Posts from — October 2006

It’s been some days since I’ve had time to write here. I thought I would write something on Friday (a Baha’i Holy Day - the Anniversary of the Birthday of the Bab), but I was tied up most of the day and then exhausted at the end of it.

Then I thought I would write yesterday (Saturday), but I had to travel to Woodstock (near Oxford) for the inaugural meeting of the new UK Baha’i Religious Education Agency, aka BREA. I’m not a member of BREA, but I represented the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the UK at the launch of the agency. It was an excellent meeting and I think the new agency will do well in supporting Baha’i RE teachers and SACRE members.

What’s that? Oh do I have to explain everything? Religious Education (aka RE) is compulsory in state primary and secondary schools in the UK. Each local education authority in England and Wales must appoint a Standing Advisory Committee on Religious Education (SACRE) to oversee the teaching of RE and the legally required collective act of worship in schools under its [tsupervision. Another locally appointed body, the Agreed Syllabus Conference (ASC), draws up the local RE syllabus for its area. Baha'is sit on an increasing number of SACREs and ASCs and there is Baha'i material in more and more of these syllabuses (syllabi?) The role of BREA is to support Baha'is who work in RE or are members of SACRE and to ensure that material about the Baha'i Faith in RE syllabuses is accurate and useful for teachers.

I kept thinking I must write about a couple of last week's activities. I attended a meeting of the Attorney General’s Equality and Diversity Advisory Group in the House of Lords on Tuesday afternoon. Inevitably part of the discussion was about the relationship between the government and the Muslim community. A comment the Attorney addressed to me at the end of the meeting indicated that the UK government will continue to pay special attention to the Muslim community for the foreseeable future.

On Thursday the All Party Parliamentary Friends of the Baha’is hosted the second of the UK Baha’i community’s seminars on freedom of religion or belief in the House of Commons. The theme was challenges to freedom of religion or belief and we had three excellent speakers: Baroness Cox of Queensbury, Frank Field, and Andrew Copson. Baroness Cox is a remarkable woman with an extraordinary commitment to the rights of persecuted Christians in various parts of the world, and a doughty fighter for human rights. Frank Field worked for many years for the United Nations Assoction in Geneva and in London and has a profound interest in and knowledge of freedom of religion. Andrew Copson, who is the Education and Parliamentary Officer for the British Humanist Association, gave an excellent account of why freedom of conscience, thought and religion applies just as much to those who have a non-religious philosophy or, indeed, who do not particularly care about religion at all.

I hope to write more about this seminar, but I’m prone to promise to write things and then find myself running out of time. So I may not get round to it!

This afternoon I attended the Week of Prayer for World Peace event at the London Interfaith Centre. More of this in a subsequent post.

Tomorrow I welcome the High Commissioner of Singapore to the UK National Baha’i Centre, and later in the week I fly to the US for a weekend of meetings.

Monday 23 October, 2006
This Daily Telegraph article and this leader comment critically on government efforts to combat Islamic extremism in the UK by funding a website and sending out free CDs to Muslims. Now I see more clearly the point of what the Attorney General said to me at the end of the meeting last Tuesday afternoon about the government’s paying special attention to the Muslim community (see above in this post).

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bab, Religious Education, RE, SACRE, Attorney General, Muslim, freedom of religion or belief, House of Commons, human rights

Rose el-Yousef, one of Egypt’s leading newspapers, has a story about the report commissioned by the country’s Supreme Administrative Court about Egypt’s Baha’is.

As Bilo comments in his blog:

It is not surprising that this clearly biased and one-sided report repeats the exact same illogical and unjustified statements and conclusions that have been circulating among the Egyptian fundamentalist establishment for many years.

In brief, it concluded that since the Baha’i Faith is not recognized in Egypt as a “divine religion,” therefore its followers in that land have no rights whatsoever and that they simply do not exist! Consequently, they concluded that Egypt’s Constitutional guarantees of freedom of belief and religion do not apply to the Baha’is. That Egypt is not bound to its commitment as a cosignatory to the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and that the Baha’is, in Egypt, should not be under its protection–since, as far as they are concerned, Egypt should have no obligations towards them! That the Baha’i are apostates (whether or not they descended from an Islamic background). That they are a threat to the “general [public] order” of the State, and that all their marriages are null and void…. That “methods must be defined that would insure that Baha’is are identified, confronted and singled out so that they could be watched carefully, isolated and monitored in order to protect the rest of the population as well as Islam from their danger, influence and their teachings.”

It’s well worth reading Bilo’s blog if you want to understand the human rights abuses that are being meted out to the followers of the Baha’i Faith in one of the world’s major Islamic countries.

The travesty of this report is that it identifies the Baha’is as a threat to the nation, isolates them in a corner, deprives them from every right to citizenship, strips them from all their civil rights, calls for their elimination and expulsion, declares their children as illegitimate and their men and women as cohabiting out-of-wedlock….

Technorati Tags: Egypt, Baha’i, human rights, Islam

I just loved this video on YouTube - music and free hugs. It’s very simple and emotional.

Later…
I love hugs - both the giving and the receiving thereof, as an expression of love. However, I know that not everyone likes to hug their friends or be hugged by them. If I sense that someone is a non-hugger, I respect their preferences. For example, my dear father-in-law is a non-hugger, as is a friend alongside whom I serve on the UK National Spiritual Assembly. I shake hands with them, although my instinct would be to hug.

On the other hand, I dislike it if someone I’ve just met for the first time pulls me into a hug against my will. I don’t want those I don’t know well to assume a degree of familiarity that doesn’t exist.

So I’m not sure how I would respond to an invitation to free hugs on the street or in the mall.

Anyway, there’s a nice huggy picture on doberman pizza.

Technorati Tags: YouTube, hugs

Every year, Baha’is around the world meet in electoral unit conventions to elect delegates who will attend the [tagBaha'i[/tag] National Conventions in the period Baha’is know as Ridvan (21st April to 2 May). These unit conventions are grassroots level of the Baha’i international democracy, in which adult Baha’is indirectly participate in the election of the Universal House of Justice, the Baha’i world governing council.

In the UK, unit conventions usually take place around this time of year, so that the delegates who are elected by them will have the opportunity to get to know many more Baha’is personally. Baha’is should vote people onto their assemblies on the basis of their spiritual qualities, not on the basis of personality or ability to give public talks or other irrelevancies.

The delegates elected in the current round of unit conventions will elect the National Spiritual Assemblies for their countries at Ridvan 2007. Those elected to National Assemblies at that National Convention will have the great honour of electing the Universal House of Justice at the International Baha’i Convention in 2008.

Our unit, in Hertfordshire, UK, held its unit convention today and has just elected a lady who has never served as delegate before. Fariba is the training coordinator for all the Baha’i communities in Hertfordshire and so has strong experience of how the Baha’i community is functioning at the grassroots. Her experience will be highly relevant to the consultations at National Convention. The fact that this will be Fariba’s first time as a delegate is also important; she will gain experience which will add to her capacities as a Baha’i and will increase the number of Baha’is in the UK with knowledge of what it means to serve at that level.

Technorati Tags: National Convention, Ridvan, democracy, Universal House of Justice

According this BBC story, many thousands of dalits, who used more commonly to be known as “untouchables” - untouchable to high caste Indians because they fall outside the Hindu caste arrangements - have converted to Buddhism and Christianity in the hope of escaping the appalling discrimination that they face in India.

Two questions strike me:

1. Aren’t they unlikely to escape the discriminationthey just because they have changed religion. Discrimination of this kind is often highly persistent.

2. Are they changing their religion from conviction and belief (which seems to me to be OK) or merely because they think it will result in an end to discrimination? If the latter, is that OK?

A further twist in this story is that some of the Indian states have passed laws in an attempt to make it more difficult to convert from Hinduism to other religions. Regardless of whether or not one thinks that the mass conversion of dalits is happening for the right reasons, these laws would seem to run counter to Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief…

Technorati Tags: dalits, untouchables, caste, Indian, Hindu, Buddhism, Christianity

This is it. The Charnwood Cove 1 stove as installed in our sitting room.

A stove of plain design that goes well with the room (which needs redecorating).

Despite the wet weather, the whole thing was done only a day late. However, Morley Stoves (who, by the way) are very helpful and efficient by and large) failed to install an airbrick and now realize that the hearth has to be extended so that it protrudes 300mm in front of the stove to comply with Building Regulations.

So those are Monday’s jobs for Morleys!

At the moment, I’m awaiting the delivery of 90cu.ft. of seasoned hardwood logs, weighing around 1.5 tons.

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I found this paper by Sahar Amer at the University of North Carolina very helpful in clarifying my understanding of the veil in Islam.

What is the veil? What is this hijab that is so often invoked in the French press as symbol of, and threat to, the civic ideal of laicite? If in the Western, but also oftentimes in the Islamic mind, the hijab has come to stand for Islam, what does Islam say about the veil, and where does it prescribe that it must be worn by all Muslim women? The following is precisely an attempt at uncovering the meaning of the veil in Islam.

Before embarking into an overview of the teachings of Islam on the “proper” dress code for Muslim women, it is crucial to distinguish from the outset between what Islam, or the sacred texts of Islam, preach and the practices of Islam which, more often than not, are culture and country specific. Therefore, when one remembers that Muslims are found on all continents (except in Antartica), one may safely say that in each case, Islam is practiced slightly differently. Most importantly for our purposes is that in each of these countries, the notion of the veil is understood differently. This situation results in great variations in the ways women wear the hijab. This may be seen by going to the following web site. Each of the women seen in these pictures earnestly claims (or is forced ) to wear the prescribed “true Islamic veil.” And yet each of these veils looks different, in colours, in fabrics (from sheer to black and everything in between) and in the extent to which it covers the hair, the face, or the rest of the body. Evidently, the cultural practices of Islam, evident in the ways the veil is understood to mean and therefore to be worn, differ widely. These cultural practices all claim to put into practice the teachings of Isladelineated in the following sacred texts: the Quran, the Sunnah and the Shari’a.

OK, so this gives the lie to those who would insist that there is only one way to practise Islam.

Amer thoroughly reviews the Qur’anic texts and well-attested hadith or traditions and then concludes:

In fact, nowhere in the Quran, except in Sura 33: 53, is the word hijab used to speak about a particular dress code for Muslim women. And nowhere, including in Sura 33:53 is hijab used to describe, let alone to prescribe, the necessity for Muslim women to wear a headscarf or any of the other pieces of clothing often seen covering women in Islamic countries today. Even after reading these passages dealing with the female dress code, one continues to wonder what exactly the hijab is: is it supposed to be a simple scarf? A purdah? A chador? Or something else? Which parts of the body exactly is it supposed to cover: just the hair? The hair and neck? The arms? Hands? Feet? Face? Eyes? What colour is it supposed to be? More often than not, the Quranic ayat seem to offer a new use for an existing piece of clothing (it is a well kown fact that women in the Roman, and therefore pre-islamic, world, but also in the Jewish and Christian traditions wore veils).

If the word hijab is used indeed in one passage, namely Sura 33:52, it does not in any case refer to what is today commonly understood by the word, namely a headscarf of some sort to be worn by all Muslim women. For this prescription is addressed clearly and specifically to the wives of the Prophet, and not to all Muslim women. Moreover, when one considers the circumstances surrounding the specific revelation of this sura, one realizes that the meaning of the term hijab here seems to have been vastly misunderstood by succeeding generations. For sura 33:52 was revealed at the time of the Prophet’s marriage with a new bride and speaks of his desire to consummate his marriage, a desire which was frustrated because some guests were overstaying their visit. God has thus sent in this revelation in order to separate the guests through a veil from the private chambers of the Prophet and his bride. When one thus contextualizes the Quranic
revelations and their prescriptions, one sees that the hijab in this aya was meant to be a physical object aimed at securing the privacy of the Prophet and of his family and not, as is still often believed, a piece of clothing for women to wear. Evidently, the use of the word hijab here may not be interpreted as a prescription for any specific type of Islamic dress code for women.

Another example of a misinterpretation in the Quran as it relates to the headscarf is found in sura 33:59. Once again here the dress code that is advised (”to draw their wraps a little over them”) is not aimed at prescribing the wearing of a hijab for Muslim women; rather it is meant to distinguish between the clothing of free aristocratic women from that worn by the female slaves. The dress code here is a social marker, and has nothing to do with a gender dress code.

Finally, sura 24:30-31 is particularly valuable to this discussion of the dress code for the Muslim faithfuls because before even addressing the particular dress code for women, the Quran speaks first of the Islamic dress code for men. And it does so in the same words as it does for women. This sura is interesting because throughout the Islamic world and in the West, one never hears anything said about the way men must dress or conduct themselves in public. The focus has always been and continues to be on women.

I make no apology for quoting at length from this paper, since it does so much to clear away the fog of war that has been stirred up by Jack Straw’s recent comments and the reactions thereto.

These examples demonstrate that the exclusive focus placed on the hijab (veil) as it relates to women and the implications the veil has for the female body clearly constitute another form of veiling, this time of the prescriptions that the Quran specifically addresses to men. By focusing on women, Muslim men have allowed themselves to be removed from any type of responsible behavior, and have ended up maintaining an inequality of the sexes, despite of Islamic prescriptions on the subject of equality, because the latter is viewed as a threat to their power and political monopoly.

In conclusion, it seems that the hijab is a construction created shortly after the Prophet’s time and maintained till today by patriarchal society in order to keep women in a subordinate position. Because of the vagueness of its prescriptions on the dress code for women, the Quran has been manipulated at various historical times, including in our own times, in order to uphold various political agendas.

I am clear from my reading of this paper that the veil cannot be used to make “a feminist statement againist the objectification of women’s bodies by the panopticon of the (male) gaze”, as Umm Yasmin claims in her comment on an earlier post of mine on this subject. (By the way, what kind of nonsense is this language of “objectification” and “the panopticon of the (male) gaze”? It looks to me (a mere weak male) like ill-digested twaddle.) The veil, says Amer, is an imposition of male power on women.

One dimension of the struggle for women’s emancipation in the 19th and 20th century was the demand for freedom from the restrictive clothing that “respectability” (i.e. men) forced women wo wear. Now it seems that some Muslim women want to turn the clock back, paradoxically in the name of feminism. Saira Khan’s her article in The Times, refreshingly reminded us tht women and girls cannot be free to participate fully in the life of society if they are hampered by the veil.

Now, even London Mayor Ken Livingstone says he would be happier if Muslim women did not veil themselves:

London Mayor Ken Livingstone has said he would like Muslims to give up the veil.

But he suggested change was not something that could be imposed from outside the Muslim community.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Getting Muslim women to give up the veil - which I suspect is something most people would like to see in the long term, including myself - is not going to be done by old white male politicians telling them to do it.

“It will be change from within. That is why it’s important we should engage with the progressive elements and leaders in the Muslim community.”

Two closing thoughts for the moment. A note to the Kitab-i-Aqdas, the Baha’i book of laws says this:

Many rules about dress had their origins in the laws and traditional practices of the world?s religions. For example, the Shi’ih clergy adopted for themselves a distinctive headdress and robes and, at one time, forbade the people to adopt European attire. Muslim practice, in its desire to emulate the custom of the Prophet, also introduced a number of restrictions with regard to the trim of the moustache and the length of the beard.

Bah??u?ll?h removed such limitations on one?s apparel and beard. He leaves such matters to the “discretion” of the individual, and at the same time calls upon the believers not to transgress the bounds of propriety and to exercise moderation in all that pertains to dress.

And Baha’u'llah very clearly gives men as much responsibility for chastity as He does women:

Say: He is not to be numbered with the people of Bah? who followeth his mundane desires, or fixeth his heart on things of the earth. He is My true follower who, if he come to a valley of pure gold, will pass straight through it aloof as a cloud, and will neither turn back, nor pause. Such a man is, assuredly, of Me. From his garment the Concourse on high can inhale the fragrance of sanctity?. And if he met the fairest and most comely of women, he would not feel his heart seduced by the least shadow of desire for her beauty. Such an one, indeed, is the creation of spotless chastity. Thus instructeth you the Pen of the Ancient of Days, as bidden by your Lord, the Almighty, the All-Bountiful.

Technorati Tags: veil, Islam, Qur’an, hadith, feminist, women, emancipation, Baha’i

Some time ago we ordered a Charwood Cove 1 woodburning stove for our sitting room from Morley Stoves in Ware, Hertfordshire.

Morley Stoves scheduled delivery and installation for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week. Installation included construction of a sectional chimney (our house didn’t have a chimney). Of course, building a chimney means making a hole in the roof. So what happened on Tuesday and Wednesday? Heavy rain!

The moment Steve the builder arrived on Tuesday and Wednesday the heavens opened. Steve the builder laughed and left.

But today the sun shone and it was a delightful late autumn day. So Steve the builder and his mate (and several others from Morley Stoves) got to work and, by the end of the working day, the chiminey was through the roof, leaded in (so no rain can get in) and the stove was on the hearth and hooked up to the chimney.

Steve’ll laughed, left and promised to be back tomorrow to render the chimney and finish the job off.

The stove looks great in the sitting room. Erica and I are looking forward to sitting by the fire on cold winter nights.

Technorati Tags: woodburning stove, chimney

Just look what Jack Straw has started!

Here’s Robert Spencer in FrontPage magazine on the issue.

Taking whose picture?

(I didn’t take this photo. It was sent to me by a friend, who got it from the Internet, I assume.)

And this very interesting article by Saira Khan in The Times of 9 October is entitled Why Muslim women should thank Straw.

Saira Khan’s parents moved from Kashmir to the UK in the 1960s. They brought their faith and their traditions to their new home. But they also understood that they were starting a new life in a country where Islam was not the main religion. Saira herself wore the traditionl salwar kameez at home and a typical English school uniform at school. Her parents did not feel that wearing English clothes compromised her faith. They wanted her to fit in and to make use of all the advantages that school offered. She captained the school hockey team and took part in county athletics, not things she could have done wearing the salwar kameez, let alone being entirely covered by a jilbab or niqab.

No one in her immediate family, she says, either in the UK or in Kashmir, wears the niqab, the blackout veil that covers the face.

Her mother had no problem with removing her chador when she used to operate heavy machinery at work. And she jogs in a tracksuit and swims in a normal swimming costume.

Of course, this is not acceptable to Muslims who believe there is only one way to dress as a Muslim, to express Muslim beliefs and do Muslim practices. Such Muslims, Saira Khan says, forget

that the Muslim faith is interpreted in different ways in different places and that there are distinct cultures and styles of dress in Muslim countries stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. But it is not a requirement of the Koran for women to wear the veil.

Ah, so there’s something else behind the increasing pressure on Muslim women to cover themselves completely, to hide their faces from the rest of society.

Saira Khan thinks that the growing number of women veiling their faces in Britain is a sign of radicalization. She tells of her shock at discovering that some of her fellow students at University in the late 1980s had turned very religious and started to wear the jilbab. They had never worn this before, nor had their mothers before them. But the university’s Islamic Society had told them they were not proper Muslims if they failed to adhere to the strict dress code. She continues:

It is an extreme practice. It is never right for a woman to hide behind a veil and shut herself off from people in the community. But it is particularly wrong in Britain, where it alien to the mainstream culture for someone to walk around wearing a mask. The veil restricts women, it stops them achieving their full potential in all areas of their life and it stops them communicating. It sends out a clear message: ?I do not want to be part of your society.?

Some Muslim women say that it is their choice to wear it; I don?t agree. Why would any woman living in a tolerant country freely choose to wear such a restrictive garment? What these women are really saying is that they adopt the veil because they believe that they should have less freedom than men, and that if they did not wear the veil men would not be accountable for their uncontrollable urges ? so women must cover-up so as not to tempt men. What kind of a message does that send to women?

But a lot of women are not free to choose. Girls as young as three or four are wearing the hijab to school ? that is not a freely made choice. Girls under 16 should certainly not have to wear it to school. And behind the closed doors of some Muslim houses, women are told to wear the hijab and the veil. These are the girls that are hidden away, they are not allowed to go to universities, they have little choice in who they marry, in many cases they are kept down by the threat of violence.

Saira Khan thinks that Jack Straw was right to raise the issue and that no one should feel threatened by his comments…

…after all, the debate about veils has been raging in the Islamic community for many years. To argue that non-Muslims have no right to discuss it merely reinforces the idea that Muslims are not part of a wider society. It also suggests, wrongly, that wearing the veil affects only Muslims. Non-Muslims have to deal with women wearing a veil, so why shouldn?t their feelings be taken into consideration? I would find it impossible to deal with any veiled woman because it goes so deeply against my own values and basic human instincts. How can you develop any kind of a social relationship with someone who has shut themselves away from the rest of the world?

And if we can?t have a debate about the veil without a vocal minority of Muslims crying ?Islamophobia?, how will we face other issues, such as domestic violence, forced marriages, sexual abuse and child abuse that are rife in the Muslim community? These are not uniquely Muslim problems but, unlike other communities, they are never openly debated. It is children and women who suffer as a result.

Thank you, Saira Khan, for writing so frankly about an issue that is stirring up profound discomfort in Britan. I’m a Baha’i and the Baha’i Faith has, as a fundamental principle, the equality of women and men. Baha’i women do not wear any kind of veil. The famous 19th century Iranian poetess, Tahirih (see my previous post with Tahirih’s story), inspired by the teachings of the B?b made a dramatic break with the male dominated past by publicly removing her veil in male company. To borrow a phrase from a letter of the Universal House of Justice, “We have crossed a bridge between times”. There can be no going back, no return to oppressive traditions. How can women and men be equal if women’s faces are hidden?

I leave the last word to Saira Khan:

This is my message to British Muslim women ? if you want your daughters to take advantage of all the opportunities that Britain has to offer, do not encourage them to wear the veil. We must unite against the radical Muslim men who would love women to be hidden, unseen and unheard.

I was able to take advantage of what Britain has got to offer and I hope Mr Straw?s comments will help more Muslim women to do the same. But my argument with those Muslims who would only be happy in a Talebanised society, who turn their face against integration, is this: ?If you don?t like living here and don?t want to integrate, then what the hell are you doing here? Why don?t you just go and live in an Islamic country??

Technorati Tags: Saira Khan, Muslim, Kashmir, salwar kameez, jilbab, niqab, veil, chador, Koran, Islamophobia, Baha’i, Tahirih

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According to this report in the Sunday Telegraph,

The Church of England has launched an astonishing attack on the Government’s drive to turn Britain into a multi-faith society.

In a wide-ranging condemnation of policy, it says that the attempt to make minority “faith” communities more integrated has backfired, leaving society “more separated than ever before”. The criticisms are made in a confidential Church document, leaked to The Sunday Telegraph, that challenges the “widespread description” of Britain as a multi-faith society and even calls for the term “multi-faith” to be reconsidered.

The report, written by Guy Wilkinson, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s inter-faith adviser, and an eminently sensible man, says that

… the Church of England has been sidelined. Instead, “preferential” treatment has been afforded to the Muslim community despite the fact that it makes up only three per cent of the population. Britain remains overwhelmingly a Christian country at heart and moves to label it as a multi-faith society suggest a hidden agenda, it says.

Furthermore, according to the Sunday Telegraph:

The report lists a number of moves made by the Government since the London bombings in July last year to win favour with Muslim communities. These include “using public funds” to fly Muslim scholars to Britain, shelving legislation on forced marriage and encouraging financial arrangements to comply with Islamic requirements. These efforts have undermined its interfaith agenda and produced no “noticeable positive impact on community cohesion”, the Church document says.

“Indeed, one might argue that disaffection and separation is now greater than ever, with Muslim communities withdrawing further into a sense of victimhood, and other faith communities seriously concerned that the Government has given signals that appear to encourage the notion of a privileged relationship with sections of the Muslim community.”

The Church of England and Jack Straw are voicing concerns that I know have been bubbling away below the surface of inter-faith relations in the UK for some time, even before the London bombings in July last year. I sit in many inter-faith meetings and I frequently talk to people from different faiths. Up to now, no one has been prepared to surface these concerns in meetings, but they have been expressed to me privately by people from a range of faiths. There’s a sense of grievance about the the privileges the government is perceived as giving to the Muslim community, when other faiths have also needs and also have things to offer to wider society.

And it’s not just members of faith communities who are saying this. Around a year ago an official from the Cohesion and Faiths Unit (at that time still within the Home Office) admitted to me in a private meeting that the Home Office’s attention had swung entirely to the Muslim community following the London bombings of 7/7. He claimed that the pendulum had subsequently swung back and that the Home Office realized that the other faith communities also had claims on their attention. But there’s no doubt that the government panicked at the discovery that the UK had its very own home-grown Islamic terrorists and was looking for ways to appease the Muslim community. It was at that point that the penny dropped that the ideology of multi-culturalism had failed.

The Church of England’s paper claims that the what the government is doing to try to integrate Muslims is doomed to fail.

“In relation to faith, there has been a divided, almost schizophrenic approach,” the briefing paper says. The Government was misguided in “scapegoating the Muslim community as the source of the problem at the same time as believing that they should be uniquely responsible for solutions”. It goes on: “The contribution of the Church of England in particular and of Christianity in general to the underlying culture remains very substantial.”

The 2001 census showed that 72 per cent of Britons describe themselves as Christian. “It could certainly be argued that there is an agenda behind a claim that a five per cent adherence to ‘other faiths’ makes for a multi-faith society,” says the document.

Religion is an intractable matter for governments to deal with. Religious fanaticism is impossible for governments to eradicate on their own. In April 2002, the Universal House of Justice, the world governing council of the Baha’i community wrote a powerful letter to the world’s religious leaders. The letter’s closing paragraph makes this resounding statement:

With every day that passes, danger grows that the rising fires of religious prejudice will ignite a worldwide conflagration the consequences of which are unthinkable. Such a danger civil government, unaided, cannot overcome. Nor should we delude ourselves that appeals for mutual tolerance can alone hope to extinguish animosities that claim to possess Divine sanction.

The responsibility lies inescapably with religious leaders. As the Universal House of Justice concludes:

The crisis calls on religious leadership for a break with the past as decisive as those that opened the way for society to address equally corrosive prejudices of race, gender and nation. Whatever justification exists for exercising influence in matters of conscience lies in serving the well-being of humankind. At this greatest turning point in the history of civilization, the demands of such service could not be more clear. ?The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable?, Baha??u?lla?h urges, ?unless and until its unity is firmly established.?

So no amount of privileging by government of any faith community is going to solve the devastating problems caused by religious extremism.

Technorati Tags: Church of England, multi-faith, Muslim, Christian, Islam