Holy Smoke: the Cal Courtney column

From its inception on the Arabian peninsula over fourteen hundred years ago Islam has displayed a unique flair for compassionate innovation.

The revelation brought to the Arabs by the Prophet Muhammad insisted that everyone should struggle to create a fair and equitable society where the poor were afforded special respect and care. This struggle - or jihad - was given added impetus by scriptural insistence on the inheritance and property rights of women and on the rights of those who were not Muslim. It is interesting to note that during the medieval period while the Christian monarchs of Europe were encouraging pogroms against Jewish subjects, the Moors in Spain offered the Jews perhaps the safest home they had known on the continent. Their protected way of life only ended in 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella stormed their way through Granada and expelled the Muslims from Iberia. Eleven weeks after their victory at Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella signed the Edict of Expulsion, offering the Jewish people either baptism into the Christian faith or deportation. The hospitality and warmth of the Islamic faith was sorely missed as religious tolerance gave way to inquisitions, torture and death.

As the world's attention becomes ever more focused on the war on terror, Muslims find themselves having to justify their religious credentials with increasing regularity. Despite many noble attempts to present the appealing characteristics of the Islamic faith, in the popular imagination Islam is becoming more and more associated with an inhumane fanaticism which threatens the underlying fibres of our western democracies. The irony is that Osama Bin Laden has about as much in common with my Muslim friends as Billy Graham has with me. I, however, don't have to spend my life protesting that I am not Billy Graham.

Those of us who choose to be religious while promoting the values of a secular society have learned to take our religion with a pinch of salt. We have learned that it is never healthy to belong entirely to any singular way of interpreting the world. This does not mean we lack commitment to our faith. It just means we have accepted that there is much to life that we can never know. In this sense the God we worship is apparent as the depth and infinitude of all things and not as some big guy on a cloud somewhere who wants us to follow his law. Between that position and the opinions of the fanatics, however, lies a deep abyss that no amount of mutual loathing will ever bridge.
The idea of flying planes into office blocks has been forged in a deep rooted fear of the modern world. When the French revolutionaries placed a statue of the Goddess Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral in 1789 they were heralding a new age which would delight some and alienate many. Religious fanaticism, whether it is Christian, Jewish or Muslim in appearance, has been forged in a fear that the modern world has no place for the sacred. It has been forged as a reaction against the Goddess Reason in the cathedral. It has been forged as a demand that the sacred be respected in our world.

The tragedy for all of us is that the counter argument from the secularists has generally failed to be accommodating. Instead of entering into dialogue with those who hoped to include God in the modern world, the secularists have engaged in a dialectic wrangle which frequently fails to show any respect for religion and its believers. Recently Paris again became the location of a discourteous assault on religious believers when it banned religious dress in state schools, sending a powerful message to the already fearful that a modern western democracy could accommodate nose-rings and nipples, but not veils, crucifixes and scarves.

Perhaps the hardest message for us to accept in our once cosy western democracies is that the strength of the religious fundamentalist has always grown in proportion to the failures of secular society. When secular states fail to uphold basic standards of decency in domestic or international affairs, they promote the fundamentalists' already festering conviction that at the centre of modern western secularism is nothing more than an unprincipled moral vacuum. Unprincipled and immoral was certainly a feature of the West's support for the Shah in Iran which did nothing but exacerbate the hurt felt by Muslims who took seriously their faith's dogged resolve to eradicate poverty. The more moral currency western secularists squander in these duplicitous and hypocritical transactions, the more they open the door for madmen to win converts to their neurotic causes.

If we really want to prevent the fanatical wing of the Islamic faith from growing in strength, then our first duty is to assess how our standards of behaviour may be feeding it. Our second duty is to hold tightly to the munificence, broad-mindedness and reverence for life which secularism is capable of. The fact is that Islam along with all religious traditions has much to learn from secularism about respecting people's rights and showing compassion in our judgements. And our third duty is to hold these values in our hearts as we listen to the fears, anxieties and hurts of our Muslim brothers and sisters and then set about rebuilding our world in hope, not fear.

Cal is Minister at the Unitarian Chapel on Newington Green.