I'm a pretty reasonable sort of guy, I like to think. Not prone to excess of any kind, willing to consider a reasoned argument, even if I don't necessarily agree with it. Right all of the time? Hardly, indeed, I tend to make a virtue of uncertainty. After all, there are known knowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns, to erratically quote Donald Rumsfeld. Generalisation is unhelpful, even as a handy debating tool.
And so, when someone popped up on Caron Lindsay's Twitter feed today, stating that they had zero respect for Sunni Islam, I felt moved to respond. Alright, I was a mite confrontational, in the way that a slightly irritable bureaucrat can be...
But let's be honest here, respect is a two way street. No, you don't tolerate violence in the cause of religion, but we have laws to deal with that sort of thing. And, in the same way that I wouldn't say that all UKIP members are racists (some of them might be, but that doesn't mean that they all are), it is hard to credit that the many Sunni that I've worked with, done politics with or otherwise interacted with are out to get me. I did live in inner London for the best part of two decades, after all.
And yet, there are people out there, people with followers, who believe that every following of the Sunni version of Islam is a potential murderer. Either that, or they aren't devout in their faith. And all because they can quote a relatively obscure part of a 1300 year old document, written at a time when might was right and life was generally short and brutal, that suggests that killing your enemies is a good thing. Well, in an environment where killing your neighbours to preserve your access to food and precious resources was advantageous, you can see why a religious text might say that. After all, a deity whose followers survive is more likely to be worshipped than one whose followers don't.
But curiously, we've all moved on a bit since those days. We've found that working together means that instead of burning your resources in conflict, you can pool resources, trade them amongst one another, build relationships based on trust. And followers of the various faiths move with society, albeit usually a few steps behind, adapting the practice of the faith to suit.
I am probably seen as a wet apologist for liberalism by the zealots. I tend to think of myself as someone who believes in keeping the channels of communication open, and in treating my fellow person with a bit of respect. Sadly, the world now offers far more scope for the provocateur, the seeker of scapegoats, through social media. It turns out that these people are not alone, that their echo chamber is a lot bigger than we might hope. And the problem is, they care more. Their passion to build walls, to expel what is different from their communities, to pull up a drawbridge, drives them, and sews the seeds of mistrust in our society.
I hope that our society is better than to fall for that. I fear that it is not...
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