Is there another Islamic agenda behind the national Muslim war memorial to the brave soldiers who died for us during two world wars?

Timing is everything. 

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced that the government will fund a national war memorial to those Muslim soldiers who fought on our side during the two world wars and in subsequent conflicts. We have also been reminded that other religions have similar memorials.

And that is true. But is there anything more that this particular commemoration might represent? To try and parse that, it is worth first considering the other memorials that do indeed exist. 

I remember my surprise when I was in Brighton, having been invited to a World War I memorial service, to discover a memorial to the Sikh soldiers who, as part of the British Empire, fought in that war and died. The memorial is situated just a few miles north of Patcham on the South Downs. 

I wondered how it came to be there? The answer turned out to be quite a simple and pragmatic one. Wounded soldiers were put on the train and brought back to be cared for in England, and a number of Indian Sikh soldiers were amongst those brought to hospital in Brighton. Some recovered, and others died. 

Immediately after the war ended, it was decided as a mark of respect to build a memorial to those Sikh soldiers who died from their wounds. It’s true that the memorial helps mitigate the fact that very few people know about these soldiers that were brought from a distant part of the British Empire to fight against the UK’s foe in Europe. 

But while multiculturalists will suggest that the provision of an Muslim memorial is a similar expression of the cultural diversity that existed in the armed forces during the two world wars, and is thus worthy of that recognition represented by the Sikh memorial, the truth may be a little bit more complex and multi-layered. 

Islam is not just an alternative religion to Buddhism or Hinduism or Christianity. There are, for example, no concerns for “Buddhistophobia”, “Hinduophobia” or even “Christianophobia”, and which if there were might temper discussion amongst people who were not fans of any of these religions. 

And yet the growing movement to both widen the definition of Islamophobia and to impose in codes of practice, or even in civil law, prohibitions on criticising Islam has begun to become a present reality in the UK.

So, against that backdrop, how might we understand this new concern by the Establishment to build into our civic history the presence of Islam as an element in our understanding of the two world wars?

Perhaps the first thing we need to do is to explore the impact of that first catastrophe and great rent in modern history, the First World War, on the subsequent developments during the following century in Europe.

I was brought up to understand that the origins of the First World War were deeply complex. Indeed they are.

In all, the war involved seventy countries and produced a death toll of 17 million. It brought about the collapse of four empires (German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian).

Depending on which school or fashion of history you follow, there are a variety of ways of interpreting the grand narrative of what it represented. 

It can be seen as the boiling point of expansive colonial nationalist ambitions. One of the populist taunts of Christianity (and which isn’t wholly unjustified) is the way that Christian clergy on both the German and British sides blessed the weapons of mutual Christian slaughter. 

Perhaps equally as bad was the attempt to justify the aggression theologically. At the beginning of the war, a group of theologians and intellectuals in Germany published “The Manifesto of the Ninety Three”, which sought to justify the actions of the German government. At the British government’s request, Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, took the lead in collaborating with a large number of religious leaders to write a rebuttal of the Germans’ contentions.

Both German and British theologians claimed the Just War Theory was on their side. Inevitably this has always raised the issue of the tragedy of nationalistic interest dominating Christian moral vision. The British and German cousins of Europe could contemplate slaughtering each other, but should European Christians have been able to?

And that in turn raises the tragedy of the Reformation, after which there was no collective identity amongst Protestants that there would have been between Catholics.

Of course there were national wars between Catholic nations in Europe before the Reformation. All of them represented a failure of the Catholic imagination. However, the very concept of the Just War Theory implied a degree of moral and religious accountability amongst Catholics. It was not unusual to invite either moderation or validation from the papacy. 

What made the First World War so different was that leading up to the unimaginable scale of slaughter, and partly because of the Protestant constituency, there was no recognised moral arbiter in Europe. 

But does the failure of Christians to resist their mutual slaughter have any implications for the long-term struggle between expansive Islamic ambitions and Christian self-understanding which has resisted it? 

An overview of the failures of Christendom suggests that at moments of its catastrophic failure, one of the consequences has been to create a vacuum that Islam, always pressing its expansionist ambitions, filled. 

One of the most striking and distressing examples of this was the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204), during which Western crusaders sacked Constantinople. The fissure this created in Christendom nearly led to the defeat of Christendom by Islam both at the gates of Vienna and at the battle of Lepanto. 

When Christendom turns on itself, Islam pushes at the weakened gates of Christian society.

The First World War represents a repeat of the catastrophic collapse of Christian vision and mutuality – a neo-Fourth Crusade. On top of that, it has become increasingly compelling amongst historians to see the Second World War as the completion of the first; as if the twenty one years between them was a pause before the resumption of the conflict. 

Historians will also note that whatever the complexities that led to mass migration – mainly comprising of Muslims moving into Europe in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century – it followed on the collapse of Christian self-understanding and mutuality in Europe. Whether mass immigration was encouraged because it was seen as a solution to falling birth rates, a pension crisis or a darker death-wish for Christian culture, it was founded on a profound ignorance of what Islam believed and how it acted.

At the same time, an entirely false distinction was made between Islam and Islamism, as if Islamism described an entirely separate and unconnected political extremist variant among Muslims. Whereas, in fact, Islam is a well-balanced hybrid of religion and politics, aspiring to create a seamlessly faithful Islamic society in terms of both spirituality and political and ethical expression. 

We might explore the demographic acceleration of Islamic presence in our country, but we would end up arguing about variables. The most useful wake-up call for many was provided by French novelist Michel Houellebecq in his novel Submission, in which he explored both the desire of Islam to change the face of French society and its means of doing so.

Is there an inherent desire to Islamify a society in which the numbers of Muslims and their political and cultural influence grows? There are Muslim voices that speak to this, but that might be countered by the argument that they are not sufficiently representative.

Either way, the present tensions in our democracy appear to reflect the growing leverage of Islamic preferences. 

In 2018, the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims defined Islamophobia as “rooted in racism” and being “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. It was, however, rejected by the government, as being too threatening to free speech. 

But it has been adopted by one in every seven local councils and by the majority of this country’s political parties. It stands every chance of being given legally binding power by the next government. 

Meanwhile, MPs are resigning because of threats made against them by Muslim activists, and the procedures of the House of Commons have been frustrated and sabotaged in a similar manner. Critics have also identified this new definition of Islamophobia as creating a de facto blasphemy law – which protects only Islam.

At the same time, patterns of policing on the streets have been shaped by an apparent diffidence toward Muslim activists, while other protesters – especially when Christian – have been treated in wholly different (and less sympathetic) ways. 

In the context of this growing influence of the Islamic community in civil affairs, what might the funding of a Muslim monument by the government represent? Is it simply an attempt at cultural parity?

Back to how timing is indeed everything.

There might well have been a case for a monument to Muslims from the many different countries that lent their support to the British Empire back in 1914 and in 1939. But there wasn’t. Why might it be considered a priority now? 

There is a growing suspicion that this is not primarily about honouring the memory of people who died up to more than one hundred years ago, but rather about re-creating a history of England that gives Islam a greater prominence, while the stimulus for this is not so much an accurate representation of nostalgia for a multicultural Empire as the need to Islamify British history.

This matters if the collapse of Christian belief and commitment in our society creates a vacuum to be filled by different values. Particularly if those values might include hatred of Jews and foster a culture and atmosphere where freedom of speech is less welcome, where our democratic representatives resign because they fear for their lives, where women’s rights are freshly contested, and one religion only is given the protection of new “blasphemy” laws. 

History is no longer taught effectively in our schools. Statues and monuments are being notoriously contested and replaced by the Left. We ought to be scrupulously careful and equally alarmed when monuments might function to create a revisionist impression of history long after the event.

It may be that there is no such thing as a value-free Islamic monument, at least not in contemporary Britain.

(Photo: Screenshot from https://www.muslimwarmemorial.org.)

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