Dreams of an altar of muddling through

Tom Holland at The New Statesman recognizes the inchoate outlines of the primitive sacred at the heart of the Scimitar. Hear me on this, please: NOT so that we can 'put blame on "THEM" (so as to) justify our hatred of "THEM" and satisfy our pent up desire to vent.' Rather, to see with vision unclouded by the vacuous secularist claim that all religions are "the same." They are not, as any student of René Girard's mimetic theory knows full well.

(The) sense of dislocation is hardly unique to our own times. The pagans of classical antiquity, who would cheerfully adopt the gods of alien pantheons and mix and match them with their own, were invariably brought to experience this sense of dislocation whenever they confronted Christianity’s one true God. Christians in turn might sometimes feel a similar uneasiness when obliged to contemplate the deity of Islam.

For instance, it is said that shortly after Muhammad’s death in 632AD the followers of the Prophet sent an embassy to Heraclius, the Christian emperor in Constantinople, demanding the surrender of his dominions and his conversion to Islam, on pain of invasion. “These people,” the emperor is said to have responded in some bemusement, “are like the twilight, caught between day and nightfall, neither sunlit nor dark – for although they are not illumined by the light of Christ, neither are they steeped in the darkness of idolatry.”

Not even Tony Blair at his most histrionic has ever put it quite like that – and, self-evidently, 7th-century Byzantium, with its murderous power struggles, its delusions of grandeur, and its imploding economy, was far removed from the Britain of New Labour. Nevertheless, Heraclius’s simile does pose in peculiarly acute form a question with which Christians have always had to wrestle: are the similarities between their own faith and Islam more profound than the differences?

Blair himself – impeccably ecumenical, even while following in the footsteps of Heraclius by launching an invasion of Mesopotamia – has been as gung-ho as anyone in emphasising the former. “Jews, Muslims and Christians are all children of Abraham,” he informed a somewhat startled Labour Party a fortnight after the destruction of the twin towers. “This is the moment to bring the faiths closer together in understanding of our common values and heritage – a source of unity and strength.”

Who could possibly argue with that? Only the most bigoted and bone-headed kind of crusader, it might be thought. And yet, and yet, there is a danger that too emphatic an insistence on what unites Christians and Muslims will prove as damaging in the long run as casting them as doomed to eternal conflict. The Crusaders themselves, ironically enough, rarely regarded Islam as something irredeemably alien; rather, when they bothered to think about their adversaries’ beliefs at all, they tended to regard them as merely a clumsily plagiarised heresy, a deficient and not particularly stimulating misunderstanding of their own religion.

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