Today’s Spectator contains an article by John Gray, criticising, as doomed to failure or, even worse, as being liable to be counter-productive, the government’s recently announced strategy against the growth of domestic Islamic extremism by encouraging local initiatives to foster closer integration of Britain’s Muslims and encourage the moderates to stand up to and speak up against the extremists.
Globalisation, Gray argues, has caused Britain to become so culturally diverse that it is folly to think we could or should seek any value consensus beyond the need for mutual tolerance in a social arrangement he calls 'modus vivendi'. To demand any more of Britain's Muslims, he argues, is to ‘single them out for deviating from a national consensus that is now largely mythical’ and positively fosters their radicalisation.
Gray writes:
‘Pressing Muslims to integrate may actually make the struggle against terrorism more difficult. … While it may seem that social cohesion and the pursuit of peace go together, the insistent demand for integration can be highly divisive. Crowd-pleasing comments by senior politicians that suggest wearing the hijab signals a refusal to join the British mainstream do nothing to create a climate of tolerance. By strengthening Islamist ideologues who claim Muslims are outsiders in Western societies, they speed up the process for radicalisation.’
Gray concludes that, although ‘we cannot hope to share many of our fundamental values, … we can still rub along together, if we can relearn the habit of tolerance.’
Gray’s argument proceeds on the assumption, common among many opponents of Britain’s current military involvement in the Middle East and Aghanistan, that the current threat it faces from Islamist extremism is largely of its and the USA's own making. He writes:
‘Nothing the government has done suggests it is ready to examine why extremism is gaining ground. Tony Blair[‘s] .. claim that Britain’s role in the Iraq war has played no part….suggests an inability to engage not only with Muslims but also with reality…. An attack on Iran that would compound the folly of Iraq .. [and] could make it almost impossible [to achieve modus vivendi with Islam].’
While today’s Spectator rightly describes John Gray as 'Britain’s foremost political philosopher', that does not mean he is necessarily correct on this issue! Like many others, I think that Gray woefully misjudges and underestimates the severity of the threat we and the rest of the West are currently facing from Islamist extremism.
To us, Gray offers no evidence for thinking Britain would not face a real and serious threat from Muslim Islamist extremism even were it and the USA to disengage militarily from the Middle East and leave their domestic Muslim communities entirely alone, save for insisting that their schools and mosques not preach or teach sedition and hatred of non-Muslims.
The whole problem is that, contrary to Gray and many others, Islamic extremism of the Al Qaeda variety is not just a product of modernity, but a new mutuation of a powerful strain of Islam that has been present and active in the Middle East and Far East, in various mutant forms, for more than five hundred years at least, and some believe from its very beginning.
Rather than globalisation merely having created here an attractive cultural diversity with which we should learn to put up, what it has done, and why we in Britain are in the pickle we currently are, is that it has also given the extremists a long-wished for bridge-head here and elsewhere into the West to assist them in realising their ultimate ambition of world-conquest in the name of their own intolerant and highly oppressive variety of Islam.
To suppose that, by not seeking to do all we can to help the many moderate Muslims here and elsewhere, resist this species of Islam, we shall be able to achieve a modus vivendi with these extremists, is what really constitutes disengagement from reality; not, as Blair and Bush are belatedly doing, facing up to the appalling truth of our times.
Comments (1)
Thanks for putting my own thoughts into words. When I read the Spectator article, I was dazed by the sheer blindness of the man. It just indicates how wrong even eminent political philosophers can be.
The Islamic extremism we face is not actually extreme by Islamic standards. We count Saudi Arabia amongst our allies and yet look how extreme they are. Furthermore, they are becoming emboldened in their attempts to control how we live, (see the recent quashing of the BAE Systems investigation; see their attempt to have Geert Wilders 'disciplined' for an anti-islamic speech).
Islam is antithetical to Western civilization in so many far-reaching ways. I think we should be looking to distance ourselves from it and protect ourselves against it wherever we can.
John Gray holds out tolerance as a solution but tolerating the intolerant is plain suicidal. Hasn't he noticed the intolerance spewing from preachers, demonstrators, sheiks, imams, politicians and the so-called 'holy' texts themselves?
When did anyone ever hear one of the self-appointed Muslim spokesmen say anything at all conciliatory? They always talk in terms of retribution and revenge, and whip their mobs into a fury by magnifying any offense.
Westerners constantly fall into the trap of trying to understand Islam in terms of western categories. They fail to understand that its frame of reference is completely different. I would have thought that someone of the calibre of John Gray could 'de-centre' sufficiently from his western roots in order to appreciate that.
Posted by Mike Woodman | February 19, 2007 12:38 PM
Posted on February 19, 2007 12:38