is surely even more important than some of the other measures we must take to tame or cage what Amin Maalouf calls ‘the panthers’ of identity politics, Muslim and other. Naturally, we need better policing intelligence about the organization of extreme anti-social radicalism; we should ban and arrest those who preach hatred and violence in mosques or elsewhere; faith schools – including Christian and Jewish ones – should be monitored to ensure that their curriculum is broad and outward-looking; economic and social policies should seek to mop up pools of alienated youth through training, education and housing policies. All these are often already part of the approach to governing the national communities of minorities to which most of us belong. What we must not try to do is sign up to a form of incoherent multi-culturalism which in effect behaves as though Britain (or any other country) could be a sort of federation of identity groups. All identities – racial and religious – should be treated with the same respect, but that respect should be enveloped in a common set of values which we insist all should esteem and to which all should subscribe. This is not tantamount to telling women what swimming costumes they should or shouldn’t wear: nudity good, cover-up bad. But a plural society in Europe or North America operates under the rule of law which is made by an accountable, democratically elected parliament. It respects human dignity. It tolerates pretty much everything except intolerance. It protects freedom of speech. It does not allow minorities to attack behaviour which the whole community has agreed to accept and may even regard as a hallmark of a civilized society. Women have the same rights as men; sexual and religious preference is a matter for the individuals concerned. We are all individual members of a national community. Our identities are subsumed, but not buried, in a broader national civic order. I am not a Catholic who refuses to accept the standards and values of the broader community in which I live, even if I may wish to change them. I believe in rule by the representatives of a majority while still believing that the majority, if it is wise, should not simply trample over the point of view of the minority. That, in a way, is the formula that has brought peace to Northern Ireland. But even there, after almost two decades of relative peace, the relations between the communities seem delicately poised with the future of the power-sharing Executive constantly questioned or in doubt. I am not sure that this unsteady balance gets sufficient attention from senior ministers in London. As we know, it is easy to forget about Northern Ireland.

 

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