Sunday 21 September 2008

Islamism, Secularism, Persecution or Stupidity.

The Christian Institute has reported that Tower Hamlets borough council (that's the local authority governing parts of London east of the Tower of London) doesn't allow its Christmas party to be called so, but is requiring councillors not to eat during daylight hours during Ramadan at town hall, and asking them generally to support the fast.
How can we interpret this?
It could be a first step to the imposition of Islam as state religion in Tower Hamlets. Other religions are driven out of the public sphere and only Islam is recognised, with all wanting to play a full role in civil society being required to be practising Muslims.
It could be that rather strange mix of secularism and racism one sometimes hears, whereby Christianity, the white man's religion, is driven out of the public sphere by secularism, but the same secularism has a rather patronising attitude to non-whites, feeling the need to give full recognition to their religions to avoid racism. In fact, such an attitude is a form of racism, because it says that the poor foreigners of different skin colour can't help their religious foibles, but white men ought to grow up.
It could be simply persecution of Christians. Christianity is being driven out of Tower Hamlets just because the people on the council don't like it. One way of doing that is say everyone ought to follow a variety of religious practices and then accuse those who won't of being intolerant and so unfit to work for the council.
Of course, the first is exceptionally unlikely. The second and third options are possible. Britain doesn't do philosophy (Russell and Ayer thought they were smart for confusing epistemological difficulties for ontological answers). So we are incapable of the radical secularism of, say, France, which simply declares a plague on all religious houses: we don't think that deeply. And we do have a somewhat colonial attitude to uncivilised Johnnie Foreigner's religions.
But personally, I don't think there's a thought through ideology at work here, be it Islamism, Secularism or Persecution of Christians. There may be a bit of all of these, but in Britain, I suspect the best explanation is stupidity.

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