Free Speech 0 : Radical Islam 1

So much for papal infalliability. After making a speech to his alma mater, the University of Regensburg in Germany, Pope Benedict XVI has apologised to Muslims for causing offence. The speech had included a description of a conversation between a Byzantine emperor and a Persian visiting his court, in which the medieval monarch declared that Islam had failed to bring anything original to the religious world save the concept of violence as a tool for spreading the faith.

Whilst the Pope had intended that section of his speech to illustrate the problems with using violence as part of any religious activity, many Muslims took it as a thinly-veiled attack on the concept of jihad. After days of unrest in Egypt, Turkey, and elsewhere, the Pope decided to backtrack.

On one level, the Pope was merely playing it safe, and doing what he could to diffuse a potentially explosive situation. Papal infalliability only applies to very specific statements defining Catholic dogma; indeed, the assumption that only God is perfect is a fundamental teaching of all the monotheistic faiths, including Christianity. So the Pope’s apology doesn’t diminish his authority or undermine his role as leader of the Catholic Church.

On the other hand, what these events have proved is that freedom of speech in the West is something that is increasingly under threat from radical Islam.

Fundamentally, the Pope did nothing wrong. He wasn’t outlining the Vatican’s foreign policy, and he wasn’t exhorting Catholics to persecute Muslims within Europe or without. The problem is not so much what was said, but that it was said at all: in the Islamic world, free speech is not a basic human right. Blasphemy in particular is viewed very dimly, often as an outright crime. It is this difference in values between the the liberal West and conservative Islam that is at the root of the failure of the two civilisations to engage contstructively.

Conservative historians in Europe and the United States like Bat Ye’or and Paul Marshall simply view this lack of engagement as symptomatic of the essential antipathy Islam has for Christians and Jews, and by extension, the social and legal values of the western world. Their reading of history puts Islam as ultimately self-serving and uninterested in accomodating any other political system but its own. In their view, Muslim states have always discriminated against non-Muslim minorities to some degree, not least of all the infamous jizya tax on non-Muslims, which in the Qur’an is linked with their submission to the Muslim state. Though the jizya itself is now obsolete, conservative historians point out that modern Islamic states remain essentially hypocritical, vocally criticising the West for slights against Islam while persecuting Jewish and Christian minorities in a variety of different ways. In Pakistan, Iran, and Nigeria, Shari’a courts count legal testimony from Christians as being of less worth than from Muslims, and in Saudi Arabia religions others than Islam simply cannot be practised at all.

Looking closer to home, conservative historians point out that radical minorities within the Muslim populations of the Europeans states especially actively seek to impose Islamic values upon whatever state they happen to be living in. They point to events like the outcry by Muslims against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the recent batch of cartoons in a Danish newspaper as indicative of a sizeable population of Muslims in these countries that simply do not subscribe to the liberal, pluralistic values of the West. Whether or not you agree with this right-wing view of Islam, those who hold it are at least consistent in what they say: Islam and Shari’a law are fundamentally incompatible with Western society, and Islamic states are essentially hostile to Western civilisation. By their reading of history, it’s one thing to buy Saudi or Iranian oil, but quite another to allow Islamic sensibilities to dictate European or American social and political norms.

For liberals like me, understanding Islam is much more difficult. Nothing so much characterises the liberal interpretation of Islam as inconsistency. Liberals want (some would say desperately) to see Islam as one of many faiths harmlessly coexisting in a global community. A certain level of pro-Arabism has always been a part of European culture, in the UK, for example, defined by such romantic characters as the explorer Richard Francis Burton and the soldier T. E. Lawrence (known to many simply as “Lawrence of Arabia”). A liberal reading of Middle East history sees Islam as a tolerant religion that for long centuries gave the Arab world a culture far in advance of anything in the West. While Europe laboured under its Dark Ages and then tore itself apart through the wars of religion in the 15th and 16th centuries, Islamic astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and jurisprudence were the most advanced in the world.

But it’s difficult to reconcile Islam’s great and noble history with people blowing themselves up on the streets of London, or crashing aircraft into skyscrapers, all in the name of Allah.

This is where the liberal view of Islam runs into problems. How can you engage with the moderate Muslims while slamming the radicals down hard enough to prevent these atrocities? How do you make space in a multicultural society for a religous group that puts their religous laws above those of the state? Conservative America can define their country as a Christian state and thereby limit the influence of the Islamic minority, but what about the liberal European who wants everyone to have a place at the top table? However hard liberals would like to define jihad as a personal struggle against the failings of the human soul, conservatives can point out that there have always been plenty of Muslims willing to view jihad as nothing less than a divine injunction to use violence to further the aims of their faith.

The tragedy is that while the conservative worldview is easier to understand and better fits a lot of the available data, it doesn’t really do anything to make life better for the people living in Muslim countries, and certainly will not extinguish the fire of militant Islam either at home or abroad. Unless the United States or Britain plan to topple every single Middle Eastern state and replace it with some sort of ersatz democracy, there will always be countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran only too happy to promote radical Islam. The European approach of “softly, softly” may work, as it seems to have done in Libya, but the pace is excruciatingly slow, and all too often the Europeans manage to woo only the leaders and not the people. In Turkey, for example, as hard as the European Union tries to draw Turkish politics into a liberal, European mold, the drift of the people is away from the secular state and towards a more religious one.

In the final analysis, about the only thing that is clear is that as scary as censorship by our own governments may be, what’s even more scary is the spectre of self-censorship through fear of reprisals by conservative Muslims. After all, if the infalliable Pope can’t say what he wants, who can?