by Gillian Dymond, TCW
BRITISH people, according to polls and to ‘lived experience’, have a problem with Islam. That is not a ‘hate crime’, and we must be allowed to talk about it.
The problem is that Islam is both unregenerate and inherently resistant to regeneration. Other religions evolve, while maintaining their essence, as ‘time makes ancient good uncouth’. Islam does not do this. It cannot do this; or rather, it cannot do this without denying its foundational selling point: that the Koran is, quite literally, the word of God.
Despite the book’s contradictory passages regarding, for example, the use of wine and intoxicants, forced conversions and the treatment of non-Muslims, the correct punishment for adultery (to name only three of the many disputed points which have been taxing the brains of diligent apologists for the past 1,300 years), and despite the intellectual gymnastics which the more couth among believers must perform to explain away discrepancies and barbarities, the sanctification of the Koran as the work of God himself will always produce a hard core of fanatical believers shouting ‘Heresy!’ at any attempt to ‘change His words’.
The inevitable adjunct to this claim of divine and immutable authority is the declaration that Islam is the final, perfect religion, superseding all those that went before: an assumption outrageous to anyone comparing it with Christianity, who can hardly help seeing it as a step backwards rather than the ultimate step forwards, echoing, as it does, some of the more indigestible passages of the Old Testament (which, fortunately, do not go under the copyright of a divine author).
With Christianity, at least as preached by Christ himself, the focus was turned inward, towards the state of the soul and its individual relationship, despite its fallen and fallible condition, with a just but loving God. Six hundred years later Islam reversed the process, focusing on outward submission and blind obedience to a divine disciplinarian. It is difficult to look on this sequence as a progression, rather than a regression, in spiritual awareness.