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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.
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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.
But we do need to be clearer about the difference between secularism and atheism. Secularism should be an argument about arrangements for a shared public and social life; atheism is an argument about scientific truth, individual liberation and the nature of the good life. Today's debate on Islam is bedevilled by a confusion between the two. Atheists must be free to say to Muslims, Christians or Jews: "Your mind would be much more free if you gave up your ridiculous belief in God." Believers must be free to argue back: "You would have a more profound sense of personal freedom if you did believe." But neither is entitled to demand that of the other as a condition for participating as a citizen in a free society. The public policy argument about freedom for religion and the private conviction argument about freedom from or within it should be on different levels.
That distinction would, of course, no longer hold if being a devout Muslim were incompatible with being a full citizen of a free society. This is what quite a few participants in the current debate really believe, while seldom spelling it out so clearly. Yet, the thought keeps peeping through - for example, as "Islam is incompatible with democracy." But as a non-Muslim, I can only agree with author Edward Mortimer, who, in Faith and Power, concluded there is no single, unchanging Islam, "there is only what I hear Muslims say, and see them do." What Muslims say and do, in the name of Islam, has varied enormously through history, and varies enormously today. Yes, of course, there is the Koran and the Hadith, just as there is the Bible. But, as in all great religions, these are complex texts, subject to diverse interpretation.
When a Muslim letter writer in The Guardian tells us, with the aid of Koranic references, that Islam, properly understood, supports "the vital principle of freedom of speech," what possible interest have we non-Muslim liberals in arguing against him? If a Christian supports the rule of law, as we understand it in a 21st-century secular liberal state, we don't cry: "But your Old Testament says, 'Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth!' " Unless, of course, an atheist agenda - to show that religion is not just nonsense but dangerous nonsense - trumps the secular liberal agenda, which is to find the ways in which people with different beliefs can live together peacefully in freedom.
