Liz Clements

Nick Timothy and Nigel Farage are right, and Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer are wrong. Small groups of people, of whatever religion, praying in public places is fine. And as a Christian country we should allow a special privilege for churches to lead services in our national spaces, like the Palm Sunday celebration that happens in Trafalgar Square. What we don't want is mass ritual observances intended to claim the civic realm for another religion, or assert the domination of another culture over our own Christian traditions. What happens in our national spaces is not neutral. People use Trafalgar Square, for celebrations and demonstrations, to make a point about the kind of country they want us to be. The Palm Sunday pageant reminds us of who we are - not as individuals (many or most of us don't identify as Christians at all) but as a national community, with the roots of our institutions in the ground of the Bible and our most solemn communal moments, from coronations to funerals, mediated through the liturgies of the Church. A mass Adhan held there, or in any town square, is making a different point: that Britain is not a Christian country, and that - inshallah - one day it shall be Muslim. This is unacceptable to the British public and indeed incompatible with our constitution. As ever with these debates, the issue is partly one of kind and partly one of degree. There is an issue with Islam itself as a religion which in most interpretations does not admit of pluralism or freedom of conscience, and therefore is inherently aggrandising, including over territory. But with a bit of confidence and a bit of toleration we could handle that - if it were not for the issue of degree. It is the scale of Islam in Britain, and the ambition of its leaders for greater scale, that makes the problem. The numbers of people who assembled for the adhan in Trafalgar Square, clearly and openly claiming the territory for a faith with no connection (indeed, with strong doctrinal disagreement) with the model of Western liberal democracy that Britain has developed and exported to the world - that is the problem. The numbers, whether everyone there understood it this way or not (and I suspect many did), convey an explicit threat to the foundations of our country. Being relaxed about other people's religion is a good thing, a very British thing. I don't mind modern druids dancing around Stonehenge in my constituency (arguably, though the historicity is tenuous, they have a claim to the place). I don't mind small groups of Hindus or Buddhists or Muslims demonstrating the reality of Britain's religious toleration by worshiping in Trafalgar Square. But let's not kid ourselves about this adhan, or pretend that we're just seeing another harmless expression of Britain's religious diversity. We are seeing an abuse of liberalism, led by people who are not themselves liberal; or - let us imagine they are acting in good faith - who are themselves deceived about what they are doing. It should not happen again. And it would be good to hear the Church of England say so.

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