One of the vilest aspects of antisemitism, all too evident in recent days, is the cowardly way bigots hide behind the “anti-Zionist” escape clause. And this is not confined to the Labour party’s front bench. Malia Bouattia, the first black, female, Muslim president of the National Union of Students, claims she has been misrepresented, and that although she is anti-Zionist she is not antisemitic.
It doesn’t work. The stench of visceral racial loathing lingers, an added reason in her case being Ms Bouattia’s wider agenda. She runs a campaign called, “Why is My Curriculum White?” The idea behind this, too, stinks.
Can the irony have escaped Ms Bouattia that she operates from Birmingham, where she lives and studies? Her parents moved there from Algeria, prospecting a better life. Despite several districts in our second city now being almost wholly occupied by Muslim and Hindu immigrants, Birmingham is as good a location as anywhere to stand as an example of why the curriculum is — and must remain for the foreseeable future — white.
Birmingham is famously the place where the scientific and industrial revolutions came together, in the form of the Lunar Society, whose luminaries included Joseph Priestley, James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Richard Arkwright, and John “Iron-Mad” Wilkinson. Their innovations (the steam engine, spinning machines, Wedgwood pottery, blast furnaces, factories) helped to create the enduring prosperity that attracted Ms Bouattia’s parents initially.
They are but two of who knows how many immigrants who have come here, searching for jobs, education and a stable life. Nonetheless, despite the numbers arriving daily, Britain is still an overwhelmingly white country, underlining that the attractions of the West are historically the achievements of white people.
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This is not a racist argument because it is not a genetic argument. Even so, it will hardly please Ms Bouattia and those who think like her. The unrivalled successes of the West owe less to the genetic genius of Europeans and rather more to the fact that the entire continent was, for centuries, a Christian land, Christendom. This insight is unavoidable, which is why the recent decision by academics at Oxford to so arrange things that one can obtain a theology degree there without studying Christianity in each of the three years is beyond parody.
Even a crusty atheist like me can applaud that Christian theology isn’t any old theology, like Buddhism, Hinduism or, yes, Islam. Christianity embraces the idea of a rational God, who reveals himself over time, and this understanding has incubated the main ideas by which we live:
Progress perfect knowledge was lost at the Fall; the task of humanity is to regain this knowledge.
Parliaments formed partly as a consequence of the battles between popes and kings in the Middle Ages.
Universities the next most important institutions after parliaments emerged from the great cathedral schools.
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Science Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln conceived the idea of the controlled experiment.
Capitalism the great works of Max Weber, RH Tawney and Robert Merton tease out the intimate links between Protestantism, capitalism and science.
Secularism St Thomas Aquinas introduced the idea that not everything falls within the realm of God.
“Scientific and industrial revolutions came together in Birmingham
This array answers Ms Bouattia’s curriculum question embarrassingly clearly. Yet aspects of her own Muslim history do offer her a way forward. In the mid-19th century, a tanzimat (reform) movement swept through Turkey, and then rolled over the Near East and north Africa. It was prompted by the Crimean War, when Christian and Islamic nations were allied against a Christian enemy (Russia), and Muslims saw close up what western science, engineering and medicine had achieved.
In consequence, more than 50 major thinkers emerged to campaign for the westernisation of Islam, the most important being Malkom Khan from Iran, Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi from Tunisia and Muhammad Abduh from Egypt.
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All three studied in Paris and returned home to champion western political, legal and scientific ideas for their countrymen. Khan proposed two assemblies, a popular assembly and another for the ulama or learned. Al-Tunisi made a survey of 21 European states and their political systems, counselling that the Muslim world should “steal from the best”. Abduh campaigned for female education, and for secular laws beyond Sharia. Tanzimat flourished until the catastrophe and chaos of the First World War. But it confirms that Islam can modernise, provided it embraces willingly the West’s accomplishments.
All of this means that Malia Bouattia should not be afraid to immerse herself in the white curriculum, as her distinguished forebears did. The sweep of history is what counts and the curriculum must reflect that. Like it or not, white Christians have played a bigger role in the creation of modernity than anyone else. It may not always be true, but for now it is.
When David Cameron said some months ago that all schools must teach British values, he was right but he was saying more than he perhaps intended. Even in a secular and multiracial UK, British values and institutions are predominantly derived from Christianity.
Peter Watson’s new book, Convergence: The Deepest Idea in the Universe, will be published in July