This, via, the Sunday Telegraph, is what Patrick Sookhdeo, director of Britain’s Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity has to say about the way that the neocons’ favorite prime minister has contributed to the disastrous manner in which Islamic opinion in the UK is developing:
“For the past two weeks, Patrick Sookhdeo has been canvassing the opinions of Muslim clerics in Britain on the row over the cartoons…”They think they have won the debate,” he says with a sigh. “They believe that the British Government has capitulated to them, because it feared the consequences if it did not. “The cartoons, you see, have not been published in this country, and the Government has been very critical of those countries in which they were published. To many of the Islamic clerics, that’s a clear victory. “It’s confirmation of what they believe to be a familiar pattern: if spokesmen for British Muslims threaten what they call ‘adverse consequences’ – violence to the rest of us – then the British Government will cave in. I think it is a very dangerous precedent. Dr Sookhdeo adds that he believes that “in a decade, you will see parts of English cities which are controlled by Muslim clerics and which follow, not the common law, but aspects of Muslim sharia law. “It is already starting to happen – and unless the Government changes the way it treats the so-called leaders of the Islamic community, it will continue.”
He’s right, and he sets out the charge sheet: “The Prime Minister’s ignorance of Islam, Dr Sookhdeo contends, is of a piece with his unsuccessful attempts to conciliate it. And it does indeed seem as if the Government’s policy towards radical Islam is based on the hope that if it makes concessions to its leaders, they will reciprocate and relations between fundamentalist Muslims and Tony Blair’s Government will then turn into something resembling an ecumenical prayer meeting. Dr Sookhdeo nods in vigorous agreement with that. “Yes – and it is a very big mistake. Look at what happened in the 1990s. The security services knew about Abu Hamza and the preachers like him. They knew that London was becoming the centre for Islamic terrorists. The police knew. The Government knew. Yet nothing was done.”The whole approach towards Muslim militants was based on appeasement. 7/7 proved that that approach does not work – yet it is still being followed. “
Where Sookhdeo is wrong, or at least partly so, in is suggesting that the roots of the problem lie in the secularism of Britain’s current government: Britain’s politicians simply do not understand the nature, and the power, of Islamist faith. While there’s something to that argument, he overlooks the fact that Blair is probably the UK’s most religious prime minister for a century or more. The problem is that his religion is steeped deeply in a very British ecumenicism, and thus inclines him always to give the benefit of the doubt to ‘people of faith’, an intellectually ridiculous presumption that can lead to disaster. And now appears to be doing so.
“You have to distinguish between ordinary Muslims and their self-appointed leaders,” explains Dr Sookhdeo. “I agree that the best hope for our collective future is that the majority of Muslims who have grown up here have accepted the secular nature of the British state and society, the division between religion and politics, and the importance of allowing people to choose freely how they will live. “But that is not how most of the clerics talk. And, more significantly, it is not how the ‘community leaders’ whom the Government has decided represent the Muslim community think either. “…So what’s the answer? What should the Government be doing? “First, it should try to engage with the real Muslim majority, not with the self-appointed ‘community leaders’ who don’t actually represent anyone: they have not been elected, and the vast majority of ordinary Muslims have nothing to do with them. “Second, the Government should say no to [state-funded] faith-based schools, because they are a block to integration…The policy of political multiculturalism should be reversed. “The hope was that it would to ensure separate communities would soften at the edges and integrate. But the opposite has in fact happened: Islamic communities have hardened. There is much less integration than there was for the generation that arrived when I did. There will be much less in the future if the present trend continues.”Finally, the Government should make it absolutely clear: we welcome diversity, we welcome different religions – but all of them have to accept the secular basis of British law and society. That is a non-negotiable condition of being here. “If the Government does not do all of those things then I fear for the future, because Islamic communities within Britain will form a state within a state. Religion will occupy an ever-larger place in our collective political life. And, speaking as a religious man myself, I fear that outcome.”
After reading (and do read the whole thing) an article like this (which also has clear lessons for the Bush administration), it becomes very difficult to be optimistic about the future for Britain, but after reading an article like this, it is impossible not to be inspired by the fact that there are people like Sookhdeo out there, still brave enough to do what they can to stop the slide into catastrophe.