It is a fascinating read with a lot of focus on “Islamism.”
Update: Brian Whitaker thinks it is wide of the mark.
It is a fascinating read with a lot of focus on “Islamism.”
Update: Brian Whitaker thinks it is wide of the mark.
Like Brian Whitaker, I am deeply uneasy about the idea of the government working with a list of approved Muslim organisations, since that brings the government, as he says, into theological questions. The American approach of strict separate of church and state seems wiser to me. I am not sure what Whitaker means in his conclusion when he says that the solution of the Islamist problem is to make use of it. He seems to be saying that the British and Western tradition of open debate is what can expose the contradictions and follies of Islamism. The difficulty, however, is that Muslim communities are so enclosed. There seems to be little integration. Take, for example, the number of honour killings of women who have refused arranged marriages. Recently there has been a spiral of these killings in Britain, which make no sense to us. Muslim communities often give the impression of being doubly isolated, first by religion and then by ethnicity. How then are they to be involved in the kind of discussions that go on in society at large? In recent years both the Dutch and the Danes have altered the law to withhold the right to settle to those who do not show enough knowledge of the host culture. In the UK such an approach would never succeed as it would seem racist. I suspect our courts would overturn it as well on human rights grounds, especially the right for a family to be together.