The best we can hope for is tolerance

17 February 2007

John Gray, Britain’s foremost political philosopher, says that Ruth Kelly’s new campaign against Islamic extremism is doomed because it exaggerates the scope for cohesion in our fragmented modern world

Public debate about the place of Islam is taking place at a time when the political consensus on multiculturalism has visibly crumbled. There is a steady stream of media reportage whose subtext is that choosing an Islamic form of dress somehow connects with atrocities of the kind that occurred on 7/7. But Islam (like Christianity) is a religion, not a culture, and there is nothing peculiarly Islamic about suicide bombing. Until the Iraq war, more such bombings were committed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist–Leninist group of mainly Hindu background that is hostile to religion in all its forms, than by any other organisation. The Hezbollah campaign against French, American and Israeli targets in Lebanon in the early Eighties included over 40 suicide attacks. Members of secular leftist groups such as the Communist party were responsible for the majority of the bombings. Several were committed by Christians, one of them a female high-school teacher. It is safe to assume she was not looking forward to paradise in the company of a host of virgins. While terror of the sort that currently threatens us in Britain is Islamist in origin, it is nonsense to suggest that suicide bombing reflects an Islamic culture of martyrdom.