There are many aspects of Islam that I admire.
Theologically I like the strict monotheism of Muslim thought. Allah is one. By
contrast Christianity allowed God to be both one and three. Christianity of course
is not polytheism, but there is a tension in Christian thought exemplified by
Jesus asking “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” which depends on
Jesus being both different from God and the same. The incarnation, which
involves Jesus being both fully human and fully God stretches thought as does
the concept that God can be eternal but live in time, mortal like the rest of
us. The radicalism of Christianity is the idea that God can live among us die
and rise again.
If I had lived in the Middle Ages, I would have found
a more pleasant society in Baghdad or Damascus than I would have found in
London. Here was squalor, intolerance and persecution. In the Middle East in
those days was often to be found enlightenment, science, medicine and
cleanliness. If I as a Christian had migrated to Baghdad, I would have been
treated with respect so long as I accepted that I lived in a Muslim society and
followed its rules.
Today I can admire that Muslims often have a stronger
faith than we do in the West. While we have discarded Christianity as something
incompatible with modern science and our desire to live as we please unconstrained
by morals or theology, Muslims have kept their love of Allah and faith in the holy
texts of Islam.
I am not therefore someone who wholly shares the negativity
about Islam which is commonly met here. But this gives rise to a question:
If Islam is so wonderful why do people flee it?
In Afghanistan the Taliban want to introduce a strict
form of Islam which punishes those who break Islamic law. The Taliban may have
various faults, but among these faults is not devotion to Islam. They wish to
be good Muslims who follow Islamic rules to the fullest extent possible. I can
think of no Muslim theological principle that the Taliban break. Indeed, everything
they do can be justified by something written in the Quran, Hadith and Sunnah.
The Taliban are trying to create a fully Islamic society. Like all rulers they
no doubt have faults, but there is little doubt that their intentions are to
conform as fully as possible to what they interpret as their Islamic duty.
If we survey the Muslim world today, there are some
countries that seem to us more preferable than others. I might consider going
on holiday to Morocco, Jordan, Malaysia or Indonesia. In the winter I might
wonder if a couple of weeks in Qatar might not be pleasant. I would not
consider going to Saudi Arabia or Iran. But what I am doing when I am making
such choices is to go to those places which are more liberal and avoid those
places that are stricter. I can drink alcohol in Morocco, I probably don’t need
to wear Islamic clothes, but in Iran or Saudi Arabia I have to follow Islamic
rules. But what this means is that liberal Muslim countries are in some
respects less Islamic than strict ones.
But surely the ideal of all Muslims is not to be less
Muslim, but rather to be as Muslim as possible. The ideal society for a Muslim
ought not to be Quatar or Indonesia, but rather Iran or Saudi Arabia. But so
too Muslims ought to prefer Afghanistan under the Taliban to Afghanistan under its
previous regime, because the previous regime was less Islamic. It permitted
things that were contrary to the Islamic laws found in the Quran, Hadith and
Sunnah.
But if Afghanistan is now more Islamic than it was
previously, why are Muslims fleeing it? Perhaps they don’t wish to be Muslims
any longer. But this is not the case. When they arrive in Europe the vast
majority of Afghans will continue to be Muslims. Indeed, many will continue to
hold beliefs which are almost identical to those in the strictest Muslim countries
including Afghanistan.
Large numbers of migrants and asylum seekers coming to
places like Britain are from Muslim countries. But what we discover when they
have lived here for a while is that they continue to believe almost exactly
what the people living in the country, they were fleeing from believe. We discover
that they wish to continue to dress as they did previously. They want their
families to follow a strict version of Islam. Not only this ideally, they would
like everyone else to follow these strict rules too. Thus, they want people in
Britain to be punished if they insult Islam or if they show cartoons of the Prophet
Muhammad. This means that they don’t merely want Islamic rules to apply to
themselves, they want them to apply to everyone living here.
What would happen if they had their wish? If Britain were
somehow turned into the ideal society for Muslims, then all of the Islamic
rules would apply to everyone strictly. But this would turn Britain into
Afghanistan, Iran or Saudi Arabia. But there is an obvious contradiction here.
If your wish is to turn Britain into Afghanistan, why flee Afghanistan in the
first place as it is already obviously your ideal society.
Clearly if migrants wish to take advantage of Britain’s
liberalism, standard of living and wish to wear what they please, marry who
they please and do as they please, it is understandable that they wish to flee
somewhere like Afghanistan. But if the vast majority of Afghans genuinely
wished to live like we do in Britain, the Taliban would not have been able to
take over so quickly. Or are we to conclude that the whole Muslim world is
forcing its inhabitants to be Muslims and to follow the rules of Islam. Would
the people of Iran and Saudi Arabia prefer not to follow Islamic rules and only
do so because they are scared to be punished? But that cannot be because surely
Muslim faith is underpinned by piety rather than dread. This indeed is our
experience where Muslims continue to follow their faith in Britain when they
have the choice not to do so. The problem is that while having this choice they
would prefer not to have it, and would prefer no one else had it too.
But the difficulty for Britain then is that a
significant proportion of Muslims who arrive here from places like Afghanistan
don’t merely wish freedom of religion for themselves because they continue to admire
the strictest form of Islam from which they have fled and continue to wish it
to become the dominant faith of Britain forcing us to live as they do. They
wish therefore to bring Afghanistan with them, even though they preferred not
to live there themselves.
But if Afghans no longer wish to live in Afghanistan,
it is reasonable that we should not wish to live there either. We must reflect
that if enough people who wish to live in a society with a strict form of Islam
succeed in arriving here, then they will also succeed in recreating the society
they fled from. But in that case where do we flee?
