In yesterday's Times magazine there is an interesting article on Britain's current dilemma of how to deal with its sizeable Muslim population and the threat its more zealous individuals may pose to the UK and others abroad. Written by Christopher Caldwell, it details a society that is grappling to come to terms with this issue in the wake of last July's transit bombings as they try to strike a balance between the protection of civil liberties and religious freedoms with increased security for the wider population. For a location that is as geographically small, highly populated, and ethnically diverse as Britain is, the import is particularly concentrated after more than a decade of laxity helped lead to the attacks nearly one year ago.  Over the course of the intervening time Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has lurched into action, creating a twelve-step plan to target the issue by shoring up asylum and deportation laws and their enforcement, banning various hard-line Islamic groups, as well as proscribing related incendiary literature and the locations that sell it.

Compounding the matter, though, is the fact that three of the four bombers of last July were British-born citizens, as opposed to outraged imports as has previously been the case. As a result, Blair's administration has also tried a softer approach, attempting to reach out to the country's Muslim leaders in an effort to generate goodwill and more moderate stances at the sources for that population's information dissemination. As Campbell writes,

"Britain's approach — tightening up law enforcement for all its citizens, while trying to ensure that Muslims feel represented in every step of the process — differs from that of both the United States, which has focused on border control and electronic eavesdropping, and France, which relies on infiltration and an aggressive investigative judiciary. But its basic problem in fighting terrorism is the same one that all Western countries face. Britain is trying to clamp down on its Muslim communities and empower them at the same time. Clamp down too hard, and you alienate the people you want to win over. Empower communities indiscriminately, and you give free rein to people it is foolish to trust."

The problem, as Campbell notes, is how to identify the more moderate (and thus more receptive, ostensibly) members of this population. How do you separate the more politically passive or religiously flexible individuals from the 40 percent who favor the installment of Islamic law in Britain, if only in a "piecemeal," restricted fashion, according to a February poll in the Daily Mail? How do you distinguish between the temperate in predominantly Muslim areas in London and the majority who "sympathize viscerally and overwhelmingly with the radical position on Israel and, more generally, on foreign policy," according to Campbell? As he writes,

"What is a moderate Muslim? It could mean someone who's not very serious about his religion or someone who's quite serious about his religion but not very political about it. What of the common formulation that terrorism is "not Islam"? This could be a politically correct dodge or a hardheaded diagnosis that something more unholy is at work. The mainstream Islamic organizations, which unite Muslims around political grievances, are certainly a useful route into the British political system, but maybe they are whipping up those grievances in the first place. And nonbelievers are so numerous among people of immigrant background that dealing with religious leaders may be a wrongheaded strategy in the first place."

Finding the answers to these questions are difficult, and according to him slow in coming. There's been considerable pushback to segments of Blair's plan regarding how long suspects can be detained (28 days, pared down from the originally sought-after 90), how large areas are where people can be stopped and searched without reason (these Section 44 areas, named for the portion of the anti-terrorist legislation from which they came, are said to encompass virtually all of London, according to critics, and be arbitrarily determined), and how to enforce provisions banning the incitement of religious hatred. (Do jokes apply, or just intolerant, vitriolic prosletyzing calling for violent retaliation against one's transgressors?) And then there's the question of what's really to blame here -- the religion itself or its politically violent manifestations? Are the two linked at all or is the former being coopted to serve the latter's purposes? Campbell, for his part, seems to think there may be something to the latter assertion. He writes,

"When you talk to many Muslim leaders in Britain, you hear them focus almost obsessively on international politics, to the exclusion of religious, social and local political issues. The charitable way of looking at this is to say that it is a function of young people's burning to change the world... The uncharitable way is to say that even some mainstream religious leaders are practicing what the French Islamologist Olivier Roy calls 'neofundamentalism' — or what the Iranian journalist Amir Taheri calls 'a religion without a theology, a secular wolf disguised as a religious lamb.' If the 'religion' causing problems is not really about religious things at all, then the risk of talking at cross-purposes is high."

Campbell goes on say that Iraq has become a particularly poignant -- and convenient -- rallying point for the creation of future radicals. Besides the religious justifications given for the resistance -- that of the imperialist interloper in holy lands -- the situation in Iraq feeds the notion that "government is casual to the point of unconcern about the lives of Muslims," according to one British MP he interviewed.  It's difficult to discern how much truth there is to these sentiments, especially the latter half, and Campbell addresses some of the uncertainty below.

"Whether Iraq is a 'cause' of terror or a mere pretext is a difficult question...[I]f Iraq 'causes' someone to become a suicide bomber, it is almost certainly not in the way Western liberals understand political causation. The terrorist may already hold jihadist views. He may be whipped into bloodlust by images on TV or the Internet. He may regard the invasion of Iraq as an incursion upon the prerogatives of the Ummah — but the source of his anger is unlikely to be any supposed violation of international law. In the end, though, it may not matter if everyone means something different by 'Iraq.' A shared opposition to the war tightens the identification between radical and non-radical Muslims, and between both those groups and some members of the non-Muslim Western left, and this muddies the terms with which the battle of ideas around terrorism is fought."

For Sam Harris, though, author of the unbelievably interesting book, The End of Faith, there is no equivocation as to the root of the above: the intolerant, illogical underpinnings of faith, as well as one's unflinching adherence to it in spite of these facts. Harris' book  posits that modern faith -- Islam in particular, here, organized religion, in general -- and its ability to avoid any criticism or rational discussion over its veracity for fear of offending the believers, has caused, and continues to, an infinite number of problems globally. Because it isn't forced to adhere to the same levels of rigor and verification as other areas of intellectual and philosophical debate, Harris asserts we've created a situation where irrationality and delusion reign, which he fears is leading us towards a Huntington-esque showdown between Islam and the West. He writes,

"For anyone with eyes to see, there can be no doubt that religious faith remains a perpetual source of human conflict. Religion persuades otherwise intelligent men and women to not think, or to think badly, about questions of civilizational importance. And yet it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in our society, or to even observe that some religions are less compassionate and less tolerant than others. What is worst in us (outright delusion) has been elevated beyond the reach of criticism, while what is best (reason and intellectual honesty) must remain hidden, for fear of giving offense."

Harris states that part of the problem, and a key difference between Islam and western religions, is that bastardizations and corruptions of Christian texts to justify violence requires splitting hairs and misreading (or plain ignoring) a lot of what is there. With Islam, though, the inverse is true -- those who claim it to be non-violent in its majority are the ones splitting hairs as so much of the text is violent and intolerant in nature, stating explicitly and repeatedly what is to be done to non-believers, sinners, and transgressors of the faith. (Harris compiles a list of these statements in order to better illustrate his point and the list runs for over five pages, full-text. Amazing.) It is therefore no surprise that he writes,

"A future in which Islam and the West do not stand on the brink of mutual annihilation is a future in which most Muslims have learned to ignore most of their canon, just as most Christians have learned to do. Such a transformation is by no means guaranteed to occur, however."

The problem with all of these religions, he says, is that the form of faith they perpetuate is immune to the precepts of logic and reason, which only serves to lead us further and further down the rabbit hole of intolerance and stupidity. Harris explains,

"Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity it he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever…"The truth is that religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern…Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse – constraints like reasonableness, intellectual coherence, civility, and candor…Faith is nothing more than a willingness to await the evidence…it is the search for knowledge on the installment plan: believe now, live an untestable hypothesis until your dying day, and you will discover that you were right."

"The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism…by failing to live by the letter of the texts while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally… Not even politics suffers from the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and spiritual experience…Either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago – while our knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate – or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress…Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse cultural singularity – a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible…"It is time we realized that we need not be unreasonable to suffuse our lives with love, compassion, ecstasy, and awe; nor must we renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason."

Regardless of your religious beliefs (or lack thereof), Harris' book raises a slew of interesting questions (and more than its fair share of cockles, I imagine) and provides an incredibly cogent argument that maybe, for once, it's time to sit down and consider whether our religious tenets and teachings are more trouble than they're worth. For as he writes,

"If all that is good in religion can be had elsewhere -- if, for instance, ethical and spiritual experience can be cultivated and talked about without our claiming to know things we manifestly do not know -- then all the rest of our religious activity represents, at best, a massive waste of time and energy."

Perhaps it's time to put our money where our mouths are and justify that which we believe. Until next time, my friends...