It's not exactly light reading, and certainly not Jeffrey Archer, but over the summer I have read four particular books that I would recommend highly to anyone interested in engaging with some of the major issues of our time. All four books, each in their own unique way, relate to the theme of freedom - freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and freedom of speech. I don't necessarily agree with absolutely everything in them, but overall they are challenging, inspiring and profoundly thought-provoking.
My four recommendations are:
- Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas
- The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power, by Melanie Phillips
- Nomad: A Personal Journey Through The Clash of Civilisations, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr, edited by Clayborne Carson
A word or two about each of them.
Bonhoeffer
Metaxas' biography of Bonhoeffer is absolutely gripping - extraordinarily researched and engagingly written, it presents Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a major challenge to the contemporary Church and society. Hitler, Metaxas writes, was disdainful of Christians, believing that they preached "meekness and flabbiness". There's a warning in that for today's Church. Bonhoeffer stood in stark contradiction to this perception, and is a role model for Christians today.
A rare combination of passionate belief and open-minded breadth, Bonhoeffer rejected both the woolliness of ultra-liberals and the harsh dogmatism of ultra-conservative evangelicals. And he stood firmly for freedom, ultimately surrendering his life for the cause. As Metaxas notes, he was horrified at the Church's appeasement of the Nazis. "Action was the only thing these bullies feared, but neither the ecumenical movement nor the Confessing Church seemed prepared to act," Metexas writes. "They preferred to keep up a meaningless and endless dialogue and played into their enemies hands". Again, lessons for today, not just for the Church but for foreign policy makers dealing with dictators.
Ultimately, Bonhoeffer followed in a long line of Christians who saw human rights and political freedom as integral to their faith. Along with William Wilberforce, and to be followed by Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu, Bonhoeffer followed in Moses' tradition of saying to those in power: "Let my people go". The church in Bonhoeffer's view, Metaxas says, "existed for 'others' ... to reach out beyond itself, to speak out for the voiceless, to defend the weak and fatherless." This is a book that should be read by every Christian, but not only by Christians. Anyone with an interest in that period of history, its relevance to today and a concern for freedom would find Bohoeffer's story, as told by Metaxas, inspiring.
The World Turned Upside Down
Melanie Phillips' new book is typically bracing. The world needs the likes of Melanie Phillips, to sound the trumpet, to rattle the cage, to wake us up. She provides a very well-researched, well-substantiated, acerbicly argued rejection of ultra-political correctness, looking at the major issues of militant secularism, radical Islamism, environmental extremism, anti-Semitism, Israel and Iraq. "The postreligious Western world is struggling to adjust to a profound loss of moral and philosophical moorings," she writes. Summing up at least parts of our society quite accurately, she concludes that:
"A consequence of this radical discombobulation is widespread moral, emotional and intellectual chaos, resulting in shattered and lonely lives, emotional incontinence and gullibility to fraud and charlatranry."
It is packed with little-known facts, such as that today there are at least 100,000 practicing Pagans in the UK, a Pagan Police Association has been established and Hertfordshire police force allows officers eight days' pagan holidays a year. In 2007, Phillips notes, "450 scientists from more than two dozen countries, several of them current and former participants in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), voiced significant objections to the claims made by the IPCC and Al Gore". By last year, the number had risen to 700 scientists. Yet, she points out, the climate change dogma has taken root so much that a Stalinist intolerance of debate and dissent results in respected scientists being demonised and dismissed as mentally ill if they so much as question the new orthodoxy.
I don't necessarily agree with Phillips on everything. She is right to champion the values of intellectual and academic rigour and debate, and thereby defend freedom of speech and reject the tendency to repel, remove and character assassinate dissident voices. Yet she undermines her case by failing to clearly and uncategorically acknowledge that even if the science on climate change is debatable, there is still a very good case for wise stewardship of the environment. We should protect our countryside and natural beauty, and therefore minimise pollution, reduce the destruction of trees, avoid dropping litter, use our finite natural resources more sparingly, recycle and renew our environment. If she had emphasised that more strongly, her well-founded argument for freedom of thought and speech would be enhanced.
Similarly, Phillips is right to seek to restore some balance to how we view Israel - but she would have helped her cause if she had at least acknowledged that not all Palestinians are Hamas or Hezbollah, and that the suffering of ordinary Palestinians is very real. The key to Israel's security is a just solution for the Palestinians, and so we need to be not blindly pro- or anti-Israel, nor blindly pro- or anti-Palestinian, but pro-freedom, pro-justice, pro-human rights, pro-security and pro-peace. Indeed, we are at our most pro-Israeli if we are genuinely concerned about the plight of the Palestinians.
Where Phillips sounds the most needed wake-up call is on the subject of radical Islamism. She writes:
This is a battle for the future of Islam between those who want to accommodate it to Western ideas of liberty and human dignity, and those who wish to impose Islamic theocracy upon the world instead. No one can say what the result of this battle will be.
Treating the radicals with kid gloves is not the way to go. The radicals don't like it when we associate them with terrorism, and so in our ultra-politically correct way we strip our references to terrorism of all mention of Islamism. As Phillips points out, often a complaint about associating Islamists with violence results in a threat of violence. "This amounts to declaring, in effect: 'Say one more time that I'm violent and I'll kill you'". While of course we need the caveats, to treat ordinary Muslims with respect, to recognise that the vast majority are peaceable, law-abiding, hospitable, to avoid gross over-generalisations, we need at the same time to shed our paranoia of causing offence if we are to have a hope of tackling extremism. We also need to shed our guilt complex. 9/11 happened before Afghanistan and Iraq, remember? "Islamists declare war against the West, but then accuse the West of trying to destroy the Islamic world," notes Phillips.
This tour de force concludes with an analysis of why Britain is at the forefront of these issues: a hub for militant Islamism, a centre for anti-Semitism and a citadel of ultra-politically correct militant secularism. It is no coincidence, Phillips says, that British teenagers today have some of the highest levels of antisocial behaviour in Europe - binge drinking, drug use, teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Why?:
"Educational standards are in freefall. Public space has been coarsened and degraded. There is widespread breakdown in civility and respect. Obscenities have become commonplace in public discourse ... Britain has been systematically hollowing out its own culture, for two intimately related reasons: a loss of its national identity and purpose, and the crumbling of religious belief that underpinned its moral codes."
This has happened because of an unholy alliance between secular liberals and Islamists:
"The correspondences between Western progressives and Islamists are really quite remarkable ... Both permit no dissent from the one revealed truth; both demonize and seek to suppress their opponents; both project their own bad behaviour onto others; both are consumed by paranoid conspiracy theories ... Both have ended up suppressing freedom and imposing a tyranny of the mind."
Whether or not you agree with her, Phillips' book is a work of philosophy which easily rivals Chris Patten's tome grappling with contemporary challenges, What Next?, and should be required reading for anyone interested in politics and society.
Nomad
Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserves complete, unreserved respect for her extraordinary courage in leaving Islam and speaking out. In Nomad, as in her previous book Infidel, she offers a passionate and deeply personal critique of the Islamic world from first-hand experience, an eloquent and inspiring defence of the Enlightenment values of freedom, and a robust challenge to the non-Muslim world - and interestingly, particularly to the Christian Church - to wake up. While declaring herself an atheist, she writes:
"The Christianity of love and tolerance remains one of the West's most powerful antidotes to the Islam of hate and intolerance .... The West urgently needs to compete with the jihadis, the proponents of a holy war, for the hearts and minds of its own Muslim immigrant populations."
Education for Muslim women, job opportunities for Muslim women, and liberation for Muslim women are the keys, she argues.
Like Phillips' book, Hirsi Ali's is eye-wateringly politically incorrect, but coming from her own personal experience, she has every right to say the things she does and her message needs to be heard. I would unreservedly defend her right to change her religion and beliefs, and to speak out freely. Where I part company with her is that she appears to have lost hope that it is possible to be a Muslim and a democrat, to follow Islam and champion progressive values. Ultimately this is a debate to be resolved among Muslims, but I know people who count themselves Muslim and are robust champions of religious freedom, pluralism, human rights and democracy. They are epitomised by the former Indonesian President and Islamic cleric Abdurrahman Wahid. I have met such people, in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the UK and among the Rohingya Muslims from Burma and the Ahmadiyya Muslims whose motto is "Love for all, Hatred for none". Hirsi Ali's own personal experience of Islam was deeply oppressive, and so it is understandable she has taken the path she has. But I am uncomfortable with writing off all of her former co-religionists. Nevertheless, Nomad is a must read and Hirsi Ali's voice is one which we should applaud for its freshness, courage, integrity and profound relevance.
Martin Luther King
To bring the reading list to a close, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King,Jr is one of the most uplifting, humbling and challenging books I have ever read. Compiled by an editor long after his death, it draws on Martin Luther King's speeches, diaries and papers, and is largely written in his voice. Rich in moral values and soaring oratory in equal measure, the book provides the perfect answer to the challenges set out by Phillips and Hirsi Ali, and a resolute echo of the example provided by Bonhoeffer. With Martin Luther King's words "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" providing the backdrop, the editor remarks:
On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' And Vanity comes along and asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But Conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.
It goes on, in Martin Luther King's original words:
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge, moments of great crisis and controversy ...
You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticised or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house. So you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at thirty-eight as you would be at ninety. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to take a stand for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice."
In between Peter Mandelson's The Third Man and Andrew Rawnsley's The End of the Party, take time to read these four books and discover what life should really be about.
