Lord Pearson of Rannoch, the Ukip peer, has complained three times in the House of Lords that he cannot access the website called the Religion of Peace from there, and has been told three times that it is classed by parliament’s internet service as a racist hate site – and, in the opinion of the deputy speaker, that is exactly how it should be classified. It is indeed a site dedicated to the proposition that Islam is a uniquely violent and hateful religion. It is hardly surprising that a former leader of Ukip should draw nourishment from such a poisoned well. But behind the name there lurks a serious question, which goes to the heart of integration: how seriously should we take the warlike scriptures of any religion?
There are no religions whose message is entirely pacifist, any more than there are societies without conflict. Any world religion will contain sacred texts that have seemed to urge its followers on to murder. Christianity, quite as much as Islam, can call on texts that seem to make the slaughter of unbelievers mandatory. So can the enlightenment ideologies, which have to some extent superseded religions in the west. The Marseillaise is a bloodthirsty anthem, and in our own time the horrendous cruelty of colonial and post-colonial wars was often justified in the name of spreading freedom and democracy.
Yet all of these religions and post-religions have another face as well. They really do value peace and brotherhood, and anyone who wants to can find texts just as authoritative that urge believers to kindness and self-sacrificing love. The question is which face will speak to the believers, and which texts will inspire them to action. That’s not something that can be answered by literary analysis. Neither religions nor ideologies proceed from word to action. Most often the words are chosen to justify decisions already taken, and to lead up to conclusions already reached. Theology is the process by which these ideas take root in the life of the world, so it is immensely powerful and important, but it cannot work in isolation.
Everything depends on the perspective from which these texts are read. The black slaves of the US and the Caribbean read their masters’ Bibles and found in them a message of hope and liberation, while the slave owners relied on the same book to furnish proof of texts to justify their own behaviour. Holy books are always read within an existing frame of association and loyalties. “Jihad” and “crusade” might seem very similar concepts to a Martian but it would be very unusual to find a native speaker of either Islam or Christianity who read the two words as equivalent. A lifetime of experience and association will have made one word express a threat and the other a noble aspiration, sometimes regrettably tarnished.
The way that the meaning of religious words emerges from their use leads to two conclusions. The first is that hate sites really do spread hate. By presenting their objects only in a context of danger and violence, they form associations that are very hard to eradicate. This is, of course, deliberate. The second lesson is that integration in cities and in daily life really matters. Real people with whom we deal every day can be impossibly frustrating, but they can’t easily be reduced to mere symbols in a clash of civilisations. We learn to see them as the complex beings they are – and that we are, too.
