Over my many years in the U.S., I have resisted the temptation to buy into the catastrophism that characterizes American conservative commentary on my homeland, from claims about NHS “death panels” to the takeover of British cities by radical Muslims intent on imposing sharia law. I grew up in rural Gloucestershire where nothing much changes, from the appropriately warm beer served in the pubs to the faces passed in the streetlight-free lanes. There is little fodder there for sensationalist headlines about the death of England. But recent months have made it harder not to think that something has gone badly awry with this sceptered isle. From the ridiculous yet sinister arrest of Graham Linehan to the refusal to allow a Catholic group to film at a holy site, the England that I knew is passing. Ideas and beliefs that were part of the fabric of the culture until the day before yesterday are now consistently rooted out, opposed, and repudiated with the full force of the cultural establishment. And this is often done under the guise of doing the exact opposite. The language of tolerance is used to promote intolerance, freedom to promote oppression, kindness to justify cruelty.
One sign of this is the recent interest in renewing blasphemy laws, not to protect the sacred but to disarm those opposed to the pet projects of progressivism. England has a long tradition of such laws, with the last only being abolished in 2008. Yet David Shipley noted in The Spectator that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has now decided to appeal the successful appeal of Hamit Coskun, a man earlier convicted of burning a Qur’an, on the grounds that the burning constituted an “act of desecration.” Shipley understandably sees this as an attempt by the CPS to establish a blasphemy law by sly legal precedent.
Shipley may be correct. The language of desecration by the CPS, the government office in charge of deciding what acts are worthy of prosecution, certainly lends itself to such an interpretation. And one would not need to be a particularly radical Muslim to regard the burning of the Qur’an as offensive precisely because of the sacred nature Islam ascribes to its holy book. But the CPS is scarcely a bastion of serious Muslims and is also very selective in those things deemed holy enough to be desecrated. Take Christians, for example. It is hard to imagine anyone being prosecuted for, say, mocking Jesus’s crucifixion. And we also believe that human beings are made in the image of God. Abortion and euthanasia would therefore constitute acts of desecration. The destruction of flesh and blood is surely of greater social significance than the destruction of paper and ink. Yet both are currently enshrined in U.K. law. Far from being acts of desecration, the legal right to them is deemed necessary.
So why is Qur’an burning so special? Shipley never quite says this explicitly, but the tenor of his article suggests the CPS is pandering to the Muslim community, or at least to its most aggressive elements. And, as noted, acts of Qur’an burning are offensive to Muslims and without doubt intended to be so by the perpetrator. But it seems unlikely that the CPS regards the Qur’an as particularly holy, nor admires the traditions of Islamic law to which it gave birth. Indeed, orthodox Muslim approaches to matters of sex and sexual identity are unlikely to find favor with the U.K.’s political or legal establishments.
And yet the language of desecration is not incidental. Qur’an burning does involve desecration even for the secular progressives who run the CPS and care nothing for the book’s teachings. For them it is not an act of intrinsic but of contextual and symbolic desecration. Such burning—as unpleasant, thuggish, and needlessly offensive as it is—is an act that calls into question the sacred pieties of England’s progressive leadership. Ironically, as with Coskun, that leadership is committed to acts of conflagration, but they seek only to desecrate the local gods of a previous era, committed to basic freedoms. That’s what makes the Qur’an a holy book to them. It is not a source of religious teaching. Rather, it symbolizes a repudiation of an allegedly Christian past.
The selectivity and incoherence of the CPS’s position reveals that there is no positive vision here, and certainly not that offered by any version of Islam, whether orthodox or radicalized. The Qur’an burning is useful as a tool for cowing any opposition. The same logic explains those LGBTQ activists who flaunt their supportive presence at pro-Hamas rallies held in the comfort of Western cities where, unlike in Hamas-controlled territories, they do not face torture and death for their sexual behavior precisely because of the Western values they so despise. They simply hate what the liberal West has traditionally represented, and they want it shattered—by any means necessary. There is no point in looking for any cogent or constructive philosophy here, for there is no positive vision, merely a Mephistophelean commitment to the negation of all that once was. For these useful idiots, the enemy of their enemy is their friend. And to make things worse, this progressive spirit blankets itself in sanctimony even as it burns down the past and buries people under the rubble of an empty nihilism. Hence the recourse to the language of desecration, drawing on the language of religious content in order to bolster its very opposite.
Marx commented on the effects of industrial capitalism that “all that is holy is profaned.” The same applies to the progressive ideologies of the English ruling class today. Indeed, for them to be validated, all once thought holy not only will but must be profaned, as this perverse blasphemy-law-by-stealth approach indicates.
Image by Frankie Fouganthin, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
