Graceless Islamophobia : Bashing the Archbishop

The nearest thing the British political blogosphere gets to a 'national treasure' is probably Archbishop Cranmer. Purveying a now quaint brand of Tory Anglicanism, a blog whose strapline is "examining politico-religious agendas with politico-religious objectives" doesn't immediately strike one as a recipe for success. However, Cranmer has a wide, and influential following. The denizens of Twitter play along with his habit of referring to himself in the third person as 'his grace', a nod in the direction of the dead theocrat whose name he has borrowed. Hold on, by the way, to the fact that Cranmer 2.0 is perhaps the only significant advocate in English politics for a tradition emphasising the identity of the State as religious, specifically Protestant -  a tradition whose bloody origins and historic advocacy of State-enforced religious uniformity cannot be entirely buried by any amount of tweeness. This awkward truth is not insignificant when assessing his grace's criticism of other religio-political traditions.

Anyway, I digress. Cranmer has an exalted fan club. His blog comes with a long list of approbations from MPs, bishops, and others (including a baffling imprimatur from the late Christian Socialist Movement). Not all of the reviews are entirely positive, it has to be said. Damien Thompson is quoted by the spectral archbishop as calling him "the ghastly Cranmer". Still, insults are signs of impact (nobody takes time out of their editorial schedule to ridicule the West Worthing Jigsaw Club) and there can be little doubt that Cranmer has impact.

This, to name the elephant in the room by jumping up and down very loudly shouting 'look, there's a bloody elephant', not withstanding the fact that his views on a whole range of topics are extremely nasty. Take his offering on Sayeeda Warsi and Sharia finance here.

Entitled "Baronness Warsi's Sharia priorities", the piece commences with a picture of Warsi in a hijab. I leave the semiotics of this to more qualified readers for analysis ("Beware, Here Be Muslamic things" is my best guess), he begins by noting Warsi's words after the meeting of a new Foreign Office group on Freedom of Religion and Belief:

Freedom of religion or belief is a personal priority for me. Across the world, people are being singled out and hounded out simply for the faith they follow or the beliefs they hold. The persecution of people because of their faith or belief has, I believe, become a global crisis. I want to make sure we have the best advice available. This is why we have set up this new Advisory Group, made up of real experts in the field, and of those who are working every day in practical ways to defend the right to freedom of religion or belief. I look forward to working with them as we seek to move towards a world where no-one is persecuted for what they believe.

The following day Warsi chaired a meeting of the Global Islamic Finance and Investment Group, a body concerned with the growth of sharia-compliant financial products which, if nothing else, is testimony to capitalism's thoroughly cosmopolitan potential. There are all sorts of interesting economic and financial questions around Islamic finance, but these do no detain Cranmer. She tweeted a lot about the meeting, which does seem to have upset him a little bit; it was certainly sufficient to bring out a sneering disdain for the Islamic, 'thank Allah that we're "Discussing how world finance centres can work together more closely to develop global #Islamicfinance market"'.

But the somewhat ironic irritation by a premier league blogger at the use of social media is only the hors d'oeuvre of outrage. Cranmer changes gear sharply,

His Grace can't help feeling that if Baroness Warsi exuded as much fervour and zeal about the persecution of Christians throughout the Middle East as she manages to conjure for sharia finance, HM Government might just begin to identify ways of alleviating the suffering, trauma and bloodshed that is occurring, as the Baroness observed last year, "on a biblical scale". It is utterly unacceptable that the only statement issued following the meeting of the Foreign Office group on Freedom of Religion or Belief was "Thought provoking". What are they going to do? When are they going to do it? How will foreign policy be geared toward the objective? 

Do not misunderstand my intention; the persecution of anyone (Christian or otherwise) by anyone else (Muslim or otherwise) is something that deserves attention, although that attention would be better focused if it were informed by an analysis of sectarianism which went beneath the surface of religiously-motivated persecution. The idea that religions just can't get along, or that one religion in particular is prone to oppress non-adherents, for all its shallowness serves a useful function in deflecting attention from the fragmenting effects on Middle Eastern societies of both military imperialism and struggles over oil wealth. That, however, is a left-wing commonplace. More interesting is the structure of Cranmer's rhetoric here. He has been talking about one issue involving some Muslim people, a discussion of Islamic finance, and has seamlessly shifted to another, the at once tragic and deeply complex reality of religious persecution. Baronness Warsi serves as a kind of middle term, simply by having jobs that require her to address both topics, but the deafeningly silent link is Islam. Cranmer echoes a standard line of Islamophobic thought: how come we are so accommodating to Muslims, when they are killing our brothers and sisters over there? What mugs we are.

An essentialised Islam faces down an equally essentialised Christianity. In this, and in many other ways, the Islamophobic Christian Right exactly mirrors the thought world of the most fundamentalist variants of Islamic thought. There need to be, for this particular bit of ideology to get a hold on our minds, such things as Muslim countries and Christian countries: in some sense every Muslim then needs to share in the guilt of countries coded as Muslim (there is an asymmetry here, of course, since Cranmer and his co-religionists are free to distance themselves from Western governments, and any suggestion that they share any kind of culpability for Fred Phelps or the Shankhill Butchers would be angrily dismissed. The situation regarding Muslims and such non-State agents as al Qaeda is, one imagines, less straightforward). This being so, the psychological stage is set for outrage on cue: why should they get mortgages when Christian coverts are in prison in Pakistan? This is only a question that makes sense within a certain ideological space, undermine that and it is as incomprehensible as asking why I am allowed to eat cake when there are cars parked on double yellow lines in Dalston.

For the slow-learner, the Christian-Muslim opposition is rendered explicit in the final paragraph:

And so the Baroness's Twitter feed becomes a metaphor for her real priorities: the pursuit of religious liberty is worth a photo-tweet and is "thought provoking"; sharia finance is worth a photo-tweet and a stream of tweets, with identifiable plans, opportunities, determination, tipping points, communications and a prime-ministerial speech. This, apparently, is #thoughtleadership, and in that Foreign-Office realm of faith, the suffering God is subject to Mohammed's Mammon.  

There you have it: this Muslim woman is crushing Jesus under the heel of the grasping Prophet. How dare she? The parallels with historic anti-Semitic discourse, by the way are fascinating: an opposition between Christian decency and the venal, worldly, Other, coming to a head at the Crucifixion.

 The use of the persecution of Christians as a lever for Islamophobia is by no means confined to the Cranmer blog. Consider the case of everyone's favourite retired right-wing Anglican bishop, Michael Nazir-Ali. It shouldn't need saying that it uses those victims as political fodder in a way that insults rather than expresses solidarity. It shouldn't need saying that it undermines efforts to do anything genuine to help these victims, not least by preventing a proper understanding of the causes of their plight. And it shouldn't need saying that it is the cassocked and surpliced outworking of the controlling ideology of the War on Terror. But, such are the times we live in, I felt the need to say those things anyway.

 His Grace sings Evensong