I am coming back to my response to Aaron Edwards’ articles where he talks about Islamisation of Britian. Previously I wrote about the need to engage properly with the reality of Islam on the ground and that means listening to Christians who regularly engage with Muslims because they live, worship and witness among them.
However, what strikes me as I read articles like Aaron’s and similar ones from others is how much the whole thing isn’t really about Islam and Islamisation. It’s about something else. Note this paragraph in Aaron’s article:
“An important question for British people to ask in all this is: what was it about hearing those prayers in Windsor Castle that felt uncomfortable (if it did)? I think it is due to the very public nature of those prayers, and the very “foreign” nature of those prayers. There seems to be a palpable sense that such prayers do not belong there, that they are literally “out of place”. This will be jarring for some to hear or admit. Are you even allowed to say that you don’t want something to be somewhere because it is “foreign” to that place? Is that not “xenophobic”?
Think about why challenging “foreignness” per se jars with us. Why does it sound “out of place” within normal “respectable” society? Is it not because such a view is itself now “foreign” to how we have been taught to think? Is this knee-jerk rejection to any and every anti-foreign sentiment not itself a kind of blanket “xenophobia” against anything which might challenge the multicultural ideology we’ve apparently been told we must adhere to at all times and at all costs?[1]
Think that through. I suspect that Edwards reports something that is true in that much reaction to Islamic prayers, events, culture etc is about its foreignness. Should it be though? Let me tell you about another event that happened recently. The other day, if you had been in Wibsey Park in Bradford, you will have seen quite a colourful sight, a large group of South Asians marching down the road and into the park, beating drums and singing in Urdu. I wonder what you would have made of it, what would you have assumed. Would you have felt threatened by this seemingly “foreign” event? Would you have assumed that it was a group of Muslims seeking to take possession of the park? You may have done but you would have been wrong.
We can easily misread the situation. A few years back, a man came down to Bearwood Chapel. He was concerned because he had seen large groups of ladies coming down to the building with their heads covered, not with traditional Brethren hats and head-scarves but with hijabs. He was alarmed because he thought that the building had been taken over as a mosque. He was delighted to discover that what was in fact happening was a graduation ceremony for women who had attended ESOL classes. Frequently at those classes, the teacher used opportunities to gently share the Gospel, especially around significant events like Christmas and Easter. At their “graduation” they got to hear the Gospel again from the guest speaker.
I wasn’t at the park in Bradford but my dad was, in fact he was with the group of marchers/singers. You see, this group were from the Asian Christian Fellowship at his church and they had decided to have a little march of witness after their Palm Sunday service.
As I said at the start, the target of the types of articles we see about Islamisation doesn’t tend to be Muslims and Islam themselves. Rather, it is this thing called “Multiculturalism” and often alongside it, a kind of nebulous thing often referred to as wokeness.
Aaron goes on to acknowledge first that yes, some aspects of foreign culture can be good but there are others that are out of place because they will not enrich the existing culture but rather transform it.
“I’m certainly not saying all“foreign” culture is bad, of course, nor even that foreign people or foreign cultures have noplace in a nation like Britain. Concepts like “cultural enrichment” may well be abused by multicultural ideologues (as Douglas Murray has often pointed out) but this doesn’t mean foreign culture is entirely void or corrosive to our culture at every level. I am saying rather that there are some things (and far more than many would admit) which simply do not belong and which cannot belong without radically transforming what is already there.”
He sees the concept of multiculturalism as weak and unable to resist take over by strong cultures. So, this is his real target, it is not even the foreigners themselves but a perceived weakness or problem in British culture. The argument is that our woke, multicultural establishment are unable to resist other stronger cultures coming in and changing Brtiain away from its traditional, indigenous culture, which is often perceived as being a Christian culture.
Now, it is worth pausing to consider two things at this stage. First, we might want to consider the extent to which Britain has ever been a homogenous cultural entity. Within the United Kingdom, we already have related but distinct cultures due to the differences between the four nations within the United Kingdom and because of regional variations, class differences and the differences between rural and urban communities. Then, there is the reality that from early times, we have experienced constant immigration as well as emigration, Celts, Picts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans etc have all brought aspects of their cultures. Finally, recent immigration has often come from places that were part of the British Empire. This means that those cultures have themselves to some extent been shaped/affected by British culture.
An important thing to remember at this stage is that any contact with another culture changes the existing culture. We might even want to consider that resistance to other cultures may itself change the culture. Secular France has developed quite a strong sense of resistance to outside change, including to the importation of English and Americanisms. That has arguably had an influence on French culture, perhaps part of the rise of the Le Pens to a greater level of acceptability reflects this? It is not a case of some cultures bringing radical transformation and others not.
Secondly, a significant element of immigration into the UK is from non-Muslim cultures, in fact, it involves people from contexts more Christianised than Britain so that what we are seeing, especially in places like London is that it is immigration that is acting as a catalyst for renewed Christian faith in our cities. Of course, that Christian culture, as with the group in Wibsey Park is different to the kind of Christian culture that people may have been used to. Even in our Charismatic church, we are seeing that increased ethnic diversity and growth means that our expression of worship and the style of preaching is different (for the better). Sadly, the experience of Christian immigrants is that they have experienced just as much resistance because they and their cultural expressions are seen as “foreign” or alien. “We don’t do things like that round here!”
For those reasons I find Edwards’ attempts to define the problem as to do with foreignness and multiculturalism unhelpful. The risk is that we end up rejecting what we should be welcoming and nurturing but also that we become distracted from what the real problem is. The problem with having Islamic prayers said anywhere is not that they are foreign and might risk our culture but because we want to see those people praying them to Jesus as Saviour.
[1] Soft Jihad and the Sound of Church Bells – by Aaron Edwards
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