THE ‘ERA OF FREEDOM’

THE ‘ERA OF FREEDOM’ We find ourselves caught up in a religious War, a war of ideas... Their (British people) reaction arouses no less passionate feelings of outrage in us because it is equally offensive to our religion. By “our religion”, I do not mean Christianity. The Christian establishment is, in fact, very awkwardly placed in this affair: it disapproves strongly of incitement to murder but feels some sympathy with the Muslim demand for censorship of “blasphemy”. However, Christianity is no longer the religion of Britain in the sense that Islam is the religion of Iran. It is not Christianity that binds us together as a community because we have long since given up trying to impose religious uniformity on ourselves or to exclude unbelievers and members of other faiths from full participation in our national life. The religion of this country and of the “Free World” to which it belongs is, precisely, freedom. Its founding fathers are Locke, Voltaire, Burke, Wilkes, and Tom Paine, the authors of the American Constitution and the La Déclaration des droits de l’Homme. Unlike Iranians, we are brought up to think it primitive to fight over metaphysical beliefs but to think of fighting for freedom as something admirable. Of course, like other peoples, we practise this religion imperfectly, and not everyone takes it as seriously as journalists, the self-appointed priests or mullahs of the cult. But the idea of sentencing a writer to death for what he wrote is just as offensive to modern Western sensibilities as the idea that Christ might have liked to make love to Mary Magdalene or that the Prophet might occasionally have listened to