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Thursday 4 December 2008

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

The news that the government is to fund a board of Islamic theologians to try to advance more moderate interpretations of Islam has been attacked as an unprecedented attempt by the state to shape the doctrine of a religion. It may well be a bad idea, but unprecedented it is not. The establishment of the Church of England meant that, until the 1970s, Parliament had the ultimate authority to determine doctrine and worship. It still has a residual role. Parliament empowered the courts in such matters. In 1850, for example, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council supported a clergyman called Gorham after his bishop had refused to institute him because of his heretical views on baptismal regeneration. The secular overruled the ecclesiastical and decided that his views were consistent with the doctrine of the Church of England. It will be amusing (and incendiary) if Parliament and the courts end up deciding what is Islamic. And yet, if the history of the Church of England is anything to go by, the creation of a Muslim equivalent might eventually (after about 300 years?) calm things down. Like the C of E, this new body will, it is announced, base its scholarly pronouncements on the learning of Oxford and Cambridge. Will something called the Mosque of England emerge? One often castigates Anglican wetness, but there would be an attraction in having more wet, Anglican-style imams who explained that ‘jihad’ really only means things like repainting the Scout hut or running a stall at the village fete.

By the way, Hazel Blears, the Cabinet minister in charge of all of this, is frequently denigrated in the Tory press. I met her for the first time last week, and found her delightful. She is kind and pretty, with the attractive energy that sometimes goes with being small. She is a proper Labour person (which so few of them are). She thinks about how to make life better for the poor and robustly opposes all alliances with any ideology — Islamism being the latest intruder in this country — which would make their life worse.

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