My Muslim Brothers – We Need You!

By "we" I mean British/Western conservatives and traditionalists – Christians.

By "need" I mean urgently require (in the face of Western materialist/self-indulgent hedonism).

By "you" I mean theistic men and women, followers of Mohammed, whose thinking is essentially conditioned by moral concepts, who believe that God created the World for His purpose.

Am I ever going to become a Muslim? No. But I am closer to Islam than I am to what I regard as the void at the heart of modern Britain.

Do I have a problem with Islam's failure to embrace Democracy, with its apparent sexism, with the violence of Islamism, with Islam's failure to distinguish between Religion and Politics, with the racism of many Muslims with respect to the Jews, with extreme reactions to infringements to "honour"? Indeed I do.

All the same, we have so much more in common with each other than we have with the ghastly zeitgeist of contemporary Britain.

You have much to remind us about family values – the care that you take of your extended family members. You don't say, "Abdul, it's OK to be dependent on the State; Aisha, it's OK for you to have multiple children by multiple fathers." In Britain one-in-five children is born to parents who have never worked – not so in Egypt or Indonesia.

Political Secularism appeals to me not because my outlook is secular but because state interference in religious practice has always been horrible, in Christendom and in Islamic societies.

Whenever Christians and Muslims have attempted to create Heaven on Earth, the result has been appalling – though our common enemies, the Socialists, have, literally, created Hell. I would rather live in Iran than in North Korea.

Muslims have slaughtered other Muslims; Christians have burned other Christians at the stake – not a record to be proud of!

The contribution that Islamic scholarship has made to Western culture is enormous. Thank you!

We (Christians) have given the World Science and Democracy (the least bad system of government) – but pretty bad! Is there an alternative to Theocracy and to electorates that vote themselves ever more generous entitlements – which impoverish societies so catastrophically? For what it is worth, I regard this as an important question – to which I don't have a ready answer.

Incidentally, we Westerners (not Christians) have also given the World Scientism, the idea that Science is the only proper way of understanding the World – profound apologies!

Jews, Christians and Muslims should be in dialogue. We should fraternally oppose the bad guys – those who declare that morality is subjective. We have many problems to resolve. I would be dishonest to pretend that I don't think Catholicism is the best religion. As a Libertarian, however, I think that we can agree that non-aggression is a good basis for living in harmony – that we have more to gain by fighting our common enemies than by fighting each other.

Christians have recently had a pathetic record of even attempting to increase their numbers. Catholics don't seem even to want everyone to be a Catholic. I do! But I'd rather my countrymen were Muslims than Materialists.