Islamic culture for the UK?

On the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph is an article entitled ‘Britain “should adopt aspects of Islamic culture”,’ quoting Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, head of the Muslim Council of Britain.
Dr Bari says that politicians should stop talking about al-Qa’eda and adopt the positive aspects of Islam - specifically arranged marriage, modesty and sexual restraint, tighter legal controls on alcohol, abortion and debt, greater charity and stricter parenting.
My first reaction was that if a Christian cleric had called for Britain to adopt aspects of Christian teaching, the list would have sounded very similar – apart from arranged marriage – and the article would not have made even an inside page of a newspaper.
Why not?
Because it’s not news. Everybody knows Christians don’t want their children going out indecently dressed, getting paralytic, having promiscuous sex, having abortions, overspending and getting crippled by debt.
But come to that, everybody knows that no British parent - of any or no religion - wants that lifestyle for their children.
Nobody’s advertising it as the ideal.
So why is it the norm?
It’s not only Muslims who are shocked by British behaviour – which many believe is Christian behaviour, because they see the West as culturally Christian.
I met a young Romanian Christian couple, just getting married, and asked them what aspects of British culture they found most unfamiliar and difficult to adjust to, and they said the parenting – that Romanian parents spend a lot of time with their children and pay a lot of attention to bringing them up carefully, and British parents seem to let them go their own way.
My hairdresser, who is an Afghan Muslim, says her main worry about living in this country is that her children will be influenced by the way British children behave.
But then another friend, who is an English Christian, said her main worry about living on a nice modern family housing estate is that her children will be influenced by the way some other parents on the estate let their children behave.
And another friend says that her teenage children absolutely refuse to do as she says, because their friends’ parents let them do whatever they want and think she’s being stuffy when she asks them to support her in imposing restrictions on their children’s behaviour.
Older British people say it wasn’t like that in their day: British parenting was strict, young girls weren’t allowed to go to nightclubs or to drink or ……
But whatever the perspective, virtually everybody seems to be in agreement that British culture is not the ideal and British parenting seems to have lost its way.
So – is the answer to have stricter standards, whether they come under the heading of Sharia law, Christian teaching, or national law?
I don’t know.
The trouble is, all those things that Dr Bari quoted as desirable and undoubtedly achievable by law, if it’s stringently imposed, can be used by human beings in a bad way as well as a good way. And some of the looseness of British parenting may be a counter-reaction to previous generations imposing those restrictions in a bad way.
It is an extreme reaction.
But that’s what generally happens when people react to something extreme that happened before.
There’s certainly a need for law, for parental discipline, for decent standards, for people in authority who believe personal integrity is important.
But St Paul said that human beings will always find loopholes in any moral law; in fact, will manipulate even the most perfect moral law to achieve more harm than they would without it, because even when we want to be ruled by God and lead good lives we’re also motivated by greed, lust and every other ruler of the human spirit.
In fact, he said, using himself as an example, the harder he tried to do good and obey the law, the more he reacted the other way and did the very things he was straining so hard to avoid.
It’s always possible to make a good rule and then use it to control people, rob their freedom, dignity and personality, or to quote a good principle and then use it to crush somebody’s spirit and make them believe God no longer loves them because they’re so morally dissolute.
We’ve seen it done, under this country’s previous culture – by the Empire-builders, the fortune-makers, the Church, the State, education authorities, health authorities – all the organisations and structures with the potential to care and to control, to encourage or to blame, to do lasting good or to do incredible harm.
And probably, we don’t want any more good rules and good authorities and good people because we don’t trust them any more, because human beings are not – under any law – infallibly good and trustworthy.
And people have stopped trusting God, because the people who claimed to speak for him haven’t been apparently any more trustworthy, loving or representative of the God who is ‘slow to anger, full of compassion and love’.
So what can save us, in this little country with big problems, in the 21st century?
Or in any country of the world, with any religion or none, at any time in history?
Is it more laws, more religion, more discipline, stricter standards?
Or God. Who sent his only Son to stand in the path of our self-destructive human culture, whether laxity or legalism is the method of spiritual suicide, and to take all our sins and sicknesses on himself, and show us – in actions that still speak louder than sermons or laws – that he loves every single one of us, without exception, without favourites, and without our deserving it at all.