Mick Hartley

We’ve seen those photos of homosexuals hanging from cranes in Iran and those videos of gays being thrown off the tops of buildings by Hamas. Yet we have Gays for Palestine – and, as Douglas Murray notes, a silence from gay publications here and in the US on Iran now.

The unwritten rule has been there for decades: the fight for gay equality – as for women’s rights – halts at the borders of Islam.

Why is that, I wonder?

Somehow Islam has managed to pass itself off as a race, so the social prohibitions which apply to racism have transferred to Muslims – that is, people who hold a set of beliefs, not people of a particular ethnicity. Which is of course the purpose behind the concept of “Islamophobia” as a way of forestalling any criticism of Islam.

This works partly because it’s simply true in the UK that the majority of Muslims are ethnically from East Asia: Pakistan or Bangladesh. There’s a deeper reason though, which is that, for Muslims, Islam is not merely a belief that they happen to hold, but an essential – the essential – part of their being. As such it’s unchangeable – as race is unchangeable.

A fundamental principle of Western thought is the separation between a person and their beliefs. This is not a fundamental principle of Islamic thought. Quite the contrary: born a Muslim, you die a Muslim. The notion that you might change your mind is so alien that the punishment for apostasy – in theory, if not necessarily in practice – is death.

And we seem to have swallowed it.

Many figures in public life here say they’re Muslim. Off the top of my head I think of Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, and former ECHR chairman Kishwer Falkner. Are they practicing Muslims? I have no idea, but I’ve seen both, recently, refer to themselves as Muslim. It’s part of their identity – fixed, whether they believe in it or not. Somehow they would never say, no, I’m not Muslim any more – as Christians, by contrast, are so happy to concede about their own loss of faith.

It seems like the comparison, deliberate or not, is with Jews rather than Christians. Something you’re born as, rather than something you acquire culturally. Can there, then, be such a thing as a secular Muslim, then – as some non-religious Jews call themselves secular? I wonder…