A great debate of our time concerns how people with different religions, ethnicities and values can live together as full citizens of free societies.
Here's the common thread that runs through half a dozen news stories every day. One day this week, for example: a teacher arrested in Sudan for allowing children to call a teddy bear Mohammed; the ethnically mixed housing estates around Paris up in smoke again; Israeli-Palestinian peace talks; a London Jewish school criticized after insisting that, to qualify for admission, an applicant's mother had to be born Jewish; an Oxford debating society offers a platform to Holocaust denier David Irving.
Recently, discussion of Muslims in Europe has crystallized around a few personalities, including some views attributed to me. Such a personalization of the issues helps to dramatize them, but it also risks disappearing down obscure polemical back alleys of the "who did or did not say what about whom" variety. It's probably more useful to restate some of the basics of the secular liberal position I propose.
Muslims start from Islam. Liberals start from liberalism - properly understood as a quest for the greatest possible measure of individual human freedom, compatible with the freedom of others. Faced with the challenges of diversity, we citizens need to agree and spell out more clearly the essentials of a free society.
Among the essentials is freedom of expression, which has been eroded to an alarming degree, both by death threats from extremists and by pre-emptive appeasement by state and private bodies. Freedom of expression necessarily includes the right to offend. We must, in particular, be free to say what we like about historical figures - Jesus, Mohammed, Churchill, Hitler or Gandhi - and then let our claims be tested against the evidence. We may not agree with what controversialists say about these figures, but we must defend to the death their right to say it. There should, obviously, be limits to what we are free to say about living people, but very tightly drawn.
Among the liberal essentials is equality before the law, including equal rights for men and women. Another essential is freedom of religion.
Since a core liberal notion is that we must be free not just to pursue our own version of the good life but also to question and revise it, it follows that we must be free to propagate, question, change or abandon our religion.
In a free society, proselytization, heresy and apostasy are no crimes. This is not accepted by many versions of Islam, but it is a liberal essential on which there can be no compromise.
To secure these freedoms, we need a secular public sphere. But what exactly do we mean by that? To say "Enlightenment values" prompts the question, "Which Enlightenment?" The Enlightenment of John Locke, which claimed freedom for religion, or that of Voltaire, which aspired rather to freedom from religion? (I deliberately simplify a complex history.) A liberal order in which the devotees of all gods are free to try their hand in the public square, on an equal footing with those who insist that there is no god? Or a liberal order in which all gods are kept as far as possible out of the public square? I'm more of a Lockean myself, but I don't think this debate is best pursued at the abstract level. Better to tackle specific issues: faith schools, new mosques, the teaching of evolution, hijab, Mohammed cartoons.
