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’. We are a wide and embracing movement, and would be more than happy to share with him some of the many benefits of an organic farming lifestyle.
To this end, we want to give him a belated Christmas present: a place on one of our organic chicken-keeping courses. We thought this might help him realise his future rural dreams, should he find himself with more time on his hands after May next year!
Molly Conisbee
Soil Association, Bristol
Even cyclists are human
Sir: Top marks to Venetia Thompson for her article on cyclists (‘Lycra-clad assassins’, 12 December). As a cyclist myself, though no longer a London one, I find little to agree with in it, but one can only applaud her candour in shouldering part of the blame for the incidents she relates. An inability to observe and anticipate events as they unfold in one’s near vicinity must indeed be a most unfortunate affliction, particularly when its severity is such as to subject one to mishap and injury in apparently innocuous circumstances, such as an encounter with a bicycle which is riderless, stationary and secured to a lamp-post.
We are all, as she reminds us, human and fallible. Even cyclists have on occasion been known to react intemperately when exposed to sudden stress and danger. I am truly sorry that she has been subjected to just such an outburst. Perhaps, in future, it would be wise only to venture out when accompanied by a chaperone who is not similarly handicapped?
Mark Shelton
Staffordshire
Sitang in place
Sir: Penelope Craig blunders when she suggests that Gurkhas should be ‘fast deployed to Sandhurst’ to ensure officers of the future are ‘adequately trained for guerrilla warfare’ (Letters, 19 December). In fact, RMA Sandhurst has had a Company Group of Gurkhas in residence for decades. It is called Sitang Company and very good it is too.
Simon Keymer
Jacksonville, Florida
Ludo’s send-off
Sir: Quentin Letts wrote in his Diary (19 December) that he suffered from ‘liverish irritation’ when he heard that Sir Ludovic Kennedy, ‘an agitating atheist’, had been given a ‘big send-off’ at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford. He said Richard Ingrams, editor of The Oldie, who gave an address, told him the clergymen had managed not to mention Kennedy’s atheism and referred to ‘snooty, mouldering humanists’ from All Souls.
I attended this service as a family friend of Sir Ludo and as memorial service columnist for The Oldie. In the January 2010 edition I describe how John Drury, the previous Dean of Christ Church, said in his opening remarks that Ludo was a ‘four square atheist but that it was fitting that he should be remembered in “his House”, as Christ Church is known by its former students’.
Kennedy’s family explained in the service sheet that their father had asked for Drury to officiate and had asked for various readings and hymns to be included, but hadn’t said where the service should be held. ‘That has been our decision,’ they said, suggesting that such celebrations are for the living, not for the dead.
I don’t know why Ingrams didn’t hear Drury’s comments. Maybe he was concentrating on composing his own eulogy, or perhaps he was pulling Letts’s leg to bring on an attack of liverish irritation.
James Hughes-Onslow
London SE5
Sermons without notes
Sir: The trouble with delivering a sermon without notes (Diary, 19 December) is that the speaker doesn’t know when he has finished.
Sam Whitbread
Southill, Bedfordshire
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