When you have guests over for dinner — Tuscan lamb with truffled polenta, perhaps, followed by pear tarte tatin — at what time do you raise your hand, or bang a knife upon a glass and say.
When you have guests over for dinner — Tuscan lamb with truffled polenta, perhaps, followed by pear tarte tatin — at what time do you raise your hand, or bang a knife upon a glass and say. ‘Friends: it’s time to have a go at the Muslims’? I ask because at my dinner parties we usually spend a half an hour moaning about Muslims in between the dessert and the cheese board, whereas rather more well-off friends of mine in London insist that this arrangement is de trop, and Islamophobia is best expressed while the white wines are still being served and before one moves on to moaning about the blacks. I ought to mention that if I have Muslim guests over for supper we miss this conversational course entirely, and moan about poofs instead. One does not wish one’s house guests to feel uncomfortable. If you are prepared to make an effort with the halal meat it seems a shame to spoil it by later making obscene and offensive statements about Mohammed and the Koran.
The chairwoman of the Conservative party (at time of writing, at least) Baroness Warsi made a speech in which she said that ‘Islamophobia’ had become ‘respectable’ talk at middle-class dinner parties, something which saddened and disturbed her. To which one must wonder — how do you know, love? Surely nobody would be crass enough to talk about how ghastly the Muslims were when she, a Muslim, was present at table, picking at her guinea fowl and looking embarrassed? If so, she deserves our apologies. Even if her speech, which was made to some people in Leicester, was perhaps the most intellectually muddled and facile speech I think I have ever read from a senior politician.
I should declare an interest. Warsi condemned the meeja for taking an adversarial and ‘shallow’ approach to Islam. She then held me up to ridicule for having made a speech from which the headline ‘Islamophobia — count me in!’ had been drawn. However, she hadn’t heard, or read, the speech I made, or asked what I had meant. Condemning a speech solely because of its headline strikes me as being the very apogee of ‘shallow’. My speech expressed a profound dislike of the ideology of Islam because it lends itself to a) homophobia, b) the subjugation of women, c) anti-semitism d) viciousness towards so-called apostates, e) authoritarianism and f) a somewhat medieval approach towards crime and punishment. And then there’s the barbarism of female circumcision, forced marriages and the notion that those who are not Muslims are not quite human, that their lives are worthless. These last three manifestations of Islamic thought are not universally present throughout the Islamic world, for sure. But the ideology facilitates them, offers them a weird sort of legitimacy.
The other manifestations of Islam I noted above, however, are universal within the Muslim world. OK, some Islamic states kill homosexuals while others merely imprison them. Some Islamic states merely loathe Jews, rather than loathing them and demanding their liquidation. Moderate Malaysia will put you in prison and take away your children for giving up your Islamic faith, while hardline Saudi Arabia will kill you. There are gradations of spite, violence, persecution and insecurity within Islam: but what there always is, beyond all doubt, is spite, violence, persecution and insecurity.
I was careful, in that speech to which she refers, to draw a distinction between Islam and Muslims, between the acrid gobbets of vindictiveness handed down from the four schools of Islamic thought and that which is genuinely subscribed to by Muslim people. I don’t for a moment believe that British Muslims sign up to the entire Islamic manifesto, any more than British Roman Catholics believe that all contraception is wrong. But Warsi, who is either disingenuous or stupid, or more likely both, then goes on to compare Islamophobia with homophobia: a grotesque analogy when homosexuals are put to death or imprisoned across the Islamic world, in accordance — that’s the point — in accordance with the strictures of Islamic faith. It may well be, Baroness Warsi, that your conception of Islam generously makes room for homosexuals; but it is not the conception of Islam shared by the majority of those people who through tradition or belief feel it necessary to call themselves Muslim. It is a conception shared, in fact, by a tiny minority of Muslims worldwide. The truth is that Warsi’s Islam is an ideology which has been mercifully mediated by the civilised world; most imams would consider it scarcely Islam at all.
Warsi further castigates those non-Muslim Britons who say the following sort of thing: ‘the family next door are Muslim but they’re not too bad’. But this is an almost perfect expression of indigenous British tolerance and in a sense the perfect riposte to Warsi’s muddled argument: the ideology of Islam frightens us with its implacability, with its severity, with its vindictiveness — but most Muslims are not like that. They do not sign up to it. They are, like us, ‘not too bad’. Warsi says that we should view British Muslims as British Muslims, rather than making distinctions between ‘extremist’ and ‘moderate’. But it would be better if we saw them not as Muslims at all, just as people like us who happen to be derogated thus by the white liberal elite and the Muslim pressure groups. Even if, in the end, it would limit our conversations at dinner.
Offer ends in:
