In The Bag

The real Islamic threat is that people disgusted with the complete collapse of all moral standards in the personal, social and economic spheres, and left helpless by the closely connected, almost total loss of collective cultural memory, will convert to Islam in droves.

Look at the mosques full of disaffected young men in Afro-Caribbean areas, and at the flourishing Student Islamic Societies full of white, middle-class, deep-thinking, and often female seekers. In comparable ways did many another country begin to be Islamised.

Who would have thought that present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and much of Northern India could have been Islamised? North Africa? Much of Sub-Saharan Africa, very much an ongoing process? Central Asia and much of western China? But how did it happen? And how quickly?

The White British Muslim population is already well over 60,000. Imagine if it alone grew by an improbably small 50 per cent every 10 years: by 2100, there would be over a million. Now imagine that it grew by a possibly over-large, but nevertheless much more realistic, 100 per cent every 10 years: by 2100, there would be nearly 23 million. Yet that is only the White British section of British Muslims.

Face-covering – not head-covering, but face-covering – is incompatible with the conduct of Western social and cultural life. Halal meat is one thing, but animal sacrifice is totally unacceptable. So is polygamy. There is nothing any more acceptable about male than about female genital mutilation. While certainly not without sympathy for opposition to usury, Sharia law must have no legal status in this country.

There should not be Muslim schools here, where my own Catholic schools have existed since a good thousand years before any other kind did. The public holidays in this country should be Christian festivals rather than pointless celebrations of the mere fact that the banks are on holiday; there is no case for non-Christian festivals to be public holidays in the West.

And mosques in the West must not have domes and minarets, which are triumphalistic manifestations of an Islamised society, culture and polity, and which were in that spirit added to former churches during Islam’s forcible overrunning of the Eastern Roman Empire. How long before our cathedrals, churches and chapels go the same way? It happened in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, the Levant and North Africa, all once integral parts of Christendom.

We need to re-learn structured daily prayer, setting aside one day in seven, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage, the global community of faith as the primary focus of personal allegiance and locus of personal identity, the lesser outward and greater inward struggle, the need for a comprehensive and coherent critique of both capitalism and Marxism, the coherence between faith and reason, and a consequent integrated view of art and science.

The answer to the challenge of the Sunna is Sacred Tradition. The answer to the challenge of the Imamate is the Petrine Office. The answer to the challenge of Sufism is our own tradition of mysticism and monasticism. Liberal Catholics will be the last to see the point.