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 PrintableVersion The Islamisation of BritainConcerns about MuslimsTHE ISLAMISATION OF BRITAIN A reviewer can rarely jettison the mental baggage he brings to his task, and it would be rash to imagine that I can prove an exception to this rule. I am a Christian, though such a woefully uncertain one that I find it hard to be sure of the exclusive truth of any particular monotheistic belief. I am a political centrist, though with an innate suspicion of over-intrusive government. I am British, and would hate to see the Union in which I have grown up fragment into smaller nationalisms. And I am Huguenot on my mother’s side, descendent of a community that fled from France in 1685 after Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes denied them religious freedom. I have all sorts of reasons, therefore, for taking issue with the notion that the growth of a particular religion should be a cause for concern, or that this concern should encourage us to take action. However, the case made in this pamphlet is a logical and persuasive one. Its author begins by suggesting that not only is the overall number of Muslims in the country increasing, a process likely to be accelerated by a disproportionately high birth rate, but the percentage of Muslims calling themselves radical has risen from 15% in 2001 to 40% in 2006. There is already a network of shari’a councils in the United Kingdom, many of which have become recognised as courts of arbitration. Some radical Muslim prisoners have been applying pressure to their co-religionists in jail to make them ‘accept more militant lifestyles and belief systems’. The relationship between British Muslims and international extremism remains impossible to assess with certainty, but in 2007 former Metropolitan Police commissioner Lord Stephens suggested that there were perhaps up to 4,000 terrorist supporters in Britain, and that the police and the security services were too understaffed and underfunded ‘to cope with the task in the decades to come, which is how long this will last’. The pamphlet suggests that the increase in the availability of halal food, especially in schools, amounts to a form of ‘economic as well as cultural and religious Islamisation’. Peace in Britain?Neither these nor other issues — like education, freedom of speech, medicine and health — need in themselves be fundamentally harmful to a society if, as my Muslim friends frequently assure me, their religion is essentially one of peace. However, one does not have to be a theologian to see that this is at least a matter of dispute, certainly if some of the Medina surahs of the Qur’an, explored at length here, are interpreted literally. It is when I read the pamphlet’s conclusions that I am a little uneasy. While it certainly makes sense to ‘curb the rise of the mega-mosques and Islamic foundations, particularly those with links to Saudi Arabia and other forms of extremist Islam’, I am less sure that ‘the church should step up the process of the re-evangelisation of Britain’. The problem, it seems to me, requires a secular rather than a religious solution, for the process of re-evangelisation risks creating exactly that clash of faiths which makes extremism more, not less, likely. The pamphlet’s suggestions as to how government might reverse the process of Islamisation are wise, and are directed towards attacking extremism and ‘promoting loyalty to Britain’s national sovereignty’. Opposing Islamisation does not mean attacking Islam, but it does demand recognition of the importance of social and cultural integration, and a better understanding of the attitude of any tolerant society to extremist groups within it — whether such extremism is inspired by race or religion. This is a provocative, timely and challenging pamphlet. Richard HolmesProfessor Richard Holmes is a writer and broadcaster and member of the Church of England. © Evangelicals Now - March 2008 |
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