Islam

Hardly anything is less likely to keep people reading than to mention an exciting evening in Toronto.  But stick with me. Because last Friday night in Toronto there was a debate (organised by the Munk debates, which can be watched in full here) on the great migration crisis which pitted Louise Arbour and Simon Schama against Nigel Farage and Mark Steyn.  Regular readers will know my views of Simon Schama on this matter, so I was looking forward to watching this exchange in the hope of seeing him get what in technical debate-speak is known as his ‘arse handed to him on a plate’.

Terrorism is a distraction. It’s a distraction from the big question of our day, about Islam and violence. Only a tiny minority of Muslims affirm that sort of violence. A far larger proportion of Muslims condone another, vaguer sort of violence. It is this that we must confront. I mean the violence of theocracy. Theocracy is the belief that one religion should be absolutely culturally dominant. Of course it thinks that the state should enforce this; if the state fails to do so it loses legitimacy. This theocratic worldview is the underlying cause of Muslim terrorism. To judge from its founding texts, and its history, Islam is a religion that wants to be very firmly established. It wants to be the official religion of a nation, or empire.

On Maundy Thursday a Muslim shopkeeper in Glasgow was brutally murdered.  Forty-year-old Asad Shah was allegedly stabbed in the head with a kitchen knife and then stamped upon.  Most of the UK press began by going big on this story and referring to it as an act of ‘religious hatred’, comfortably leaving readers with the distinct feeling that – post-Brussels – the Muslim shopkeeper must have been killed by an 'Islamophobe'.  Had that been the case, by now the press would be crawling over every view the killer had ever held and every Facebook connection he had ever made.  They would be asking why he had done it and investigating every one of his associates.

After terrorist outrages like the one in Brussels, our leaders always say the same thing: ‘We must defend European values against these evil killers.’ It seems the Metropolitan Police didn’t get the memo. For they have just arrested someone — actually arrested someone — for tweeting something unpleasant about the Brussels attack, in the process trampling their coppers’ boots all over what is surely, or at least ought to be, the most important European value of all: freedom of speech. The arrested man is one Matthew Doyle. He went viral after tweeting about a run-in he had on the day of the Brussels attacks: ‘I confronted a Muslim woman yesterday in Croydon. I asked her to explain Brussels. She said “Nothing to do with me”.

Well at least we all know the form by now.  This morning Islamist suicide-bombers struck one of the few European capitals they haven't previously hit in a mass-casualty terrorist attack. The standard response now goes as follows.  First the body parts of innocent people are flung across airport check-ins or underground trains.  Briefly there is some shock.  On social media the sentimentalists await the arrival of this atrocity’s cutesy hashtag or motif and hope it will tide them over until the piano man arrives at the scene of the attack to sing 'Imagine there's no countries’.  Meantime someone will hopefully have said something which a lot of people can condemn as ‘inappropriate’.

I’ve always admired the liberal Muslims in the Quilliam Foundation. It is hard to take accusations of betrayal from your own community. Harder still to keep fighting when the thought feeling keeps nagging away that out there, somewhere, there are Islamists who might do you real harm. But Quilliam keeps fighting. To mark the launch by students of the Right2Debate campaign, which seeks to make universities live up to their principles and respect the right to speak and dispute, they have collected accounts from atheists and secularists of the wretched state of higher education. I should pause to explain that last sentence to the confused. You might have assumed that universities would be the last institutions in the country to censor.

I have never been to the island of Guernsey. This is a large world and we have a finite amount of time on it and must make our decisions about where we visit based on necessarily limited information. We cannot know everything. I have never been to Japan, for example, because I do not wish to be crushed to death by a mass of jabbering humanity, nor take part in unpleasant sadomasochistic sex acts, nor watch people disembowelling themselves in order to affirm their masculinity. I realise that this is not all that Japan has to offer. There is also sushi, for example, and buttock-clenched politeness. I could get both of those things in Harrogate. So that’s Japan off my itinerary.

There are things that happen when you grow older — bad things, harbingers of death and decay. Past the age of 55, I mean. For example, a friend and fellow columnist confessed recently that upon rising from a sitting position he almost always unintentionally farts. A delicate little ‘glip!’ from his bottom, every time he stands up. I am a little older than him and have yet to experience this demeaning imposition, this additional whiff of misery as we trundle downhill, via the unctuous and grimly cheerful hospice attendants, to the crematorium. But I am so terrified of it happening that nowadays, when I stand up, I rise very slowly and clench my buttocks tightly together just in case. It will happen sooner or later I’m sure.