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Banish religion from public life

Polly Toynbee

Now, as the death cult strikes again, Tony Blair must act.

TWO WEEKS on, London is stricken once more. The death cult strikes again, unstoppable in its deranged religious mania. This time no deaths but a savage reminder of the unknown waves of demented killers lining up to murder in the name of God.

Whatever they intended, the message was loud and clear: they can and will do this whenever they want and it does indeed spread very real terror. The police have said there are many more of them. The security services have already revealed that they know absolutely nothing. In the growing fear and anger at what more may be to come, apologists or explainers for these young men can expect short shrift. This is not about poverty or cultural dislocation of second-generation immigrants. There is plenty of that and it is passive. Iraq is the immediate trigger, but this is about religious delusion.

All religions are prone to it, given the right circumstances. Intense belief, incantations, secrecy and all-male rituals breed perversions and danger, abusing women and children and infecting young men with frenzy, no matter what the name of the faith.

Enlightenment values are in peril not because these mad beliefs are really growing but because too many rational people seek to appease and understand unreason. Extreme superstition breeds extreme action. Those who believe they alone know the only way, truth and life will always feel justified in doing anything in its name.

Moderates of these faiths may be as gentle as the carefully homogenised BBC radio "Thought for the Day" preachers. But other equally authentic voices of religion, the likes of Northern Ireland's Ian Paisley or Omar Bakri Muhammad, represent a virulent intolerance that is airbrushed out by an official intellectual conspiracy to pretend that religion is always or mainly beneficent. History suggests otherwise. So do events on the streets of London. Meanwhile the far Left, forever thrilled by the whiff of cordite, has bizarrely decided to fellow-travel with primitive Islamic extremism as the best available anti-Americanism around.

It is time now to get serious about religion — all religion — and draw a firm line between the real world and the world of dreams. Tony Blair has taken entirely the wrong path. He has appeased, prevaricated and pretended, maybe because he is a man of faith himself, with a Catholic wife who consorts with crystals. But never was it more important to separate the state from all faiths and relegate all religion to the private — but well-regulated — sphere.

Instead the former British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, said he wished he could spread the ethos of religious schools everywhere and Labour has done just that. The 3 per cent of the population that is Muslim may well feel excluded in a country that makes so many allowances for Christians .

A third of all state-run schools in the U.K. are religious. The National Secular Society, a lone voice in monitoring their onward march, reports that Labour has let 40 more non-religious state secondaries be taken over by the Church of England in the last four years, with another 54 about to go. The Office for the Schools Adjudicator said in a recent report that the only reason faith schools often achieve better results is because of "their practice of selection from churchgoing families." That attracts the pretend churchgoers, but selection, not religion, is the magic.

Rampant hypocrisy

In the face of this hypocrisy it seems a small thing to let Muslims have more schools too. Only this week Britain's Education Secretary Ruth Kelly (devout herself) announced plans to go ahead in her autumn white paper with more Muslim schools. Bombs, she said, would not stop her policy of offering more "choice" and allowing more faith groups, including Muslims, to run schools. A Hindu state school will open soon in Harrow, west London.

But this is not choice. Only on Thursday, an angry email arrived from a parent on the south coast of England protesting that the only choice of primary school was a C of E (Church of England), a Catholic and an oversubscribed ordinary school. Disqualified from the first two, failing to get into the third, their child is sent miles across town; three nonreligious schools would have been genuine choice. A YouGov poll shows that more than half of voters oppose this. While Northern Ireland struggles with sectarianism festering in religious schools, this is no time to foster yet more segregation.

So what do we do about the madmen? Bombs do change things, maybe not in the extremists' favour. A great shift in attitude seems to have swept through many Muslim groups who signed the full-page newspaper statement on Thursday headed "Not in Our Name." Many were equivocators on the fatwa that had Salman Rushdie locked away for years. At the time (leading U.K. Muslim) Iqbal Sacranie himself said: "Death, perhaps, is too easy for him ... his mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks forgiveness to Almighty Allah." Nowadays Sir Iqbal is a leading moderate, showing how tolerance grows, given a chance.

The statement read: "We will not allow our faith to be hijacked by a few extremists. British Muslims should not be held responsible for the acts of a few individuals." Entirely right. Yet — like members of the same family — like it or not they are stuck with responsibility for rooting out wild men hiding in their midst and questioning what elements of their religious practice have proven so lethal. But no one can police minds and no new draconian laws to silence thinkers and preachers will ever stop dangerous ideas.

All the state can do is hold on to secular values. It can encourage the moderate but it must not appease religion.

The constitutional absurdity of an established church once seemed an irrelevance, but now it obliges similar privileges to all other faiths. There is still time — it may take a non-religious leader — to stop this madness and separate the state and its schools from all religion. It won't stop the bombing now but at least it would not encourage continued school segregation for generations to come. And it might clear the air of the clouds of hypocrisy, twisted thinking and circumlocution whenever a politician mentions religion. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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