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Saturday, 27th March 2004

I can quite believe Rod Liddle’s suggestion (‘Fear, loathing and respect’, 20 March) that the Western Left sees Islam as the great new anti-capitalist hope. In the global competition of ideas and values, however, the West is already winning hands down. From the Strait of Gibraltar to the Timor Sea, Muslims are risking penury, barbed wire, drowning, asphyxiation in containers, imprisonment and humiliation in order to get out of the Islamic world and into the West.

It is this unpalatable fact — that a never-ending flood of Muslims would rather live under Western than Islamic values — that has unleashed Muslim rage among some Islamic thinkers and encouraged a serious reappraisal of Islamic relations with the West and bourgeois liberal democracy among others. How typical of the Western Left that it should jump on the Islamic militant bandwagon just as it is about to topple into the nearest ditch.

Clive Christie
University of Hull

From Tim Footman

Roger Scruton’s invocation of Manet in his attempt to demonstrate the existence of the soul is flawed (‘What it means to be human’, 20 March). ‘Bar at the Folies Bergère’ ‘is’ a young woman only in the sense that the viewer, familiar with the conventions of Western representational art of the 19th century, puts that interpretation on it. As Magritte pointed out, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’ It is, rather, we who translate the artist’s efforts into a woman, a pipe, sunflowers, etc.

Similarly, ‘the soul’ exists within human existence only to the extent that believers interpret existence thus. The idea that a work of art is ‘real’ and the idea that God is ‘real’ rely on the same intellectual and emotional characteristic — suspension of disbelief.

Tim Footman
Bangkok, Thailand

From Brandon Ovington

Perhaps Pascal’s famous wager would better convince sceptics (‘Just think about it’, Jonathan Barnes, 20 March): ‘We lose nothing by choosing to believe in God, but we lose the possibility of eternal bliss if we choose not to.’

Brandon Ovington
West Sussex

Spanish lessons

From Fiona Pitt-Kethley