It’s a terrible thing to disagree with Brian Whitaker, and I would hope that this is all a misunderstanding, but I really think his recent piece on Quilliam and anti-terrorism was a little too optimistic. What he is arguing against is the idea that we should have some kind of established and state-approved brand if Islam here: an established mosque, if you like. That seems to be what Quilliam is proposing, and it certainly what the French and to a lesser extent German governments are trying to do with their programmes for training imams.
This is doomed, says Brian, for reasons of both principle and practice:
“Getting into theological arguments is a very dodgy route for any government to go down: ultimately it means deciding which interpretations of the scripture are “correct” and which are not.
That, to varying degrees, is what governments of Muslim countries do already – appointing senior clerics who will toe the official line, vetting sermons, etc. Quilliam seems to be proposing something similar for Britain by dividing Muslim organisations into those that have a seal of approval and those that don’t (and are consequently to be shunned).
But it doesn’t work in Muslim countries and there’s no reason to think it would work here. The more closely organisations and individual clerics are associated with the authorities, the less credibility they have among the people they are supposed to be influencing away from extremism.”
If one interpretation of scripture says it is OK to blow yourself and your fellow passengers to bits on tube trains, and another says it is very wrong, then government, society, all of us, have strong and legitimate reasons to claim the second interpretation is correct without any scare quotes at all.
We certainly have a vital interest in seeing that government policy works to strengthen the peaceful interpretation and weaken the other. Now the strong point of Brian’s argument is the claim that overt interference is actually counter-productive here. If a body like Quilliam is seen as a government stooge, then we are worse off than if we had never expressed any preference.
This is an argument about tactics, not about strategy. It’s not saying that the government can have no theological positions. It is saying we must be cautious and thoughtful about expressing them. Any government has to choose which groups to trust and work with, and, increasingly, which groups it should fund. These choices will always be contested and sometimes wrong. But they can’t be ducked by saying we don’t have theological opinions.
And I don’t think that the conditions which make the policy fail so spectacularly in Muslim countries apply with the same force here. After all almost all Muslim countries are dictatorships of one sort or another, and the role of the established mosque there is to justify and excuse the actions of the dictators. But we’re not asking anything so grotesque of any mosques or churches here.
The difference that matters is not one between a state that eschews theological opinions and one which takes a stand on these disputed matters. If a judge, or a minister says “this or that doctrine is not true Islam” (or true Christianity, if they were dealing with bombers of abortion clinics) this is a reasonable and sometimes necessary thing to say. The vital distinction we need to keep clear, and which we can hope to observe, is the one between states which claim the right to persecute and torture heretics, and those, like ours, which don’t.
