Although portrayed as the spontaneous outpourings of justifiably alienated Muslim youth, the current disturbances occurring nightly in France, but also lately in Denmark, are not isolated incidents. They form part of a wider clash between two ways of life. One is secular, liberal and tolerant. It is the western way, although it has not always been so. The other is closed, illiberal, and fundamentalist. It is the way Islam is currently practised in so many places today and is long overdue for the same kind of modernisation and liberalisation as Christianity started to undergo at the time of the Reformation.
At that time, Europe was riven by similar kinds of religious strife as we are seeing there today. Indeed, tomorrow marks nothing less than the 400th anniversary of what, arguably, Was London's first successfully foiled religiously motivated planned suicide-bombing.
There are striking parallels between, on the one hand, the current conflict in Europe between disaffected and radicalised young Muslims, typically of non-European extraction, and earlier conflicts there between its various different Christian denominations.
One might, therefore, have supposed that those called on today to deal with these problems would have been tempted to see how similar problems were successfully addressed in earlier times. But so close-minded is our present government towards anything and everything that happened before about 1960, that, despite the best endeavours of those within it, like Tony Blair and Charles Clarke, who at least take the Islamist threat seriously, they simply cannot see how so many of the current measures they are proposng to resolve the current problems simply play into the hands of those behind religiously-motivated disorder.
Two classic instances illustrate this folly. The first is the government’s appallingly short-sighted Religious Hatred Bill. The other its cooption of to all appearances extremely immoderate Muslims onto the very advisory bodies it has created for suggestions as to how it should deal with these problems.
As far as the bill is concerned, while called for by Muslims ostensibly so they may gain the same legal protection from hatred being stirred up against them as Sikhs and Jews currently enjoy under the Race Relations Act, in reality the bill seems unneeded to secure such protection, since they already enjoy it. Nor does concern to gain such protection seem the real reason they are calling for it which rather seems to be a desire to insulate any aspect of their religion from criticism.
However honourable might be the motives of Muslims calling for it, this truly is going to be the tragic effect of this bill when enacted. Its effect will be tragic because, like all other creeds, religious or secular, Islam stands in permanent need of being able to be openly criticised, even ridiculed, so that the respective and prospective adherents of its various forms be able to be liberated from any intellectual or moral errors to which their adherence might otherwise have led them. This is important, not just for those who may have become subject to these errors, but for others.
No one saw more clearly than Adam Smith how crucial for the stability and cohesion of any society was the need for its members to be able to criticise and even ridicule each others’ most dearly held beliefs, especially their religious ones. Writing in 1776 in his Wealth of Nations, Smith observed ...
... that, typically, in societies containing a multiplicity of social classes enjoying different degrees of affluence, the wealthier would tend to adopt a more easy-going way of life than the less affluent for whom a more austere form of morality was more suited because more needed. (He was writing, of course in days before a comparatively luxuriant welfare-state.) A consequence, he points out, is that the moralities associated with the religions which have sprung up among and appeal to less affluent classes tend to be austere, rather than easy-going.
Smith goes on to observe that, when someone emigrates from a rural environment to a city, he thereby is liable to forfeit the informal monitoring of his conduct by intimate acquaintances that previously might have kept him behaving decently. He thereby exposes himself to the risk that he might ‘abandon himself to every sort of low profligacy and vice’, avoided only if he ‘becomes the member of a small religious sect’, thereby subjecting himself once more to the moral scrutiny of peers, but ones whose economic circumstances necessitate the morality they will hold him to be an austere one. The consequence of this, for Smith, is the inevitable emergence of just the straight-laced fanaticism we see among disaffacted young Muslims today who have returned with a vengeance to their religion, in one of its less tolerant forms, after their families had transplanted themselves from rural villages faraway to large cities of much more affluent societies like ours. Smith writes: ‘In little religious sects, accordingly, the morals of the common people have always been almost always remarkably regular and orderly…. [and have also] frequently been rather disagreeably rigorous and unsocial.’ (WN V.i.g13].
To remedy these potential sources of political dissidence and sedition, Smith recommends a two-fold strategy of which one part is directed at moderating the beliefs and moral attitudes of the religious leaders of these communities, the other at doing the same for their followers.
So far as concerns the religious leaders of these potentially politically dangerous sects, Smith recommends a system of occupational licensure that makes attendance on what he thought would be bound to be a moderating course of philosophy or science a condition of eligibility for anyone's entry to ‘any liberal profession, or before he could be received as a candidate for any honourable office of trust or profit’ – including, we might add, being able to preach in any religious establishment. As Smith put it, ‘Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition; and where all the superior ranks of people were secured from it, the inferior ranks could not be much exposed to it.’
So far as concerns the less well-educated rank and file members of these sects, Smith thought the way to reduce the strength within them of politically dangerous religious enthusiasms and superstitions was their exposure to other sources of moral and intellectual influence besides that of their preachers. He writes:
‘The state, by encouraging that is by giving entire liberty to all those who for their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, music, dancing; by all sorts of dramatic representations and exhibitions, would easily dissipate, in the greater part of them, that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the nurse of popular superstition and enthusiasm. Public diversions have always been the objects of dread and hatred, to all the fanatical promoters of popular frenzies, The gaiety and good humour which those diversions inspire were altogether inconsistent with that temper of mind, which was fittest for their purpose, or which they could best work upon. Dramatic representations besides, frequently exposing their artifices to public ridicule, and sometimes to public execration, were upon that account, more than all other diversions, the object of their peculiar abhorrence.’
The profound insights of Adam Smith into the sociology and moral psychology of religious fundamentalism and fanaticism have continuing relevance to our present predicament. One thing they show is the folly of the government’s Religious Hatred Bill.
Smith's insights also reveal the much greater wisdom, as well as courage, of Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Rasmussen. For, as reported in today's Daily Telegraph, he has resisted the calls of Muslims within and outside his country for him to censure, if not prosecute, Carsten Juste, editor of the Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten, whose recent publication of a series of cartoons of the prophet Muhammed – of which one portrays the prophet with an about-to-explode bomb on his head in place of the more conventional turban -- sparked off recent riots in Denmark.
Prime Minister Rasmussen has stood by Carsten Juste who defended his action by saying that ‘ to demand that we take religious feelings into consideration is irreconcilable with western democracy and freedom of expression. This does not mean we want to insult any Muslims.’
Sadly, few Muslims seems able to understand the distinction being drawn here. Nor, even more sadly, is our Government liable to be able to do for much longer, given the credentials of some Muslims it has drafted in to advise it on how to deal with the problems caused by our home-grown disaffected young Muslims. One of these is Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who, apart from havng been claimed to have had close links in the past with several leading Al Qaeda operatives, also seemingly favours a very uncompromising form of Islam that is unlikely to tolerate the kind of criticism and ridicule of his faith which both Adam Smith and the brave editor of the Danish newspaper favour the freedom to engage in.
Of course, it did not take the publication of any offensive pictures to trigger the explosion of riots that have broken out nightly in and around Paris for the past week and have now spread to other towns in which live large numbers of disaffected Muslim youth. Their example teaches something well worth being noted by those who have claimed it has been our government’s complicity in the toppling of the Saddam regime that led to the London bombings in July. One of that war’s most vociferous critics was France. Although to date it has been spared any terror bombings on its soil, its opposition to the Iraq war has seemingly done nothing to reduce the alienation and disaffection of its large Muslim minority.
Nor, would its oppositon to the Iraq war seem to have it spared France becoming, just like Spain and Italy, a target of organised Islamist violence. What is notable about the current rioting in both Denmark and France has been its apparently organised non-spontaneous character in both countries, As one of the Danish rioters, a 19 year old Palestinian domiciled in Denmark, is reported to have told a reporter from the Jyllands Posten: ‘We are angry to what has happened to our prophet,… I know that it wasn’t you, but we are not going to take this… We have planned this for three weeks, that’s why only two were arrested in Saturday.’
Likewise, in France, the immediate occasion of the riots there was the accidental electrocution of two Muslim youths who had hidden in a power station after wrongly believing the police were chasing them. Tthe scale and ferocity of the subsequent rioting suggest it was orchestrated and 'perfectly organised', as France’s interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, is reported to have claimed.
Everyone at the time thought the July London bombings and the failed attempt that followed shortly after were the autonomous work of local groups with no direct links to al Qaeda. That analysis, we now know, to have been wrong: al Qaeda is in the business of actively recruiting and running such potentially willing suicide bombers. The example of what is happening in France and Denmark suggests that it matter not one iota what stand a country takes to the war in Iraq whether they are liable to strike in it: all that matters is their willingness and ability so to do. The government’s proposed Religious Hatred Bill would close a badly needed and presently still open small window of opportunity moderate opinion has to lessen the susceptibility of young Muslims to be so recruited, by subjecting their religion, especially in its less moderate forms, to criticism and even ridicule. That is why the bill should be dropped forthwith.