The AGE of UNREASON

Despite one hundred and fifty years of post-Darwinian scientific enquiry and discovery, vast numbers of the planet’s citizens are as bewitched as their ancestors ever were by the absurdities, fantasies and mendacities of supernatural superstition. I have argued before that the delusion that its sufferers call “faith” is the source of far greater suffering in the world – suffering through personal guilt and self-hatred, deprivation and oppression, persecution and mutilation, murder and genocide – than all the other abstractions – nationalism, tribalism, politics and ideology – put together. Paradoxically, the dominance of religious bigotry as a force for evil seems to grow ever stronger as the world becomes smaller and liberal education spreads further.

In an editorial of 1941 for Life magazine, the Time-Life publisher Henry Luce described his era as “the American century”. At different points in that time-frame, other candidates for the accolade briefly arose, but hindsight shows that Luce got it right: more than any other global player, the United States shaped the century. How will the present one be known? Already, there seem compelling arguments to dub it “the Muslim century”.

Luce talk

The millennium had barely begun when, “out of a clear blue sky”, the most profoundly world-shaking challenge was made to the confidence of American power, a challenge made specifically in the name of Islam. There are Muslim apologists who fend off the connection between the central tenets of Islam and the 9/11 atrocity, but they are confounded by the words of the Qur’an that I found and have quoted before: “Allah has bought from the believers their selves and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the way of Allah; they kill and are killed; that is a promise binding upon Allah in the Torah and the Gospel and the Qur’an” [from Arthur J Arberry’s translation for OUP, though I have changed his own term ‘God’ to ‘Allah’]. It is, of course, no accident that the book of the Qur’an from which this passage comes (which is called, in English, ‘Repentance’) is book number 9 and the verse number is 111.

Islam has been at the centre of the world’s flashpoints in the first 163 months of the present century. A prime mover in the spread of Muslim fundamentalism has been the Deobandi wing of Sunni Islam. Deobandis are devotees of Sharia law, the most proscriptive interpretation of the Qur’an. This wing of Islam is, in every sense, the most aggressive. If it has not already become the dominant force in the Muslim community in Britain, it will do so before you know it. The Taliban are adherents of Deobandi practice. The word “Taliban” means “students”.

Saddam nuisance

Western forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 in an initially successful attempt to overthrow the Taliban whose activists had dominated the country for five years. The pretext was “to keep the streets of America and Britain safe”, but the notion that the Taliban (rather than al-Qaida) was responsible for terrorist attacks in the west was never remotely credible. In any case, as everyone knows but no politician will acknowledge, the Taliban will again be ruling Afghanistan within a maximum of three months after western troops have finally withdrawn.

The American and British governments muddied the water and overstretched their own resources by adding an irrelevant invasion of Iraq to their military commitments, for no better reason than that George W Bush wanted to complete what he took to be “unfinished business” left over by his father following the Gulf War of 1990-1. Anxious to establish his profile on the world stage, Tony Blair joined this vain exercise.

Assad sack

Ten years on, Iraq is riven by inter-faith strife. This week, there have been more than 250 casualties of car bombs in Baghdad, at least fifty of them fatalities and almost all of them Shias, which means that the bombers were certainly Sunni Muslims. If that sounds a lot, consider that there have been fifty times that number of fatalities in sectarian attacks in Iraq in the past three months. So much for the west’s legacy.

The Shia are also Muslims and they form the government in Iraq, where they make up the largest demographic (the most dominant Shia representation anywhere in the world is in Iran, where about two-fifths of the world’s Shias live). Shia and Sunni Muslims have been in conflict for many centuries. Do not expect reconciliation any time soon.

The renewed struggle between Iraqi Shia and Sunni is wholly a product of the western invasion. Saddam Hussein was a Ba’athist. The Ba’ath Party, though Islamic, is notably liberal – it may be surprising to note – and opposes Muslim fundamentalism and Sharia law. In some ways, Alawite Islam parallels Ba’athist Islam. Bashar al-Assad of Syria is an Alawite. Like Saddam, he has been more exercised by Arab nationalism than by Islamic orthodoxy. If he falls in Syria, there must be a strong possibility that some form of Islamic fundamentalism will succeed him in that benighted country. This is the dilemma that stays the hand of the international community under pressure to intervene in the brutal Syrian civil war. Unthinkably, intervention might produce a result that had worse consequences for the Syrians, for the Arab world and for the wider world even than the reign of Assad.

Gadd-out-of-here

After all, there is the precedent of Libya as well as that of Iraq. Muammar Gaddafi’s regime was again far more concerned with Arab nationalism than with Islam – Gaddafi was raised as a Bedouin Muslim. Islamist factions infiltrated the anti-government forces in Libya as they have done in Syria. The present prime minister of Libya, Ali Zeidan, is a Sunni Muslim.

Many new Islamist factions have appeared in Libya since the war and several of the militias formed to fight Gaddafi have declined to disband. It was an Islamist cadre that attacked the American consulate in Benghazi last September, killing several people including the ambassador. Abdelsalam al-Mosmary, a critic of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Libya, was assassinated just this week. Sporadic exchanges of fire and regular car bombs, particularly in Benghazi and Tripoli, continue to imperil the stability of Libya.

A Sunni outlook for Ali Zeidan

Through patient infiltration, al-Qaida has established itself in Pakistan, Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, Mali, Nigeria, Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Turkey. It is al-Qaida that still represents the most effective and most ruthless armed expression of Islamic fundamentalism. President Obama has been assiduous in concentrating on pre-emptive strikes against al-Qaida – controversially, more in Pakistan than anywhere – rather than diluting this effort with speculative engagements elsewhere.

But terrorism, guerrilla warfare and the fomentation of uprisings against secularist regimes are not the only methods by which Islamic fundamentalism exerts its muscle. Sharia rule profoundly circumscribes personal freedoms that citizens of liberal democracies take for granted. The judiciary wholly or largely imposes Sharia law in Afghanistan (even without Taliban rule), Pakistan, Muslim parts of India, Bangladesh, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank, Saudi, Qatar, much of the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Brunei, the Maldives, Muslim parts of Sri Lanka and Singapore and Indonesia, Sudan, Mauritania and for Muslims in Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Gambia, Djibouti and Comoros.

The late Abdelsalam al-Mosmary

Restrictions imposed by Sharia apply to everyone, including visitors, as unguarded tourists are apt to discover. Visiting a Muslim country is like staying with vegans: they serve you vegan food but, when they visit you, they expect you to serve them vegan food. So Islamists in non-Muslim countries go on demonstrations carrying placards on the theme of “death to the infidel”, but any reciprocal tolerance is unthinkable. How long would you stay alive if you brandished a poster with the legend “Death to Islam” in downtown Khartoum, Riyadh, Mogadishu or Islamabad?

More than any other issue, it is sexuality that brings out the feudal in Sharia law and Islamic fundamentalism. Sharia strictly interprets the Qur’an, so anything in that text that already seems oppressive is made more so by its application. This comes from the section on ‘Women’: “Men are the managers of the affairs of women for that Allah has preferred in bounty one of them over another, and for that they have expended of their property. Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for Allah’s guarding. And those you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them” [book 4 verse 38]. Needless to say, the courts will always favour a man’s testimony over that of his wife.

Sweet 16 at the UN

The world knows of the case of Malala Yousafzai, the Sunni Muslim who, at 15, was the object of an assassination attempt by the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley. Malala – her name means “grief-stricken” – had had the audacity to advocate full rights of education for girl pupils, an offence against Islamist views on the subjugation of women. Malala made a remarkable recovery and addressed a convocation of youth delegates at the UN on her sixteenth birthday. She has become a figurehead for women’s rights under Islam and was named by Time magazine in April as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World”.

The brutal, iniquitous and unyielding nature of Sharia law is sufficient cause for opposing the spread of Islam in any of its guises. Hence the European Union’s continuing difficulty with the long-standing application to join made by Turkey, a nation that, while very nearly entirely sited in Asia, occupies a tiny area of southeastern Europe.

Though Turkey’s population is almost wholly Sunni Muslim, it is formally a secular nation. Several days of unrest in Istanbul in May were centred on the perception of encroaching Islamisation by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. Informing this perception was an attempt by Erdogan to reduce the power of the army, widely seen as a significant force for secularism (like the army in Egypt). Several other recent government restrictions were read as Islamist.

Erdogan – not best pleased

The wearing of the hijab has been banned for the entirety of Turkey’s modern existence, a lot longer than in France, where the wearing of the burqa was addiitionally made illegal in 2010. France has a rapidly growing problem with Islam, which now counts a tenth of the country’s population among its supporters. It has been estimated that Muslims could be powerful enough to determine the outcome of presidential elections within thirty years.

Wherever you look, even in Europe, there is evidence of the encroachment of Islam on the very different philosophies, cultures and traditions that have survived strife and oppression in the past. It may be that Islam, that most proscriptive and intolerant of dogmas, is stronger than the rest and will eventually hold sway across the world. It won’t be in my lifetime and perhaps not in yours either, but the need to stem the tide is urgent now.

YULE BE LUCKY

It’s that time of year when, willy-nilly, everything seems to be coloured by its proximity to Christmas. I rather resent it. The whole thing only survives of course as a celebration of the triumph of capitalism. Were it primarily a religious occasion, as it once was, I should resent it no less. I prefer to think of this period as it was in the first place: a pagan festival called Yule, one which, as they did with all the culture they encountered that they deemed “heathen”, the Christians ruthlessly eradicated. If I didn’t find the term so studiedly ghastly, I might embrace it as “winterval”.

We still speak of Yule logs and find ourselves amusing when we wish each other “a cool Yule”, but realistically one has to accept that it’s become this amorphous mass called Christmas. Brought up in the low-church Anglican tradition and singing in my school choir, I was perforce made aware of the progression of the beginning of the Christian calendar from Michaelmas through Advent and so to Christmastide. The choral traditions that accrue at this time of year are certainly seductive – who doesn’t melt to Harold Darke’s version of ‘In the Bleak Mid-Winter’ or Boris Ord’s haunting ‘Adam Lay Ybounden’? This amounts to a cultural rather than a religious observance of the season. Many will be exercised by a similar spirit – actually attending a carol service, say, or going to Midnight Mass at the end of Christmas Eve which we, though rationalists, did as obeisance to our upbringing up until about 15 years ago.

But the infant Christ was shouldered aside long ago by a more demotic and transaction-friendly figure to embody the moment: the fat, jolly man in red with a white beard. Not that even he is entirely holding his own. It was the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam (as they called New York) who brought to the New World the legend of Sinter Kraas. Clement Clarke Moore’s much-loved poem of 1823, ‘The Night Before Christmas’, popularized the figure of Santa Claus, which was cemented as an image by Thomas Nast’s caricature for Harper’s Weekly in 1863. Of all commercial enterprises, Coca-Cola made most of this image in its advertising. The British version of the character, Father Christmas, is now all but subsumed into the American Santa.

The style of Christmas celebration in Britain has further changed in recent years and I blame all those holidays taken in Florida by people with more money than taste. Americans want passers-by to see that they are celebrating the season. This ostentation has spread to the more modest homes of the British. The result is that street upon residential street is embellished with rippling lights, parked sleighs and abseiling Santas, a riot of ill-assorted effects that must quadruple each house’s annual electricity bill. The old carol urged us to “deck the halls with boughs of holly”. But I think that what was meant was the inside of the halls, to enhance an intimate and communal act of worship, not the outside to announce that you are competing with the Joneses next door and the Argos store in the Arndale Centre.

And of course, it is the houses that have no architectural distinction that thereby draw attention to themselves. Any dwelling of style and grace will vouchsafe no more than the glimpse through a drawing room window of lights on a tree and, what’s more, a tree not dressed until Christmas Eve (as is traditional) and dismantled promptly on the morning of Twelfth Night. Only the most vulgar householders can feel comfortable turning their homes into the festive equivalent of a lap-dancing dive in the red-light district of a down-at-heel holiday resort for two solid months.

Again, it is a sign of American commercial influence that the Yule season lasts so long. Macy’s start putting up their Christmas lights in mid-September. (Mind you – I wrote the foregoing few sentences for my book Common Sense in 2006 and this year there’s been a decided cutting-back. Instead of the lights going up in what seemed still to be early autumn, it was as if there were a pact among the self-decorating class, as a result of which nothing twinkled until last weekend. Now they’re up, though, perhaps the shameless householders will keep the lights till Easter).

A few years ago, the Radio 4 programme Saturday Review, in which a rotating group of critics debate the cultural openings of the week, turned its attention to the festive lights on Regent Street which, that year, centred on promotions for a seasonal Hollywood movie. The critics roundly deplored this development, as though earlier, less specific designs somehow betokened a less commercial philosophy. “Oh please” I shouted at the wireless. “Do you imagine the stores put up these lights in honour of the new-born Christ? They do it because they want you to come and gaze at the spectacle and come into the stores and spend money. If you want to attack lights that advertise a movie, focus on the real Satan here: attack capitalism”.

Christmas is now primarily an orgy of indulgence, even in these straitened times. Though the royal family’s trip en masse to St Mary Magdalene church at Sandringham on Christmas morning still brings the media, and television news the world over runs clips of the Pope speaking the same dreary message in dozens of languages from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, religious observance is marginal in the scheme of things. This Christmas Day, BBC1 has an hour of Eucharist in the morning and five minutes from the Gospel of Matthew late at night. Unless you count a 50-minute programme on BBC2 at 18.00 about Botticelli’s ‘Mystic Nativity’ – which anyway is from a series about painting, not religion – that is the sum total of religious broadcasting from British terrestrial television on the big day. I have not checked out the hundreds of satellite channels but, save for stations dedicated to evangelism, I suspect that between them they can muster no more.

It’s a tough call, deciding which has done more harm in the world: religion or capitalism. As widely anticipated, capitalism scuppered the Copenhagen summit and ensured that nothing was bound into law that would limit the freedom of capital to continue to plunder, exploit and despoil the planet. So, as I have argued here before, capitalism will surely ensure that life in the universe comes to an end. That’s quite a lot of harm.

Religion’s harm is more often on an individual basis, expressed in fear, guilt, self-loathing, cruelty, hubris, anti-rationality and all other charming qualities that prelates, priests and shamans preach. In this last week, the Bishop of Limerick, Donal Murray, has been prevailed upon by the Vatican to resign – you can just imagine the endless negotiation – over his failure to act on the abuse practised by priests in his diocese. Recently, we sent out Hanukkah ecards, including one to a friend in Israel that depicted, in a line drawing, a cantor intoning alongside a boy. The roguish legend on the card was “Here’s to you, Judaism! You’re all the tradition with none of the paedophilia”. Our friend replied, more gravely: “Would that this sentiment were true. It may not now or in the past have been as rampant as within the Catholic Church, but abuse by rabbis is definitely not unknown”.

Needless to say, wherever people have taken power over others, there is abuse. Catholicism particularly lends itself to paedophilia and pederasty because it has a culture of secrecy (the confession) overlaying the requirement that priests be unmarried and the tradition that the head of the church is “infallible”. Arguably even worse than the centuries of abuse practised by priests and nuns have been the knee-jerk denial and the instinct to protect the abusers rather than the abused. But that is religion all over. Islam honours the suicide bomber and ignores the innocent victim, dismisses the “infidel” (anyone not Moslem) and persecutes anyone who questions the absurd cruelties inflicted by fundamentalism on those too weak to fight back, especially women and children. The gruesomely misnamed “honour killing” is forgiven because men have all of the privilege and women none of the rights.

Meanwhile, in the evangelical churches of Christianity, evil is rewarded with the trappings of the secular world as though there is no possible contradiction. The unspeakable American preacher Oral Roberts died last week at 91, having led a life of fake cures and conspicuous consumption, courtesy of the backwoods idiots who flocked to his revivalist meetings. In a field where greed and fraud run rampant, Roberts was the wealthiest and the most shameless. One fact that he cannot escape: as I write, he is not resident in any version of heaven, but then nor would he be had he led an utterly blameless life.

In his most recent new year message, the pontiff Ratzinger – a man sitting on a throne, wearing a dress and protected by the Swiss Guard among whom being gay is practically compulsory – identified the main threat to the world not as capitalism or climate change or nationalism or Islam or human greed or nuclear weapons or terrorism or warfare or disease but homosexuality. In the United States, there are churches that bend their most determined efforts to denouncing homosexuals, even – what could be more sanctimoniously revolting? – barracking at the funerals of fallen service personnel on the argument that they died in the name of a country (the US) that tolerates homosexuals. The African churches that remain members of the Anglican communion are leading the movement on that continent to have homosexuality registered in law as an offence punishable by the death penalty. In nations where Sharia law obtains, homosexuals are publicly executed. Even were I not myself gay, I should denounce the world’s religions as barbarous, hypocritical and utterly irrelevant.

I am not much attracted to the post-hippie, self-sufficient, new-age life that anyway touches hands with the pastoral, simple-life version of Christianity and certainly embraces a good deal of superstition and unsustainable swooniness about what is proper. Some of these people, no doubt, will be doing Yule this coming weekend. So I guess the only alternative is to accept that capitalism has won here as everywhere else and accede to the season of conspicuous consumption. “Merry Christmas, you suckers” as the satirical songwriter Paddy Roberts sang nearly half a century ago, “It may be your last”.

FREEDOM from INQUISITION

Today’s report that the Home Secretary is prepared to consider outsourcing the national database is one of the most alarming developments so far in the shaming story of New Labour’s flight from its own base, both in terms of its increasing instincts to control every damned thing and of its growing love affair with the private sector. As The Guardian put it, such a move “would be accompanied by tougher legal safeguards to guarantee against leaks and accidental data losses”, but of course there can be no such guarantee, however “tough” the safeguards.

We know already that the security applied to supposedly encrypted and/or confidential data is close to non-existent and that those who behave in a cavalier manner with sensitive material are almost never in practice subjected to penalty, either through the courts or even in their career paths.

I would like to make a modest proposal. Let Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, build into the premise of the operation of the national database’s security a provision that, in the event of a leak or a data loss, the then holder of the office of Home Secretary along with Ms Smith herself (whatever her then status) be obliged to serve a term of not less than two years’ detention in a maximum security prison. Such a provision would offer a rather more reliable “guarantee” against leaks and data loss and, moreover, would furnish both the then Home Secretary and Ms Smith with useful first-hand experience of “tough” security.

It never ceases to astonish me that politicians cannot envisage situations in which the powers that they wish to arrogate to themselves might be considerably more oppressive, for instance in the hands of some as-yet unforeseeable successor. In my lifetime, several European nations, not so unlike Britain, have laboured under dictatorships, usually of a military stripe. It is sadly not beyond the power of imagination to picture Britain too being governed by a regime even less concerned to protect the freedom of the individual than is New Labour. In fifty years from now, Britain will doubtless be a Muslim state. How much more effective will it be to inflict upon the nation the extremes of Sharia law when the Blair and Brown governments have created the infrastructure of surveillance that will allow a future mullah-turned-Interior-Minister to enforce orthodoxy on a British people who once rejoiced in their non-conformist traditions.

Rather more urgent – because the present economic climate makes it unavoidable – is the certainty that forms of access to the national database will be sold for profit to commercial organisations. Once the control of the data moves out of the hands of central government and into the hands of entrepreneurs who are answerable first to shareholders, the rush to cash in will become a stampede and government, having acceded to the thin edge of the wedge, will be powerless to prevent, say, your insurance company having total access to every financial transaction you conduct, every email you send or receive and details of every visit you make to a website. Is that what you voted for?

Sir Ken Macdonald, lately Director of Public Prosecutions, told The Guardian: “The tendency of the state to seek ever more powers of surveillance over its citizens may be driven by protective zeal. But the notion of total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile. We must avoid surrendering our freedom as autonomous human beings to such an ugly future. We should make judgments that are compatible with our status as free people”. I couldn’t put it better.

Regulation is a perfectly honourable instinct in the make-up of the left. The current catastrophe of capitalism makes the case for regulation of the markets as no politician, however eloquent, ever could. But there is regulation and there is oppression. I do not say that the present government has turned to oppression … yet. But we are on a worrying path. Already more CCTV cameras gaze upon Britons than the residents of any other nation if measured by head of population. The suspicion that most of the cameras do not actually function properly helps to make the Brits relaxed about this chronic level of surveillance. After all, as a nation we are – we have always been – hopeless at maintenance. Count the clocks in public places that have stopped, the great majority of them not during the past month either.

If the level of surveillance actually delivered what it promised, there would be no shooting, no arresting and no convicting of innocent civilians. There would be much less theft, shoplifting, criminal damage and breaking in; much less speeding, hitting and running, dangerous driving and illegal parking; much less rape, kidnap, assault and child molestation; much less gang culture and fewer sink estates. The cost of this vast network of surveillance is nowhere near justified by its results.

So what the hell does the government want of this love affair with data-collecting? The knee-jerk response – that it is a crucial weapon in the front line of “the war against terror” – is a busted flush. The government could enact all manner of targeted controls on the community from which terrorism emerges if it were not so squeamish about giving offence to Islam. Faced by the loss of confidence in Labour among the non-Muslim population, part of it fuelled by the resentment at the imposition of oppressive regulation on communities that do nothing to justify it, you might think that Mr Brown’s advisors would suggest that he cut his losses and pursue a more broadly popular agenda.

ROWAN and BARACK and ALL the GANG

My regular reader may perhaps be surprised to have found no comment here yet on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s outrage. (For the record, he tentatively advanced the notion that certain disputes in the Muslim community in Britain might be settled by specially convened courts operating under Islamic Sharia law). It seems an obvious one for me to write about, he or she would hazard (and not be far off the mark). I confess I have not “privileged” (as they say) my own blog on this matter. Upon listening to His Grace’s interview on The World at One (which preceded the formal address in which he formally unveiled his thinking on Sharia law), I did something that I have never done before which was to email a comment to the programme. For a few hours, I believed that my comment had been sucked into cyberspace. There were apparently no comments at all posted within three hours of the programme – all were timed later – and many of them were trivial and even rude. I wrote to the website asking why I should have bothered to email. Impressively, I received a prompt reply from no less a personage than the deputy editor of The World at One (who certainly must have more pressing duties to which to attend) and was able quickly to verify his assurance that my comment was after all there in all its glory. (Needless to say, I sent him a grateful and admiring response). The BBC had by then received upwards of 17,000 emails. Just processing them must require a dedicated team.

I was also an early joiner of the thread that inevitably spun out to inordinate length on the Richard Dawkins website. On-line newspapers and every other kind of forum have been humming with this matter. Cantab has unleashed a vast hornets’ nest and very, very few of those roused are buzzing in his support. The (pretty feeble) consensus among his few apologists appears to be that his view has been misunderstood, misinterpreted or taken out of context. It is true that there is a large amount of personal abuse in the reaction, not least in the tabloids. I tried to give Dr Williams some credit in my postings. He is, after all, about as liberal a leader as the Anglican church can boast in my lifetime (since Michael Ramsey, anyway) and, if this storm ensures that his successor is a flint-faced fundamentalist, the church and wider public life in Britain will be the poorer for it.

The argument that I put forward in my postings which I have yet to see in any others is this: I rather suspect that Rowan Williams is fundamentally a decent and caring man (and far from stupid) but he doesn't appear to comprehend the aspiration of Islam to control the whole planet. Here's a refinement of his proposal that would leave him with less egg in his beard and, at the same time, would demonstrate vividly where Islam stands. Let the Archbishop propose that all Islamic nations reciprocate and allow non-Muslims and (especially perhaps) apostates to bend to arrangements other than those prescribed by Sharia. I have no expectation that any Islamic nation would subscribe to such an arrangement but, if I were wrong, it would constitute a major breakthrough.

Further, I made this point on the Dawkins site: I remember lodging for a while in the 1960s in the Bourneville area of Birmingham (England). There wasn't a pub to be found for miles because the Cadburys were religious teetotallers of some stripe (quakers?) and their writ ran throughout the area. Maybe it still does. By itself, this is of no great moment (unless you're a lush) but it is really only a small step from that to the Bishop of Rochester's “no-go areas” and then on to a situation where Sharia is more powerful than the law of the land in the ghettoes that we always said we didn't want.

Another poster asked “How will it affect you if you're not Muslim?” Not to put too fine a point on it, I repeat that Islam is set on world domination. Today Southall, tomorrow south London, next week the home counties. If I live in a society or a world where being an infidel (which is to say, not a Muslim) is a capital offence, I think I will justifiably feel that the rise of Sharia has affected me more than somewhat.

This week is General Synod. Someone from high in the Anglican church must be monitoring the Dawkins site, it being always one's duty to keep an informed eye on the enemy (serious lefties take The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal). That spy, I suggested, should encourage Synod to tell Cantab that he ought to resign unless he can satisfactorily answer the largest question that his musings raise: whether anyone whose convictions run against the law of the land might expect to be heard before a court more sympathetic to his own stance.

In another part of the forest, the American primaries game (much relished by me if evidently not by everybody) has moved nearer to a resolution. In my earlier entry Five Days Are a Long Time in Politics (January 9th), I counselled that the respective party conventions were months away. Time enough for much to occur.

Events over the last month have refined my analysis and eliminated a number of the players. It seems to me now that the next president is most likely to be Barack Obama. He has astutely handled the obvious negatives that hang about him – his inexperience, his race – without offering other hostages to fortune. He has remained unknowable while yet firing up millions of voters. Who, even among the American chattering classes, could list five of his policy positions? What he offers is freshness, charisma, his mantra of change, the promise (probably undeliverable) of politics very much not as usual. Will he cope with his first crisis as president? Well, he will have shrewd advisors to head him away from the rocks.

Why him rather than Clinton or McCain? Because I think neither Clinton nor McCain has smothered the negatives so well. Every advance by Obama hurts Clinton double because it makes her look less and less the inevitable and the unbeatable candidate. Obama can cast himself as the underdog all the way to November. Clinton looks less and less likely to be able to maintain her image as the heir apparent. What is more, Bill Clinton has unexpectedly begun to seem more of a hindrance than a help. When he shines, he dims her light and people fear that he would interfere in her administration. When he attacks, he makes her seem simultaneously mean and weak. Meanwhile, McCain is no nearer being loved by his own party. The Republican electorate sent him a stark message in the votes yesterday. Mike Huckabee cannot hope to catch McCain in the delegate count but he certainly can hurt him.

No candidate is a sure thing. There may be more racism hidden in the anonymity of the November ballot than anyone has yet bargained for. Clinton would be just as hurt by unspoken misogyny and indeed McCain will be deprived of the votes of deep-dyed conservatives who might even switch to “punish” him. But I feel sure that the Democrats will begin crucially to realize that Obama can beat McCain more surely than Clinton can. Obama offers a sense of the positive that neither McCain nor Clinton can match. His presence underlines the doubts that the electorate have about two candidates who are both seen as machine politicians and yet who are both seen as divisive. To a degree, I think this a pity and that the Democrats may be missing a trick. I argued before for a Clinton/Obama ticket that could look forward to holding the White House for 16 years. But Hillary sure as hell won’t agree to be Barack’s running mate. When Obama wins the nomination, she and Bill will decide to retire to the semi-showbiz world in which Bill now operates.

In The Sunday Times today, Andrew Sullivan argues that the catastrophe (not his word) of the Bush presidency is the ingredient that will most determine the outcome of the state primaries and the national vote. There is something in his argument as presented, though to hazard that Bush has “crafted” (Sullivan’s word) the election is absurd. Had America enjoyed two terms of President Al Gore (whose Vice-President Joe Lieberman – perhaps not his only VP – would hardly be running now as a Democratic contender; what he is actually doing now is backing John McCain), the contenders would probably be the ones we have and the situation would probably be just as poised.

Few retiring presidents are able to bequeath a satisfied nation to an anointed successor as Ronald Reagan did (or could have done, had he taken the remotest interest in the identity of his successor). As president, Al Gore would surely have found a more cultivated response to 9/11 than the attack on Iraq. He would certainly have ratified the Kyoto Agreement and the US might now be in the vanguard of tackling climate change. But I bet Gore’s popularity would have suffered accordingly, especially insofar as his measures required personal sacrifice. So it’s just as likely that the 2008 candidates would have been distancing themselves from a Gore presidency (as indeed Gore himself did in 2004 from the Clinton administration of which he was part).

Most political careers, as Enoch Powell sagely observed, end in failure. Even President Obama’s may do that. And of course archbishops may also make a conclusive bish of it.

The SEASON TO BE JOLLY

I spent a merry hour yesterday evening searching for and downloading Christmas carols. Not that we lack for piles of CDs and indeed LPs of traditional favourites in this house, but the beauty of iTunes and other sites is that you can cherry-pick what you want; you don’t have to acquire the whole album and hence a bunch of duplications.

I had been especially missing ‘Adam Lay Ybounden’, an anonymous 15th century madrigal most widely known these days in its 20th century setting by Boris Ord. We used to sing this one when I was in the school choir and I was always moved by the way Ord caught its medieval spirit without being either unduly pious about its age or unsympathetic in his own modernity.

A second favourite unaccountably missing from the CD compilations was ‘The Boar’s Head Carol’, another 15th century lyric that was later published in the collection of Christmasse Carolles by Wynkyn de Worde, great ally of William Caxton in the fledgling business of The Print and possessor of one of the most enviably distinctive names in fame’s history. ‘The Boar’s Head’ is so rumbustious a crowd-pleaser that it warms up the most perishing congregation, even in the bleak mid-winter.

Despite my knowledge that there are no supernatural powers, beings or states of being, I have absolutely no difficulty in appreciating carols or, come to that, hymns from all through the calendar of ‘Ancient and Modern’. Music is music and poetry is poetry and one doesn’t need to be put off by the illusory nature of its inspiration. A huge proportion of art of all kinds is expressive of fantasy and none the worse for that. What’s more, low-church music is very redolent of my childhood and so has a powerful claim on my emotions.

Brought up in the Anglican tradition – by which of course I mean a calm, benign and very nearly agnostic approach to worship – I was well able to distinguish between the theatre and the propaganda from an early age. Had I been a Catholic, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Jainist, a Jew, a Parsee, a Zoroastrian, a Mennonite, a Sikh, an Amish or a member of any of the other faiths, I would doubtless have had a bloodier battle to escape. As it was, once I was confirmed by the then Bishop of Peterborough, I rapidly moved from being a daily reader of selected passages of the Bible (“that boy’s going to be a vicar” said my Dad, who never possessed the gift of prophesy) to the warm embrace of apostasy. In my book Common Sense (see the link in the right column), I wrote about my rationalism, but it wasn’t until this year, when I started to read Richard Dawkins and then Sam Harris (the latter of whom is nearer to my own position), that I discovered that the battle against the dangerous power of religion is at last being joined in earnest. The site richarddawkins.net has been the year’s best discovery for me and I have been greatly stimulated by the range of (often heated) discussions among people who are, at the level that counts, like-minded.

In an unusual declaration, Nick Clegg answered the question of whether he believed in god, posed on Radio Five Live yesterday, with the word “no” (at least that’s what The Guardian says; I listened to the entire phone-in on the BBC iPlayer and the matter never came up). It is rare indeed for party leaders anywhere in the capitalist world to reveal such things and Clegg was instantly transformed from being the least promising-looking Liberal Party leader since Clement Davies to a bold and interesting chap. Alas, as politicians are apt to do, he blew it immediately. “I have enormous respect for people who have religious faith,” he ‘clarified’ later in the day. “I’m married to a Catholic and am committed to bringing my children up as Catholics”. So, rather as his website cites “Jonny [sic] Cash” as his favourite singer, Clegg looks like another disingenuous opportunist saying what he hopes is the ingratiating thing rather than what he knows is the true thing.

In another part of the (same) forest, year’s end is the conventional time for the computation based upon the names given to the year’s new-born (not, one assumes, that there will have been no more over the remaining twelve days before January 1st). The Office of National Statistics – whose data, you imagine, could hardly be expected to extend beyond, say, June (say, 1994) – reckons there were 6,772 Jacks joining us this year. Thomas was the next most popular name with 5,803 votes; that is unless you count together those christened – to use entirely the wrong word – Mohammad, Mohamad, Muhamet and Muhammed, in which case Thomas is relegated to third, the M guys registering 6,368 hits.

What this demonstrates is the alarming penetration of Islam into British society. Will our children or our children’s children find themselves constrained under Sharia law in Britain? It will surely occur sooner in France, where more than five million Muslims have settled and where they are widely expected to become a majority before 2030. That’s France, our nearest neighbour on mainland Europe. In due course, Nick Clegg may find himself saying that he is “committed” to his grandchildren being brought up as Muslims. And, by the way, Islam is a faith that promises suicide bombers the attentions of the curiously precise number of 72 virgins in paradise (I don’t think the Qur'an specifies that they should be attractive or female or even indeed human virgins) and that routinely countenances murder for the 'sins' of adultery, homosexuality and being an infidel, which is to say not being a Muslim. By the time the first Muslim government is sworn in at Westminster – and don’t doubt that it will assuredly be an all-Muslim government – Adam will certainly lie ybounden.

LET MISS GIBBONS GO OR THE BEAR GETS IT

The urgent need for all courageous and determined people to band together and rid the world of the scourge of religion has been heavily underlined this week. If you have yet to hear of it, here is the grotesque situation: a 54 year-old teacher from Liverpool, Gillian Gibbons by name, volunteered out of the goodness of her heart to teach in a primary school in Khartoum, Sudan. The school was founded a century ago, when The Sudan (as it was apt to be called then) was a condominium jointly administered by Egypt and Britain. Its catchment is comparatively wealthy but I dare say a British teacher is still an asset and the school and its pupils can consider themselves lucky to have her.

One of the children brought a teddy bear to class and Miss Gibbons suggested that the children might like to think of a name for the toy. With a commendable – if perhaps unwarranted – regard for democracy, the teacher accepted the children’s choice of a name. It was Muhammad. There are two things to note about this moniker. First, it is the name of the prophet of Islam. Second, it is commonly given to Muslim boys or assumed by Muslim men (the world famous boxer Cassius Clay converted to Islam and renamed himself Muhammad Ali).

Now accounts diverge. Some say fellow teachers raised objection, others that parents protested to the school authorities. What is not in doubt is that offence was taken, the prophet had been “insulted” and Miss Gibbons was detained by the authorities and held in jail where, at the time of writing, she waits to discover her fate. She may be released in the unlikely event that common sense prevails or if the British embassy makes a sufficiently cogent case. Or she may be incarcerated for up to six months. Or she may be assaulted by forty lashes. Here we see the full wisdom, might, compassion and (above all) righteousness of Sharia Law in action. And – hoorah for the thoughtful pastoral care of the little children – the school has been closed down until next year. Everyone’s a winner, baby!

You might wonder, as I do, about Islam’s confidence in its own prophet if he can be “insulted” by a harmless teddy bear being given his name. Isn’t he just a bit bigger than that? Just a touch more untouchable? Doesn’t this touchiness on the part of his advocates make him seem something of a wuss?

Fundamentalist Muslims think nothing of threatening to kill infidels and anyone else to whom they take a gratuitous dislike. The charmingly preferred method is beheading, a suitably medieval method. We infidels might find such menaces a bit offensive. What about our sensibilities? For my part, apart from being scorned as an infidel, I am condemned as a homosexual. There isn’t any religion in the world that respects me, yet I am expected – indeed obliged by law – to respect them. The miserable, hypocritical bastards.

Who are these Imams who make their self-important, posturing, anti-human, po-faced pronouncements? It’s a teddy bear, for Pete’s sake. Grow up. And what about the seven year-olds who decided to call the teddy bear Muhammad? Are they to be flogged? Or their parents who didn’t teach them any better? Or their religious instructors who didn’t teach them any better – more at fault, surely, than a foreign non-Muslim teacher of secular subjects. And what about the prophet’s name being given to mere mortal boys? Doesn’t this insult the prophet? If a boy called Muhammad turns out to be laggardly in his studies of the Qur’an or parsimonious in the payment of zakat or progressive in the licence he gives to his wife or a butterfingers in goal, does he not dishonour the prophet more than a boy named Muhafiz or Mujaddid or Muharrem? Isn’t his name (to coin a phrase) a cross to bear?

Whatever the fate that awaits Gillian Gibbons, I hope that, when she’s safely back in Liverpool, she will have the gumption to take the Sudanese government before the International Court of Human Rights. I hope that the United Nations will have the gumption to take an effective stand on the issue. Most of all, I hope that others, apart from me and Professor Dawkins, will stick their heads above the parapet, even if the result is that those heads are swiftly separated from their bodies. And anyway, Muhammad: it’s a crap name, isn’t it?

TRUE GRIT of the SPLIT BRITS

What it means to be British is on the agenda yet again. Me, I’ve always viewed myself as a citizen of the world, though admittedly there are more than enough parts of the world of which I would not care to be a citizen. There may be some who consider our move nine years ago from London to the English West Country to be only one up from going to live overseas. But I can’t imagine emigrating for any reason, especially any of the usual ones – climate, cost of living, favourable tax levels. I remember friends of my parents selling up and moving to the Caribbean after the husband was told by his doctor that he would never survive another British winter. He died anyway and his widow was then stuck on an unfamiliar island, knowing no one, divorced from her own history.

Of course, the union of nations in which I live is an area of the world uniquely fraught with uncertainty (and even dispute) about its own nomenclature, long before we get onto what it “means” to live here. I am perfectly happy to describe myself as English and to announce that I live in England. (Tom Sutcliffe, the new chairman of Round Britain Quiz which returned to Radio 4 on Monday, told us that this week’s contest was between Scotland and the Midlands, and it occurred to me that he should have used the term “the English Midlands”, thereby avoiding any implication that Scotland is in some way a region of England – not, I think, a notion that would be readily embraced by Alex Salmond).

But few now are prepared to humour me on this point (about being English, I mean). When, while sitting on a plane, I fill in a landing card, I find that my answer to the identification of “country of residence” – England – gets crossed through by the cabin staff who substitute “UK”. This makes me want to ask for the card back so that I can alter my answer to the identification of “destination” from “USA” to “North America”.

In my childhood, our country was usually known as “Britain” or, if you wanted to swank a bit, “Great Britain”. Formally, “Britain” is a short form of the precise and correct identification of our united nations as “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”, the term “Great Britain” specifically excluding that part of the island of Ireland that cedes to the House of Windsor as furnishing the Head of State. I rather deplore the standardization of “UK” as my homeland’s identity. It smacks too much both of the US and of the EU. It embraces the fact that we are still a monarchy (“Kingdom”) in a way that seems irrelevant and futile. It’s an ugly coinage too, suggesting a rhyme with “yuk” and worse. And we’re called Britons, the British, “Brits”, not Yookayians or Yukites.

The International Organization of Standardization designates us “GB” which is therefore what appears on, for instance, vehicular plates registered in Britain. The internet calls us, ipse dixit, “UK” and I’m not allowed (anywhere on the net, as far as I can see) to call where I live anything else. On the other hand, the Americans (who established most of the verbal conventions of the net) to a large extent refer to the whole of the UK as “England” (as in “the Queen of England”, “the Prime Minister of England”). Of course they also frequently say “America” when they mean “the USA” – as in the politician’s banker, “I love America!” – and (correctly, I’m sure) assume that no one will wonder why they should apparently so sweepingly embrace Canada, Panama and Bolivia.

So if I wanted to declare what it means to hold the nationality that I do – and indeed to say that I was “proud” to do so – I would first have to establish what I was calling my nation. Most people – Mexicans, say, or Mongolians or Malawians – don’t have this difficulty. Many people, however (if not particularly from those three countries), seem to want to come here and wrestle with this problem. And one of the motors of this debate about national identity is the delicate subject of immigration.

It ought to be possible to discuss immigration without buttocks being instantly clenched and battle lines drawn. The sociologist Robert Putnam has greatly assisted in the drawing of the teeth of this issue. Interviewed on The World at One today, he spoke of some of the findings of his rigorous study into multi-culturalism on both sides of the Atlantic, including the interesting conclusion that “the only two things that rise in more diverse communities are protest marches and watching telly”, that in every other way, neighbourhoods where there are mixed communities are not thriving as they ought in the west. His solution is not to put controls on immigration but to construct more centres where “people can learn to have an identity other than their racial identity”.

That Putnam is American greatly helps his argument to be accepted as rational here. Immigration into the States over the last 150 years has been proportionately far higher than into any European nation. Though almost all of them are ultimately immigrants, Americans have certainly not always been free of racism or xenophobia. The urgent need of a civil rights movement is only forty years old. That both Bush’s Secretaries of State have been black demonstrates how far that issue has been blunted by good sense all round.

But immigration is at present a fiery issue in the US, concerning both the waves of illegal workers into California and the remarkable influx of economic migrants from Asian and Arabic countries, to the extent that the demographic that determines that no presidential candidate can ignore the Jewish vote will soon be superseded by the need to attend to the Muslim and indeed to the anti-Israel votes.

The Muslim penetration of Britain has its own difficulties but the present flashpoint here is the immigration from the new member states of the EU. It amazes me that the European authorities cannot regulate this matter better. There are certainly concentrations in some British towns of Poles, Romanians, Slovenians and other eastern Europeans that have stirred long-buried prejudices. It’s not a prejudice to note, however, that these economic migrants have significantly taken over the kinds of jobs that students here need in order to keep themselves solvent while completing their studies. If the government will not regulate the level of EU immigration, it needs urgently to reconsider the matter of student grants before it produces a generation that is educated to the highest level but financially bankrupt. Moreover, there ought to be a presumption in any kind of local waiting list scheme that priority will be given to those who are demonstrably “local”, which is to say those (of whatever racial origin) who have lived all their lives in the community and whose families have done the same. Incomers – whether from city or country or abroad – ought not to expect that their particular economic imperatives necessarily carry any weight with the host community. I don’t think that is at any level a discriminatory argument.

There has been talk of the French building “another Sangatte” to accommodate those who gather near Calais in the hope of smuggling themselves across the Channel to seek income in Britain. I ask what I always asked when the original Sangatte operated: why don’t these guys want to settle in France? What is it about Britain that makes it the Shangri-La for economic migrants and asylum seekers? I’m trying to avoid the expression “soft touch” here, but if Britain and France are comparably liberal, civilized members of the EU, why do not all of these people, who have often travelled huge distances in appalling deprivation, throw their hats in the air with delight because they are already in a European country?

At the current European summit, Mr Blair is leaving behind a bad odour because he is refusing to sign up to most of the provisions of the “this-is-not-a-constitution” compromise prepared by Angela Merkel and supported by Nicolas Sarkozy. The EU President, Jose Manuel Barroso, made some pithy and pertinent comments about the British position. It is hard to see how we can continue to play a meaningful role in the European Union if we are to continue to refuse to accept any of those provisions that are designed to bind us together. Many people here doubt that Turkey ought to be allowed to join the EU because, it is feared, its Muslim “bias” would be called on as a reason for the country to be exempted from the observation of some of the Union’s rules. If Britain thinks itself too important to bow to the consensus, why should it expect quiescence from a newly European Turkey? It’s perfectly understandable that Blair, with his record on both world and domestic stages, would not be amenable to any degree of shared foreign policy or extended rule of law and justice from Luxembourg. That doesn’t make it a virtuous position.

But it is a curious union in which all the poor of the new member states aspire to residence in Britain and only Britain. Why not go to Finland or Belgium, Portugal or Greece? Here is a matter on which we really should sue for parity. Let all the existing member states do their bit and make their provisions just as enticing as ours. Why shouldn’t there be an Estonian enclave on the Algarve? And what should the Estonians do when they get to Faro? Why, what all immigrants should do: integrate, learn the language, tailor their own culture to the host culture. One of the greatest problems the British have with Muslims, both immigrant and native, is that their primary allegiance is so often expressed as being to Islam rather than to Britain. As St Ambrose counselled: “When in Rome, live as the Romans do”.

There are Muslims in Britain who advocate that Sharia law should take precedence over British law. In so doing, I would maintain, they forfeit any right to live here. I understand perfectly that, when in other countries, I am expected to observe the laws of those countries even as a tourist. As one who is, by his nature, an outlaw in certain areas of the world (being a homosexual), I am acutely conscious that local law is powerful. Some of those who come to Britain – and some of those born to people who have come to Britain – make the mistake of assuming that their own traditions and beliefs are due a special dispensation. They are not. So-called honour killings – murder in the name of supposed family honour – may be overlooked in some nations, but in Britain they should be and are treated as crimes of barbarians.

Moreover, the knighthood bestowed on Salman Rushdie is a domestic matter and no business of any Muslim country. These knee-jerk reactions from monumentally self-important people who have never seen – let alone read – a copy of The Satanic Verses should be dismissed with the contempt they deserve rather than kowtowed to as if they constitute due sensitivity. The so-called minister for religious affairs, who implied in the Pakistani parliament that the award would justify suicide attacks in Britain, should be hauled before an international court and tried for sedition. At the very least he should be relieved of his post, denied any influence over impressionable people and told to maintain a discreet silence for the rest of his days. If he had been a Hamas minister denouncing (say) Amos Oz, the Israelis would immediately have bombed the Palestinian Legislative Council.

The antics of football fans aside, we in Britain seem rather shy of proclaiming our nationality. Quite right too. The unthinking nationalism and factionalism that has riven so much of the world for so long is the last ingredient we need in our culture that has already taken on far too much of the global decline since the Second World War (see my book Common Sense, freely downloadable from the link in the right margin). So I still cleave to the notion of being, first and foremost, a citizen of the world. Perhaps if we all thought like that, we might help each other just a little more and shout witless slogans a little bit less.