Confessions of a Heretic Page 14
Who should we blame for this? Some point their finger at the free marketeers, saying that their philosophy is one that endorses big business, whatever big business might do. But that, I think, would be a mistake. The free market, as defended by Mises and Hayek, is simply an instance of the kind of consensual problem-solving that I have been advocating in this article. The Burkean argument for a partnership across generations is an argument of the same kind, which asks us to recognise that consensual solutions may sometimes require that we consult the interests of the unborn and the dead. What has gone wrong, it seems to me, is not the attachment of conservatives to the market, but the failure to see what a real market solution requires: namely the retreat of the state and its projects from every decision in which local aims and loyalties are at stake. It is surely time for conservative politicians to recognise that, with really big issues, you need to think small.
12
– Defending the West –
I don’t think we will understand the confrontation between the West and radical Islam if we do not recognise the enormous cultural shift that has occurred in Europe and America since the ending of the Vietnam war. The citizens of Western states have lost the appetite for foreign wars; they have lost the hope of scoring any but temporary victories; and they have lost confidence in their way of life, and indeed are no longer sure what that way of life requires of them.
At the same time their people have been confronting a new opponent, who believes that the Western way of life is profoundly flawed, and perhaps even an offence against God. In a ‘fit of absence of mind’ Western societies have allowed this opponent to gather in their midst, sometimes, as in France, Britain and the Netherlands, in ghettoes which bear only tenuous and largely antagonistic relations to the surrounding political order. And in both America and Europe there has been a growing desire for appeasement: a habit of public contrition, an acceptance, though with heavy heart, of the censorious edicts of the mullahs, and a further escalation in the official repudiation of our cultural and religious inheritance. Twenty years ago it would have been inconceivable that an Archbishop of Canterbury should give a public lecture advocating the incorporation of shari’ah law into the legal system of England. Today many people consider this to be an arguable point, and perhaps the next step on the way to peaceful compromise.
All this suggests to me that we in the West will go through a dangerous period of appeasement, in which the legitimate claims of our own culture and inheritance will be ignored or downplayed, in the attempt to prove our peaceful intentions. It will be some time before the truth will be allowed to play its all-important role, of rectifying our current mistakes, and preparing the way for the next one. This means that it is more than ever necessary for us to rehearse the truth, to come to a clear and objective understanding of what is at issue. I will therefore spell out some of the critical features of the Western inheritance, which should be understood and also defended in the current confrontation. Each of these features marks a point of contrast, possibly of conflict, with the traditional Islamic vision of society. And each has played a vital part in creating the modern world. Islamist belligerence stems from finding no secure place in that world, and turning for refuge to precepts and values that are at odds with the Western way of life. This does not mean that we should renounce or repudiate the distinguishing features of our civilisation, as many would have us do. It means that we should be alert in their defence.
The first of the features that I have in mind is citizenship. The consensus among Western people is that the law is made legitimate by the consent of those who must obey it. This consent is delivered by a political process through which each person participates in the making and enacting of the law. The right and duty of participation is what we mean by ‘citizenship’, and the distinction between political and religious communities can be summed up in the view that political communities are composed of citizens, religious communities of subjects – of those who have ‘submitted’ (which is the primary meaning of the word islām). And if we want a simple definition of the West as it is today, it would be wise to take the concept of citizenship as our starting point. That is what the millions of migrants are roaming the world in search of: an order that confers security and freedom in exchange for consent.
Traditional Islamic society sees law as a system of commands and recommendations laid down by God. These edicts cannot be amended, though their application in particular cases may involve jurisprudential argument. Law, as Islam has seen it, is a demand for our obedience. And its author is God. In a certain measure that is the opposite of the conception of law that we have inherited with the idea of citizenship. Law for us is a guarantee of our freedoms. It is not made by God but by man, following the instinct for justice that is inherent in the human condition. It is not a system of divine commands, but a residue of human agreements.
This is particularly evident to British and American citizens, who have enjoyed the inestimable benefit of the common law – a system which has not been laid down by some sovereign power, but on the contrary built up by the courts, in their attempts to do justice in individual conflicts. Our law is a ‘bottom up’ system, which addresses the sovereign in the same tone of voice that it uses to address the citizen – namely, by insisting that justice, not power, will prevail. Hence it has been evident since the Middle Ages that the law, even if it depends on the sovereign to impose it, can also depose the sovereign if he tries to defy it.
As our law has developed it has permitted the privatisation of religion, and of large areas of morality. To us it is not just absurd but oppressive that there should be a law punishing adultery. We disapprove of adultery; but we also think that it is none of the law’s business to punish sin just because it is sin. In the shari’ah, however, there is no distinction between morality and law: both stem from God, to be imposed by the religious authorities, in obedience to God’s revealed will. To some extent the harshness of this is mitigated by the tradition which allows recommendations as well as obligations as rulings of the Holy Law. Nevertheless, there is still no scope in the shari’ah for the privatisation of the moral, still less of the religious, aspects of life.
Of course, most Muslims do not live under shari’ah law: only here and there, in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, for example, is the attempt made to impose it. Elsewhere Western codes of civil and criminal law have been adopted, following a tradition begun in the early 19th century by the Ottomans. But this recognition accorded to Western civilisation by the Islamic states has its dangers: for it inevitably provokes the thought that the law of the secular powers is not really law; that it has no real authority, even that it is a kind of blasphemy, as Sayyid Qutb, former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, argues in his seminal work Milestones. Rebellion against the secular powers is easy to justify, when their law is seen as usurping the sovereign authority of God.
From its origins therefore, Islam has found it difficult to accept that we stand in need of any other law, or any other sovereign, than those revealed in the Koran; hence the great schism which divided Shi’ite from Sunnite over the matter of the legitimate succession. From the point of view of secular government, questions of legitimate succession are settled by the very same constitution that governs the daily operation of the law: ultimately they are a matter of human agreement. But a community that believes itself to be governed by God, on terms conveyed by his messenger, has a real problem when the messenger dies: who takes over, and how? The fact that rulers in Islamic communities have a greater than average tendency to end up assassinated is not unconnected with this question. The Sultans of Istanbul surrounded themselves with a household guard of Janissaries chosen from their Christian subjects, precisely because they could not trust any Muslim to ignore the opportunity of rectifying the insult to God contained in the person of a merely human ruler. The Koran itself speaks to the point, in 3, 64, addressing Jews and Christians with the command to take no divinity beside the one God and no lords (ārbābān) from
among each other.
Citizenship and secular law go hand in hand. We are all participants in the process of law-making: hence we can view each other as free citizens, whose rights must be respected, and whose private life is their own concern. And it is this that has made possible the privatisation of religion in Western societies and the development of political orders in which the duties of the citizen take precedence over religious scruples. How this is possible is a deep and difficult question of political theory; that it is possible is a fact to which Western civilisation bears incontrovertible witness.
But that brings me to the second feature which I identify as central to European civilisation, which is nationality. No political order can achieve stability if it cannot call upon a shared loyalty, a ‘first-person plural’ that distinguishes those who share the benefits and burdens of citizenship, from those who are outside the fold. In times of war the need for this is self-evident; but it is as necessary in times of peace, if people are really to treat their citizenship as defining their public obligations. National loyalty marginalises loyalties of family, tribe and faith, and places before the citizen’s eyes, as the focus of his patriotic feeling, not a person or a group but a country. This country is defined by a territory, and by the history, culture and law that have made that territory ours. Nationality is composed of land, together with the narrative of its possession.
It is this form of territorial loyalty that has enabled people in Western democracies to exist side by side, respecting each other’s rights as citizens, despite radical differences in faith, and without any bonds of family, kinship or long-term local custom to sustain the solidarity between them. National loyalty is not known everywhere in the world. And it is not known in the places where Islamists are rooted. Consider Somalia. People sometimes refer to Somalia as a ‘failed state’, since it has no central government capable of making decisions on behalf of the people as a whole, or of imposing any kind of legal order. But the real trouble with Somalia is that it is a failed nation. It has never developed the kind of secular, territorial and law-minded loyalty that makes it possible for a country to shape itself as a nation state rather than an assembly of competing tribes and families.
The same is true of many other places where Islamists are bred: even if they do function as states, like Pakistan, they are often failures as nations. They have not succeeded in generating the kind of territorial loyalty which enables people of different faiths, different kinship networks, different tribes to live peacefully side by side, and also to fight side by side on behalf of their common homeland. And their recent history might lead us to wonder whether there is not, in the end, a deep conflict between Islamic conceptions of community and the conceptions which have fed our own idea of national government. Maybe the nation state is an anti-Islamic idea.
This observation is, of course, pertinent to the Middle East today, where we find the remnants of a great Islamic Empire divided into nation states. With a few exceptions this division is the result of boundaries drawn on the map by Western powers, and notably by Britain and France as a result of the Sykes-Picot accords of 1917. It is hardly surprising if Iraq, for example, has had such a chequered history as a nation state, given that it has been only spasmodically a state, and never a nation. It may be that Kurds, Sunnite Arabs and Shi’ites in Iraq could all come, in time, to see themselves as Iraqis. But this identity will be fragile and fissiparous, and in any conflict the three groups would identify themselves in opposition to each other. Indeed, it is only the Kurds who seem to have a developed national identity, and it is an identity opposed to that of the state in which they are included. As for the Shi’ites, their primary loyalty is religious, and they look to the homeland of Shi’ism in Iran as a model in turbulent times. Hence, in the current conflict with the Islamic State, it is the Iraqi Shi’ites, together with their Iranian and Lebanese co-religionists, who are in the front line of the fighting.
Not all the nation states carved out of the Ottoman Empire are as arbitrary as Iraq. Turkey, which saved itself as the rump of the Empire, succeeded in recreating itself as a genuine nation state – though not without the expulsion or massacre of non-Turkish minorities. Lebanon and Egypt had enjoyed a kind of quasi-national identity under Western protection from the mid 19th century. And of course Israel has established a thoroughly Western form of national government, over territory which is disputed for that very reason. But the examples in no way serve to allay the suspicion that Islam is not friendly to the idea of national loyalties, and certainly not friendly to the idea that, in a crisis, it is national rather than spiritual allegiance that should prevail.
Consider Turkey. Atatürk created the Turkish nation-state by imposing a secularist constitution, adopting a secular legal system based on French and Belgian models, outlawing Islamic dress, expelling the ‘ulema’ from public office, forbidding polygamy, rooting out Arabic words from Turkish and adopting the Latin alphabet, so cutting off the language from its cultural antecedents. The conflict between the secular state and Islam was thereby pushed underground, and for a long time it seemed as though a stable compromise had been achieved. Now, however, the conflict is erupting all over again. There has been an attempt by secularists to outlaw the ruling Islamic Party, recent electoral victors in a landslide vote, and also an attempt by the government to arraign leading secularists in a terrorist trial of dubious legality.
Lebanon owes its exceptional status to its erstwhile Christian majority, and to the long-standing alliance of Maronite and Druze against the Ottoman Sultan; its current fragility is largely due to Hezbollah, which allies itself with Iran and Syria and rejects Lebanon as a national entity to which its loyalty is owed. Egypt has survived as a nation state only through radical measures taken against the Muslim Brotherhood, and only by leaning upon a legal and political inheritance which would probably be rejected by the Muslim population (though not by the Copts) in any free vote. As for Israel, it has been condemned by its neighbours to live in a permanent state of siege.
This leads me to the third central feature of Western civilisation: Christianity. I have no doubt that it is the long centuries of Christian dominance in Europe which laid the foundations of national loyalty, as a loyalty above those of faith and family, and on which a secular jurisdiction and an order of citizenship can be founded. It may sound paradoxical, to identify a religion as the major force behind the development of secular government. But we should remember the peculiar circumstances in which Christianity entered the world. The Jews were a closed community, bound in a tight web of religious legalisms, but governed from Rome by a law which made no reference to any God and which offered an ideal of citizenship to which every free subject of the Empire might aspire.
Christ found himself in conflict with the legalism of his fellow Jews, and in broad sympathy with the idea of secular government – hence his famous words in the parable of the Tribute Money: render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. The Christian faith was shaped by St Paul for the use of communities within the Empire, who wanted only space to pursue their worship, and had no intention of challenging the secular powers. And this idea of dual loyalty continued after Constantine, being endorsed by Pope Gelasius the First in the 6th century, in his doctrine of the two swords given to mankind for their government, that which guards the body politic, and that which guards the individual soul. It is this deep endorsement of secular law by the early Church that was responsible for the subsequent developments in Europe – through the Reformation and the Enlightenment to the purely territorial law that prevails in the West today.
During the early centuries of Islam the philosophers attempted to develop a theory of the perfect state. But always religion was at the heart of it; Al-Fārābī even tried to adapt the argument of Plato’s Republic, with the Prophet as philosopher-King. When finally all discussion stopped, at the time of Ibn Taymiyya in the 14th century of our era, it was clear that Islam had turned its back on secular government, and would hen
ceforth be unable to develop anything remotely like a national, as opposed to a religious, form of allegiance. The most important advocate of Arab nationalism in recent times, Michel Aflaq, was not a Muslim but a Greek Orthodox, born in Syria, educated in France, and dying in Iraq disillusioned with the Ba’ath party that he had helped to found. If national loyalties have emerged in recent times it is in spite of Islam and not because of it. And they seem peculiarly fragile and fissiparous, as we have noticed in the case of Palestinian attempts at national cohesion, and in the chequered history of Pakistan.
Christianity is sometimes described as a synthesis of Jewish metaphysics with Greek ideas of political freedom. And no doubt there is truth in this – which is hardly surprising, given the historical context of its inception. And it is perhaps the Greek input that is responsible for the fourth of the central features that I believe worthy of emphasis, when addressing the confrontation with Islam, and that is irony. There is already a developing streak of irony in the Hebrew Bible, one that is amplified by the Talmud. But there is a new kind of irony in Christ’s judgements and parables, which look on the spectacle of human folly and wryly show us how to live with it. A telling example of this is Christ’s verdict in the case of the woman taken in adultery: ‘Let he who is without fault cast the first stone’, in other words: ‘Come off it; haven’t you wanted to do what she did, and already done it in your hearts?’ It has been suggested that this story is a later insertion – one of the many culled by the early Christians from the store of inherited wisdom attributed after his death to the Redeemer. Even if that is true, however, it merely confirms the view that the Christian religion has made irony central to its message. This irony is shared by the great Sufi poets, and especially by Rumi and Hafiz. But it seems to be largely unknown in the versions of Islam that shape the souls of the Islamists: theirs is a religion which refuses to see itself from outside, and which cannot bear to be criticised, still less to be laughed at – something we have abundantly witnessed in recent times.