Rowan Williams: a difficult posting

The Archbishop of Canterbury has had some stick on this site, most recently over his sermon at the memorial service for the victims of the London bombings. I’ve just been reading something in a very different register: his lecture to the European Policy Centre in Brussels. This is the one-time Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in his element, treating an audience of wonks to some heavy-duty intellectualizing. A man who can wrap Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire into one lecture with this much assurance has some serious brainpower. It’s well worth a read.

And yet, and yet…

I complained that his sermon airbrushed out the ambivalences in British Muslim reactions to 7/7, presenting an idealized view of a community united in unequivocal rejection of terrorism.

Drawing on the work of Tariq Ramadan, the Brussels lecture argues that Western Muslims are able to draw on a tradition of adaptation to non-Muslim majority cultures which would encourage them positively to embrace a Western cultural identity.

‘There is, says Ramadan (Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, p.53) no single “homeland” for Muslims: they can be at home in any geographical and political environment, and they need to avoid “self-ghettoization”, becoming “spectators in a society where they were once marginalized” (55). They need to be arguing and negotiating in the public sphere. But the acceptance of such argumentation is undoubtedly a development, as Ramadan agrees – a necessary recognition of distinctions between primary and secondary concerns in social life, a following-through of principles rooted deeply in classical Muslim thinking about ijtihad, the labour of interpretation (43-48). In modern conditions, this labour is something needed not simply in the context of jurisprudence within Muslim society, but in relation to an irreversibly plural and complex environment.(65-77).’

So the Archbishop does not here deny what is plain to all with eyes to see: a ‘development’ and ‘labour’ are required to break down the walls of the self-created ghetto in which too many Western Muslims live. But how, in the meantime, is the non-Muslim majority to manage its relationship with communities which have benefited from European ‘cultural hospitality’ but remain deeply suspicious of the liberalism in which it is rooted? As the Archbishop says, ‘while [Europe] is essentially hospitable to the stranger and the migrant, it has to confront the risk that it may find itself being hospitable to some sort of bid to alter the foundational idea of Europe as a sphere of “liberal” interaction between communities within the frame of law’. Well, it is actually a lot more than a risk. How do we confront it in a way that does not undermine the very traditions of tolerance and pluralism which we want to protect for the sake of all the other groups which need to be able to rely on them? Ramadan provides the Archbishop with some good ideas about which way we should be heading, but there is not even the sketchiest roadmap here.

Another complaint was widely made about the sermon, and drew a speedy apology: listing groups who had fallen victim to terrorism, the Archbishop omitted the Jews. There was some scepticism about the explanation that this was 'inadvertent’.

In his lecture, the players shaping European culture are Christianity, secular liberalism and Islam. Is there any absence which strikes you here? I wanted to be sure I hadn’t missed anything. I called up the source code and searched for ‘Jew’. Then I searched for ‘Judaism’. Nada.

I can just about believe that the contribution of Jewish thought and culture to the shaping of modern Europe was considered by the Archbishop to be too marginal to merit a mention in his ‘breathless tour’ of European history. But when the Jews figure neither as a force shaping European culture nor as an exemplar of a religious minority negotiating its relationship with it, it all begins, in the words of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, to look like carelessness.

What on earth is going on here? I feel embarrassed to be raising this issue in relation to the spiritual head of my church. Surely this wise and holy man wouldn’t be influenced by something so crass… But perhaps it is time to take him down from his pedestal and see him as a fellow human being.

Before Auschwitz, it was not unusual, and quite acceptable in polite society, for heavyweight intellectuals to declare robustly that they just didn’t like Jews. That notable Anglo-Catholic T.S. Eliot was one instance. Since 1945 shame has largely silenced these voices, but shame does not in itself transform feelings. What is suppressed will find some means of expression. It will invent rationalizations – righteous anger over the uniquely appalling behaviour of Israel, as articulated in the Anglican Consultative Council resolution which the Archbishop disgracefully supported. Or it will simply manifest itself in what is not said - and of course a case from significant omissions can never finally be proved.

This is part of the trouble with attempts to outlaw ‘incitement to religious hatred’, and the culture of politically correct inoffensiveness generally. The less space is left for plain speaking, the less we know where we are and what we have to confront. If Rowan Williams really doesn’t like Jews much, he should feel he is free to say so, and leave the rest of us to decide what we want to do about it. Heaven knows I have enough gut prejudices of my own to deter me from casting the first stone.

And if anyone can demonstrate that I’m barking up the wrong tree altogether, please get writing.