Islam: Tenets

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, first, I declare my interests as in the register, in particular my directorship of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University. Having spent a great deal of time thinking about these things and then listened to the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, I do not know whether the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, will have the same nostalgic feeling that I have had, because so many of the things that I heard him say were exactly those that I grew up hearing from Dr Ian Paisley about Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland. “They’re going to breed us out”, was one of the favourite ones. “They kill people because of apostasy. Look at the Spanish Inquisition, and poor Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer burnt at the stake in Oxford for their Protestant religion”—indeed, he called his church in Belfast Martyrs Memorial because of all the Protestants who had been murdered by the Catholic Church. He was not so strong on mentioning the Catholics who had been murdered by the Protestants, but there you are: we see it from our own perspective. There were many other similarities as well.

Then came the demand: if Catholics are actually opposed to the IRA, why does the leadership of the Catholic Church not come out and say so in unequivocal terms? It is very much what the noble Lord has said about the leadership of the Muslim community. And so, one month after Lord Mountbatten, then a Member of your Lordships’ House, was murdered by the IRA, Pope Jean Paul II became the first reigning Pope to come to Ireland. As the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, referred to, he said:

“I appeal to you, in language of passionate pleading. On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence and to return to the ways of peace … To Catholics, to Protestants, my message is peace and love. May no Irish Protestant think that the Pope is an enemy, a danger or a threat”.


He appealed to young people to turn away, and so on. Within days, the IRA gave him his reply: it dismissed it. In that reply, it pointed out that the problem was a political problem and not a religious problem: it was not killing Protestants because they were Protestants, and the loyalists were not killing Catholics because they believed in transubstantiation; it was a political problem.

Sometimes, people will say, “Ah, but it is a completely different thing if you’re dealing with Islamist terrorists”. I think people sometimes need to explore the issues that they are talking about rather than simply presume. I went and spent some time talking to Abu Qatada, the European leader of al-Qaeda. I started talking to him in prison, necessarily through an interpreter, about the fact that, for me, religious faith was very important. He said, “Look, that’s fine. We can talk about religious faith if you like, but this is not a religious problem. This is a political problem. It is a political problem of what is happening in my part of the world and has been happening for a very long time”. The more I have looked at it, the more I have become convinced that he was correct—in fact, he was actually prepared to do what the IRA had been doing: to come out and say that violence would not get the political outcome they wanted. He asked me to take a personal message to the office of the Prime Minister here in the United Kingdom—the Prime Minister at the time was Gordon Brown. I took the message, but there was no interest on the part of the British Government in exploring whether Abu Qatada was prepared to come out and say, “This business of the use of violence is wrong, counterproductive and a mistake”. They were prepared to do it eventually, after a lot of pressure, with the IRA, with people like John Hume, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, but they were not prepared to do it with Abu Qatada.

The noble Lord, Lord Desai, as he very often is, is absolutely correct to make the connection with the end of the caliphate, because, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, a very short time after that some young men in Egypt said, “We’re going to come together”. Was it for the purpose of martyrdom? No. It was for the purpose of reinstituting the caliphate.

In all our religious and political backgrounds, there is great variegation. Just a couple of weeks ago, I had another long conversation, as I have had before, with Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and Ennahdha in Tunisia. This man is a democrat. He has demonstrated clearly that he is committed to democracy. In fact, I sometimes think he has more understanding of the basics of democracy than I find with politicians in this country because, as he says, it is not just about votes and elections; it is also about having a culture of liberal democracy that makes sure those elections are used to good purpose. He is absolutely right, of course. That is not the same as the Muslim Brotherhood everywhere but, if we paint everyone with the same brush, we will find that we make the situation worse rather than better.

That is my appeal: that we do not get mixed up about the fact that people will see religious faith from many different perspectives. As the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed, said, people will interpret the scriptures written in the past in a very different way now, if they have made progress, and in the same way if they see things in a fundamentalist way. We have to address the fact that there are political problems and that we in this country have our responsibility to resolve some of those wider problems. Sadly, the events of the last 48 hours and the pronouncements from Washington have made our job much more difficult in addressing the political problems, when they should have been making them easier.