Author: Peter Hitchens
Publication: Mail on Sunday
Date: November 2, 2003
Could Islam one day become the established
church of Britain? Might English women adopt the headscarves and enveloping
robes of their Asian sisters, as the call to prayer rises and falls across
the slate roofs of rainswept industrial cities?
The idea is not as impossible, as
bizarre or distant as you might think. An astonishing Channel 4 programme
last week - The Last White Kids -- showed two English children who live
in an entirely Muslim district becoming enthusiastic attenders at the local
mosque, wrapping themselves in Islamic draperies and learning the Koran.
Amie Gallagher, nine, and her sister
Ashlene, 12, are all-too-typical children of modern Britain in some ways,
daughters of a single-parent household where the father is absent.
In Islam they seem to have found
something that would otherwise be missing from their lives. At the mosque
there is authority, certainty, even disciplined education in the Arabic
language and the Koran.
This has happened because the Gallaghers
are the only white family in a suburb otherwise completely dominated by
Asian Muslims.
If they move away, as they may well
do, then perhaps the two girls' attachment to the mosque will fail. Their
brother, Jake, has not followed them down the Muslim path and has instead
become even more defiantly English than he might otherwise have done.
But this strange little story contains
a warning for Britain as a whole, as it careers ever more rapidly down
the path of permissiveness which began so gently in the Sixties and now
slopes ever more steeply downwards towards sexual chaos, drunkenness, family
breakdown and the epidemic use of stupefying drugs.
Sooner or later, as in every other
era of human history, there will be a revulsion against this licence, a
desire to stop the waste, cruelty and misery which these things bring,
especially to children.
Where will that revulsion come from?
In the 18th and 19th Centuries it came from Christianity and the mighty
but forgotten Temperance movements which reacted against the squalor and
misery of Hogarth's Gin Lane, and whose effects we still just feel.
But Christianity shows little sign
of doing the job a second time. Its leaders are more concerned about foreign
conflict than about domestic misery, and more interested in the sexual
tastes of bishops than in trying to regulate the confused sex lives of
Britain's young.
The Christian churches have all
but disappeared from the lives of the British people. The chapels of Wales
are gaunt ruins, the great Roman Catholic churches of the industrial North
West are often empty and derelict, the Anglicans scuttle about in their
hallowed, lovely buildings like mice amid ancient ruins, rarely even beginning
to fill spaces designed for multitudes.
The choirs and the bells gradually
fall silent, the hymns are no longer sung and one by one the doors are
locked and places which in some cases have seen worship for centuries become
bare museums of a dead faith.
Few listen to what these churches
say. They have become exclusive clubs, whose members celebrate bizarre
rituals which are baffling to outsiders.
The Christian message is a difficult
and complicated one, which if not learned in childhood is hard for adults
to understand. The Christian ceremonies, viewed coldly by an outsider unschooled
in 2,000 years of tradition, are positively peculiar. Why would anyone
eat God?
When Christianity was part of our
culture and its beliefs were handed down in homes and schools, its familiarity
kept it strong. Everyone knew Bible stories, hymns and prayers. Now it
is at least as alien to many young people as Islam, if not more so because
it does not seem to be interested in them.
But Islam is interested in them.
And Islam is growing. More and more British cities have seen the domes
and minarets of smart, prominently positioned new mosques rising in their
neighbourhoods.
A large and imposing Islamic centre
is now nearing completion in Oxford, one of Christian England's holiest
places. Imagine what would happen if Anglicans sought to build a Christian
centre in Qom, Isfahan, Najaf or anywhere on the soil of Saudi Arabia,
and wonder what Muslim leaders think of Christian feebleness on such matters.
Thanks to the immigration of recent
decades, Britain has a young, energetic and swelling Muslim population
which is increasingly assertive about its faith.
Official Islam may disapprove of
such things but there have even been signs of the Muslim intolerance towards
Christianity that is a nasty feature of so many Islamic societies.
In the Bradford suburb of Girlington,
not far from where the Gallaghers live in Manningham, Asian youths tried
to set fire to an Anglican church. Soon afterwards, a Brownie pack leader
was attacked in a nearby street by young men who snarled 'Christian bitch'
at her.
An isolated and meaningless incident?
You might hope so, but it would be unwise to be sure.
If you travel to these areas, you
get the sense that Islam, one of the great forces of history, long ago
defeated by the armies and navies of a mighty Christian Europe, is once
again feeling its strength and finding that it has been able to penetrate
what were once the most impregnable fortresses of its great rival.
Islam's appeal, wherever it has
triumphed, has been in its simplicity. It requires submission to some basic,
straightforward rules which are easily kept, and in return it offers that
most wonderful and rare commodity, peace of mind. To modern Westerners,
its attitude towards women seems incredibly backward and even hateful.
But as the reactions of Ashlene
and Amie Gallagher show, its discipline, safety and certainties have an
appeal for girls lost in the churning seas of permissiveness, whose own
families have been weakened by the crumbling of the two-parent family,
the absence of fathers and the impermanence of husbands, if there are husbands
in the first place rather than boyfriends and ' babyfathers'.
And in most societies it is the
women who sustain religions in the home and among children. In a country
in the grip of unbelief, those with strong, clear convictions and an uncluttered
message have a great advantage over those who offer nothing but choices
to the perplexed and cannot seem to make up their minds about anything.
So if eventually Britain begins
to sicken of strong lager, pools of vomit, Bacardi Breezers, bouncers looming
on every High Street, the battlefields in the streets of many towns on
Friday and Saturday nights, ecstasy tablets, cocaine, football-worship,
pregnant 12-year-olds, morning-after pills and all that goes with them,
is it possible that puritan Islam will be the cause that benefits?
If bureaucratic police and feeble
justice continue to fail to suppress crime and disorder, will the savage
but simple remedies of Sharia law begin to appeal to the British poor,
who are already weary of seeing dishonesty triumph everywhere and lawless
violence go unchecked?
Might Islam become respectable among
the politically correct middle classes, in a way that Christianity never
really can, because Christianity is always associated in this country with
the conservative, imperial past?
You will already find plenty of
bright young Muslims in our universities, many of whom are impressive and
diligent students, and their influence is bound to increase as they move
into the professions.
The idea of an Islamic Britain may
seem highly unlikely now, amid what still seems to be more or less a Western,
Christian society. We are used to thinking of Islam as a religion of backward
regions, and of backward people.
But we should remember that Muslim
armies came within inches of taking Vienna in 1683 and were only driven
from Spain in 1492. In those days it was the Islamic world that was making
the great scientific advances which we now assume are ours by right.
And is it any more unlikely than
the things which have happened here in the past 40 years, during which
a country of peaceful, self-restrained, lawful and rather prudish men and
women has been transformed into the land of sex and swearing on TV, ladettes,
semi-legal cannabis and armed police?
If we don't respect our own customs
and religion, we may end up, as Ashlene and Amie Gallagher have done, respecting
someone else's. Don't be surprised.
