The Spectator’s Notes

There isn’t enough dialogue between Islam and other faiths, so when invited to address the admirable Three Faiths Forum, chaired by Sir Sigmund Sternberg, I happily agreed, and went to the mosque in the Whitechapel Road last week. I had been asked to raise worries I had expressed in an article about some aspects of Islam today. One was whether Islam has enough of a separation of Church and State (as Christians put it) in its teaching. Another was to ask how clearly Muslim teachers distinguished between conversion by preaching and by conquest, and how absolute they were in their condemnation of religiously motivated violence. One example I cited was Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the Imam of al-Azhar in Cairo, the world centre of ‘moderate’ Sunni learning. Sheikh Tantawi, who is a patron of the Three Faiths Forum, has argued that Muslims are entitled to use violence against non-Muslims who are ‘actively condemning or belittling Islam’; he also supports suicide bombing. In my remarks, I made clear my respect for Islam as one of the three great Abrahamic religions, but questioned its adherents’ extreme sensitivity to criticism. The reaction was interesting. The Muslims who responded were very angry, and so was one Jew, Richard Stone, who is a big wheel in the race relations industry. I was offensive, prejudiced, phobic, they said, and what I said should not have been permitted. Only one man, a rabbi, spoke up in my support, but afterwards I received numerous emails, messages and quiet words (one from a Muslim) all supporting me. The meeting brought out two things. The first is that even moderate Muslims are immensely prickly about any questioning, no matter how polite. The second is that they, and Jews, and Christians, are frightened.

An interesting juxtaposition on the BBC news: it was announced that Boots was considering selling sex toys.