On April 26, I returned to my alma mater, the University of Edinburgh, to attend a film screening hosted by the Edinburgh chapter of Academics for Academic Freedom. The film, Adult Human Female, is a gender-critical documentary, which is all you need to know to understand why it has caused such a fracas.

The academics had tried to screen it last December but the event was disrupted and shut down by a gang of activists who took offence at the film’s content. I had not tried to attend that time, but thought I should go along to the rescheduled showing on 26th April. As it happens, I am not particularly interested in the gender wars. I have my criticisms of the radical feminists as well as the gender ideologues. But the gender debate is, among other things, a central free speech battle, and free speech is something I care about very much. I wanted to express solidarity with the organisers.

There was a loud protest outside the venue—a crowd of people behind a barrier, a loudspeaker blaring out cheesy music, and speeches about how evil the film was. Fine, I thought. They have every right to protest. But then I discovered that masked activists (apparently, or at least officially, unaffiliated with the protestors) had shut off all entries to the venue. University security could not remove them for fear of escalation, so the screening was cancelled.

You may say this is just another drama in the long, slow, agonising death of academic freedom and free speech at British universities. But familiarity should not breed complacency. Disruptions like the one I have just described should always inspire anger. They cannot be allowed to become normal, unremarkable events. Masked activists shut down, essentially by force, a screening of a film about an important and controversial matter of public concern – on a university campus, no less! If important and controversial issues cannot be debated at universities, then what exactly is the point of having them in the first place?

The details of the gender debate and of the disruption on 26th April are not the point here. The point is that the threat to academic freedom and free speech posed by ideological zealots – or self-righteous bores, as I prefer to call them – is real and dangerous. I bring up the Edinburgh example only as a recent illustration of this threat, and one which occurred shortly before I read Professor Steven Greer’s new book – and because it recurred to me often as I read it.

Falsely Accused of Islamophobia: My Struggle Against Academic Cancellation relates Greer’s experience of being silenced by people who did not like what he was saying. Greer’s story is in many ways different from the Edinburgh disruption, but at the same time shares some important features with it and with other recent attacks on free speech at universities. [See our interview with Greer – Ed.]

Greer, Professor Emeritus of Human Rights at the University of Bristol, was the target of a complaint by Bristol’s student Islamic Society (BRISOC) that he was an Islamophobic bigot who had, inter alia, mocked the Quran in a lecture and denied that Uighur Muslims were being persecuted in China.

The complaint was, as the merest glance at the evidence shows, full of lies and misrepresentations. In February 2021, BRISOC went public with their complaint and targeted Greer with a social media campaign designed to intimidate him into apologising or resigning. Later that year, Greer was completely cleared of all charges by the university. Throughout all this, the University of Bristol, and Greer’s own Law School in particular, were either useless in the face of, or actually compliant with, BRISOC’s harassment of Greer.  

Greer has since retired from Bristol and has become the Research Director at the Oxford Institute for British Islam. He is currently pursuing litigation against his old university. In Falsely Accused of Islamophobia, he aims to put his story down comprehensively, rebut publicly all the allegations made against him, and persuade universities and academics to take the threat posed by what he calls ‘illiberal leftism’ more seriously.

In writing this book, Greer has provided a document that is very valuable to those of us who care about academic freedom and free speech. He forthrightly defends himself and expertly dismantles the pathetic case that was made against him. And, in a chapter reflecting on the broader trend of illiberal leftism on campuses, he shows that ‘cancel culture’ and the like are not right-wing myths but real – and dangerous – phenomena.  

Perhaps even worse than the cases of campus authoritarianism that make the headlines are all the cases which are less dramatic in their cause, and which do not garner as much media interest, but are no less chilling in their effects. Indeed, although it is impossible to know how many students and academics have self-censored in fear of the consequences they could face for expressing an unfashionable opinion, it is almost certainly a large number. Greer cites the cases and the data to prove that cancel culture and campus illiberalism are, even if their extent is sometimes exaggerated, very much not merely products of right-wing fantasy.

There are, however, some stylistic problems with this book. In some ways, it is too academic. For instance, chapters are mapped out at the beginning and summarised at the end, textbook-style. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make for sometimes repetitive, bloated reading. It certainly makes it less engaging.

Greer also uses language—“snowflakery” or “wokeism”—that is likely to put off the very people he is trying to reach. To be clear, he defines these terms correctly and uses them in very precise ways. He is not frothing at the mouth and screaming ‘TRIGGERED SNOWFLAKES!!!’ Unfortunately, however, his use of this language will make it easier for his enemies to dismiss him as just such a frother.

Finally, the book could have done with a more thorough copy-edit. The overuse and occasional misuse of commas is distracting. For example: “What might be done to tackle these toxic trends and to cultivate a more tolerant and less censorious, hair-trigger, environment?” Or: “The Committee, thus not only presumed to know more about the scope and remit of my research than I do myself; it also ignored the fact that…” Perhaps I am being pedantic and allowing my inner English teacher to come out, but this sort of thing is grating and destabilises my reading experience.

I said that Greer’s story is different from the Edinburgh film disruption, but that many of the core issues at stake are the same. This is true, so far as it goes, but it is not the whole story. There is one aspect of Greer’s case that distinguishes it from other campus controversies: it is a controversy involving one very sensitive religion.

Greer is correct to point out the strange alliance between ‘woke’ authoritarians and often-conservative Muslim students. In short: the latter are ‘oppressed’, so the former must stand with them in all things. Illiberal leftism is indeed at the root of many of our contemporary campus woes. But Greer’s story is about how he was targeted by an Islamic group – and yet, for some reason, he spends very little time on this part of the problem.

There are a few mentions of Salman Rushdie and Charlie Hebdo; and Greer writes, shockingly, of feeling so threatened that he had to leave his home for a few days. But mostly he blames illiberal leftism and elucidates the ways in which the Bristol Islamic Society’s complaint fits into that ideology. Indeed it does, but is there not another interesting and important story to be discussed here?

They may use the language of ‘wokeism’, but cries of offence and calls for retribution have long been used by illiberal Muslims. In fact, such cries have been used by all powerful religions throughout history. The illiberal leftists are neophytes in comparison. Could it be that the causal relationship is the other way around? That is, have the ‘woke’ inherited their brittleness from the religious impulse, rather than conservative believers adopting ‘woke’ language for their own ends? No doubt the original, godly offence-takers will adopt whatever garb seems most alluring at any given moment, but still, they did it first. It would have been interesting to hear Greer’s views on this subject.

Another difference between typical illiberal campus culture and Islamic illiberalism is that the latter comes with very real threats of violence and even murder. Think of Samuel Paty and the Batley schoolteacher in hiding for displaying an image of Mohammed to his class. Religious fanatics are past masters of cancel culture, in a much more sinister sense of the term. Greer’s neglect of the Islam(ism) theme is a puzzling oversight. But perhaps this is slightly unfair—after the trauma of being targeted by an Islamic mob, and with the examples of Paty and countless others in mind, Greer might be forgiven for glossing over the topic in this way.

I was also disappointed that Greer takes the silly word ‘Islamophobia’ at face value. Such an imprecise word, and one which has so often been used to demonise all critics of Islam as bigots, is a word not worth having. In defending himself from what he once or twice more properly calls ‘anti-Muslim prejudice’, Greer arguably gives too much ground. Defining Islamophobia as ‘visceral prejudice against Muslims and Islam based on myth, caricature and misrepresentation’ shuts off quite a lot of what I am sure Greer would consider legitimate criticism of Islam. The Charlie Hebdo cartoons were, quite literally, caricatures. Why should hatred, even blind, stupid hatred, of a particular belief system be equated with prejudice against a group of people?

By lumping together ‘visceral prejudice against Muslims and Islam [my emphasis]’, Greer makes easier the job of the fanatics who wish to equate the criticism of ideas and beliefs with bigoted hatred of an entire, and very diverse, demographic. Perhaps this is simply an issue of tone: as an academic specialist who has spent many years comparing human rights in the West, in Islam, and in Asia, Greer may be inclined to be cautious and careful.  

Still, the choice is surely not between vile bigotry and respectful disagreement. Ruthless satire and the mockery of sacred beliefs—even hatred of and disgust at certain ideas—do not a bigot make. That is why terms like ‘anti-Muslim prejudice’ or ‘anti-Muslim hatred’ are preferable. They are much more precise and do not conflate bigotry against people with criticism, however savage or merciless it may be, of ideas. I think Greer would agree with this, but sometimes he comes off as too defensive. Again, perhaps this is understandable, given everything he has been through. Indeed, his descriptions of the personal consequences of the campaign of vilification against him are the book’s most moving, and angering, parts.

All in all, Greer’s book is an essential addition to the literature on cancel culture and academic illiberalism. And it is heartening to see him still fighting the good fight despite everything he has been put through. Those who ought to be ashamed are the Bristol Islamic Society and Bristol University itself, along with all those colleagues and acquaintances who sided with Greer’s harassers or, perhaps even worse, maintained a cowardly silence in the face of all the lies and the intimidation.

It is to be hoped that more academic victims of cancel culture will write their own stories in future. If they do it half as comprehensively as Greer has, then they will have achieved something extremely important: they will have rebuked – and exposed – their persecutors.

Falsely Accused of Islamophobia: My Struggle Against Academic Cancellation, by Steven Greer, was published by Academica Press on 13 February 2023.

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The post Cancel culture and religious intolerance: ‘Falsely Accused of Islamophobia’, by Steven Greer appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

An expert on human rights might seem to be an unlikely target for censorship by a British university. Yet this is what happened to Steven Greer, emeritus Professor of Human Rights at Bristol Law School and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Royal Society of Arts, in the years leading up to his retirement in 2022. As reported by the Free Speech Union and elsewhere, in October 2020, the president of the Bristol University Islamic Society (BRISOC) complained to the authorities that Greer’s module on ‘Islam, China and the Far East’, on the Human Rights in Law, Politics and Society (HRLPS) unit, was ‘Islamophobic’. In February 2021, despite being warned not to go public about a matter still under investigation, BRISOC set up an online petition that featured a photograph of the professor next to a sign saying ‘Stop Islamophobic teaching’.

In July 2021, Greer was cleared of all allegations after an independent enquiry lasting five months. Nevertheless, he claims, some of his colleagues in the Law School effectively prevented him from teaching the module again in the last of his thirty-six years there. Moreover, ‘Although the complaint [against Greer] was not upheld,’ as the university publicly admitted, the latter also ‘recognised BRISOC’s concerns and the importance of airing differing views constructively.’ Greer argues that the university’s conduct ‘sent a clear signal’ that he was ‘guilty of Islamphobia in spite of having been officially exonerated.’ His latest book, Falsely Accused of Islamophobia: My Struggle Against Academic Cancellation, which contains a full record of his ordeal, was published by Academica Press on 13 February 2023.

In January 2022, as a direct consequence of the BRISOC scandal, Greer was appointed to a non-stipendiary Visiting Research Fellowship at the Oxford Institute for British Islam, a fledgling UK charity whose stated aim is to develop ‘an authentic Islam that is rooted in and relevant to life in 21st century Britain…and which has taken on board the useful nuances and good personality of British life and culture without compromising any of the fundamentals of the faith.’ He later became OIBI’s Research Director.

I met Greer over tea in Piccadilly, London. In the interview which follows, he talks to me about the origins and course of the campaign of vilification against him, including its allegations of Islamophobia, and his response. We explore the reasons for the failure of his fellow academics and Bristol University to defend his right to responsible scholarly discussion about Islam.

Greer also looks back on his youth in Belfast during the Troubles, his early research into counter-terrorism in Northern Ireland, and his assessment of Prevent, the UK government’s controversial counter-extremism strategy after 9/11. Finally, we consider two knotty problems: how Islam can be best integrated into and accepted by modern British society, and how we in the UK can move beyond the polarising mindset of the culture wars.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

Freethinker: Do you have any religious or spiritual beliefs?

Steven Greer: I would describe myself as a freethinker – one who inclines towards classic liberal values: human rights, democracy, rule of law, and open markets with a touch of Oriental mysticism and Buddhism. I have a sense of the spiritual, if you like. But my interest in Buddhism is open-ended – it is more about contemplation and meditation. This is possible without endorsing its finer points, except perhaps for the basic ideas of impermanence and insubstantiality.

Could you tell us a bit about your background and where you grew up?

I come from Belfast and grew up in a very devout, liberal Methodist family. My parents were not very political and were uncommonly anti-sectarian. I suppose that gave me the opportunity to think for myself. I went to a state grammar school. Looking back on that, the thing I value most was that our teachers also encouraged us to think for ourselves.

Today, would you see yourself as Irish or British?

I am British-Irish or Irish-British – I have had both passports for decades. That was another thing that was unusual in my upbringing, because my father in particular always insisted that we recognised our Irish identity. It has become fashionable recently for more Protestants in Northern Ireland, and people further afield, to claim Irish citizenship, particularly because of Brexit. I was ahead of the game. However, I am proud of both my British and Irish identity, and I recognise the strengths and flaws of each. In both cases, there have been negative and positive elements.

What are your research interests?

My research was initially motivated by my experience of growing up in the Troubles, which blighted my teenage years. There were gangs roaming the streets, you could easily get caught up in fights, and you could be blown up or shot at a moment’s notice. I was very perplexed by this: why was it happening? How had I ended up in such a dysfunctional society? I yearned to find out more. I studied law at Oxford from 1976-79, but I was disappointed by it intellectually. It was very dry and limiting. Then I went to the LSE to study sociology, and then back to Belfast for a PhD in counterterrorism law.

I ended up writing a book about the ‘supergrass’ system in Northern Ireland: a series of trials in the 1980s on the evidence of informants, which was deeply controversial on both sides of the sectarian divide. It was one of the few things that, in the counter-terrorist framework, both Loyalists and Republicans vehemently objected to, partly because they were very worried about it decimating their ranks. It may well have done. But it did so in a way that was difficult to defend by any credible conception of civil liberties and the rule of law: there were not enough legal controls, there was little corroboration, and it all happened in a non-jury context.

My intention was to have a career that straddled law and sociology. But there were more jobs in academic law than sociology. I was initially obliged to teach traditional legal subjects. In the mid-1990s, however, the law school at the University of Bristol was mildly criticised in a teaching review for not having a human rights course. So I said, ‘I’ll do that.’ It was not until 2005 that I had the first opportunity to design a unit that fully coincided with my interests. This was a socio-legal or social science course, which I called ‘Human Rights in Law, Politics and Society’, and which provided a platform from which to observe global current affairs through the lens of human rights, or vice versa.

Where does the study of Islam fit into all of this?

In the post-Cold War context of 2005, in addition to western liberalism, the two biggest kids on the block were political Islam, which had been on the rise since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, plus China and the Far East. Islam, China and the Far East are ideologies or a ‘geopolitical spaces’ which offer self-conscious alternatives to Western liberalism. The fact that there was a rapidly expanding literature about human rights in all these contexts made it possible to add a module on Islam, China and the Far East to the HRLPS course, which I then taught without incident for 13 years.

The fact that I have served the University of Bristol productively and faithfully for 36 years makes my experience all the more bitter. I had some of the best students in the law school – the more reflective and more thoughtful ones who wanted to look over the legal parapet and see the lie of the land beyond. Many of them were Muslim. Nobody had any issue with the unit or module whatsoever until, almost out of the blue, the University of Bristol Islamic Society (BRISOC) decided everything I had been saying about Islam was Islamophobic.    

It is important to separate the intellectual debate about Islam and human rights from the scandal that developed. BRISOC lodged a complaint with the University in October 2020 without bringing it before any of the law school’s half a dozen or so informal mechanisms first. It was signed by the president of BRISOC, a medical student, who was ostensibly acting on behalf of anonymous students, but who had never attended my course himself.

Ultimately, after a vitriolic campaign by BRISOC on social media, and after a senior academic at the University of Bristol had investigated my conduct, in July 2021, I got a very gratifying email saying I had been completely exonerated of all charges [see a fuller account in Greer’s conversation with the Bristol Free Speech Society, and in his book].

However, I was told I was not allowed to tell anybody except my family and close friends until I, the university, and BRISOC had drafted a joint statement, which never happened. There was then the question of what I was to teach in my last year before my retirement in 2022. I wanted to deliver the topic on Islam, China and the Far East again, to prove that I had been vindicated. But two junior colleagues, who were due to take the unit over, decided to remove the module from the syllabus, precisely for the reasons the enquiry had rejected. This decision was immediately approved by the Law School. I then went on sick leave for three months because there was no way I could have gone back into the Law School with a cloud like that hanging over my reputation and integrity.

In October 2021, after BRISOC had unsuccessfully appealed against my exoneration, the University issued its final public statement, which said, ‘the complaint has not been upheld…[but] we recognise BRISOC’s concerns and the importance of airing differing views constructively.’ It also said that my course had been altered to respond to the new conveners’ ‘wish to deliver the material in a context that is both broad-reaching and respectful of sensitivities of students on the course.’ I was absolutely furious because, in spite of my exoneration, this statement made it look as if I had been let off on a technicality, and that there might have been substance to BRISOC’s complaint after all. This was not only a smear on my reputation and integrity; it compounded the risk that BRISOC’s campaign posed to my physical safety.

When my sick leave ended, the Law School and the University also declined to authorise my return to work and in fact obstructed it.

Did your two colleagues who decided to cut your module give reasons for their decision?

I was told expressly in an email that it was to avoid further complaints and to prevent ‘othering’ Muslim students. This was, of course, totally in defiance of my exoneration.

What were BRISOC’s charges against you?

They claim that everything the authoritative academic literature says about Islam, particularly about Islam and human rights – which is all I was discussing in the class – is Islamophobic.

Let me give you an example. It is universally accepted that in its early history, the Islamic faith spread very rapidly through war and conquest in the first instance, driven mostly by material motives – power and booty, basically. And then it stabilised through trade and conversion. Within a few decades of Mohammed’s death, a huge Muslim empire had been established extending from the shores of what is now Portugal to the Himalayas. BRISOC claims that to make such an observation is Islamophobic. Yet there is not a scholar or historian who knows anything about the history of Islam anywhere in the world who would dispute it. BRISOC also claims that it is Islamophobic to observe that traditional Islam does not regard men and women as truly equal. Yet, according to the Qur’an, a man can have four wives, but a woman can have only one husband. That is plainly unequal. On divorce, children also typically go to the husband, and not to the wife.

What was BRISOC’s response to these points?

They have no answer. That is precisely the point. And it graphically illustrates the current crisis of academic ‘cancel culture’: the people who want to take their opponent down through vilification and victimisation do not want to engage in debate about the substance of the issues themselves. They just want to say, ‘You are a racist, Islamophobe, transphobe, etc. – because you have said things we do not like, that we think are Islamophobic, transphobic, homophobic, and so on.’ But if you ask them to tell you why something you have said is Islamophobic, their response is, ‘We are not going to tell you – it’s just the way it is.’ There is no debate. If we had had a debate I could easily have demonstrated how ignorant BRISOC is about the history of their own faith.

What is your view about using cartoons of Mohammed as a teaching aid in a lecture theatre at a university? Have you ever done so, or would you have done so?

No. It is obviously very dangerous. There is a huge risk even if, like the unfortunate US Art history teacher Professor Erika Lopez Prater, you take great care and only show representations of Mohammed painted by a highly respected medieval Muslim scholar for devotional reasons. Professor Lopez effectively lost her job for doing so.

We seem to be in a strange situation where academics and university administrators who are not Muslim are themselves suppressing people who want to discuss Islam. How have we got into this situation?

Fear – of two kinds. One is the fear of some kind of violent reprisal. But I do not think this is the dominant one. The most prominent is the fear, on the part of university administrators, of being seen as hostile to a minority, Muslims in my case, and of losing income from students as a result. It is as brutal as that. We have not used the term ‘woke’ in our conversation yet. But that is what it is.

On the subject of ‘woke’, what is your experience of the ‘culture wars’ and ‘cancel culture’ at university?

What the University of Bristol has done to me is a classic example of ‘wokeism’ and cancel culture. It is based upon many of the classic features, for example, the attitude that ‘we must be so concerned for and so sympathetic to (certain) minorities that they can never be criticised for wrongdoing. Whatever they say, whatever complaints they have, must be taken at face value and those who have offended them must be sanctioned.’ That is exactly what happened in my case. The university’s attitude seems to have been, ‘BRISOC was offended by your teaching and although you were cleared of wrongdoing we are still going to bend over backwards to placate them, we are going to take the module off the syllabus and you are effectively going to be frozen out for the remainder of your career.’

The ‘remainder of my careeer’ happened to be a very short time span. But had I been a younger man, less well advanced in my career, it would have been much more costly for me to have taken the stand I did. In fact, I probably would not have done so. I probably would just have capitulated myself.

Whose opinion are university administrators worried about?

They seem to be most worried about the opinion of angry militants and their supporters on the illiberal or ‘regressive’ left who dominate the social sciences, humanities, law and the arts in British universities. I have seen this perspective gain currency over the course of my career. As a result, I am no longer sure where I am now myself on the political spectrum. I spent most of my adult life on the centre left. I was, for example, a member of the Labour Party for 30 years, until I left in 2013, when I saw the leftward direction the party was taking.

I think that, in British universities, there has been a drift over the past decade or more, towards greater extremism, less tolerance, a greater willingness to vilify and victimise opponents, and to regard them as enemies rather than colleagues with a different, though legitimate, point of view. When I first arrived at Bristol, most of the staff were centre left politically, but academically conservative. But without my fully realising it, the whole institution has been shifting further and further towards the left, particularly over the past decade or so. Colleagues whose views were centre-right were squeezed out of the Law School. Life was made so uncomfortable for them that they moved elsewhere.

You might have thought of the tradition of Western scholarship in all fields, humanities and sciences, as being about the disinterested pursuit of knowledge – that this should be the ideal of liberal education. How do academics today who are so far on the left reconcile their dogmatic views with this idea of disinterested scholarship? Or do they not think that such a thing exists anymore?

Since they will not engage in these debates, it is difficult to say. But I think, from reading the literature and from what I know about some of my own former colleagues who are on that wavelength, that they view ‘disinterested scholarship’ as itself an obstacle to the ‘liberation’ of those oppressed minorities whose ‘emancipation’ they seek to facilitate.

Are the academics themselves in these oppressed minorities?

Sometimes, but usually not. Typically, they are people who regard themselves as the ‘allies’ of putatively subordinate or oppressed groups, and who are trying to fight their battles for them. One of the grievances I have with this is that, quite often and quite plainly, people who belong to these so-called ‘oppressed minorities’ do not subscribe to the political profile that the ‘wokes’ want to impose upon them. The ‘wokes’ want them to be angry, hostile and aggressively asserting a sectional identity. They do not want them to integrate. And anyone who belongs to such a minority but does not subscribe to this ideology is simply regarded as a traitor to the cause.

Take my case, for example. One of the questions it raises is why it happened when it did. One of the triggers seems to have been that I am a vocal defender of the government’s Prevent counterterrorism strategy. The people who regard me as their enemy had been trying to discredit me for this reason for some time. In 2018, some colleagues from another university denounced me and one of my Bristol colleagues on twitter as racist and Islamophobic because we publicly defended Prevent. Another of my own Bristol colleagues then jumped on the bandwagon and retweeted the denunciation, adding that we were suffering from ‘white psychosis’. We complained to the Law School, arguing that it should not tolerate one of its own staff falsely denouncing other colleagues as racist and Islamophobic, and endorsing a demand that they be sacked as unfit to work at any academic institution. Nothing was done about it. The colleague in question is still in post and has, in fact, since been promoted.

Is there any evidence that the Prevent strategy has increased Islamophobia?

No. The reason is that hardly anybody knows about it. The activists are hyper-aware of it. But the general public, including Muslims, generally have not heard of it.

The other thing that has happened in academic life, which is a source of great dismay to me, is the prostituting of social science. What I mean by this is that social science has become a vehicle for prejudice. Studies are being conducted and published which have no scientific credibility. Typically, those involving surveys do not employ random sampling but are driven by a self-selected group of people who tend to share the objectives of those who have conducted the survey. So the entire exercise is constructed in a manner which confirms the prejudices of the researchers.

One of the few randomly selected surveys about public attitudes towards Prevent found, for example, that very few Muslims knew about it. That knocks on the head the claim that Prevent is turning Muslims into a suspect community, and fuelling Islamophobia.

The reasoning of the anti-Prevent movement is also a classic exercise in illogicality. The argument goes like this: ‘Prevent is Islamophobic and racist. Therefore, anyone who denies that it is Islamophobic and racist, must themselves be Islamophobic and racist.’ Any logician would tell you that this is a logical fallacy, because the premise – that ‘Prevent is Islamophobic and racist’ – is precisely what is at issue.

You could argue that there are many logical fallacies in the ‘woke’ approach.

Yes – it is based on prejudice. The tragedy is that it warps something that is actually, on a more sensible interpretation, very worthy. Like many, I am in favour of social justice, inclusivity, diversity and equity in the academy and everywhere else, but not on ‘woke’ terms. However, according to the ‘wokes’, if you have a conception of social justice that differs from theirs, you are the enemy and part of the problem, not part of the solution. Therefore, you have to be silenced, not debated with.

The Oxford Institute for British Islam is a young organisation. Could you tell us a bit about it?

The Provost and originator of the OIBI, Dr Taj Hargey, originally from South Africa, is the imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation. He wants to promote a liberal and progressive version of Islam globally, and particularly in Britain. His wife, Dr Jacqueline Woodman, is a Unitarian Christian and gynaecologist. The idea behind OIBI is to establish a think tank and research academy that can study and debate Islam in the UK and promote a liberal conception of the faith. I was originally invited to become OIBI’s first non-stipendiary visiting research fellow and later became its first Research Director.    

The profile and position Muslims have in Britain is primarily for them to determine. But those of us who are not Muslim should help them to address this challenge in a way that is positive for everybody. Muslims have the prime responsibility to deal with the issues of Islamism, jihadism and the threat of terrorism, because only they can authoritatively demonstrate their inconsistencies with any legitimate interpretation of Islam.

What is the future of Islam in Britain?

Religions can be both forces for good and for bad. The key lies in how they are interpreted and what is done with them. Islam is no exception. The message of the Oxford Institute is that Islam takes on distinctive forms according to the environment in which it is found.

Like Christianity?

Yes. Therefore the challenge for organisations like OIBI is to try to mould both Islam and its environment – a kind of autopoiesis or symbiosis. The precise details are matters for negotiation, consideration and reflection.

Muslims are here in this country to stay. They are our neighbours and friends. Nobody could seriously think, and it would be terrible if they did, that they should be expelled as Jewish people once were. The challenge is to ensure they manage to live here in a way that is decent, fair, makes them feel at home, and contributes to society in a way that we can all appreciate and understand. A particular feature of this challenge is to find ways of persuading younger Muslims that they can have an authentic Islamic faith and still be part of Western liberal democratic society.

How can we in Britain move beyond the polarisation of the culture wars?

One of the lessons I have learned from my own, very sour experience is that when people try to shut you down, you should respond by saying more, not less. But finding ways of doing so can become more difficult as a result.

See also: Daniel Sharp reviews Greer’s book.

The post British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities: interview with Steven Greer appeared first on The Freethinker.