What the fear-mongers don't tell you about Islam

The depredations of gangs of criminals posing as Islamist warriors have, of course, resulted in death and destruction on an appalling scale in many parts of the world. However, the writer’s insistence on explaining away these atrocities as a product of Islam’s medieval origins is just nonsense. Even worse is his vile claim that the violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar can somehow be justified because they are Muslims.

In many respects Islam has been an enlightened religion, from which Western civilisation has gained great benefits. More than 1,000 years ago, the caliphate in Baghdad ushered in a golden age of Islamic learning, in fields such as astronomy, mathematics, law, science and literature. This continued under the Ottoman Empire, until, like all empires, it fell into decline. The Christian and other minority communities across the Middle East now being destroyed by ISIS all survived relatively untroubled and unscathed for centuries under a succession of Islamic rulers.

The writer also evokes an apocalyptic vision of European civilisation being engulfed by a wave of Islamic migration, but is he aware there are nearly twice as many Muslims in Thailand as there are in Britain? These Muslim communities have existed here for centuries, a fact that demolishes the writer’s claim that Islam is completely incompatible with Buddhist countries. (The violence in the South is a tragic exception, but the causes of that conflict are complex and longstanding.)

Robin Grant