Mick Hartley

Timothy Garton Ash returns to the “vital conversation” – “how people with different religions, ethnicities and values can live together as full citizens of free societies”. There’s a history to this, starting, more or less, with attacks by TGA and Ian Buruma on Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She was, we were informed, an enlightenment fundamentalist. She’s not mentioned here, but much of what he says echoes back to that debate. Take, for instance, his discussion of secularism and atheism. It’s a familiar enough distinction, but the way he then uses it is curious:

That distinction [between secularism and atheism] would, of course, no longer hold if being a devout Muslim were in fact incompatible with being a full citizen of a free society. I feel this is what quite a few participants in the current debate, both atheist and Christian, really believe, while seldom spelling it out so clearly. Yet the thought keeps peeping through, for example in the formula “Islam is incompatible with democracy”. But as a non-Muslim I can only agree with the author Edward Mortimer who, in his book Faith and Power, concluded that there is no single, unchanging Islam, “there is only what I hear Muslims say, and see them do”. What Muslims say and do in the name of Islam has varied enormously through history, and varies enormously today. Yes, of course, there is the Qur’an and the Hadith, just as there is the Bible. But, as in all great religions, these are complex texts, subject to diverse interpretations.

When a Muslim letter-writer in yesterday’s Guardian tells us, with the aid of Qur’anic references, that Islam, properly understood, supports “the vital principle of freedom of speech”, what possible interest have we non-Muslim liberals in arguing against him? If a Christian supports the rule of law, as we understand it in a 21st-century secular liberal state, we don’t cry: “But your Old Testament says ‘life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth’!” Unless, of course, an atheist agenda – to show that religion is not just nonsense but dangerous nonsense – trumps the secular liberal agenda, which is to find the ways in which people with different beliefs can live together peacefully in freedom.

The problem, then, would seem to be those naughty people, like, um, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who claim that Islam is incompatible with democracy. It’s they who confuse secularism with atheism, and thereby deny the possibility of people with different beliefs living together peacefully in freedom.

But of course we have very good reason for doubting that devout Muslims can live happily in a liberal democracy. They’ve told us this themselves, loudly, clearly, and at tedious length. Not only have they told us: they’ve also demonstrated the fact. It requires a considerable effort not to be aware of this. So to be persuaded by a Muslim letter-writer in yesterday’s Guardian that Islam, properly understood, supports “the vital principle of freedom of speech”, displays a remarkable propensity for wishful thinking. What possible interest have we non-Muslim liberals in arguing against him? It’s not a question of arguing against him: we’d all be very happy if that was in fact the case, and Islam, properly understood, did support freedom of speech and mutual tolerance. It’s more a question of having the strong suspicion that he is, sadly, incorrect.

It’s another case, it seems to me, of deflecting criticism away from Muslims, and onto Islam’s critics.