Cabbages & Kings: Britain's faith deficit

“Don’t meditate to ‘find yourself’
There is no silver needle,
Only the vast haystack
Of your confusion.”
From Robust Bandobast by Bachchoo

A school in Guernsey raised eyebr-ows and stimulated nationwide comment when its department of religious studies asked 12 and 13-year old pupils to write a letter to their parents explaining the satisfaction of converting to Islam. Some commentators implied that this was a sort of subversive move by a teacher or a department to groom impressionable children.

The school, of course, made clear that this was an exercise in empathy with the values of another religion, that the “letters” would remain in the exercise books and not be sent to the parents who would undoubtedly be alarmed and also that the exercise was a legitimate test of knowledge about a nationally approved part of the syllabus.

A convert to Islam, say at university age, of which there are many examples on British campuses today, may of his/her own accord have written such a letter to parents. The exercise that was set by the Brighton school asked the 12 and 13-year olds to consider the satisfactions that their new religion may bring.
I fervently hope, though none of the comments have hinted at such an extension, that the religious studies department didn’t venture into martyrdom territory.
It may be true that children in the heartlands of the contemporary turmoil in Islamic countries are told that blowing themselves up as suicide bombers will ensure them an instant transition to paradise. Children in Brighton, whether they are born Muslim or not, should be told no such thing.

Is 13 a bit young to be burdened with or stimulated to such an exercise in empathy? One of the ethical lessons civilised societies hold is that putting oneself in someone else’s shoes is a part of righteousness. It’s an essential part of socialisation. The shoes may be heavier or lighter, wobblier or higher-heeled than one is used to, but learning to walk in them is fine. Catching athlete’s foot from wearing them is not so good.

Setting Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and Buddhism on a school religious studies syllabus is part of the attempt of British schools to embrace multiculturalism, and to recognise that Britain is becoming a multi-faith society. But is it? Having been born into and brought up in a genuinely multi-faith society — India — I can see that Britain may have, over the ages and through the present decades, acquired synagogues, mosques, temples and Vedantic societies and retreats, but it isn’t as yet a multi-faith society in the robust sense that the India of my growing up years was.

I don’t mean to imply that India isn’t any more. The currents of bigotry have imposed some strains in the last decades but in essence it remains so.
Most of the English-speaking elite today, and all of them in my years of growth in the 1950s and ’60s, went to schools founded and run by Christian denominations. There were Catholic schools and Protestant schools.

We pupils, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Parsis sang hymns, said the Lord’s Prayer and listened to Bible readings every morning at assembly. In the evenings and at home we went the way of our own faiths. We undoubtedly absorbed the fact that Christians, from John, Mary, Peter and Paul to the Toms, Dicks, Harrys and Evangelistas among us, believed that Jesus was God on earth. If we were Muslim we continued to believe that Issah was a prophet, but that God couldn’t have children or a fragment of himself be born as a human and we would certainly have believed that Muhammad was the last prophet.

If we were Hindu we would have believed that Ram and Krishna were both Vishnu incarnate and that even Jesus might have been (in fact, a theologian of the Hare Krishna persuasion insisted that both Jesus and Muhammad were incarnations of Vishnu, sent to preach dharma!).

I can’t remember any one of my contemporaries who converted to Christianity through the pieties of our daily assemblies. Neither can I think of any parent who objected to the proceedings of these assemblies. Now looking back on it, there must have been the assumption among us pupils and our parents that knowing about other faiths would not in any way erode our identities as Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs or Parsis. Was this because the traditions, rituals, routines and celebrations of our own faiths so permeated our lives and beliefs that there was no danger of seriously wavering?

In Britain recently there was a public debate in which some mullahs castigated Muslim families for celebrating Christmas, having declared in Friday sermons that such celebration was either haram or kufr or some other category of taboo.

I can’t recall any such injunction in India. It’s true we didn’t eat turkey or go to the fire temple on December 25, but we gave each other presents and as teenage boys went to midnight mass as a way of staying out late and smoking leafy substances out of the jurisdiction of parents and guardians.

We celebrated Diwali with lamps and sweets and some of us shuffled and danced through the night till dawn behind the tajia or taboot processions of the Shia communities of Pune. Despite the multi-faith efforts of archbishops, rabbis, mullahs and acharyas who conference now and then to declare a common devotion to higher things, Britain remains hermetically divided by its religions.

This is not seen universally as a good way to be. This month the Muslim Council of Britain held a Visit My Mosque Day. The sponsors claimed that thousands availed of the opportunity “to see how Muslims connect to God, connect to communities and to neighbours around them”. No doubt some went for the tea and samosas on offer.

It wasn’t, just as the Brighton school exercise wasn’t, an attempt at conversion to Islam. They were both attempts at stimulating empathy. Only the visit was, unlike the school exercise, for adults and was voluntary.