A C Grayling has written yet another misconceived polemic about the necessity of regarding religious belief as some kind of disease of the mind that brave people are prepared to overcome by renouncing their Islamic religion despite the charge of apostasy and death threats.
I responded to his Guardian piece Free to Think for Themselves ( Guardian October 16 2008 ) with the following response.
Yet again Grayling is conflating the political and the religious in the same way as fundamentalists do because he regards Islam as essentially fundamentalist when the Qu'ran does not demand the death penalty for apostasy.
This does not mean that Grayling is wrong to speak out against this and he makes it clear that being against the 'crime' of apostasy is also part of a broader struggle against the death penalty.
What Grayling is terminally incapable of realising or recognising is that all the world's religions are multi-vocal and not one rigid monolithic force representing the continued existence of dark barbarism versus the sweetness of enlightenment and reason.
Indeed Grayling himself belongs firmly in the militant Christian and Enlightenment tradition of believing that 'the truth will set you free' no less than Dawkins who also shares this form of humanism.
The earnest proselytising tone when lauding the unshackling of Muslim minds from superstitions and the healing process, presided over by the tender and wise guardians is very characteristic of C19th missionary Christianity .
The problem with propaganda for the Council of ex-Muslims and the worthies of the National Secular Society and British Humanist Association is that it condemns Islam whilst remaining in ignorance of the political conditions that have been crucial in the rise of Islamism.
Within Britain there is a problem with the cultural pressure to remain within Islam and the law of the land must be enforced against those who issue death threats for apostasy.
Yet the contradiction is that liberal democracy, in Grayling's view, depends on the free choices of the autonomous individual. So for Grayling if Muslims choose to support 'Islamism' then it just can't be a 'real' choice but depends wholly on social conditioning.
The problem is that increasingly it is and this has nothing to do with the widespread hold of sinister clerics over the minds of the young but more to do with the 'information age' where the sight of Muslims being oppressed and killed in their own lands leads to a burning hatred of 'Western' hypocrisy.
The problem is primarily political with forms of politicised religion upping the stakes. Given that Grayling's brand of militant Enlightenment can be used as a justification for invading Muslim majority nations, to spread civilisation to the benighted natives, then missionary liberal beliefs are another example.
One need only look at the propaganda of a Christopher Hitchens for that. True, not 'every' missionary liberal agreed with Iraq but not 'every' Islamist believes in in the death penalty for apostasy, even though like Tariq Ramadan they are mealy mouthed and craven when trying to rationalise their creeds.
Denying that choosing to be an Islamist can ever be truly rational as Grayling does is bound to irk those for whom it is the apex of personal subjective committment to 'the cause' of liberating the Middle East from secular tyrannies that the West has backed in order to procure stability and cheap oil.
Many Islamists are militant progressives who want to get rid of false forms of statist Islam that uphold tyranny and injustice. Islamism is a political ideology that can incorporate many trends from within Islam and Western revolutionary ideology.
Progressive Islamists like Ramadan or Ghannoushi remain dismissive of atrocities committed in the name of Islam because they will just see it , rather like Marxists did with any 'really existing socialist regime', as not real Islam that is being propagated.
The reason is that actions chosen consciously and in full realisation of their significance, from wearing the hijab to joining militant political groups, is seen as a revolutionary action.
The personal is political and Western identity politics has been embraced by those who value the potential for global solidarity against the US power regarded for long as the Great Satan by very secular Westerners who saw is Enlightenment fundamentalism as a way of imposing Empire.
Grayling needs to think outside the parochial mindset of nineteenth British liberalism and not just rehash Bertrand Russell's arguments without the lucidity or even the humour. At least, Russell back in 1920 understood the connection between 'Mohammedanism' and Bolshevism.
Most of the problems looming ever more ominous in the relationship between 'the West' and the lands of Islam are geopolitical in origin and concern the struggle to appropriate resources like oil and gas which are essential to underpin consumerism, the great car economy and tourist travel.
For Muslims and non-Muslims alienated by the hypocrisy and greed of 'the West' the potential for them to embrace psychopathological ideologies is becoming greater and this is mirrored on the mssionary liberal left with Hitchens conflating all Islamists necessarily as 'Islamofascists' and Bin Ladenists.
The consequences could be truly tragic and catastrophic.
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