The long term future will be ‘conservative’ anyway since within 30 of 40 years Muslims will be a very serious electoral force. Decadent, frivolous and emasculated cultures are usually transcended by serious and confident ones. Islam has always been quiet and cautious when weak but when it is strong, it is ferocious and everything else is subjected to it.

Eek! The eeeevil Muslims! Everyone run around in circles.

FFS.

Can’t work out whether Adam is a paranoid Gates Of Vienna-ist, or an over-optimistic convert…

Well, if that’s what Jesse Norman said, fair play to him – isn’t it the unvarnished truth? I’m not aware of any time in our history when a “living income” hasn’t been greater than the average unskilled manual wage, and we can hardly expect benefits to be higher than that, even if we thought they should be. You may wished to live in a society that has abolished unskilled manual labour (by mechanisation, presumably) but you still need to say what role you see for those who presently perform it and have no aptitude for, nor interest in, higher education.

There will always be relative poverty if only because some people, even in a socialist paradise, will place a higher value on the things that money can buy than others do. I’ve yet to discover an ethical system that can tell me what that value ideally is – even Buddhism considers (insofar as the words “Buddhism considers” can have a meaningful predicate) that those who engage their enlightenment with the market-place do better, karma-wise, than those who engage in solitary meditation on mountainsides.

Much of our poverty is a consequence of unhappiness at least as much as it is a cause of it. There are plenty of pensioners living happily on incomes that younger people couldn’t cope with, even allowing for pensioners’ lower expenses. Many of our poor are as broken in spirit as they are empty in pocket – Norman’s words will remain a truism until we acknowledge this.

“Where, for example, is the apology to the thousands of communities destroyed by Thatcherism’s approach to heavy industry? ”

Then again, when will ASLEF apologise to me for making countless journeys to school in the 1970s really arduous because they were on strike? How about the unions getting to grips with the fact that their activities in the 1960s and 70s made a class war inevitable…and they lost.

“The Tories aren’t offering any real solutions to poverty, to inequality, to injustice. What they’re offering is merely what Norman called ‘a different way of getting things slightly wrong.’”

that’s why they’re called “conservatives” – they don’t believe that society can be radically improved through politics, but they worry that it can be made much worse by politics, so we ought to sit tight and conserve what we have. That *is* their ideology – not having an ideological scheme for reform. It’s all very Zen isn’t it?

Anwyay, that’s what you’ll find in Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790) which is often called the first conservative book – although most “conservatives” (especially in the US) would make Burke turn in his grave. (although I think he’d approve of Blair and Brown).

“Can’t work out whether Adam is a paranoid Gates Of Vienna-ist, or an over-optimistic convert…”

Maybe I’m neither. Maybe I’m just stating an obvious fact with which it is rather difficult to disagree. I’m rather puzzled as to why you think what I have said is somehow strange. Do you actually deny that Muslims will be a sizeable and powerful minority within the next 40 years? Don’t you agree that their culture is fiercer, more confident and more illiberal than the culture of modern secular Britian? I’m going to resist making any value judgements here, I’m just saying it how it is and how things will be. If you can provide any evidence to the contrary, I should like to hear it.

“Do you actually deny that Muslims will be a sizeable and powerful minority within the next 40 years?”

Maybe they’ll account for 5% of the population instead of 3%. This doesn’t worry me overmuch.

Adam – I find your lumping together of all Muslims curious. Islam is not a political position, although some dictators have used Islamic fundamentalism as a way of gaining and retaining power. The 3% of the population who are Muslims are not all illiberal. Nor do they all vote Tory, although some of them do.

Woobegone: Well, that was the interesting bit about the discussion. The Tories may – may – be advocating something like a return to Burkian Conservatism.

Adam : “Do you actually deny that Muslims will be a sizeable and powerful minority within the next 40 years?”

Unless you have a crystal ball to hand, how do you know what’s going to happen in 40 years? What if there’s an economic boom in the Middle East and lots of them “go home” (as the BNP would put it?) What if the British economy collapses and noone wants to immigrate? What if two million more Christian Eastern Europeans immigrate and “cancel them out” on the electoral rolls?

Laurie : I think it would be very hard for Cameron to out-Burke Blair simply because Blair has done it so well. Blair and Brown would never admit it, but New Labour basically *is* Burkean. The problem is that Blair (in the early years) had the personal charisma to disguise that fact whereas Brown doesn’t (no-one votes for a Burkean because they have no inspiring flags to wave. “Let’s keep things basically the same and maybe gradually improve a few of them” is not sexy is it?)

LP at #9 “Islam is not a political position”

Er Islam is a VERY political position. It predates the nation state, and having missed out on the reformation and the renaissance, continues to straddle what the west see as the necessary divide between the secular and the spiritual, which muslims do not recognise as legitimate, necessary or logical. The West has replaced faith with science, Islam has not. That is the major difference between Islam and Western ideology. Political, not “religious”.

Laurie:

Matt’s pretty much on the money in his comments.

Within Islam there is no distinction to be drawn between religion and the state, the two are more or less synonymous but for a few fine point of Islamic jurisprudence as regards who has the authority to legitimise certain courses of action.

For example, any recognised religious authority can call for a defensive jihad, which covers the defence of Muslim-held lands and the recapture of territory that was once under Muslim control, but only a Caliph may call for an offensive jihad (i.e expansion of Muslim control over non-Muslim territory). That one reason why restoring the Caliphate is such a big deal amongst some Islamist, without a Caliphate (and Ataturk dispensed with the last one in Turkey after WWI) the idea of Muslim expansionism has no spiritual legitimacy.

“that’s why they’re called “conservatives” – they don’t believe that society can be radically improved through politics, but they worry that it can be made much worse by politics, so we ought to sit tight and conserve what we have. That *is* their ideology – not having an ideological scheme for reform. It’s all very Zen isn’t it?”

Not quite true, Woobegone, the ideological scheme of reform might just take place outside and beyond politics, if only politics left it alone. It is possible to be an optimist and a conservative.

“…provide any evidence to the contrary”… “that Muslims will be a sizeable and powerful minority within the next 40 years”.

Ahahahaha…

evidence for something yet to happen…

Ahahahaha!

Every generation reacts differently to that of the previous generation in an open society, so if muslims interact on any sort of scale they will influence non-muslims as much as the non-muslims will influence them and we will actually be all the stronger for it.

I’ll be off to eat some ethnic food now, thank you very much.

Unity,
I don’t think you are correct if you lump all the different sectsof Islam together. Part of what distinguishes each from the other is the way they relate politics and religion together, which is a consequence of historical roots diverging on points of organisation.

I think you need to look a little deeper to appreciate the diversity within the faith, otherwise you’ll be left scratching your head about why there is ongoing religious conflict.

The same is true within Christian society, but you don’t confuse papal diktats with anglican democracy, do you?

I don’t have the scholarly qualifications to identify whether or not Unity’s right to deny a distinction between religion and state in Islam, but I do know – as surely anyone with eyes must – that there are huge differences between the practice and attitudes of different Muslim communities in Britain. If Islam can be called a political position, it surely cannot be called a coherent or definitive or even a single political position. If Islam was one, definitive, political position, how the hell could we have seen Bhutto, Saddam Hussein, Abdelaziz Buteflika, Anwar Sadat and Labour MPs like Sadiq Khan all operate in the public political arena in such massively different ways?

Thomas:

Perhaps I should clarify my comments.

Within Islam there is no scriptural basis for a separation between religion and state, unlike Christianity where Matthew 22:21 (‘Render unto Caesar…) is taken as authority for the legitimacy of such a separation.

Conversely, religious authority within Islam is decentralised and based on scholarship rather than following the hierarchical Imperial/Feudal model adopted by Christianity, although modern political Islamism owes as much to Bakunin and the Russian Anarchists as it does to the Q’uran.

Sophie: The same way a Labour party can contain members that would rather chew their own arms off before voting for 42 days while others would actively campaign for longer.

Unity,
It comes down to interpretation, but I think we’re confusing the presumed connection between Islamic religion and the state here.

The problem arises historically during the conflict over the succession to Mohammed following the battle of Karbala and how his doctrine (the religious texts) were to be instituted. It wasn’t really until the 12th century that the dogma developed splits between the culturally-based and state-based understandings after the conquests had reached their height.

Technically you could argue that the shia and sunni split came first and sufism developed later in response to the collapsing political power (which provided evidence to many of the flaws in literal interpretations of the prophecies).

However it gets more complicated when we start to look at the different schools of thought/belief within each of the sects (in which I’m not well versed enough to begin to explain in a short comment). All the same the diversity within Islamic tradition defies simple categorisation of what the politics are.

The growth of modern political Islam stems from the fall of the Ottoman empire/caliphate in 1923 which had been the symbolic expression of Sunni political orthodoxy and can therefore be seen as tying in with the ideological wars of the twentieth century.

While I think it is arrogant to interpret the movement in terms of a western perspective (ie according to thinkers such as Bakunin) this may help illuminate discussion. So ultimately for our purposes (and rather simplistically) it may help to describe Sunni Islam as left-wing imperialism and allied with the ‘Islamist’ tendency, Shia Islam as right-wing nationalism and allied with the ‘fundamentalist’ tendency, and Sufism as supporting secular democratic liberalism.

Interestingly this three-way split correlates quite closely with voting tendencies of religious muslims in this country, though it must be said that at least the two larger parties vary somewhat in adherence to the rule and therefore allows for movement between them in preference.

Every generation reacts differently to that of the previous generation in an open society, so if muslims interact on any sort of scale they will influence non-muslims as much as the non-muslims will influence them and we will actually be all the stronger for it.

I hope that you are right. Though it must be said, the Muslim community are rather less open to the sort of influence which might affect say, second or third generation Hindus or Sikhs. I also suspect that Islam will increasingly come to be seen as attractive answer to many of the worsening pathologies which affect modern British society.

John b, I think your estimate of 5% is rather blithe. There has already been a 400,000 increase in the size of the Muslim community in the past seven years, so it now stands at about 3.3% already. Plus when you examine the age structure of the community, more than one-third was under the age of 16 at the time of the 2001 census. Trends change but all we can really go on are the dynamics which exist today. The Muslim vote is set to grow very fast, that is an unalterable fact. Already it is crucial in many constituencies and has scared many politicians into a submissive attitude. Muslims are already becoming aware of this change, and though they are currently preoccupied with issues like Israel/Palestine, Iraq etc, even the most ‘liberal’ and ’secular minded’ are totally opposed to left-wing views on abortion and gay-rights. (As a gay man myself, I think I can be forgiven for being slighly uneasy about this). If as you say, Muslims will come to see themselves as being part of the societal mainstream society, they may likely turn their attention onto domestic social issues. This is moreorless what happened with the religious right in America during the mid-seventies – they have always been a minority but a very influential one, to say the least.