Ed Husain

Down with la laïcité — to beat Islamism, we need a secularism that encourages religion

‘We are avenging the Prophet Muhammad’ shouts the jihadi murderer as he escapes, having killed 12 at Charlie Hebdo. In Syria, an American fighting for al-Qaeda says: ‘I want to rest in the afterlife, in heaven. There is nothing here’.

There are thousands of young men and women in our midst who share these sentiments. They believe that their cause is worth dying for – and they want to have that honour, confident in the reward that they will get for their actions. They are disillusioned, not disenfranchised. Many are well-educated, with a good family life. But they seek a value that they can fight for – a cause for which they can die.

There is the sense that in the west – to quote Jimmy Porter – there ‘aren’t any good, brave causes left’. Western values are vacuous, adrift without root or anchor. The eternal has been lost, replaced by the individual and the material, seeking maximum gain for minimum effort. The charge of decadence is admitted – even defended in the name of liberty. We preach secularism divorced from our heritage. What do we have to offer against appeal of militant Islamism?

The west does have something, secular pluralism. It was born of our particular Judaeo-Christian heritage, and depends upon it – but it does not require one to be a religious believer to believe in its value. The religious must recognise and respect the utility of the secular worldview – and the secular must recognise and respect the inherent value of the religious.

Last weekend, political leaders marched with millions in Paris to demonstrate unity. The symbolism was powerful, but protests will not puncture the theology and ideology of Jihadi fanatics and their Islamist advocates. What will defeat that is a better understanding of the motivations of the killers and their spokespeople and a broad challenge to their worldview.

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