After five centuries, religious war has returned to Britain

Islamist terror comes from a long tradition of brutal supremacism

Tom Holland

On 6 July 1535, the severed head of England’s former lord chancellor, Sir Thomas More, was carried across London Bridge to the gatehouse on the southern bank. There it was parboiled and set on a spike. Another head, that of the bishop and theologian John Fisher, was removed to make way for it, and thrown into the Thames. Both men, rather than accept Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church of England, had willingly embraced martyrdom at the king’s hands. Both men would end up canonised by the Catholic Church. Amid the violent convulsions of the Reformation, nowhere bore more public witness to the willingness of men to kill and be killed in the cause of God than London Bridge.

Time, though, would see the intensity of these religious passions fade. What a cooler and more whiggish age would dismiss as ‘enthusiasm’ passed out of fashion. By 1974, when a tourist attraction named the London Dungeon opened on Tooley Street, just south of where More’s head had once been exhibited, religious fanaticism appeared as much a part of Britain’s past as public hangings or the Black Death. The causes which had led a succession of English monarchs during the Reformation to torture and kill those they condemned as heretics appeared so drained of contemporary relevance that they had become the stuff of jokey waxworks.

But then, last Saturday night, religiously motivated killing returned to London Bridge. Three men, swerving to murder as many pedestrians as they could, drove a rented van across the very spot where severed heads had been fixed to the bridge’s southern gatepost. They crashed opposite Tooley Street. Then, brandishing long knives, they plunged into the warren of streets and passageways around Southwark Cathedral where, back in the reign of Mary, six high-ranking clergymen had been tried and convicted of heresy. For eight terrible minutes, terrorists — no less convinced than Tudor inquisitors had been that they were the agents of a stern and implacable god — visited slaughter upon Borough Market. Just four days later, another group of Islamists, equally fanatical and set on martyrdom attacked the Iranian parliament and Ayatollah Khomeini’s mausoleum in Tehran, killing at least 12 people and injuring many more.

The London Bridge attackers wanted us to be in no doubt about their motivation. ‘This is for Allah,’ they shouted, as they slashed and stabbed their victims. When they could, they slit people’s throats — just as Isis executioners in Syria, claiming obedience to a command in the Quran ‘to strike off the heads of unbelievers’, had slit the throats of western hostages. Shot by police marksmen, the three men were hailed by supporters of Isis as ‘martyrs’.

Sometimes it can be hard to recognise ghosts for what they are. Reactions to the atrocities committed on Saturday — as to the atrocities committed only a few short weeks previously in Manchester and on Westminster Bridge — have mingled despair with perplexity. We just don’t understand violent religion.

The Church of England, offspring of the Reformation though it is, has long since forsworn the sugar-rush of fanaticism. Vicars today rarely quote from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Christianity in Britain has made its peace with the values of the Enlightenment: secularism, liberalism, humanism. The ease with which it has done so reflects the degree to which, in large part, it came to serve as their midwife. The God who provided assurance to Tudor monarchs that they were justified in killing heretics, and to Cromwell’s major-generals that England should be ruled as a theocracy, is today far more likely to be found in the nightmares of Richard Dawkins than in the prayers of Christians. The Church of England these days is far too busy wringing its hands over its faults and failings to demand vengeance on those of others.

Not that Anglicans are alone in their commitment to what is, theologically speaking, milky tea. Whether in GCSE Religious Studies lessons, or the speeches of politicians, or the manifestos of diversity programmes, all religions are presumed, in their essentials, to be pretty much the same. Every speaker who appears on ‘Thought for the Day’ — Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, it makes no difference — subscribes to the same inoffensive tenets. God is peaceful; God is politically correct; God probably votes Liberal Democrat. Yet while these are undoubtedly assumptions that have served to oil the wheels of multi-cultural Britain, and enabled most people to maintain an attitude towards religion of mild and relaxed indifference, their promotion is not necessarily, perhaps, as tolerant as it might at first sight seem.

Their guiding principles — that religion should properly rank as a matter of personal belief, that church and state should be kept distinct, and that the law of the land should trump any legal system claimed to derive from a god — are not nearly as universal as most people in Britain might like to think. Shaped by the twin inheritances of Christianity and the Enlightenment, they are in reality decidedly contingent. Indeed, to assume that all other belief systems, all other ways of ordering existence, can simply be folded without difficulty into the liberal embrace of our secular state risks verging on the complacent — or the arrogant.

When, for instance, in her speech after the London Bridge attacks, Theresa May decried as a perversion of Islam any notion that it might be incompatible with Western concepts of human rights, she had things precisely the wrong way round. Classically, Muslims have believed that no human rights exist except for those that have been prescribed by God. In the Quran, it is taken for granted that the only way to know how to live well is by means of a divine revelation. Naturally, the Quran casts itself as the ultimate source of these revelations.Anyone who does not submit to the god revealed in its pages is, then, by definition, inferior to those who do. This is all the more so because, according to one of Mohammed’s most quoted sayings, every newborn is naturally Muslim. ‘Then his two parents make him a Jew, a Christian, a Zoroastrian.’ Non Muslims, in other words, are effectively apostates. This is why, should they subsequently convert to Islam, they are termed by many Muslims ‘reverts’. It is also why, for a millennium and more, Islamic states actively discriminated against them. A Quranic injunction decreed that Jews and Christians pay a humiliating tax, the jizya, in exchange for the right to practise their respective religions. Those defined as mushrikun — ‘idolaters’ — were denied the right to practise their religion at all.

Does this mean, then, that Islam is inherently a supremacist religion? Not at all. Like Christianity, it has experienced a long weathering by the Enlightenment; and many Muslims today, like many Christians, have not the slightest problem in living by its values. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, across the Islamic world, the jizya and the slave trade went the way of the Spanish Inquisition; today, in multicultural Britain, the vast majority of Muslims would have no truck with the notion that they are superior to non-Muslims by virtue of being Muslim.

And yet, for all that, it is clear that the legacy of Islamic supremacism, deriving as it does from both the Quran and sayings of Mohammed, still has a potent and seductive appeal. Indeed, there is a sense in which it may be precisely the integration into Islam of the Western notion of human rights that is helping to fuel its recrudescence. After all, if — as Muslims believe — their religion is the last and ultimate of God’s revelations, then any dimunition of its purity, any dilution of its traditions, can all too easily be portrayed as a lethal threat to the entire future of humanity. Isis, who have pointedly reintroduced both the jizya and slavery, are merely the most extreme of those factions within Islam who insist that Muslims, far from compromising with the values of the West, should instead seek to destroy them utterly.

We are witnessing a civil war within Islam and the three men who brought
carnage to Borough Market last Saturday did not see themselves as murderers, but rather as warriors. They imagined that they had been divinely summoned — just as Mohammed had been — to the overthrow of kufr: unbelief.

No laws, no increase in police numbers, no boost to the powers of the security services can adequately patrol such ideas. Only by directly confronting these beliefs do we have even the faintest prospect of diminishing their potency. To do that, though, will first require acknowledging what Isis and their cohorts in the West actually embody: a strain of Islam that has its roots deep in the past, and which, as our most careful analyst of Isis, Shiraz Maher, has put it, ‘believes in progression through regression’. To dismiss it, as Theresa May did, as ‘a perversion of Islam’ is not merely to close our eyes to the nature of the threat that it presents to Britain’s future as a free society; it actively risks making it worse.

So as we begin the inevitable discussion about what to do next, the first step ought to be a fairly basic one: recognise the problem.


https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/after-five-centuries-religious-war-has-returned-to-britain/

Thorin wrote:So as we begin the inevitable discussion about what to do next, the first step ought to be a fairly basic one: recognise the problem.

And the step after that?

Original Quill wrote:

Thorin wrote:So as we begin the inevitable discussion about what to do next, the first step ought to be a fairly basic one: recognise the problem.

And the step after that?

When people recognise the problem, then its far easier to find the cure

The cure is simple, people have to see the wrongs within Islam and that it has to reform

That religions have no special privileges.

Make all schools secular and neutral in teaching

To stop protecting religious text that is hate speech, making it classified as hate speech

one has to ask why other nations are not having the same level of problem

Could it be that we simply have 2 pig headed Un-adaptable cultures rooted in historical wrong doings battering heads?

veya_victaous wrote:one has to ask why other nations are not having the same level of problem

Could it be that we simply have 2 pig headed Un-adaptable cultures rooted in historical wrong doings battering heads?

Half the world is having problems with islam terrorism

Yes the islamic culture is unadaptable, its been that way for 1400 years

Hence Islam needs to come into the 21st century and reform

Why are other nations not having trouble"? Says Veya, Sweden, France,
Holland, Belgium to name just a few.

nicko wrote:Why are other nations not having trouble"?    Says Veya,   Sweden, France,
Holland, Belgium to name just a few.  

It's a European problem.  Yes, we have a few 'copy-cat' criminals, but we've got many more issues with wife-beaters, drunk drivers and bank robbers.  WTF, the KKK and racist cops are a bigger sore.

Europe is more accessible, and perhaps Europe's past colonial period exacerbates the problem.  Over here, we've had many more incidents where RW gun-nuts and white supremacists, and just plain old southerners (eg, Dylann Roof) are the real threat.

Original Quill wrote:

nicko wrote:Why are other nations not having trouble"?    Says Veya,   Sweden, France,
Holland, Belgium to name just a few.  

It's a European problem.  Yes, we have a few 'copy-cat' criminals, but we've got many more issues with wife-beaters, drunk drivers and bank robbers.  WTF, the KKK and racist cops are a bigger sore.

Europe is more accessible, and perhaps Europe's past colonial period exacerbates the problem.  Over here, we've had many more incidents where RW gun-nuts and white supremacists, and just plain old southerners (eg, Dylann Roof) are the real threat.

So its a European problem?

Really?

So yazidi' in iraq are not being butchered or raped?

How about the Kurds in Syria and iraq?

How about Nigeria with Boko haram?

Do you wish me to continue?

I have a very long list on islamic problems cause in countries?

So if you fear white supremacists, why do you ignore Islamic supremacists?

Thorin wrote:

Original Quill wrote:

It's a European problem.  Yes, we have a few 'copy-cat' criminals, but we've got many more issues with wife-beaters, drunk drivers and bank robbers.  WTF, the KKK and racist cops are a bigger sore.

Europe is more accessible, and perhaps Europe's past colonial period exacerbates the problem.  Over here, we've had many more incidents where RW gun-nuts and white supremacists, and just plain old southerners (eg, Dylann Roof) are the real threat.

So its a European problem?

Really?

So yazidi' in iraq are not being butchered or raped?

How about the Kurds in Syria and iraq?

How about Nigeria with Boko haram?

Do you wish me to continue?

I have a very long list on islamic problems cause in countries?

So if you fear white supremacists, why do you ignore Islamic supremacists?

We'll send 'em a five pound box of See's Candy at Christmas.



The point I'm making is, white supremacists are our problem, you guys take care of your own past.

So there have been over 35,000 Islamic terrorist attacks in over 65 countries since 9/11 Quill world wide

How many white supremacist ones in that time world wide?

Now i agree that white supremacy is a major issue, but it pails in comparison to the terrorism of Islamic supremacy

Policemen and Firemen will sort it.

nicko wrote:Policemen and Firemen will sort it.

lol, best quote of the day.....

nicko wrote:Policemen and Firemen will sort it.

You laugh, but that's exactly right.  The military is useless in such an asymmetrical conflict.  Five NYC or London cops would clean up the whole mess, and the firemen would finish the job.

But that aside, it's not America's problem.  It's uniquely Europe's problem.  Not to leave y'all alone, as Trump is advocating (on behalf of Russia), but it's your history coming back to haunt you.  Thoughts of terrorism over here, while it may get idiots elected, is mainly about motorcycle gangs, drugs in the center city, and workplace or school violence.  

The only thing they have against us--and then only indirectly--is our support of Israel.  Otherwise, it's not our fight.

Original Quill wrote:

nicko wrote:Policemen and Firemen will sort it.

You laugh, but that's exactly right.  The military is useless in such an asymmetrical conflict.  Five NYC or London cops would clean up the whole mess, and the firemen would finish the job.

But that aside, it's not America's problem.  It's uniquely Europe's problem.  Not to leave y'all alone, as Trump is advocating (on behalf of Russia), but it's your history coming back to haunt you.  Thoughts of terrorism over here, while it may get idiots elected, is mainly about motorcycle gangs, drugs in the center city, and workplace or school violence.  

The only thing they have against us--and then only indirectly--is our support of Israel.  Otherwise, it's not our fight.

Seriously Quill, just back down mate, the above is embarrassing as an answer

Original Quill wrote:

nicko wrote:Policemen and Firemen will sort it.

You laugh, but that's exactly right.  The military is useless in such an asymmetrical conflict.  Five NYC or London cops would clean up the whole mess, and the firemen would finish the job.

But that aside, it's not America's problem.  It's uniquely Europe's problem.  Not to leave y'all alone, as Trump is advocating (on behalf of Russia), but it's your history coming back to haunt you.  Thoughts of terrorism over here, while it may get idiots elected, is mainly about motorcycle gangs, drugs in the center city, and workplace or school violence.  

The only thing they have against us--and then only indirectly--is our support of Israel.  Otherwise, it's not our fight.

Then kindly keep us out of your fights.

Raggamuffin wrote:

Original Quill wrote:

You laugh, but that's exactly right.  The military is useless in such an asymmetrical conflict.  Five NYC or London cops would clean up the whole mess, and the firemen would finish the job.

But that aside, it's not America's problem.  It's uniquely Europe's problem.  Not to leave y'all alone, as Trump is advocating (on behalf of Russia), but it's your history coming back to haunt you.  Thoughts of terrorism over here, while it may get idiots elected, is mainly about motorcycle gangs, drugs in the center city, and workplace or school violence.  

The only thing they have against us--and then only indirectly--is our support of Israel.  Otherwise, it's not our fight.

Then kindly keep us out of your fights.

Truth be told, we have no fights except for Europe.  The only serious problem we've had in the last century in the Americas is Cuba, and that was really with Russia.  Japan was a bit of a gnat, but 6-months in to the conflict, on June 6th, 1942, we sunk the heart of their navy at Midway and that was that.

We've been helping out, lending a hand, and saving others the rest of the time...and I'm sick of it.  ISIS is no sweat off our ass, and they can kill each other off for all I care.  And America is sure as shit not going to help Netanahu with his real estate investments in the west bank. We've got our hands full with a puppy/monkey/baby for president, but otherwise things are going swimmingly for us.