Letters | 9 January 2010

Freedom fights fanaticism

Sir: John Deverell (Letters, 19 December) is right to draw attention to the precarious position of Christians in the Middle East: though the implication seems to be that if we keep quiet about the Islamification of Europe, the Islamists penetrate further into Europe; while if we speak out, the Islamists tighten their grip on the Middle East.

The deeper issue is the lack of religious freedom in the Muslim world. Christians, Zoroastrians, animists and Hindus are forced either to emigrate or to endure humiliating persecution. The apostasy law imprisons Muslims in Islam as surely as any Berlin Wall; while the laws against the defamation of Islam prevent Muslims from hearing any rational criticism of their religion.

Realists will say that our own interests are restricted to defeating al-Qa’eda and international terrorism, and that it is mere sentimentality to want to bring religious freedom to the Middle East. Al-Qa’eda itself thinks rather differently, if (as is reported) it has placed a $60 million bounty on the head of Father Zakaria Boutros, the Egyptian television journalist who asks informed questions about Islam. Nothing is so destructive of the grip of fanaticism as freedom of speech and the freedom to change one’s religion, and the best way to defeat the fanatics is to promote religious freedom in the Muslim world.

David J. Critchley
Winslow, Buckingham

Forster was bang-on

Sir: Whether you love or hate E.M. Forster, (Books, 19 December), he provides one of the finest of insights in Howards End when Margaret Schlegel observes that ‘The continent of Europe is all more like itself than any part of it is like England’. Today these few words encapsulate our unease in the European Union.

John Littlewood
Farnham, Surrey

Mandelson’s rural dreams

Sir: At the Soil Association we were delighted to read about Lord Mandelson’s desire to take up farming (‘Meet Farmer Mandelson’, 19 December), especially as he likes ‘properly grown food from organic soil’.