Muslims are trading respect for fear

The Sunday Times February 12, 2006

Muslims are trading respect for fear
Minette Marrin


Respect is not a right. Almost anything one can think of these days
is, supposedly, a right, and judging from the angry demands on all
sides for respect, one might easily be bamboozled into thinking
respect is somehow a right as well. Not so, rightly not.

Yet all the terrifying Muslim uprisings across the world in response
to the Danish cartoons have all been about a demand for respect, as
of right. They are demanding respect for religion, or at any rate for
their own religion and their own religious sensibilities. The same is
true of the more moderate demonstrations in London yesterday. Worse,
many westerners are penitentially admitting that Muslims do indeed
have a right to respect for their faith, and that it is wrong to
express disrespect for a religion. This is disastrous.

Yesterday’s demonstrations were organised by the new Muslim Action
Committee, which claims to represent more than 1m Muslims. They may
indeed be moderates, as they claim, yet what they say sounds anything
but moderate. They demand changes in the law and a strengthening of
the Press Complaints Commission code to outlaw any possible
publication of the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in the UK. “What
is being called for,” said Faiz Siddiqi, the committee’s convenor,
“is a change of culture. In any civilised society, if someone says,
‘don’t insult me’, you do not, out of respect for them.”

Here in one sentence lies the entire, tangled problem; it is all
entwined round several different uses of the word “respect”. First of
all there is a tendentious conflation of respect for one’s religion
and respect for oneself. It may be true that in traditional Muslim
thought a perceived insult to the Prophet is an insult to the
believer, but in western culture there is a crucially important — and
highly prized — distinction. Freedom of speech depends on people
accepting that criticism of a belief, even aggressive, satirical or
offensive criticism, is not necessarily intended to insult a person
or an ethnic community.

Even in cases where perhaps it might be — where the criticism of a
belief is quite clearly disrespectful — then putting up with that is
the price of freedom of speech, and a price well worth paying.

Freedom of speech is the keystone of western civilisation, of
individuality, of scientific discovery, of wealth and of democracy;
without it, the entire edifice would collapse.

Indeed it is arguable that it has been the lack of freedom of speech,
along with an excessive respect for authority and religion, that has
for centuries held back and impoverished the once great civilisation
of Islam. Faiz Siddiqi’s call for a change of culture is indeed
nothing less, and a very destructive and retrograde one at that.

Of course, Siddiqi is right in saying that in any civilised society,
most people do generally avoid insulting other people’s beliefs, but
that is not necessarily out of respect for them, or for their
beliefs. It is very often out of an overriding respect for something
impersonal — for the benefits of civility in a civil society and
above all for the ideal of tolerance.

I personally have always been enraged by Catholic teachings, or by
Maoist doctrines but I have no desire to insult Catholics or Maoists
personally, merely a temptation to argue with some of them. I have
been to parties where thumping crooks have been treated with great
civility by other guests, for a similar reason. But it would be wrong
to mistake that sort of civility for respect.

Respect cannot be demanded, or imposed by a free state. It can only
be freely given. The demand of Muslims for uncritical — and legally
binding — respect for their beliefs is simply not one that can be met
in a society like ours. And the failure, by some Muslims at least, to
perceive these distinctions is, without exaggeration, tragic.

It is a failure for which we in the West — we in this country — bear
a great deal of responsibility. Until very recently, the doctrine of
multiculturalism reigned supreme here. For at least 15 years public
services and the liberal media have been riddled with the idea that
all cultures are equally deserving of respect, and that the values of
the host culture are not supreme, but on the contrary, rather racist
and oppressive (so possibly not equally deserving of respect). At
last this has come to be understood. There are countless examples:
the finding of the Climbie report that social workers were inclined
to apply different standards to different cultures, and therefore
overlooked or explained away what was happening to the wretched
Victoria; a similar lack of will to question religious practices such
as exorcism.

Others include the decision of HM chief inspector of prisons not to
allow the English flag in English prisons, in case the red cross
might be offensive to Muslims; the blind eye that is turned to
physical punishment of young children and long hours in some
madrasahs; the shameful tolerance here of domestic violence and
arranged marriages of convenience to highly unsuitable strangers, in
the name of religion; the public library in Buckinghamshire that
banned a notice of a Christian carol service and yet held a party to
celebrate Eid at the end of Ramadan. These things are done,
apparently, out of a desire to show equal respect to all faiths.

Quite why large sections of the host culture here were taken in by
the confused claims of multiculturalism remains a mystery to me. But
the consequence is that many Muslims (among others) have come to
believe that we agree that their religion and culture are entitled to
unquestioning respect. They must have seen that the post-Christian
majority, especially in the state sector, has been mired in an
unthinking relativism, and has lost the conviction to stand up for
essential western values.

What’s more these state organisations have humbly accepted the charge
that they are institutionally racist, which has further demoralised
them. This is a very extreme form of trahison des clercs — the
betrayal of the functionaries. It is hardly surprising, now, that the
more extreme and politicised Muslims and their unthinking hangers on
feel entitled, in defiance of our greatest freedoms, to demand
respect from us, as of right. The tragedy is that what they are now
getting from the rest of us is not respect at all, but fear, posing
as respect.

Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.