Seeking God but finding Allah
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
ABC Religion and Ethics | 30 Jul 2010

Islam claims to be the fasting-growing religion in the world today. This expansion is achieved partly through the relatively high birth rate of Muslim societies but also through dawa, by which people are persuaded to adopt its values and outlook.

Millions of Muslims now live in the West; clearly it's not enough to assume that the allure of the material plenty around them will sway these Muslims to relax into a Western value system of tolerance and individual rights. Some of them may, but the evidence is all around us that many will remain sympathetic to a worldview that is steeped in conspiracy theories and blames all Muslim failures on outsiders. Moreover some non-Muslims in the West will be attracted to that worldview and become converts.

Some Westerners have a vision of Muslims as a mass of unbending, irrational, unthinking beings, incapable of calmly examining new ideas on their merit. But a Muslim's mind is just like anyone else's and is capable of absorbing new information.

If Muslims can be helped to re-examine the bedrock ideas of Islam, they may then admit that the Prophet Muhammad's example is fallible, that not everything in the Quran is perfect or true, and that this doctrine can be adjusted so that the mental pain that comes of trying to apply it in the modern world is diminished.

I have a theory that most Muslims are in search of a redemptive God. They believe that there is a higher power and that this higher power is the provider of morality, giving them a compass to help them distinguish between good and bad.

Many Muslims are seeking a God or a concept of God that in my view meets the description of the Christian God. Instead they are finding Allah. They find Allah mainly because many are born in Muslim families where Allah has been the reigning deity for generations; others are converts to Islam or the children of converts.

The Muslims who say that Allah is peaceful and compassionate simply do not know about other concepts of God, or the concepts they do have are wrong.

They have been told that Christians have misunderstood the real God, Allah, that they are guilty of shirk (an unforgivable sin) by associating the one true God with the Holy Ghost and Jesus, a mere prophet, they argue, whom Christians wrongly put on the throne as the son of God.

The Muslims who hear all this (and worse) about Christianity hardly ever make an attempt to find out more. Meanwhile Christians have stopped teaching people in Muslim countries because the bitter resistance from the local Muslim clergy and political elites made it harder and harder to do so.

In short, the Muslim masses are insulated from all alternative religions.

To change this, I have in mind a kind of spiritual competition. If Saudi Arabia invests millions of dollars in madrassas and a systematic campaign of dawa, taking advantage of all the institutions of freedom in the West, why should the Catholic Church, with its financial resources and its millions of steadfast followers, not do the same?

I hope my friends Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens - the esteemed trinity of atheist activists in Britain and the United States - will not be dismayed by the idea of a strategic alliance between secular people and Christians, including the Roman Catholic Church.

I concede that the idea is a little paradoxical. For centuries the proponents of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment saw the Vatican as their archenemy. The Church persecuted and in some cases executed those it condemned as heretics. My atheist friends are right to point out that many Christians have abandoned biblical literalism only because of the constant criticism by such free-thinkers.

It is also true that there is no shortage of misogyny in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Contempt for women is inscribed in the works of Saint Paul.

But the modern Catholic Church is a very different and more tolerant institution. Christians in more recent times must be given some credit for heeding at least some of the critiques advanced by the thinkers of the Enlightenment.

That very openness to criticism is what makes Christianity different from Islam.

Nor is Christianity riven as it used to be by bitter sectarian conflicts dating back to the Reformation. Today the relationship between the Catholic Church and the mainstream Protestant denominations, the Anglicans and Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, Unitarians, and Universalists, is peaceful.

In most of the Western world these churches and their congregations either leave one another alone or have good ecumenical relations. Finally, the Christian churches have put behind them the centuries of anti-Semitism that so stained their reputation.

It is true that on a wide range of issues the Roman Catholic Church takes positions with which I, along with most liberals, disagree. On questions such as abortion, birth control and women priests there are deep divisions within the Western world. Many American Protestants as well as Catholics are deeply opposed to abortion, a polarizing issue particularly in the United States.

But all these differences are matters of debate and not matters of war. Debate, however bitter, takes place within Western societies in a peaceful if sometimes heated exchange of words. The occasional madman who blows up an abortion clinic or murders physicians who provide legal treatments to women whose pregnancies are unwanted is the exception that proves the rule.

The clash between Islam and the West is different. All possible means are used by the agents of radical Islam to defeat the West. Even though most of our attention is consumed by those Muslims who are willing to blow themselves up in the name of their religion, we cannot ignore the more subtle campaign of conversion and radicalization.

For too long the West has sat back and allowed Islam to make a run at people who are susceptible to conversion. Sometimes I feel as if the only people in the West who really get this are Jews, who are far more exposed to the workings of radical Islam because of their contacts with the state of Israel.

* * *

Take a look at the institutions of the Enlightenment, the schools and universities established throughout the Western world on secular principles. To defend the values of the Enlightenment from the encroachment of Islamist thought they must wake up and see how effectively they have been infiltrated.

Their resources are limited, and large donations from Saudi princes and Qatari sultans come with strings attached. Their curricula are increasingly politicized, and they tolerate and even encourage the rise of all kinds of anti-Enlightenment movements based on feelings of group grievance and victimhood.

Some teachers even encourage their classes to wallow in self-flagellation over the misdeeds of Western history. Eastern, Middle Eastern and African cultures that see compromise and conciliation as manifestations of weakness interpret all this as a sign of their own impending victory: it emboldens them.

In this clash of civilizations the West needs to criticize the cultures of men of colour too. We need to drop the ethos of relativist respect for non-Western religions and cultures if respect is simply a euphemism for appeasement.

But we need to do more than criticize. We need - urgently - to offer an alternative message that is superior to the message of submission.

When I'm told to be careful not to impose Western values on people who don't want them, I beg to differ.

I was not born in the West and I did not grow up in the West. But the delight of being able once I came to the West to let my imagination run free, the pleasure of choosing whom I want to associate with, the joy of reading what I want, and the thrill of being in control of my life - in short, my freedom - is something I feel intensely as I manage to extricate myself from all the shackles and obstacles that my bloodline and my religion imposed.

Many contemporary Western thinkers have unconsciously imbibed the toxin of appeasement with the ideas of equality and free speech. They give chairs in the most distinguished and best institutions of higher learning to apologists for Islam.

There is no unity, no shared view of how to deal with this threat. Indeed, those of us who clearly see the threat are dismissed as alarmists.

That is why I think we must also appeal to other, more traditional sources of ideological strength in Western society. And that must include the Christian churches. There are people in Europe and America who maintain that it is secularism that has made us defenceless against a Muslim onslaught.

But it is not only leftists who appease Islam. Afflicted with similar pangs of white guilt, many prominent Christian theologians have also become accomplices of jihad.

When I came to the West what I found truly amazing was the fact that believers, agnostics and unbelievers could debate with and even ridicule one another without ever resorting to violence.

It is this right of free expression that is now under attack. And in time of war, internal feuding in the ranks - between atheists and agnostics, Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics - serves only to weaken the West.

So long as we atheists and classical liberals have no effective programs of our own to defeat the spread of radical Islam, we should work with enlightened Christians who are willing to devise some. We should bury the hatchet, rearrange our priorities, and fight together against a much more dangerous common enemy.

On 12 September, 2006, at the University of Regensburg, Germany, where he had once taught theology as a professor, Pope Benedict gave a wide-ranging lecture, titled "Faith, Reason, and the University - Memories and Reflections." In it he proclaimed that any faith in God must also obey reason; God cannot ask you to do something unreasonable, because God created reason.

Islam, he pointed out, is not like Catholicism: it is predicated on the idea that God may overturn law and human reason. Allah may demand immoral or unreasonable behaviour, for he is all-powerful and demands absolute submission.

In spite of the pope's invitation to dialogue with people in other cultures, his speech unleashed Muslim protests around the world, and several churches were fire-bombed: more evidence of the intolerance of criticism of Islam by Islamists.

The pope also knows that wherever radical Islamists become a majority they oppress other faiths. In Muslim countries there is no equal competition for souls, hearts and minds, because atheists and missionaries and communities of Christians are forced to operate in an atmosphere of physical menace. And although there are plenty of mosques in Rome, not a single church is permitted in Riyadh.

A confrontation between the values held by Islam and those of the West are inevitable. There is already a clash, and we are in some sense already at war.

That Western civilization is superior is not simply my opinion but a reality I have experienced and continue to appreciate every day. I assume the West will win. The question is how.

Can the various churches of Christianity help stem this rising tide of violent Islam? Can today's Christianity play a role in preserving the values of Western civilization?

Can the Vatican join in this campaign, if not lead the way - or is it doomed to become a decorative relic, like the European royal families and the fish fork?

Can the Established Churches of Europe heed my call - or will the cultural and moral relativists prevail, Christian leaders like the Archbishop of Canterbury, who professes to have an "understanding" attitude toward Shari'a?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C. This article is an edited extract from her most recent book, Nomad (Fourth Estate, 2010).

Christianity, the Enlightenment and Islam
By John Milbank
ABC Religion and Ethics | 24 Aug 2010


Ayaan Hirsi Ali doubtless shocked many of her admirers and detractors alike when she concluded her recent article on the ABC's Religion and Ethics website, "Seeking God, but finding Allah," by praising Pope Benedict XVI's stance on Islam and calling for an alliance between atheists and what she calls "enlightened Christians" in their struggle against a common foe.

I find myself in profound agreement with certain of Ayaan's arguments, and her piece raises two issues that are absolutely critical.

The first one concerns the triangular relationship between Christianity, the Enlightenment and Islam. As she rightly suggests, far too many Christians tend to take the simplistic stance of defending religion in general against the attacks of the new atheists.

Yet in important ways Christianity has more in common with the Enlightenment legacy than it has with Islam. Both see the role of reason as central and both favour tolerance and open debate, whereas Islam, on the whole, is more equivocal about these values.

In a sense, this is not surprising because both Christianity and the Enlightenment are Western phenomena. As Ayaan rightly observes, it is clear that the latter has recently influenced the former. What she greatly underrates, however, is the degree to which the former is itself the child of the latter.

Christianity already proclaimed a universalism based upon love and the divinity of the human beyond law and custom. Far from being especially mysogynistic, Christianity is itself the sustained source of feminism, and it is evident that even St Paul played a positive role in this respect (so long as one does not absurdly imagine that he could have arrived at modern views concerning female emancipation in the first century AD).

The Christian tradition has nurtured natural science, while so-called "biblical literalism" is itself a modern doctrine, completely unknown to the traditional orthodox faith.

The advocacy of tolerance is also grounded in the Christian insistence on the integrity of individual conversion and the initial emergence of this faith is a world of highly pluralistic debate.

Thus, in my judgment, Ayaan is most certainly right about certain shared emphases between Christianity and Enlightenment. And this brings me to what I regard as the second critical issue her piece raises: the lack of a level playing field between Islamic and Christian mission.

There is no proper tolerance of Christian practice and mission in many Muslim countries and cultures, while perhaps the majority of Muslims still think that apostasy is legitimately punishable by death. No Christians take this attitude and almost no Christian polities prevent Islamic dawa or mission.

It is also true that radical Islamists are systematically infiltrating Western educational institutions. I would agree with Ayaan that in the face of all this Christians need to take a more militant approach to mission and that, in the name of freedom, secularists should welcome such a venture.

One can also agree with Ayaan that there is some evidence that, when faced with a genuine, well-informed choice, many Muslims, and especially women - for example in Bangladesh - find Jesus to be far more attractive and universally relevant figure that Mohammed.

Surely she is correct that Muslims, like everyone else, need better education about other faiths and that spiritual allegiance should not be a matter of covert coercion.

However, in terms of this "triangulation," it is imperative that Christians sometimes side with Islam rather than Enlightenment, to a far greater degree than even Ayaan allows. This is true especially with regard to the area of religious self-organisation and involvement in education and civil society.

With Muslims, Christians would insist that monotheism has had a positive influence upon the formation of knowledge and social organisation, in a way that atheists often fail to recognise.

But it is also important to say that Ayaan's characterisation of Islam is far too monolithic and negative. It is doubtless true that mainstream Islam is too much permeated by a spirit of ressentiment, but this is largely the outcome of a specific history of decline, and there are significant minorities not touched by this ethos.

And while I welcome her unusual openness to the real content of the Pope's now infamous Regensberg address, I do not believe that Benedict would himself agree that all Islamic theologies ascribe to the view that God has an entirely arbitrary will.

This is certainly not true of many important Shi'ite and Sufi traditions, nor would it accurately describe perhaps the greatest Islamic thinkers, Ibn Arabi and Mulla Sadra. Indeed they share many things in common with great Christian thinkers like Augustine, Maximus, Aquinas and Eckhart - a fact that stems from a shared synthesis of Hebraic and neoplatonic elements.

Ayaan appears to think that it would be better if Muslims all converted to Christianity. And yet, as a Christian theologian, I would say that, even where they do convert, they need to find their own Islamic path to Christ.

I would also say that there is much more possibility of Muslims acknowledging the importance of reason, tolerance and debate in Islamic terms than Ayaan allows. This can occur without such Muslims necessarily feeling compelled to say that the Prophet was fallible or that the Qur'an can err, because Islamic mystical thought has many resources for stressing esoteric meanings of scripture as more important than the literal ones.

For instance, among some interpreters of Qutb (such as in Iran) one tends to find, interestingly, a radically modern approach to the reading of the Qur'an, as well as a certain amount of openness to Sufism and to philosophy.

In much of the wahhabi tradition, by contrast, one finds something like a parallel to Protestantism - vulgar scriptural literalism, a refusal of all sacramental mediation, a this-worldly austerity, and consequently a tendency to embrace the modern market while also refusing the modern spectacle.

What the West needs to do, I maintain, is to encourage the growth of more mystical forms of Islam, which are also the forms that stress a religious mode of organisation that is not directly a political one, or even necessarily a legal one. What is needed, in other words, is for Islam to evolve toward an ecclesial or "church-like" mode of organisation.

Islam possesses no "church." There are simply sacred sites, pilgrimages to them - generally without the Christian emphasis on "way stations" and the journey itself - and assemblies of individual believers who pray all at once but do not offer a liturgy nor engage in a divine mystery as do Catholic Christians.

Likewise the imam occupies a social and legal role within a single community, but not a priest-like office within a sacred polity that has to be distinguished from a secular polity within which it is located. Islam, consequently, does not provide a trans-political vision of universal human society.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is unfortunately correct when she observes that the current trajectory of global Islam is not moving in the direction of such mystical and ecclesial forms of organisation, and that both secular and Christian institutions are often culpably or criminally naive in the face of this reality. Hence, I would concur that, for all the many iniquities of the State of Israel, Jews are often more alert to the dangers manifest by current Islam.

To this extent I can understand her dismay over Archbishop Rowan Williams's remarks concerning the possibility of parallel legal jurisdictions in Britain and his broadly expressed sympathies for the role of Shari'a among Muslim communities in the West.

For Ayaan and others, this suggests an apparent tendency on the Archbishop's part to endorse - either by words or silence - the scholarly inaccurate "Religious Studies" view of Islamic history put forward by figures like Tariq Ramadan.

This version tries to gloss over the historical problems of Islamic origins, Muhammed's treatment of women, the expansion of Islam by unprovoked conquest, the Qur'anic legitimation of the slaughter of polytheists and religious war (including the massacre of civilians) against non-Islamic monotheists.

Similarly passed over in silence are the Islamic genocide of Hindus on a gigantic scale, and the tendency of resentful Islamic populations to turn murderously upon their Christian neighbours once the latter are given equal status - as happened in Greece and Turkey in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

More recently, Tariq Ramadan has praised Sudanese leaders whose record of oppression is atrocious, while Rowan Williams naively cites Malaysia as relatively tolerant (despite the fact that it does not tolerate many aspects of Christian practice and is increasingly falling into the hands of radical Islamists).

The proper response to our present, seemingly incommensurable tensions is not to gloss over or seek to rehabilitate the past in such a dishonest way, but to analyse why exactly Islam has largely taken such a dangerous, non-mystical and often political direction in recent times.

This surely has to do with the lamentably premature collapse of the Western colonial empires (as a consequence of the European wars) and the subsequent failure of Third World national development projects, with the connivance of neo-colonial, purely economic exploitation of poorer countries.

Political Islam offers itself as a new international, but non-colonial, vehicle for Third World identity. Unfortunately, it also perpetuates over-simplistic accounts of the imperial past and fosters a spirit of resentful rather than self-sustaining and creative response to the ravages of Western capitalism.

John Milbank is Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham.

Pat statements about Britain's "Christian heritage" trip easily from the lips of Christians and non-Christians alike and these claims can sometimes be ludicrously expansive. I am used to sitting on a panel with some bishop or other to be informed that – although it may surprise me – democracy, volunteering, human rights, justice, the rule of law, freedom, equality, schools and hospitals are all artefacts of our Christian heritage. And motherhood. And apple pie.

No one can deny that Christianity has had an effect on our national culture. But there are obvious and serious flaws in such an account of British history (Christian opposition in Britain to many of these "good things" in the past for example, or the fact that pre-Christian and non-Christian societies seem to have achieved many if not all of these advances at various times without the spur of a belief in Jesus).

Elizabeth: STFU. I will judge my people by their deeds, not by their beliefs.

fourth_rose: Unless they choose not to believe in the Act of Supremacy, of course.

cutecoati: I take it this is another movie whose makers failed to notice that the Enlightenment took place in the 18th century, not in the 16th.

Marriage suspends sexual competition and distributes sexual partners equally. It still today usually protects women physically and compensates for their lesser muscular strength.

Here's an article on catholic.org that is pure unadulterated creationism, flatly denying the facts of human evolution because it contradicts the Magisterium of the Church on original sin and our exclusive descent from Adam and Eve.

It's unclear how this particular site is associated with the official Catholic church, but one thing should be clear: practicing Catholics seem to ignore official papal decrees fairly routinely, and there are a lot of creationist Catholics.

...there is some evidence that, when faced with a genuine, well-informed choice, many Muslims, and especially women - for example in Bangladesh - find Jesus to be far more attractive and universally relevant figure that [sic] Mohammed.

The Archbishop made no proposals for sharia in either the lecture or the interview, and certainly did not call for its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law.

Instead, in the interview, rather than proposing a parallel system of law, he observed that "as a matter of fact certain provisions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law" . When the question was put to him that: "the application of sharia in certain circumstances - if we want to achieve this cohesion and take seriously peoples' religion - seems unavoidable?", he indicated his assent.

Why will Ramadan not simply say that stoning is a barbaric punishment and should be banned? Because, as he explained when I interviewed him for a Radio 4 documentary, the Qur’anic text that demands stoning “comes from God”.

I would humbly suggest the following counterpoints:

· The problem with decolonization was not that it happened “too fast,” but that the only state structures that had been put in place in most colonies (above all in Africa) were geared solely toward population control and the extraction of natural resources. Not surprisingly, after these structures were handed over to the locals, we got “national security states” presiding over the extraction of natural resources. The same thing would’ve happened regardless of when decolonization took place, because the Western powers never had any interest in authentically governing and developing their colonies — “purely economic exploitation” was the agenda all along, as it continues to be today.

· The forms of Christianity that are having the most success in the Third World are not characterized by any close kinship to Enlightenment values — instead, they are largely shaped by a general Pentecostal ethos that fosters magical thinking. Even the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches are often affected by such trends. It appears that the countries where such a Pentecostal awakening is not taking place are generally those where the national security state forbids new forms of social organization from arising.

As she rightly suggests, far too many Christians tend to take the simplistic stance of defending religion in general against the attacks of the new atheists.

Yet in important ways Christianity has more in common with the Enlightenment legacy than it has with Islam. Both see the role of reason as central and both favour tolerance and open debate, whereas Islam, on the whole, is more equivocal about these values.

In a sense, this is not surprising because both Christianity and the Enlightenment are Western phenomena. As Ayaan rightly observes, it is clear that the latter has recently influenced the former. What she greatly underrates, however, is the degree to which the former is itself the child of the latter.

Far from being especially mysogynistic, Christianity is itself the sustained source of feminism, and it is evident that even St Paul played a positive role in this respect (so long as one does not absurdly imagine that he could have arrived at modern views concerning female emancipation in the first century AD).

Marriage suspends sexual competition and distributes sexual partners equally. It still today usually protects women physically and compensates for their lesser muscular strength.

The Christian tradition has nurtured natural science, while so-called "biblical literalism" is itself a modern doctrine, completely unknown to the traditional orthodox faith.

...it is imperative that Christians sometimes side with Islam rather than Enlightenment, to a far greater degree than even Ayaan allows. This is true especially with regard to the area of religious self-organisation and involvement in education and civil society.

With Muslims, Christians would insist that monotheism has had a positive influence upon the formation of knowledge and social organisation, in a way that atheists often fail to recognise.

The advocacy of tolerance is also grounded in the Christian insistence on the integrity of individual conversion and the initial emergence of this faith is a world of highly pluralistic debate.

And this brings me to what I regard as the second critical issue her piece raises: the lack of a level playing field between Islamic and Christian mission.

There is no proper tolerance of Christian practice and mission in many Muslim countries and cultures, while perhaps the majority of Muslims still think that apostasy is legitimately punishable by death. No Christians take this attitude and almost no Christian polities prevent Islamic dawa or mission.

It is also true that radical Islamists are systematically infiltrating Western educational institutions. I would agree with Ayaan that in the face of all this Christians need to take a more militant approach to mission and that, in the name of freedom, secularists should welcome such a venture.

One can also agree with Ayaan that there is some evidence that, when faced with a genuine, well-informed choice, many Muslims, and especially women - for example in Bangladesh - find Jesus to be far more attractive and universally relevant figure that [sic] Mohammed.

Surely she is correct that Muslims, like everyone else, need better education about other faiths and that spiritual allegiance should not be a matter of covert coercion.

For instance, among some interpreters of Qutb (such as in Iran) one tends to find, interestingly, a radically modern approach to the reading of the Qur'an, as well as a certain amount of openness to Sufism and to philosophy.
...
What the West needs to do, I maintain, is to encourage the growth of more mystical forms of Islam, which are also the forms that stress a religious mode of organisation that is not directly a political one, or even necessarily a legal one.
...
...Islam has largely taken such a dangerous, non-mystical and often political direction in recent times.

To this extent I can understand her dismay over Archbishop Rowan Williams's remarks concerning the possibility of parallel legal jurisdictions in Britain

The Archbishop made no proposals for sharia in either the lecture or the interview, and certainly did not call for its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law.

Instead, in the interview, rather than proposing a parallel system of law, he observed that "as a matter of fact certain provisions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law" . When the question was put to him that: "the application of sharia in certain circumstances - if we want to achieve this cohesion and take seriously peoples' religion - seems unavoidable?", he indicated his assent.

More recently, Tariq Ramadan has praised Sudanese leaders whose record of oppression is atrocious, while Rowan Williams naively cites Malaysia as relatively tolerant (despite the fact that it does not tolerate many aspects of Christian practice and is increasingly falling into the hands of radical Islamists).

This surely has to do with the lamentably premature collapse of the Western colonial empires (as a consequence of the European wars) and the subsequent failure of Third World national development projects, with the connivance of neo-colonial, purely economic exploitation of poorer countries.

I would humbly suggest the following counterpoints:

· The problem with decolonization was not that it happened “too fast,” but that the only state structures that had been put in place in most colonies (above all in Africa) were geared solely toward population control and the extraction of natural resources. Not surprisingly, after these structures were handed over to the locals, we got “national security states” presiding over the extraction of natural resources. The same thing would’ve happened regardless of when decolonization took place, because the Western powers never had any interest in authentically governing and developing their colonies — “purely economic exploitation” was the agenda all along, as it continues to be today.

· The forms of Christianity that are having the most success in the Third World are not characterized by any close kinship to Enlightenment values — instead, they are largely shaped by a general Pentecostal ethos that fosters magical thinking. Even the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches are often affected by such trends. It appears that the countries where such a Pentecostal awakening is not taking place are generally those where the national security state forbids new forms of social organization from arising.

But it is also important to say that Ayaan's characterisation of Islam is far too monolithic and negative. It is doubtless true that mainstream Islam is too much permeated by a spirit of ressentiment, but this is largely the outcome of a specific history of decline, and there are significant minorities not touched by this ethos.
...
Ayaan appears to think that it would be better if Muslims all converted to Christianity. And yet, as a Christian theologian, I would say that, even where they do convert, they need to find their own Islamic path to Christ.

I would also say that there is much more possibility of Muslims acknowledging the importance of reason, tolerance and debate in Islamic terms than Ayaan allows. This can occur without such Muslims necessarily feeling compelled to say that the Prophet was fallible or that the Qur'an can err, because Islamic mystical thought has many resources for stressing esoteric meanings of scripture as more important than the literal ones.

Political Islam offers itself as a new international, but non-colonial, vehicle for Third World identity. Unfortunately, it also perpetuates over-simplistic accounts of the imperial past and fosters a spirit of resentful rather than self-sustaining and creative response to the ravages of Western capitalism.

The message you received was an alert to a particular virus threat. This alert does NOT say you have a virus, only that you need to protect yourself from it. Please disregard the message if you already have an anti-virus solution in place.

While we can’t verify the validity of ZoneAlarm’s zeus threat. I can safely assume that it was a fake-one. Why? Because there’s no such thing as a Zeus with a string-ending of ‘Aoaq’. A generic zeus Trojan will be detected by anti-virus as Zeus.Zbot. But there’s no such thing as ‘aoaq’ ending. Obviously, that name was just appended to its the generic-name to make it sound like a real zeus Trojan.

Glastonbury abbey apologises after allowing Nicolas Cage to plug film

Hollywood star broadcast live to US chat show from site thought to be King Arthur's grave

The director of Glastonbury abbey today apologised for any offence caused after allowing the Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage to promote his new film, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, from the site said to be King Arthur's grave.

Cage and a film crew were allowed into the abbey in the early hours of the morning so they could broadcast live to an American chat show earlier this year.

But some local people were upset that a film featuring magic was promoted in a place important for many Christians. One resident said he was "horrified and disgusted" that the abbey had been used to sell a film "full of sorcery and black magic".

There has been much controversy about Muslim arbitration tribunals, which have attracted attention because they operate as tribunals under the Arbitration Act, making their rulings binding in UK law.

But sharia councils, which are charities, are equally harmful since their mediation differs little from arbitration. Sharia councils will frequently ask people to sign an agreement to abide by their decisions. Councils call themselves courts and the presiding imams are judges. There is neither control over the appointment of these judges nor an independent monitoring mechanism. People often do not have access to legal advice and representation. Proceedings are not recorded, nor are there any searchable legal judgements. Nor is there any real right to appeal.

(Read the rest of the article here)

Atheist, and especially nihilistic, Right-wingers can be applauded, even if their thinking requires a little radical-chic tweaking. (The exception clearly is the Catholic Schmitt. But it is not accidental that the bleakness of his vision caused him to regard politics in a more or less nihilistic light.)

the Left bizarrely ignores the way in which they advocate an ethical critique of capitalism and propose alternatives that may be both more practical and more genuinely transformatory than the average run of Social Democratic proposals.

One can only conclude that what is really hated here is religion, along with certain moral stances that religion tends to advocate. And not just religion - more specifically Christianity, because the academic secular Left can sometimes forgive also Right-wing thematics if they derive from an Islamic source.

This prompts the question: can atheism sometimes be not just incidental to a political program, but lie at its very source - as Pope Bendict recently suggested on his visit to Britain?

I think that this can indeed be true of both ostensibly Right-wing and ostensibly Left-wing programs. The Nazis tried to disenchant the world by enthroning pure material force as the only reality: in conversations Hitler admitted that even his racist rantings were but a populist gloss upon this goal.

Stalin and Mao tried to disenchant the world by removing all traces of tradition and most traces of beauty from the world. For the problem with beauty is that it is too enigmatic and unsettling in its intimations of transcendence. Was the Cultural Revolution in China driven by socialism? Surely it was driven by a ferociously virulent and scientistic secularism.

Given the evidence that atheism itself can become a political program and seek to enact nihilism with dire results, should we not be worried about the gradual drift of the Labour party towards atheism, despite the genuine - though varied - pieties of both Blair and Brown? 

I would go further, and suggest that this drift towards atheism keeps exact pace with a retreat from any genuine radicalism. The party of R.H. Tawney, the party shaped by Methodism, by Anglo-Catholic socialism and the legacy of British philosophical Idealism, was a party that sought to create an entirely ethical market, whether through State intervention or (in my view more promisingly) through mutualist association.

But the largely secular party we have today essentially agrees with the Right about the inevitably amoral character of the market, a view that is increasingly backed-up by new modes of social Darwinism.

A programmatic atheism is at work in the growing hostility to the Crown, to the House of Lords (which needs reform, not total mutation into a second House of Commons which would likely be a less radical body), to the Churches, to the family and to group-rights, and in favour of foxes, exclusively metropolitan life-styles and absolute value-pluralism.

Indeed, it can sometimes appear that for sections of today's Left, as for past totalitarianisms, a naturalistic atheism is the main program. This is why political categorisation is increasingly made in terms of attitudes to sexual issues, to traditional cultures and to religious belief, rather than to issues of substantive economic justice. 'Culture wars' have come to displace older debates about just distribution.

But the evidence of history is that the politics of atheism drifts towards a nihilism of the rule of power alone. The evidence is equally that advocacy of the sovereign power of the individual soon gives way in practice to the absolute power of the amoral market and of the sovereign State whose only purpose is itself.

Just months after the Australian Labor Party appointed its first openly atheist leader, the Labour Party in Britain has followed suit. The elevation of Ed Miliband - who, despite being rather evasive on the subject of religion, is a genuine atheist - provides an appropriate occasion to reflect on the relationship between atheism and the political Left.

For some time I have noticed a curious phenomenon amongst Left-leaning academics. This concerns exactly which Right-wing thinkers are regarded in vogue, and which others are seen as lying beyond the pale. What is strange is that this divide has nothing to do with their degree of Right-wing extremism.

To the contrary, various far-Right thinkers are virtually the darlings of many Left-wing thinkers - Nietzsche (whose Right-wing credentials have been re-affirmed by the most recent scholarship), Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine are the names which most spring to mind.

Contrast this with the attitude towards a more ambivalent figure like T.S. Eliot or even with that towards figures of the radical centre like G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Joseph Ratzinger. Instead of adulation, we have derision.

What lies behind this contrast? I think that it is obvious. Atheist, and especially nihilistic, Right-wingers can be applauded, even if their thinking requires a little radical-chic tweaking. (The exception clearly is the Catholic Schmitt. But it is not accidental that the bleakness of his vision caused him to regard politics in a more or less nihilistic light.)

But when it comes to figures like Chesterton or the current Pope, the Left bizarrely ignores the way in which they advocate an ethical critique of capitalism and propose alternatives that may be both more practical and more genuinely transformatory than the average run of Social Democratic proposals.

One can only conclude that what is really hated here is religion, along with certain moral stances that religion tends to advocate. And not just religion - more specifically Christianity, because the academic secular Left can sometimes forgive also Right-wing thematics if they derive from an Islamic source.

This prompts the question: can atheism sometimes be not just incidental to a political program, but lie at its very source - as Pope Bendict recently suggested on his visit to Britain?

I think that this can indeed be true of both ostensibly Right-wing and ostensibly Left-wing programs. The Nazis tried to disenchant the world by enthroning pure material force as the only reality: in conversations Hitler admitted that even his racist rantings were but a populist gloss upon this goal.

Stalin and Mao tried to disenchant the world by removing all traces of tradition and most traces of beauty from the world. For the problem with beauty is that it is too enigmatic and unsettling in its intimations of transcendence. Was the Cultural Revolution in China driven by socialism? Surely it was driven by a ferociously virulent and scientistic secularism.

Much more subtly, but also insidiously, Margaret Thatcher undid the last Anglican State-settlement in Britain by advocating the view that basic economic and social behaviour is egocentric and amoral. This was brilliantly argued by the atheist Jewish historian Raphael Samuel in a long article in The Guardian titled "The Terror of Brick Lane."

But a similar comment to that made about Schmitt is in order here. Of course the Thatcherite program was supported by many religious politicians. However, we need to be attentive to the mode of theology that is involved here.
As with Schmitt, Thatcher's was a kind of hyper-Augustiniaism which subscribes to the view that that the nature of fallen man is so depraved that he can only be regulated in worldly affairs by appeal to his baser instincts and not by appeal to higher nature.

But this was not at all the view of Augustine himself, and it is not the official view of the Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox or Methodist churches today - not to mention both Judaism and Islam.

Given the evidence that atheism itself can become a political program and seek to enact nihilism with dire results, should we not be worried about the gradual drift of the Labour party towards atheism, despite the genuine - though varied - pieties of both Blair and Brown?

I would go further, and suggest that this drift towards atheism keeps exact pace with a retreat from any genuine radicalism. The party of R.H. Tawney, the party shaped by Methodism, by Anglo-Catholic socialism and the legacy of British philosophical Idealism, was a party that sought to create an entirely ethical market, whether through State intervention or (in my view more promisingly) through mutualist association.

But the largely secular party we have today essentially agrees with the Right about the inevitably amoral character of the market, a view that is increasingly backed-up by new modes of social Darwinism.

It is therefore evident that the new secularism involves also some degree of nihilism. In practice this means that while the neo-liberal Right thinks that the amoral market is a beast that must be set free in order to achieve a paradoxical self-control (the "hidden hand"), the social democratic Left thinks that the beast must be constantly "struggled against" by Trade Unions who are not (as in Germany) part of the power-structure, and "held-back" by State intervention and welfarism.
One fears that this will be Ed Miliband's agenda - though one can still hope that he will rather embrace that mixture of civil society mutualism plus judicious state regulation of finance and encouragement of industry which his brother has been gradually edging towards. (It is significant that this resulted in part from the explicitly atheist David's conversations with members of the religiously-based London Citizens.)

By contrast, the essentially negative stance towards the market of much Social Democracy, as though it was inevitably evil, ensures in the long-term that the market in its most evil aspect will become ever more entrenched. For the evidence of the past forty years is that the attempts to qualify the market seen as the enemy eventually fail.

One should note that by regarding the market as an inevitably amoral sphere, social democracy is merely the child of Marxism, just as Ed is of Ralph Miliband, the (very fine) Marxist theorist.

For Marxism was the first current within socialism to think of economics in entirely materialist terms and so to regard capitalism as a necessary phase of development. The Chinese Communist Party is witness to how easy it is for this to mutate into the idea of the final necessity of Capitalism after all.

But pre-Marxist socialism was mostly religious, and the Labour Party up until recently continued this legacy. Sometimes we think of religious and moral socialism as the "soft option."

But to the contrary, it was this legacy - inspired by Methodism, Anglicanism and Catholicism, and not by hyper-Augustinianism - which seriously hoped to render all economic practice moral. It sought a just distribution in the first place, and, prior to Anthony Crosland's revisionism in the late 1950's, not just an ameliorative "redistribution" that was entirely predicated upon the promoting of capitalist growth.

The truth is that the differences between social democracy and neo-liberalism are in the end trivial, and that both sides have covertly to borrow from each other. This is because the worst ravages of an amoral market have to be plastered over by the State, but in the end the main game for either ideology is producing 'wealth' that is defined indifferently to questions of true human flourishing.

It is for this reason that a secular Labour Party today tends to abandon its critique of a market where things and money dominate people ('capitalism' if you like) and defines itself instead as against all tradition and in favour of unfettered personal choice.

A programmatic atheism is at work in the growing hostility to the Crown, to the House of Lords (which needs reform, not total mutation into a second House of Commons which would likely be a less radical body), to the Churches, to the family and to group-rights, and in favour of foxes, exclusively metropolitan life-styles and absolute value-pluralism.

Indeed, it can sometimes appear that for sections of today's Left, as for past totalitarianisms, a naturalistic atheism is the main program. This is why political categorisation is increasingly made in terms of attitudes to sexual issues, to traditional cultures and to religious belief, rather than to issues of substantive economic justice. 'Culture wars' have come to displace older debates about just distribution.

But the evidence of history is that the politics of atheism drifts towards a nihilism of the rule of power alone. The evidence is equally that advocacy of the sovereign power of the individual soon gives way in practice to the absolute power of the amoral market and of the sovereign State whose only purpose is itself.

In the face of this drift of the Left towards secularism and away from radicalism, there is today a remarkable counter-tendency that is a real source of hope. This is a new tendency of religious bodies, and especially of the Catholic Church, in despair at the nihilistic drift of secular politics, more directly to articulate and enact its own political views, often outside current conventions of what counts as Right or Left.

These views, as exampled by Benedict's encyclical Caritas in Veritate, refusal to be resigned to the notion that there is any aspect of human life where justice cannot be implemented.

John Milbank is Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of the highly influential Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Wiley-Blackwell, 2nd edition, 2005) and The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Cascade Books, 2009).

English Defence League forges links with America's Tea Party

As the far-right group marches in Leicester, details are emerging of growing contacts with extremist US groups in a 'war on Islamification"

Mark Townsend
The Observer, Sunday 10 October 2010



The English Defence League, a far-right grouping aimed at combating the "Islamification" of British cities, has developed strong links with the American Tea Party movement.

An Observer investigation has established that the EDL has made contact with anti-jihad groups within the Tea Party organisation and has invited a senior US rabbi and Tea Party activist to London this month. Rabbi Nachum Shifren, a regular speaker at Tea Party conventions, will speak about Sharia law and also discuss funding issues.

The league has also developed links with Pamela Geller, who was influential in the protests against plans to build an Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero. Geller, darling of the Tea Party's growing anti-Islamic wing, is advocating an alliance with the EDL. The executive director of the Stop Islamisation of America organisation, she recently met EDL leaders in New York and has defended the group's actions, despite a recent violent march in Bradford.

Geller, who denies being anti-Muslim, said in one of her blogs: "I share the EDL's goals… We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose the Islamisation of the west."

Devin Burghart, vice-president of the Kansas-based Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, said: "Geller is acting as the bridge between the EDL and the Tea Party. She plays an important role in bringing Islamophobia into the Tea Party. Her stature has increased substantially inside the Tea Party ranks after the Ground Zero mosque controversy. She has gained a lot of credibility with that stuff."

Details of the EDL's broadening aspirations came as about 1,000 supporters yesterday gathered to demonstrate in Leicester, which has a significant Muslim population. Home secretary Theresa May banned marches in the city last week but the EDL said its protest would proceed, raising fears of violence. Parts of Leicester were cordoned off to separate a counter-protest from Unite Against Fascism. Officers from 13 forces were on hand to maintain order.

The Tea Party is expected to be an influential force in America's mid-term elections. Last month their candidate Christine O'Donnell romped to the Republican nomination in Delaware, following a stream of populist rightwing candidates who carry the movement's endorsement. Burghart says anti-Islamic tendencies have become far more marked in the grassroots organisation: "As we move farther and farther away from the Tea Party origins, that were ostensibly around debt and bail-outs, social issues like Islamophobia are replacing that anger, that vigour. The idea that there is a war between Islam and the west is becoming commonplace."

Another Tea Party-associated grouping, the International Civil Liberties Alliance, which campaigns against Sharia law, confirmed that EDL leaders have made "contacts with members of important organisations within the American counter-jihad movement". A statement said: "It seems now that America and Europe are acting as one, and united we can never fail."

With the Tea Party said to benefit from millions of dollars of funding from conservative foundations, experts warn an alliance between the EDL and extremist elements within the US movement could allow the English group to invest in wider recruitment and activism.

Shifren, a Californian senate candidate, said Britain's Jewish community should rally behind the EDL: "The Jewish community is paralysed with fear, exactly what most radical Muslim agitators want. The people of England are in the forefront of this war – and it is a war. One of the purposes of this visit is to put the kibosh on the notion in the Jewish community that they cannot co-operate with the EDL, which is rubbish."

The EDL's website relaunched briefly last week with new US links. Currently shut down for "maintenance", the site featured prominent links to a site called Atlas Shrugs, which is run by Geller, and another US-based site, Jihad Watch, which compiles negative news coverage of Islamic militancy.

In addition, two members of the EDL leadership, a British businessman called Alan Lake who is believed to fund the group and a man known by the alias Kinana, are regular contributors to web forum 4Freedoms. The forum claims to be "organising US activities" and has links to the anti-jihad group, American Congress for Truth, which in turn has supporters within the Tea Party.

Lake is also believed to have been in touch with a number of anti-Islamic Christian evangelical groups in the US. One posting by Lake on 4Freedoms warns that the UK of the future will start to fragment into Islamic enclaves. Lake, believed to be a principal bankroller of the EDL, which claims to be a peaceful, non-racist organisation, is understood to be keen on the possibility of setting up the UK equivalent of the Tea Party. At an event organised by the Taxpayers' Allliance last month, US Tea Party organisers outlined how the movement emerged last year, partly in protest at the US bank bail-out.

Those present included Freedom Works and the Cato Institute, one of the Tea Party's main backers. However, Simon Richards, director of the Gloucestershire-based Freedom Association, which is looking at developing a pseudo-Tea Party movement in the UK, said he was concerned the project could be hijacked by elements such as the EDL. Nick Lowles of anti-fascist organisation Searchlight said: "The EDL is an integral part of an international campaign against Islam. While some are fighting in a cultural and political arena, the EDL are taking it to the streets. The images of the EDL allegedly taking on Muslim fundamentalists on the streets of Britain is also delighting right wing religious organisations in US."

And they say this about the EDL: "Ms. Geller went on to champion as patriotic the English Defense League, which opposes the building of mosques in Britain and whose members have been photographed wearing swastikas. (In the interview, Ms. Geller said the swastika-wearers must have been “infiltrators” trying to discredit the group.)" They don't mention that the EDL unequivocally supports Israel, waves the Israeli flag, has a Jewish division, has Hindu and Sikh members, and does have an ongoing problem with leftist infiltrators joining their rallies in order to try to discredit them by making racist or neo-Nazi statements.

Who's misimpressioning here? The site of the building is Ground Zero. You can have your own opinion, but you can't have your own facts. That building was hit by the landing gear from one of the planes, and destroyed. It is part of the Ground Zero attack site. And I never said that the building would solely house a prayer space. (Note "prayer space": the Times can't bring itself to call it a mosque, even though the prayer space in this building will be a mosque.)