Winds of War: Britain Should Learn from Orwell

Hat tip to Cranmer.

“Mr Paul Goodman MP, in a speech in the House of Commons last week, has articulated perfectly the threat posed by Islam to the peace and safety of this Realm. His constituency is High Wycombe (11% Muslim) which was the focus of the plot to simultaneously bomb a number of transatlantic flights in a terrorist spectacular that would have equalled the bombing of the World Trade Centre. He referred to this plot, the Dhiren Barot conviction, the Abu Hamza affair, the bombings of 7th July, and the attempted shoe-bomb atrocity by Richard Reid, to remind the House that UK security is under threat.”

I suggest to the House that that missing something is the ideology of Islamism. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (David Maclean) said, Islamism is not Islam. Islam is a religion-a great religion at that and one, it seems to me, as various, as complex, as multi-faceted and as capable of supporting a great civilisation as Christianity. Islamism, however, is an ideology forged largely in the past 100 years, and that word ‘ideology’ should help to convey to the House a flavour that is as much modern as mediaeval.

See my post “Did the Islamic Reformation Already Happen?”

Like communism and like fascism, those other modern ideologies, Islamism divides not on the basis of class or of race, but on the basis of religion. To this politician, it has three significant features. First, it separates the inhabitants of the dar-al-Islam - the house of Islam - and the dar-al-Harb - the house of war - and, according to Islamist ideology, those two houses are necessarily in conflict. Secondly, it proclaims to Muslims that their political loyalty lies not with the country that they live in, but with the Umma - that is, the worldwide community of Muslims. Thirdly, it aims to bring the dar-al-Islam under sharia law. I am not an expert on Islam, but I have learned enough about it since I was first elected to this place in 2001 to recognise that its view, and our inherited view of the difference between the sacred and secular, diverge. In our inherited view, the sacred and the secular are separate. The Christian tradition from which our inherited view springs has always acknowledged a distinction between what is God’s and what is Caesar’s. In Islam, that distinction is harder to perceive.

He ends his speech with this. More references to the 1930s and the Gathering Storm. (Unabashed plug)

George Orwell once wrote of the ‘deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.’ On 7/7, we heard the roar of bombs in London. I sometimes worry that the deep, deep sleep that Orwell described in the 1930s is still here in relation to Islamism in sections of the Government, parts of the political and media establishment, the House and the country. This is one of the most urgent problems facing us, and if we are in that deep, deep sleep, it is time for all of us to wake up.