If inter-faith gestures — gimmicks though they might be — help reduce tensions, then let’s have more of them.
Such was the media hype that anyone even sleep-walking through Britain last week couldn’t have failed to notice the news of the country’s “first female Muslim Cabinet Minister”, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, launching a spirited defence of Christianity against “militant secularism” on a “historic” visit to the Vatican where she had a private audience with the Pope.
There was breathless media coverage of her speech in which she told the Vatican that British Muslims stood “side by side with the Pope in fighting for faith”; warned against “militant secularisation” of Christian Europe; and argued for Europe to become “more confident and more comfortable in its Christianity”.
Christianity, she said, was an intrinsic part of British and European life and Christian values were as important to its followers as to the people of other faiths.
“You cannot extract Christian foundations from the evolutions of our nations any more than you can erase the spires from our landscape,” she said pointing out that her own life, growing up in a northern England milltown, had been influenced by Christian values.
A picture of Baroness Warsi with the Pope, her head respectfully covered with a black dupatta, splashed on newspaper front pages became a defining image of her Vatican visit.
Sceptics can be forgiven for dismissing the event as a tacky political gimmick by the Conservative party to demonstrate its “inclusiveness” and cultural pluralism. Remember — they may remind you — the fury that Prime Minister David Cameron caused among Muslim immigrants when in a speech in Munich last year he savaged multiculturalism saying it encouraged “passive tolerance” of Muslim extremism? And that, too, on a day when the racist English Defence League was holding a major anti-Muslim protest in a predominantly Muslim town. He was accused of “writing propaganda material for EDL”.
Similarly, Baroness Warsi can be accused (indeed she has been by a section of her community) of allowing herself to be used by the party as a token Muslim to promote its agenda. Read more
Sources
- Hasan Suroor in The Hindu
- Image: The Telegraph
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