The Curious Dilemma of the Liberal

Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. For if ye love them that love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the Gentiles the same? Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. (Matthew 5:39).

This, to me, is the basis of liberalism. Others might claim that the source of liberalism is different, and, since history is vast and complicated, I would not presume to be the authority here. Nonetheless, I do have a notion that Western liberalism stems originally from Christian thought, that it is not fundamentally political, but moral and religious.

Those generally called liberal are, today, often in conflict with religious groups, or at least, with Christian groups. It seems to me, however, that it is Christian values by which we reject dogmatic Christianity as illiberal. We have seen how the church does not love its enemies.

Perhaps all ideologies hold within them the seeds of their own decline. For instance, in the above-quoted verses of the Bible, there is the comparison between the followers of Jesus and other people – the publicans and the Gentiles. You, unlike them, are to be perfect. By loving them, you will become better than them. And so we have, once more the division between people, and perhaps, in a way, a more deadly division than ever, since it is a self-righteous division.

Self-righteousness allowed the Christian West to colonise the world and send missionaries. Now, as a consequence of this imperialism, which brought us wealth, the world is coming back to us, to share that wealth, in the form of immigrants. So, self-righteousness, arising out of Christian liberalism, gives birth to multi-culturalism, which again requires something of the original liberal Christian values.

Yesterday, I listened to Radio 4's Start the Week, which this week featured guests Martin Amis, Quentin Skinner, Jim Al-Khalili and Asmar Jahangir. It was a fascinating programme this week, and you can listen to the podcast here. Asked whether he believed multi-culturalism has caused an "intellectual loss of nerve", Martin Amis replied, "Well, yes, and a moral loss of nerve. The deal with multi-culturalism is the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own."

Amis was speaking specifically with reference to Western relations with the Muslim world. Amis goes on to make remarks such as the following: "The other day I asked an audience at the ICA, I said, 'Hands up those who feel morally superior to the Taliban.' There were about 120 people there and I'd say 40 trembling arms were raised. Now we all know the kind of thing the Taliban does and I think we'd find a lot more clarity if we looked at Islamism, or Jihadism, as a feminist issue. The Taliban, not satisfied with getting women out of public life, actually insisted on blacking up the windows of the houses that they were confined to so that they couldn't be seen, but also to deny them sunlight. Now, the audience at the ICA in there, you know, if they were to tell the truth, would admit to feeling moral superiority, but it wasn't that, it was a statement of principle: You don't feel morally superior to anyone except America, and by extension, Israel."

By the way, I believe he is using the word 'Islamism' to make a distinction between militant movements within Islam and Islam as a whole.

This quote is interesting to me because I have sometimes wondered what the liberal does when confronted with a conflict of loyalties. One has to support Islam, because it's a foreign religion (and really for no other reason than that), but one also has to support equality for women. What, actually, do liberals do in this case? Well, I don't know, because I no longer really consider myself a liberal. I did, for a while, in a lazy kind of way, in the way, for instance, as a boy, knowing nothing about football, I would always say, when asked what team I supported, that I supported Manchester United, just to keep people happy. This particular question is not a dilemma for me, although there may be some dilemmas related to it. For me, women's rights would immediately take the priority over a wish to avoid offending or demonising some fanatical religious group, even if they are foreign. Another interesting question is, did I really have to renounce my liberal credentials in order to support the cause of women's rights?

This is not an entirely hypothetical question for me, although I am not an oppressed woman and have not had any contact with the Taliban. I remember, before the destruction of the Twin Towers, receiving an e-mail petition from a friend of mine, regarding the Taliban. It gave details of the violence towards and oppression of women that was taking place in Afghanistan under the influence of the Taliban, and people were asked to sign in order to voice their disapproval and ask – I believe – for UN or governmental intervention. My friend had written, at the top of the e-mail, something like, "You know I don't usually get involved in politics, but this lot look really nasty." And I agreed.

It was not, in any way, a dilemma for me to sign that petition. Of course, since September the 11th, 2001, any criticism of any aspect of Islam has become a very sensitive issue, and the anti-Taliban petition I received now seems to belong to a different age. In this sense (as well as many others) I would say that George Bush's 'war on terror' has been counter-productive.

After 9/11 (okay, I'll give in and use the abbreviation), I was in a pub talking with a certain party who shall not be named (just because I generally prefer to avoid naming people) but who played his part in the world of horror and whom I hold in high esteem, and he asked me what I knew about Islam. Very little, I had to admit. He then went on to tell me that since 9/11 he had conceived a strong interest in Islam and was reading everything he could on the subject. I understood and felt infected by this interest. I must confess, however, my own determination to read up on the history and so on of the religion has not yet really become reality.

Of course, I was vaguely aware of Islam before this time, but the first occasion on which it really entered my consciousness as something to be cogitated on was in 1990, at the age of 18, when the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei upheld the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing his novel The Satanic Verses. Even at that age (and since some time before that, I'm afraid to say), I was a bit of a writer, and my immediate reaction, as someone who simply couldn't give a toss either way about Islam, was that this was an infringement of free speech, and an unacceptable barbarism. I didn't give it that much thought, however, but it remains among my 'first impressions' of Islam. I also remember Cat Stevens, sorry, Yusuf Islam, at the time, doing his bit by upholding the fatwa, too, and how I thought what a wanker he was. In a way, Cat Stevens is an example of Western liberalism in all its paradoxicality. Hate your own culture (free speech) and fly into the arms of another culture (in this case Islam).

I'm very willing to accept (even sympathetic towards) the idea that the English-speaking press has been more interested in focusing on negative aspects of Islam than positive ones. Nonetheless, I'm afraid that my own limited consciousness of Islam has come to be composed most vividly of negative impressions. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the violent oppression of women by the Taliban, the assassination of Theo van Gogh, and, actually, I'd like to pick up on something here. I distinctly remember, at the time of the fatwa against Rushdie, a number of people – and I don't mean Muslims, now, but, well, British non-Muslims – saying things like, "Well, I can't help thinking that he knew what he was doing and he shouldn't have done it." This is the old, "S/he was asking for it" argument. Really? Was he really asking to have a death threat against him, so that he had to spend the next years of his life in a secret location under police supervision? And now I hear people saying the same thing about Theo van Gogh. "Oh yeah, it's true they killed him, but he was a bit of a loud-mouthed prick." Oh well, that's all right then, I suppose.

I notice that the film, Submission, which Theo van Gogh made with Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now on Youtube. I have not watched it yet, but I shall. It has cost someone his life to make it.

Now, Hirsi Ali grew up Muslim. She is not a foreigner attacking Islam from the point of view of ignorant prejudice. And yet, liberalism has reached such a pitch of hypocrisy that that is how some liberals feel the need to treat her. I witnessed an example of this on television. It was the usual, "You were asking for it" treatment. Hirsi Ali was being interviewed about the film Submission and the death of Theo van Gogh. The interviewer, a caucasian woman, showed no concern or compassion for Theo's death, or for the fact that Hirsi Ali had received death threats herself, but only asked how Hirsi Ali could have been involved in such a film, that had upset so many people.

I found this curious. Something very strange was going on in our media. On the one hand, if you were the wrong person (IE, not a politician) or if you criticised Islam in the wrong way (IE actually looked at its theology, the history of abuse of women under Islam etcetera), then you were an Islamophobe and a racist and asking to be assassinated. On the other hand, to murder thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children in Iraq, partially using excuses of a 'war on terror', in the manner of that unctuous and evil shyster, Tony Blair, was perfectly fine and good and not in the least bit racist.

How has this happened?

My guess is that it's a combination of sincere liberalism and those who never had any sincere belief in liberalism manipulating liberal rhetoric, thought, feeling and so on to their own ends.

[Would you believe it, I've just written this whole article, and pressed the wrong button on the computer and lost everything from this point forward and will now have to retype the whole thing. Let us not squabble amongst ourselves. Let us unite against out common enemy, the fucking computer! Oh well, I sigh and carry on.]

I said earlier that I used to consider myself liberal. I haven't really changed since that time, and I suppose that in many ways I actually fit the liberal bill, even in the (possibly) negative sense. I mean, I pretty much hate my own culture. Western civilisation is built on genocide and slavery, and I find it very difficult to be proud of that. But genocide and slavery are also products of liberalism. I think so, anyway. I mean, if we go back to the quotes with which I started this entry, and take them as the basis of liberalism, then they gave rise to the self-righteousness that allowed the expansion of empire and the dispatching of misssionaries to all corners of the globe. To expand on this point, I know George Bush isn't generally considered liberal, but isn't his apparent desire to 'spread democracy' a consequence of liberalism, the missionary zeal of the liberal West? Perhaps I'm way off the mark there, but if I'm on it this is a good illustration of the paradoxical nature of liberalism – the assumption of cultural relativism as a universal value that must be imposed upon others at all costs, unless one flips over to the other side of liberalism and decides to side with the illiberal enemy. Anyway, to return to the point I was trying to make – not only do I hate my own culture, I actively favour other cultures above it, for instance, in my preference of Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism and so on over my native religion of Christianity. I'm also a writer, and I think that writers tend naturally towards the 'moral relativity' of liberalism, because they must see things from all different angles, and treat 'good' and 'evil' characters with equal respect, or even, if they are a subtler writer, do away with good and evil in their work altogether. But if self-righteousness and self-hatred are the two sides of the paradoxical liberal coin, then I seem to have both sides, perhaps to be a more complete liberal than many. After all, although I do prefer Buddhism, which, in its emphasis on no-self may be seen as a cause or symptom of groupism and conformity in the East, I also find that Christianity contains something lacking in all Eastern faiths. Jesus, apparently, loves you. He loves you in particular, with all your quirks and foibles and the things that drive everyone else so mad that they declare war on you. He loves you for your self.

This I find admirable. Not only that, it is still not adequately understood or appreciated.

So, maybe if I were to try and tie of these threads together in a glib manner, with some kind of soundbite, I would say something like, it might be best to love your enemy and your self, if you can. Loving your enemy does not mean submission. It can be assertion. There is a quality way of saying 'no', if you are doing it with an understanding of who you are and of who you are saying no to, and without any ill-will. Well, this is just an idea that I'm floating, anyway, a work in progress.

I suppose that I feel towards religion as I feel towards genre. Different genres interest me, have enriched my life and so on, but I'd hate to have to write within the strict limits of one genre for the rest of my life. I even find the need to define and circumscribe genre too closely to be very childish. Genre is our history. We can refer to it and learn things from it, but why limit ourselves by it? And yet, that is what readers and publishers (and even some writers) do; the readers out of egoism and narrow-mindedness, the publishers out of a craven desire for money.

And so with religion.

I don't want to see the eradication of religion, but I do want to see the abolishment of religious borders. We now live in a world where we cannot move without treading on each other's toes. In such a world, religion is a shared heritage. The separate religions are each cultural artefacts. The Japanese, for instance, should not be allowed to go on vandalising the architectural heritage of Kyoto as they do. It doesn't belong to them now. It belongs to the world. In the same way, how can you issue a fatwa against Rushdie for writing about Islam. It is his heritage to write about. And mine. Christianity is mine. Hinduism is mine. Buddhism is mine. Atheism is mine. And yours. And since this is world heritage, we should also take care of it. I don't mean with an exaggerated reverence (which is the tool used by those who say that religion belongs to them alone). I just mean that the books in the human library should be maintained in a legible state with no pages torn out. So, you, Taliban, oi, that means you! No more destroying Buddhist statues! They belong to all of us. Enough of your loutish vandalism! And no more bombing of mosques, either!

I suppose, in this way, I differ from Richard Dawkins. He seems to desire the amputation of religion. I would rather see it integrated or transcended, so that we can live in a world where "all is God and God is just a word". There is one thing I appreciate about Dawkins, however. He is even-handed in attacking all religions, whether they be Judaism, Islam or Christianity. In doing so he is helping to break down the hypocrisy into which liberalism has grown. I don't actually know what the general 'liberal' position is with regard to Dawkins, but I'd be interested to find out.