Civitas Blog

Having argued here before that we should shut up the radicals and repress their materials, I now have to admit that I’ve changed my mind. If we call ourselves a free and open society then we cannot react to the violence and the threat of more violence from Islamists by censoring the opinions of their coreligionists. To shut down Islamic bookshops selling literature that advocates extremism is inconsistent, unless it is proposed that anything with unpalatable views – think BNP pamphlets or Mein Kampf – is also banned. Added to which, as The Economist leader points out this week, such material would simply end up on the internet, making surveillance even harder, and it’s also worth remembering - think The Satanic Verses - that censorship is fastest way to create a bestseller.

It is, furthermore, hypocritical to oppose the Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill on the grounds of its limitation of freedom of speech without realising that such a law is tantamount to what we are asking be imposed on the Muslim community. We should repeal the blasphemy laws, block the religious hatred law, enforce current laws, such as the incitement to racial hatred (if the BNP could be indicted under this in 2001 for their abuse of Muslims, then Hitzb-ut-Tahrir could be tried under this now), admit intercept evidence in court, and bring in the law for acts preparatory to terrorism.

The danger is that we respond to attack by being reactionary. If we are, as we say of ourselves all the time, tolerant, stoical in the midst of a crisis, and so on, then we must show that we are now. At least in part, how we define the current crisis effects how we decide to confront it, and allowing debate, rather than stifling it, is the best hope we have of finding a way through in the long-term.

Frankly, I can’t wait for 24-hour drinking. It’s going to be hilarious. Quite apart from pubs packed to the rafters at three in the morning with insomniacs who’ve come down for a nightcap, and bedraggled nymphs who’ve tumbled out of clubs looking for a quick eighteen pints of lager before going to bed, we’re going to be treated to a round-the-clock version of those most contemporary of spectator sports – chav fighting and oik baiting. As the BBC reports today, the Council of Circuit Judges, responding to a Government consultation document, Drinking Responsibly, has warned that with the relaxed licensing laws that there will be ‘an inevitable explosion in alcohol-fuelled violence’. Certainly anyone who thinks that longer drinking hours in Britain will turn us into svelte continentals, eating bouillabaisse late into the evening with a glass of montepulciano had better think again. Or even better, think Faliraki.

Having been subjected to a fatwah that called for his death for blaspheming against God and insulting the man Muslims consider His supreme prophet, few besides Salman Rushdie can be considered better qualified or to have more of a right to call on Muslims to modernise their outlook.

Such a call is precisely what Mr Rushdie makes in an article in today’s Times, entitled, ‘Muslims unite! A new Reformation will bring your faith into the modern era’.

Amidst all the various flim-flam this week about how the anger of young alienated British Muslims might be abated by re-branding them British Asians or Asian British, Mr Rushdie goes to the heart of the problem when he writes:

‘It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it….

‘However, few Muslims have been permitted to study their religious book in this way. The insistence within Islam that the Koranic text is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical scholarly discourse all but impossible….

‘The traditionalists’ refusal of history plays right into the hands of the literalist Islamofascists, allowing them to imprison Islam in their iron certainties and unchanging absolutes. If, however, the Koran were seen as a historical document, then it would be legitimate to reinterpret it to suit the new conditions of successive new ages. Laws made in the 7th century could finally give way to the needs of the 21st.’

Amen, to that, brother!

Assuming what Mr Rushdie asserts here is spot on -- as I certainly do, it follows Mr Rushdie is no less right in drawing attention to how ineffective the government's present reliance on ‘traditional, but essentially orthodox, Muslims’ is likely to prove in helping to quell Islamist radicalism, unless they too publicly affirm the need for their religion to modernise itself in the way in which he calls for.

Earlier this year, doubtless through the offices of the Prime Minister, a knighthood was bestowed on Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, for his work in helping to promote good inter-faith relations in Britain.

In his article, Mr Rushdie reminds readers this is the man who, as recently as January of this year, denied Muslims could be terrorists, saying that he expected use of the expression ‘Islamic terrorist’ to become an offence after the proposed law proscribing incitement to religious hatred comes into effect.

Mr Rushdie further reminds readers this is also a man who, in 1989, said of him in relation to the fatwah just issued against him, ‘death is perhaps too easy’.

Iqbal Sacranie – whoops, sorry, Sir Iqbal - readers of the Times are elsewhere reminded in today's issue, is also someone who last year responded to concerns the paper had raised about what was being taught to prospective British imams at a training college in Wales, whose course was then validated by the University of Wales, by accusing the paper of engaging in a witch-hunt against what he described as being a ‘credible and established institution’.

The curriculum of the parent body of this training college, whose course the Times reprts today has had its validation withdrawn by the University of Wales, is one devised by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a great Muslim progressive according to the well-known authority on Islam, Ken Livingstone, whose teachings -- that is, al-Qaradawi’s, not Livingstone's -- include the legitimacy of wife-beating and the slaughter of homosexuals, apostates, and all Israelis.

Reliance by the government on ‘moderate’ Muslims of the likes of the head of the Muslim Council is unlikely to prove the way in which to curb Islamic fanaticism, given such ‘moderation’ as his.

Nor will simply requiring Imams wishing to preach at British mosques to speak in English be enough to stem the growing tide of alienation and hatred of Britain, and of much else too, to which young British Muslims are all too easily exposed today, not simply at their local mosques, but, often and far more commonly, through the inter-net or on videos – and all conveniently in the vernacular!

One thing is absolutely certain. Giving orthodox Muslims the power to prevent their religious texts being exposed to the kind of criticism for which Mr Rushdie is calling, through their being able to claim any such criticism an incitement to religious hatred, is the very reverse of what is needed.

What, then, is?

I am tempted to say that it should become mandatory for all British citizens, by the time they have completed their secondary education, to have been obliged to study and been examined in a course about religion in the modern world which would require them to become familiar with the very approach towards religious texts for which Mr Rushdie is calling in the case of Islam.

Control of marking of any such examinations would, of course, be in the hands of those qualified to teach and examine them -- an ideal way, we might think, in which to keep any idle theology and philosophy graduates fully occupied!

If it is protested that imposing any such requirement would be a gross intrusion into freedom of thought and expression, I would reply by citing in its support the words of that well-known apostle of liberty, John Stuart Mill, who, in his famous essay, ‘On Liberty’, proposed something not at all dissimilar, although, for purely pragmatic reasons that are no longer applicable reasons, he stopped short of calling for it to be made compulsory.

This is what Mill wrote on the subject:

Lord Adonis' City Academies continue to cause controversy. The Telegraph is ambivalent on principle, since they are really a rightwing thing, but has repeatedly pointed out that for the amount of money being spent the returns are remarkably mixed. As the for the Guardian, since the idea of using the private sector to bolster the shortfalls in the public sector is automatically to be regarded as a bad one, the government's experiment is a betrayal as well as a failure. What with the widespread acceptance of the academic failure of comprehensives and the admission by the likes of Baronness Warnock that was inclusion was a mistake, the Labour project's day are numbered. The New Labour project is hardly faring better - patchy semi-selection in the form of specialist schools, catchment (i.e. income) selection in comprehensive schools and then of course these dubious academies. Type 'City Academy' into the search engines on any of the newspaper websites and you'll find a plethora of material, but here are two notable columns, one from the Telegraph, the other from the Guardian. It is patently clear that if Blair is to achieve his number one objective in office - and let's face it, it's looking a bit late now - he's going to need far better education, education, education.

Last month, according to a report in today’s Times, saw a massive increase in muggings on the streets of London and of such suburbs as have loaned it uniformed police officers to help patrol its public transport system in wake of the heightened security concerns triggered by the terror bombings at the start of that month there.

The threat of further terror strikes in the capital has not abated. Indeed, if anything it has intensified and shows no signs of going away for the foreseeable future.

It can then hardly be the right moment for the government to be embarking on a social experiment likely to stretch police resources still further away from what should be their normal task of protecting the law-abiding against criminal predators.

However, it is on such a foolhardy course that the present government seems intent by pressing on with its plan to relax current licensing laws to allow very much longer opening times for pubs and off-licenses.

It seems intent on continuing with this course, despite severe criticism by police and judges who have said that extending hours will merely add further alcoholic fuel to the already raging fires of drunken violence that nightly turn our city centres into no-go areas, save for all intent on taking part in what seems to have become the new national past-time for Britain’s young of binge drinking.

In a piece of insane reasoning worthy of a character from Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the government justifies its policy by claiming that, by keeping pubs open for longer, urgency will be removed from drinkers to get down a few before closing time. It claims the current fast-track to drunken disorderliness will make way for a gracious meandering lane to quiet inebriation apparently the fashion on the continent where extended open hours are said to encourage less frantic alcohol consumption.

It would be interesting to know upon exactly what evidence, if any, the government bases its surmise that, by extending British opening hours, it will reduce drunkenness.

The notion that it is likely to do any such thing seemingly flies in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary provided by the annual spectacle of young British holiday makers in Europe displaying their legendary propensity for getting drunk. They seem unmoved by Europe’s longer opening hours to moderate their native approach towards drinking which may best be described as drink-as-much-as-you-can-as-fast-as-you-can-and–then-knock-over-everything- in-sight-that-moves-until-you-pass-out-in-a-drunken-stupor.

The general short-sightedness and complete lack of intelligence displayed by the present government’s approach towards dealing with social problems, or at least those it considers such, of which its approach towards the problem of binge-drinking is but an instance, is never better illustrated than by the findings released this week by the Office of National Statistics on social inequality which reveal how little progress the government has made since 1997 in its multifarious efforts to close the gap between rich and poor. Despite all its initiatives and special measures since gaining office to reduce inequality, it turns out it has had next to no effect in achieving that goal.

The principal reason it has failed to do so is something on which it chooses not to dwell. Setting aside the special problem posed by endogenously generated radical Islamism among Britain’s disaffected young Muslims which has an entirely different and peculiar cause, what primarily lies behind practically all of Britain’s present current social problems, from binge-drinking, through anti-social behaviour to relative deprivation, is the collapse of the two parent family. For this collapse has left large numbers of young males, especially those from the lowest social classes where single parent families are most frequently found, inadequately socialised and unmoored by claims of familial responsibilities.

The government refuses to address this problem – or even to acknowledge that it really is one, let alone how much of a principal cause it is of all those that it does identify as such.

If we stand back and ask what must be done to put the genie of deracinated, demoralised, out of control drunken, violent and disorderly British young males back in the bottle of domestic responsibility, the search for an answer must surely take us back, beyond the 1960’s radical feminism that did so much to undermine the family and to inform present social policy of new-Labour, to a much deeper cause.

Best ever A-level and GCSE results yet another year running. The Opposition points to grade devaluation, the Government to ever-brighter pupils and improved teaching. Meanwhile in schools, indignant heads assure us that pupils and teachers simply ‘worked really hard’. So what’s the real score?