I was recently struck by the insights of a once-radicalised Muslim who was answering the questions of a Radio 4 journalist. His comments helped sharpen my focus on something that had previously been more of a hunch.
The basic point is that Western secular observers are not best placed to understand what makes the suicide bomber ‘tick.’ In a sense they too are so ‘radicalised’ that the psychology of religion is beyond their powers of analysis. Put simply, they don’t do theology well.
Not just another psychopath
As the interviewee pointed out, the Manchester bomber (and his like) was not just another psychopath, nor deprived, nor damaged by abuse. He probably never watched pornography, or did drugs, or touched alcohol. Never spoke blasphemous words, or listened to explicit pop music. Instead he prayed earnestly and worked honestly for his family’s welfare.
He was a calculating follower of a religious code which he sincerely believed would curry favour with his god, Allah.
The attack on what he saw as degenerate and immoral, was to him a vigilante act of righteous anger. As an agent of Allah’s justice he believed he was serving his cause and in some way improving his own spiritual prospects, atoning for his own sins by taking action against the sin of others.
Now of course, such barbarism doesn’t sit well in our culture, nor do ritual beheadings in Iraq or spraying bullets across a beach in Tunisia. But, to many devoted young Muslims, neither do our so-called British values, which include the mass abortion of unborn babies, gay pride parades and drunken hen nights.
In other words there is an interesting and challenging conundrum which our culture is rarely minded to consider. It is essentially to do with our own identity and the criteria which shape it.
No watertight worldview
Secular humanism is not quite the watertight world view that so many assume. For starters, it is severely lacking and leaking when it comes to the whole question of ethics and the basis for them. It is actually a strange hybrid of scientific determinism and Judeo-Christian moral principles borrowed at its own convenience, because pure materialism is simply too bleak.
Having no real reason to say that human life is worth more than that of a maggot, humanism fumbles around its own hunches and allows sentimental nonsense to cloud the harsh realities it inevitably affirms. In other words ‘secular’ is one thing but the ‘human’ bit tends to complicate the picture. On the one hand, the thought of God frightens us and, on the other hand, meaningless-ness may frighten us even more.
Conscience
You see, human beings have a persistent and embarrassing tendency towards the transcendent and the sublime. For one thing, they are constantly influenced by that strange factor we call conscience. And conscience never works well alongside the notion of the survival of the fittest. Time and again it undermines pure evolutionary efficiency. It comes up with messy things such as compassion and equality, tolerance and self-denial. Things which Richard Dawkins and his like should be trying to eliminate completely, if we are really to ‘move on’.
At times, it creates within us the vague notion that we might in some sense be morally accountable to a higher power and may even live on in some way after the machine has been switched off. All very irritating.
And so, while most people never darken the doors of a church on a Sunday, they still come up with all kinds of semi-religious twaddle about angels hovering over a memorial concert in Manchester, or dear old Fred raising a glass of heavenly single malt at the golfing buddy’s funeral.
And for the millions of moderate Muslims the world over, who would regard a Stephen Fry as patronising beyond words, our liberal lifestyle choices are, with good reason, hardly what they want their children to embrace.
In other words, while in no way condoning the bomber or a murderous white-van man, let’s not assume that we are the paragons of virtue which the rest of the world should aspire to follow. Those in glass houses should be the last to throw stones.
So, in conclusion, let me suggest that, in a world increasingly divided and nervous about its prospects, what is needed is the rediscovery of something far more radical than the extremes of Islam or atheism.
I have in mind the words of a man who spoke as no other ever has in that realm which our hunches point us towards. Who said: ‘While you are from below, I am from above and have come down not to condemn the world but to save the world, for I am the light of the world and he that follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.’
For the real need of the sincere and thoughtful Muslim is not a big dose of amoral, secular propaganda that’s already poisoned millions, but an introduction from a kind Christian to the person who conquered death and still tells us…‘Your sins which are many I can forgive.’
