Allow me to introduce my boss, the leader of the Conservatives in the European Parliament. Syed Kamall is a Thatcher/Reagan conservative: eurosceptic, patriotic, a devotee of Austrian economics. He’s a handy cricket-player and a Jimi Hendrix fan. He’s also a practicing Muslim who does his best to pray regularly and observe the other pillars of his faith.
Occasionally, some of his more disagreeable coreligionists email to ask why he has had so little to say about Iraq or Palestine or Chechnya. Syed replies politely that he represents London, and that his priorities are to cut taxes, reduce the state’s role in welfare and enlarge liberty. If they are concerned about Iraq, he says, he’ll gladly put them in touch with Iraqi politicians.
There is an important difference between Syed and the bearded nuts writing to him. He has taken the trouble to get himself elected to something, thereby demonstrating the popularity of his opinions. British Muslims are in politics at every level and in all parties. Their views span the spectrum; but they don’t exceed the spectrum. No elected British Muslim has ever, to my knowledge, suggested that we adopt a shari’a-based system.
The trouble is, Muslim MPs don’t make especially entertaining television. For that, you need someone like Anjem Choudary, who occasionally appears on Fox News saying obnoxious things. That’s what he does: He’s a Muslim shock-jock.
Choudary seems to have convinced some Americans that Britain is in the grip of an Islamist insurgency. Although commentators condemned Donald Trump’s demand to halt Muslim immigration, Choudary’s bizarre claim that there were estates in London where the police wouldn’t patrol went largely unchallenged.
True, Trump, like Choudary, sets out to say provocative things. But he is an outlier rather than a one-off. How many leading Republicans today would do what George W. Bush did a few days after 9/11 and declare, at the Islamic Center of Washington, that “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam”?
The mood has sifted palpably. Ben Carson says no Muslim should be president. Mike Huckabee says Islam is “a religion that promotes the most murderous mayhem on the planet.” John Kasich wants a federal agency to spread “Judeo-Christian values.” (Since when do Republicans want new federal agencies to tell us what to think?)
In fairness, if I was forever reading news reports about imaginary no-go areas in British cities, I’d be worried, too. But, hand on heart, my Muslim constituents have the same quotidian concerns as anyone else: schools, taxes, traffic.
Ah, you might say, but are they proper Muslims, then? What about all those bloody and bellicose verses in the Koran? To be sure, such verses exist. Like all revealed religions, Islam can be read in more than one way — necessarily so, since it seeks to express transcendent truths in earthly language.
I’m no expert in Koranic exegesis. I’d simply observe that almost all practicing Jews and Christians manage to live with biblical verses that, taken at face value, can be read as ordering slavery, concubinage, torture and genocide (“Thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee,” Deuteronomy 20:17).
These verses have not been excised from the Bible. Rather, as the behavioral psychologist Steven Pinker observes, religious people have learned to compartmentalize their faith. Passages that are utterly removed from modern experience — when’s the last time you had cause to smite an Amalekite? – have lost their relevance.
So why, you ask, does the Islamic State go in for stoning adulterers and the like? Isn’t that pretty Islamic behavior? Curiously, the penalty of stoning is not found in the Koran; it comes from the Old Testament. The Bible is also unequivocal about what to do with the altars of Baal. But when the Islamic State monsters put that injunction into practice by dynamiting Palmyra’s temple, the world looked on in stunned horror: Christian, Jewish, Muslim or atheist, we were all aghast at the vandalism. Why? Because we have moved on from those literal teachings.
Don’t get me wrong: Those who sympathize with the Islamic State are morally deficient to the point of inhumanity. So let’s not vindicate a major plank of their world-view, namely that it’s impossible to be a good Muslim and a patriotic citizen of a Western democracy. We can do better than that.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
