Politicians are so busy squabbling over extremism that they are failing to tackle it
The Home Secretary, Theresa May, has asked some rude questions about why Michael Gove's Education Department had not acted
Stand back and think of some news stories in the past fortnight or so. The search for the 300 Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram; the Sudanese government’s death sentence for apostasy on a pregnant mother; murders in the Jewish Museum in Brussels; the exchange of Taliban prisoners for their dubious American captive soldier Bo Bergdahl; alleged election-rigging in Tower Hamlets; the revelation that some jihadists in Syria are British citizens; and finally, the row about the Birmingham schools.
All these stories are about a religion in ferment. I do not agree with the growing numbers in the West who see Islam itself as inherently violent. All great religions contain so much of the human story that nasty bits can always be extracted by nasty people. (There was a time, remember, when many Christian adherents were more bloodthirsty than the Muslims, let alone the Jews, whom they persecuted.) What is happening, rather, is that the “ownership” of Islam is in contention.
The loudest voices in this struggle, unfortunately, are of those who turn their faith against the free, Western world. In their story, an amazing Muslim civilisation has been trashed by Christians, Jews, white men in general. No blame for misgovernment and economic failure attaches to Muslim countries themselves, except to those leaders (“hypocrites”) who sell out to the West.
The solution, in this simplistic narrative, is political Islam – it demands sharia, the rule of Allah’s law, with no tolerance of democracy or of wider civil society. It is no accident that the al-Qaeda offshoot in Syria, the most murderously extreme of all the factions, is called the Islamic State. Islam is the truth revealed, and therefore those to whom it has been revealed must impose it and rule, if necessary by the sword. This grand false logic is setting the world on fire.
One Western response to this threat – still the dominant one in officialdom – is to look for “credible partners” among Muslims to neutralise it. This is the doctrine of the official behind the Gove/May explosion, Charles Farr. The able Mr Farr, seconded to the Home Office from MI6, has been head of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) since 2007. He has been passed over for two important jobs – permanent secretary of the Home Office and, more recently, director-general of GCHQ. He may be in the running to be the next head of MI6. His position is complicated because he is the partner of Mrs May’s special adviser Fiona Cunningham: the personal, the official and the political have got muddled up.
Mr Farr does not like David Cameron’s approach to Islamist extremism, as first set out in his Munich speech of 2011. He prefers not to ask too many questions about the ideology of potential Muslim partners, so long as they can be used to suppress violence. He thinks that the more moderate ones tend to be less “credible” among Muslims. In his view, the Government’s Prevent counter-terrorist strategy should leave him and his fellow experts free to cut deals with some quite bad people to keep the maniacs quiet.
One can understand his position. It is the classic view, particularly among officials with an intelligence background and more acquaintance with foreign than domestic affairs. MI6 learnt in the colonial era the importance of buying off trouble, dividing and ruling, and saying “Take me to your leader” even if he was vile. It must be annoying for officials when “here today, gone tomorrow” politicians less knowledgeable than themselves exercise their democratic right to tell them what to do. But there is a massive difference between a colonial situation and our own here and now. We made colonial deals – and we still make foreign policy ones – in the knowledge that we could all go home if things went wrong. Nowadays, they have gone wrong at home in Britain. Tens of thousands of British Muslims are infected by doctrines that teach them to hate the country of which they are citizens.
It is absurdly narrow to see this as a problem only of actual violence. If you are taught to see Britain as a conspirator in the persecution of Muslims, to hate Jews, to try to keep your women away from participation in wider society, to emphasise difference, there will be little to stop you approving of violence committed in the name of Islam. If you are young and male, you may want to be violent yourself. “Slowly the poison the whole bloodstream fills.”
Part of the poison is a relentless effort to deny or conceal the problem. After 9/11, I recall, and even after 7/7, those of us who publicly linked the word “Muslim” with the word “extremism” were censured. The Muslim Council of Britain seriously suggested that making such a link should be forbidden. A similar argument today hampers every effort to check what is happening in the public sector. It would be “alienating”, we are told, to point out Islamist extremism: much better to show how “inclusive” you are.
On Monday, we shall find out what happened in 21 supposedly secular state schools in Birmingham. I suspect we shall discover from the new Ofsted reports that in the past Ofsted did not do its work properly. Did it recruit inspectors, sometimes Muslims themselves, who did not ask searching questions? Did its foolish rule of giving advance notice allow the schools time to take down their loudspeakers broadcasting the call to prayer? Did it investigate whether teachers recruited by some of these schools were members of hardline Deobandi mosques, or on the board of governors of other Muslim-dominated schools?
I wonder what we shall learn about the curriculum. Was evolutionary biology taught? Were any dancing or singing classes allowed? Were classes sexually segregated, with girls at the back, not allowed to ask questions? How were non-Muslim teachers, parents and pupils treated? Were there cultural exchange visits to Mecca and did these exclude non-Muslim pupils? Were religious education classes on Christianity contrived specially for external visitors.
We have now become accustomed, unfortunately, to the painful discovery that children were abused in the state system – in some schools, hospitals, children’s homes. When these things are exposed, we all agree how disgraceful it was that the authorities turned a blind eye. The danger from Islamist extremism is comparable. It too is an abuse of children, and yet we still dare not face it.
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