Respect is not a right. Almost anything one can think of these days is, supposedly, a right, and judging from the angry demands on all sides for respect, one might easily be bamboozled into thinking respect is somehow a right as well. Not so, rightly not.
Yet all the terrifying Muslim uprisings across the world in response to the Danish cartoons have all been about a demand for respect, as of right. They are demanding respect for religion, or at any rate for their own religion and their own religious sensibilities. The same is true of the more moderate demonstrations in London yesterday. Worse, many westerners are penitentially admitting that Muslims do indeed have a right to respect for their faith, and that it is wrong to express disrespect for a religion. This is disastrous.
Yesterday’s demonstrations were organised by the new Muslim Action Committee, which claims to represent more than 1m Muslims. They may indeed be moderates, as they claim, yet what they say sounds anything but moderate. They demand changes in the law and a strengthening of the Press Complaints Commission code to outlaw any possible publication of the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in the UK. “What is being called for,” said Faiz Siddiqi, the committee’s convenor, “is a change of culture. In any civilised society, if someone says, ‘don’t insult me’, you do not, out of respect for them.”
Here in one sentence lies the entire, tangled problem; it is all entwined round several different uses of the word “respect”. First of all there is a tendentious conflation of respect for one’s religion and respect for oneself. It may be true that in traditional Muslim thought a perceived insult to the Prophet is an insult to the believer, but in western culture there is a crucially important — and highly prized — distinction. Freedom of speech depends on people accepting that criticism of a belief, even aggressive, satirical or offensive criticism, is not necessarily intended to insult a person or an ethnic community.
Even in cases where perhaps it might be — where the criticism of a belief is quite clearly disrespectful — then putting up with that is the price of freedom of speech, and a price well worth paying.
Freedom of speech is the keystone of western civilisation, of individuality, of scientific discovery, of wealth and of democracy; without it, the entire edifice would collapse.
Indeed it is arguable that it has been the lack of freedom of speech, along with an excessive respect for authority and religion, that has for centuries held back and impoverished the once great civilisation of Islam. Faiz Siddiqi’s call for a change of culture is indeed nothing less, and a very destructive and retrograde one at that.
Of course, Siddiqi is right in saying that in any civilised society, most people do generally avoid insulting other people’s beliefs, but that is not necessarily out of respect for them, or for their beliefs. It is very often out of an overriding respect for something impersonal — for the benefits of civility in a civil society and above all for the ideal of tolerance.
I personally have always been enraged by Catholic teachings, or by Maoist doctrines but I have no desire to insult Catholics or Maoists personally, merely a temptation to argue with some of them. I have been to parties where thumping crooks have been treated with great civility by other guests, for a similar reason. But it would be wrong to mistake that sort of civility for respect.
Respect cannot be demanded, or imposed by a free state. It can only be freely given. The demand of Muslims for uncritical — and legally binding — respect for their beliefs is simply not one that can be met in a society like ours. And the failure, by some Muslims at least, to perceive these distinctions is, without exaggeration, tragic.
It is a failure for which we in the West — we in this country — bear a great deal of responsibility. Until very recently, the doctrine of multiculturalism reigned supreme here. For at least 15 years public services and the liberal media have been riddled with the idea that all cultures are equally deserving of respect, and that the values of the host culture are not supreme, but on the contrary, rather racist and oppressive (so possibly not equally deserving of respect). At last this has come to be understood. There are countless examples: the finding of the Climbie report that social workers were inclined to apply different standards to different cultures, and therefore overlooked or explained away what was happening to the wretched Victoria; a similar lack of will to question religious practices such as exorcism.
Others include the decision of HM chief inspector of prisons not to allow the English flag in English prisons, in case the red cross might be offensive to Muslims; the blind eye that is turned to physical punishment of young children and long hours in some madrasahs; the shameful tolerance here of domestic violence and arranged marriages of convenience to highly unsuitable strangers, in the name of religion; the public library in Buckinghamshire that banned a notice of a Christian carol service and yet held a party to celebrate Eid at the end of Ramadan. These things are done, apparently, out of a desire to show equal respect to all faiths.
Quite why large sections of the host culture here were taken in by the confused claims of multiculturalism remains a mystery to me. But the consequence is that many Muslims (among others) have come to believe that we agree that their religion and culture are entitled to unquestioning respect. They must have seen that the post-Christian majority, especially in the state sector, has been mired in an unthinking relativism, and has lost the conviction to stand up for essential western values.
What’s more these state organisations have humbly accepted the charge that they are institutionally racist, which has further demoralised them. This is a very extreme form of trahison des clercs — the betrayal of the functionaries. It is hardly surprising, now, that the more extreme and politicised Muslims and their unthinking hangers on feel entitled, in defiance of our greatest freedoms, to demand respect from us, as of right. The tragedy is that what they are now getting from the rest of us is not respect at all, but fear, posing as respect.
