The author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid, wrote a good piece in the Guardian the other day about Western perceptions of Islam. He wrote, "There are more than a billion variations of lived belief among people who define themselves as Muslim - one for each human being, just as there are among those who describe themselves as Christian, or Buddhist, or Hindu. Islamophobia represents a refusal to acknowledge these variations, to acknowledge individual humanities, a desire to paint members of a perceived group with the same brush. In that sense, it is indeed like racism. It simultaneously credits Muslims with too much and too little agency: too much agency in choosing their religion, and too little in choosing what to make of it". You can read the full piece here.
I thought Hamid's article well-argued, though I didn't quite agree with his conclusion, and it reads even more oddly in the light of yesterday afternoon's truly awful murder of a soldier in Woolwich.
It appears that the perpetrators thought of themselves as Muslims. Hacking the soldier to death was part of their "choosing what to make of" Islam, as Hamid would put it. I don't think you can really argue that people should continue to think well of a religion if some its adherents' "lived belief" (Hamid's words again) involves murdering someone who, whatever your views about British foreign policy, cannot truly be said to be personally to blame. A religion has all shades of believers, as Hamid says, but in the UK, curiously, a disproportionately high number of Muslims think it is OK to go around killing other British people (not to mention doing dreadful things to Muslim women). Are we to make nothing of this?
The Spectator rather nobly posted some tweets this morning from Muslims deploring the murder. Again and again I was struck by their tone, which slipped seamlessly from "Isn't this terrible" to "How dare you blame this on Islam!"
In the same way I was struck yesterday by the heroism and nobility of the people who shielded the dying man on the ground, and the woman who got off a coach to engage the murderers in conversation. I have no idea whether these people were Christians or not; it doesn't matter much. Most British people have at the very least a set of ideas about how to behave which they have inherited by a combination of Christianity mediated by the conscience of the Enlightenment.
The police didn't even shoot the murderers stone dead. They shot them in the legs. The shootings have triggered an automatic investigation by the Police Complaints people. The murderers are being treated in hospital by the very best medical care the NHS can provide. If they survive, they will stand trial by what is still on the whole a pretty good criminal justice system, represented by really clever and scrupulous people who will try to get them off. All these things will be paid for by a system of government - itself a fructification of post-Christian ideals - the murderers (and many like them) utterly despise.
By their fruits shall ye know them, I believe it says somewhere in the Bible (not that I have ever read it); and this is true of all religions and all people, all the time, all over the world. It seems to me Mr Hamid has some more thinking to do.
