* Dr Jeremy Shearmur (Retired academic
** Dr Usama Hasan (research consultant)
Dr S. Yaser Mirdamadi (Teaching fellow)
Tuesday 12th July 2022
The above notions are among many that are supposed to define modern society in what is commonly termed “the free world”. But despite the euphoria of publicity these notions often appear to many as slogans that fail to materialise in the complex societies evolving in the West. While multiculturalism remains an attractive notion the real world has failed to embrace it fully. Close monitoring of the social dynamics will reveal only moderate success in transforming human behaviour; also the hopes for such a transformation go a long way beyond the aspirations for multiculturalism. While the debate is one of the ways of softening the grounds on which pluralism may flourish, there is a long way to go before an environment of freedom of speech and free press is formed. How can a true and meaningful debate be held among people belonging to different cultural, political and religious backgrounds? Can modern statehood become a melting pot for cultures and ideas? And how realistic is it to build a society which embraces meaningful multiculturalism?
Dr Jeremy Shearmur: May I start by thanking you for this invitation, and also expressing my concern lest, because of my ignorance of Islam or my lack of knowledge of your cultural backgrounds, I might give offence – which is certainly not intended. We all need, I think, to bear in mind our own fallibility, and that it is all too easy to make mistakes or to say things that are not perceived in the way that they were intended. Let us all take the goodwill of everyone involved in an occasion such as this for granted, do what we can not to give offence, but also understand that we hope to learn from one another, and be ready to forgive any infelicities that we might commit.
It is interesting to live in a multicultural society, but it also brings problems. I think that we all need to work together in making sure that the difficulties are defused. For I think that there are genuine difficulties, which unless we are careful, can give rise to discord or worse.
Let me split the issues up into a few different groups. Of necessity, this division must be very rough and ready.
First, people don’t always easily get on well with one another. There have been many historical cases where resentments between neighbours build up over the years, and have led to homicidal behaviour. We are all too ready to operate with malicious caricatures of other people, to think the worst of them, and not to recognise that, for everybody, their day-to-day behaviour is as normal and proper to them as ours is to us. It is also worth noting the research undertaken by the American political scientist Robert Putnam, from which he argued that there tended to be less social trust in ethnically mixed neighbourhoods.
Second, it is difficult to respect one another, and their sensibilities, if we know little about them. But this can get complicated. For what are we concerned with here – the formal teachings of different religions; the different lived cultures of different people (and the complexities that are involved, when different national origins or class issues come into the picture)? A further issue, here, is that members of minority groups may feel reticent – for cultural or religious reasons – about opening up their lives to scrutiny by majority groups. These issues are difficult, as we also can’t expect people to spend a huge amount of time being educated about one another. But equally, it is difficult to respect demands for the rationale for which we cannot understand.
Third, I think that a major problem has been introduced by current ‘progressive’ attitudes, which tend to insist on all institutions looking ‘representative’, and they’re not being ‘exclusion’, when what is involved is something superficial and in many ways intolerant. For example, there seems to be an intolerance towards traditional interpretations of the Abrahamic faiths, and a view that sexual diversity should not just be tolerated but celebrated, when this may be at odds with some people’s deep-seated religious and cultural views. It seems to me, here, that genuine difference needs to be respected, and that we should give careful thought to how this is to be handled (e.g. in education). It is important to bear in mind that the correctness of religious and moral sensibilities is not something that can be demonstrated, and that respect for one another is incompatible with pushing our views onto other people. However, the fact that our societies are diverse, means that we may all have to make accommodations in the face of this diversity.
There is also genuine diversity within religious groups. Obviously, societies need to protect themselves from terrorism and to make sure that all children obtain an education which will allow them to function within the country in which they are living. But while we may not, personally, like, or think sound, very conservative interpretations of religious traditions with which we are familiar, we are no more entitled to impose our views on these people, than they are on us.
It is also important to bear in mind the character of the society in which we are living. Britain has not, historically, been a society in which social mobility takes place easily, and the structure of the society means that there are limited slots of some kinds available for anyone. Those from the working class and lower middle-class backgrounds, have typically found it difficult to get into high-prestige jobs – and there is thus a sense in which the relative absence of people from minority backgrounds in such positions does not in itself indicate that there is anything sociologically strange taking place. (One would need to compare how people from majority cultural backgrounds from the working class or lower middle class have fared.) How, and in what way, these things can change, is an interesting issue, but not one which is open to easy resolution. It is worth noting that people from immigrant backgrounds who have done well in commerce or the professions have sometimes been able to achieve positions of some social prominence – e.g. as cabinet ministers in the British Conservative Party.
It is also worth bearing in mind that the very fact of participation in social life in Britain, has consequences for women’s social roles. If, say, women enter ‘mainstream’ employment, this will have consequences for traditional social roles and also for their attitudes.
What about free speech and dialogue?
First, it seems to me that to talk about a ‘right to freedom of speech is misleading. I think it important that there be settings in which issues can be debated in a responsible manner, and with respect. But that is quite a different matter from people thinking that they are entitled to yell insults at one another or to behave in ways that will be found offensive. (I think, though, that what matters here is the judgement of a well-informed third party. It is not OK to allow anyone who feels victimized to say that we should take their word for it. This would allow them to behave unfairly towards other people. The emphasis on a third party, here, also points to the fact that it is important for minority groups to inform the general public about their concerns and sensibilities. People can hardly respect something that they don’t understand.)
At the same time, just because you feel strongly about something, does not mean that others should necessarily be expected to respect it. Take the issue of the Danish cartoons.
First, it seems to me that the editor of the Danish newspaper concerned was an idiot. He was worried that there was a tradition growing up of self-censorship: that Danish illustrators, say, were not willing to be involved in work relating to the life of Mohammad, for fear of retaliation. In my view, rather than commissioning cartoons which the editor knew might be found offensive, he should have convened a conference, and then some seminars, in which these issues were talked about in a sensible way. In this context, it would have been necessary to discuss the sensibilities of some Muslims, but also such things as the tradition of hard-hitting journalism and cartoons in Denmark (and that there pretty much nothing was off limits), and also that, in much of Western Europe, rights to free publication had to be battled for, over many years, against religious censorship.
A second issue is that it seems to me that one needs to bear in mind the local context of material – something that can get lost sight of, when material prepared in one location is spread, e.g. using the internet, all over the world.
Third, there are limits to the degree to which one can expect other people to respect your sensibilities, given that the world is – and how many different countries are – pluralistic in their character. Clearly, there is an argument for respecting the sensibilities of one’s fellow citizens. Yet at the same time, it is worth bearing in mind that even the followers of the three Abrahamic faiths think – as part of their own traditional beliefs – that the others have got things badly wrong. (One also needs to bear in mind the degree to which many people in Western countries are now completely secular, and have turned their backs on the Abrahamic traditions as a whole. This is true not just in terms of matters of religious faith, but also, say, in respect of ideas about virtue: one can’t, say, just assume that modesty and chastity are valued by everyone. )
All told, it seems to me, it is important that there are places in which people can raise points of scholarly criticism of the substance of other faiths. But that is a very different matter to saying that it is fine that people can make insulting comments about other people’s views, wherever they might wish to do so. In the United States, there has been a tradition of the defence of the freedom of speech and expression, however much of what is being said might be found upsetting by other people. (E.g. the ACLU – a civil rights charity – defended the right of Nazis to parade through a suburb of Chicago, Skokie, IL, in which there lived a number of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.) In my view, we should all cooperate in not inflaming differences between different groups of people, and in not saying things which others will find offensive, in settings that are inappropriate for quiet scholarly exchanges.
Finally, I’d like to say something about toleration and academic exchanges. Karl Popper, with whom I studied, stressed the importance of dialogue, and of learning from one another. He argued that there was no reason to believe that dialogue was impossible, even if people had radically different views. All our ideas are fallible, and we may find that other people hold views, and have social practices, which we find upsetting. But from which we may nonetheless learn. Popper stressed that we should be conscious of our own fallibility and that we should approach others who are willing to discuss things in the hope that we might each be able to learn something from one another.
At the same time, however, he stressed that we were not likely to reach an agreement. We can hope to learn from one another, even when we still end up disagreeing. He stressed that it is valuable for us to enter dialogue with people who have different views from our own – that it is through interaction with them that we may be able to discover that there is something wrong with assumptions which we were sure are correct.
All told, the lessons that I’d hope to learn in this field, are that we should respect other people and their views, even when we disagree with them. That we should hope to learn from one another, even if we start – and also end up – in disagreement. I’d like, now, to learn the respects in which you disagree with me!
** Dr Usama Hasan: To summarise I am going to talk about the universal message of Islam, the objective of shariah law and the basis of shared values without which we cannot have meaningful dialogue. I will touch on multi-culturalism and interculturalism – the blurb for this event talked about multiculturalism but there is an important related concept of interculturalism which we must not forget and I will also touch on free speech.
We are today or tomorrow on the last day of the haj pilgrimage in Mecca where Prophet Muhammad gave his farewell sermon on the Mountain of Mercy 14 centuries ago and he referred to a very important verse of the Quran which says O humanity we created you from male and female into nations and tribes so that you may know each other. And related to that he said that everybody is equal. Even slaves are equal to their masters which was a completely revolutionary thing to say in seventh-century Arabia.
And he went on to say that nobody has priority over anyone else: Arab over non-Arab, white over black- all of you were created from Adam and Adam and Adam was created from dust from the salt of the earth except by piety or God-consciousness or being aware of God. This was a very revolutionary thing to say because Arab society was racist against non-Arabs and black people. You had African slaves. The Arab language was incredibly advanced and that is why you had that is why the Quran was such a miracle in the context of the exceedingly high standards of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry
And the Prophet said that in his final big speech to humanity. And it seems to me that many Muslims and yet alone people who are not Muslims have not realised the significance of that teaching. It was the last big public speech to 10,000 companions. He speaks about different tribes – multi-culturalism.
We are gathered here online from different countries. My parents are from India/Pakistan. I was born in Africa and grew up in London. Many of you have different nationalities, different cultural backgrounds, you speak different languages you are from different nations and tribes.
The question of multiculturalism is how we get different tribes into what is called a melting pot. Modern citizenship means shared values and through shared values, we can begin to live together.
I should stress what happened for a long time in Islamic history was that people who were not Muslim were given protection by the state. They were dimmis-protected people and they paid protection tax. That continued for many centuries and the world was divided into the land of Islam and non-Islam. The Christians did the same thing. They talked about Christendom and the world outside.
There is now talk of a composite land and that opened my research into what modern Islamic scholars talk about when they talk about modern citizenship. The basis of it is that you do not have to have exclusively Muslim versus non-Muslim anymore. That was a medieval idea which was in Christendom as well.
This is something we have to grapple with because as we know there are two million Muslims in the world and there are many Muslim movements with good intentions who want to create a pure Islamic state or caliphate or imamate or whatever it is. But the melting pot of modern citizenship is a different approach which can only be based on shared values.
The higher objective of shariah is basically the theory which draws on the teaching of the Prophet and his disciples which began to be written down by the early jurists and was later popularised and there has been a revival of that approach to shariah in the past two centuries.
They talk about universal principles just like our Jewish cousins. It is not just about praying five times a day and not drinking alcohol. This is important but it is about a set of universal principles. So Ghazali famously talked about the promotion and protection of life and faith. So the shariah is there to protect these universal values of God: trustworthiness, and keeping the commandments.
Interestingly John Locke repeated these principles of Ghazali. John Locke read the translations of Islamic works and he may well have read Ghazali. Professor Craig called it the most sophisticated theory of law ever in human history and he converted to Islam. He was an American professor.
So what are these universal principles? Ghazali identified five but later scholars added others including liberty, equality and fraternity. And you can easily make the argument that liberty is basically an Islamic principle. Without freedom, you are not truly free to believe in God: la ikraha fi din. There is no compulsion in religion so you have to have the freedom and the liberty to choose. Someone holding a gun or a sword to your head – that is not faith.
In the 18th and 19th centuries there was an interesting development of thought. Equality is obviously an Islamic principle. The Quran speaks of justice and equality and of course of our brotherhood and sisterhood.
It is interesting that Ali Shariati said we should widen our fraternity to spirituality: equality, liberty and fraternity. I think it is really interesting because he widened it and made fraternity part of spirituality. I think that needs to be explored further.
With regard to shared values, there is a project in the UAE called the alliance of virtue and virtue is an important concept not just for people of our faith but for people of all faiths. And as Professor Jeremy said there is no respect for values in our society. With virtue shaming, you cannot point things out to somebody. They will say on Twitter you are truth-shaming me. In other words, it is okay to tell lies. This is the era of fake news so with fake news people say it is my freedom of speech.
We must try and hold on to the virtues and the alliance of virtue does that and it is not only Muslims leading this. It is Jews and Christians and people of other faiths as well. There was a statement from one of the Christian people involved with that. He said rights protect, and virtues are perfect. So in the West rights are very important.
Professor Jeremy said the Western world has a strong attachment to values and rights. That is something positive. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1914 was welcomed by scholars of Islamic law, especially in Turkey and they said it was consistent with Islamic principles. It was written in neutral language so all cultures and religions could participate in it. You need rights to protect people but you need something on top of that which is a virtue: truth, beauty, goodness, and respect for each other – this makes for a nice society. If we did not have that we would not have a civilised society: yelling and heckling all the speakers. That is something which people forget about when they talk about rights only. You cannot have a society without virtues.
And here I would recommend a book by the late Lord Hailsham who was the Lord Chancellor of this country. He wrote a book called Virtues: Collapse and Cure. He wrote it in the deep depression of the 1980s and 90s and he writes in the book that he realised that British intelligence had given up on the idea of values. The book was handwritten. It was printed in its handwritten form and it was never typeset. It should resonate with Hindus and Muslims as it talks about the collapse of values.
So now we come to multi-culturalism. I recommend you read Professor Maldoud. The basic idea of multi-culturalism is that you have separate cultures but they don’t talk to each other. That is what David Cameron meant when he said that multiculturalism has failed. He said we have getto communities and then there is the terrorist violence of the far right. With interculturalism, people talk to each other and there seem to be shared values.
I believe a generation of British Muslims actually lived through that as did Christians, Jews and others. We have a fusion. They call it fusion. Many of us are from different backgrounds. We speak Arabic or Urdu or any other languages but we are having this conversation in English. This is just a small example of the next generation. I am blessed with four children – our next generation will total more than forty, nephews and nieces that I have.
And they are all completely British or American. They all live in the United States or Britain and they have all of these influences from their parents: India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Britain, and America. But they are Muslim people and they create their own fusion because of who they are with their Muslim values. They are all pretty much committed to Islamic values.
Then finally freedom of speech which was related to the cartoon business which Professor Jeremy mentioned but the latest one we have had in this country in the Lady of Heaven film which caused a lot of consternation. And I did like the Muslim Council of Britain’s statement which I thought was spot on. I have been critical of the Muslim Council of Britain. I was critical of some of their statements in the past but their statement on this was sport.
They said it is very simple. The writer of the film is well known because he has raised radical Shia positions towards the world of Sunni Islam. He had the freedom of speech to make that film and the protestors had the freedom of speech to protest against it peacefully and they should not be demonized for protesting. Of course, the protests should not be violent or threatening.
But the key thing here is that major British cinemas did not know the background and the whole centuries of violence based on these issues and I do not believe that if they had known the whole history they would have ever agreed to screen that film. It is like the BBC screening a propaganda film by Tony Robinson or the Nazis. Would the BBC screen a propaganda film by the Nazis because they did not check the background of the filmmaker. This would never happen. In this case, the top British cinema chains, View and others did not do their homework and they have no idea about the background of this film.
Yaser Mirdamadi: “Together but different” seems a desirable motto. Still, the difficult question is whether or not peaceful and durable co-existence is possible despite communities in a diverse society being radically different. Maybe it is possible to be together and remain different, but only if the tensions are dealt with. I will address one among many tensions between togetherness and difference, specifically between actively maintaining a religious identity and the requirements of living in a culturally pluralistic society. My presentation, therefore, will be a philosophical exercise in identity politics.
To characterize the tension between togetherness and difference, specifically between apologetics and cultural pluralism, let me clarify the key terms. William Lane Craig (b. 1949), an American analytic philosopher of religion and Christian apologist, defines apologetics as “that branch of Christian theology which seeks to provide a rational justification for the truth claims of the Christian faith.”1 By extension, one can talk of Muslim apologetics when a theologian defends the truth claims of the Islamic faith, or Jewish apologetics when a theologian defends the truth claims of the Jewish faith, and so on.
Apologetics has traditionally been an exclusivist enterprise. William Lane Craig, whom I’ve just cited, is a famous case in point. He defends the exclusive truth claims of Christianity against all other religious traditions, especially other Abrahamic religious traditions.
By ‘cultural pluralism,’ I mean a (religious, racial, sexual, linguistic, etc.) identity retaining its core identity within a multicultural society without, on the one hand ‘the penalties of loss of status, educational, social, or political disenfranchisement’3and, on the other hand, each identity-based community participates in a societal common good. Simply put, cultural pluralism is a formulation of a ‘together but different’ ideal society.
But societies with multiple identity-based communities are far from this ideal society. The dominant anti-pluralist culture in non-ideal society demands assimilation and not integration, and the minority groups tend to take an isolationist or even separationist approach toward the dominant culture. The situation is marked by competition and mutual misunderstanding rather than cooperation and mutual understanding.
Though these tensions are to be analyzed historically, sociologically, regionally, and so on, philosophical analysis is also a desideratum. One can argue that religious or otherwise identities could be a source of the common good in a multicultural society. Therefore, defending an identity in the form of apologetics is, in principle, an intellectually and socially viable enterprise. Some identity proponents have gone so far as to argue that without well-established valuable identities, democracy is doomed to failure: “Without identity, a democracy becomes incapable of defending even the values it holds most dear.”2 This contrasts with those approaches that take theological apologetics as an obsolete and even obscurantist enterprise that is at best useless and at worst a source of conflict in an already enough polarized society.
Although this objection is not strong enough to render identities worthless or dangerous across the board, I think it has a grain of truth. To address this objection, I will focus on religious identity especially Abrahamic religion, as I am more familiar with them.
Before addressing the objection, it is worth mentioning that if a religious tradition is reinterpreted pluralistically, then the tension with which we are dealing, i.e., the tension between religious truth claims and cultural pluralism, does not arise. Religious pluralism is a view that all world religions equally contain truth. This contrasts with hard religious exclusivism, according to which only one religion reflects the truth and all other religions are false. Soft religious exclusivism, better known as inclusivism, takes a middle position between pluralism and hard exclusivism, to the effect that although one religion contains the whole truth, other religions, as far as they have similar truths, are partially true.
It is fair to add that although Abrahamic religious traditions, including Islam, have been reinterpreted pluralistically, they are usually understood exclusively (hard or soft). And then, the tension between religious truth claims and cultural pluralism forcefully arises. This tension can be augmented if the separation between private, public, and political spheres is blurred or diminished. If a religious identity claims that it has an exclusive share of divine truth and monopolizes political power, cultural pluralism is nowhere to be found. This is the case with religious fundamentalism gaining political power. But the tension remains deep-down unsolved even with religious political quietists. They may not take over politics, but how can one fully participate in a multicultural and pluralistic society if, for example, one thinks that only Muslims go to heaven?
Let me conclude with a note on the status of apologetics in a multicultural and pluralist society. Even if we take this position, to which I am inclined but for which I cannot argue here, that religious exclusivism does not square with cultural pluralism, apologetics, which is usually an exclusive enterprise, can, under certain conditions, be a helpful enterprise and even a desideratum. How so?
Let me illustrate this point with an anecdote. Few Iranian poets and men of literature, including prominent Iranian poet Mehdi Akhavan-Sales (1929-1990), once met ʿAbd al-Husayn Amini (1902-1970), known as ʿAllama Amini, the author of the well-known compendium Al-Ghadir fi l-kitab wa l-sunna wa l-adab (lit.: [Event of] Ghadir in the book and tradition and literature). Amini was a renowned Shi‘a jurist, hadith scholar, theologian, and historian. Akhavan-Sales, a secular Shi‘a, protests against Amini that you have wasted your time and energy writing an 11 volumes compendium just to engage in a long over-due Ali versus Umar quarrel. Amini has been reported as responding that it is not about Ali versus Umar quarrel. I wrote it because they take us, Shi’as, as nothing. I tried to prove that we Shi‘is have had rich literature and multi-layered history that can neither be ignored nor denied.4
I think there is a profound insight behind their short response of Amini. That insight can be formalized, as far as our purpose is concerned, in this way: apologetics can be used to delineate the contributions of a specific identity to the common good. In this sense, if not in any other sense, apologetics can be defended pluralistically.
1 William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, Third ed (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 15.
2 Antonia Pantoja, Wilhelmina Perry, and Barbara Blourock, “Towards the Development of Theory: Cultural Pluralism Redefined,” The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 4, no. 1 (1976): 126.
3 Natan Sharansky, Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy (New York/London: Public Affairs, 2008), 6.
4 Ahmad Amini, the son of Amini, relates this anecdote in a Persian interview: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cent0HiI4BA/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
*Dr Jeremy Shearmur is a British former reader in philosophy in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University, who retired at the end of 2013. He is currently an emeritus fellow, lives in Dumfries, Scotland, and is undertaking research and some Zoom-based lecturing. He was educated at the London School of Economics. He has taught at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Manchester, and at George Mason University, where he was a research associate professor at the Institute for Humane Studies. He was also director of studies of the Centre for Policy Studies, in London.
**Dr Usama Hasan holds a PhD, MSc & MA in Theoretical Physics and Artificial Intelligence from the Universities of Cambridge & London and is a Fellow of the UK Royal Astronomical Society and of the Muslim Institute. Usama served as President of the students’ Islamic Societies at all three UK universities that he attended. He also served as Director & Trustee of the City Circle, organising about 60 weekly events at Abrar House in 2008-9. Dr Usama has served as a part-time imam in the UK for nearly 40 years, including being Khatib & Trustee of Leyton Mosque (1992-2012) and has translated a number of Islamic texts from Arabic and Urdu into English. He has also co-authored a book on interfaith dialogue with Rabbi Prof. Dan Cohn-Sherbok & Dr. George Chryssides: People of the Book – How Jews, Christians & Muslims understand their sacred scriptures (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2019). Dr Usama also translated Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah’s extensive discussion on “Islam & Modern Citizenship” in his 100-page essay entitled, From Dhimmitude to Democracy – Islamic Law, Non-Muslims & Equal Citizenship.
Dr S. Yaser Mirdamadi was a Visiting Teaching Fellow at Maktoum college, Dundee Scotland in the field of Islamic Studies. He is a researcher in Muslim biomedical ethics at the Institute of Isma‘ili Studies, London. He is the first recipient of ‘Muhammad Arkoun doctoral scholarship’. In addition to his seminary background, he received his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the University of Edinburgh. His fields of study are philosophical theology, philosophy of religion, political theology, modern Islam, and Muslim ethics.
