Do you like couscous? I do. I like all sorts of ethnic foods: curry, Peking duck, sashimi, frog’s legs, snails. I bet you too enjoy some of those delicacies although, if you’re English, probably not all of them.
It’s not just food either. Some Arab architecture is sublime, though you have to go as far as southern Spain to find it. Belly dancing too has its fans, and I can join their ranks after a few pints of Kingfisher – although in full sobriety I may prefer ballet dancing instead.
Ancient Indian texts uncover some eternal depths of human nature. Muslim, especially Persian, graphic arts can be lovely, and those Japanese watercolours can put me in a sweetly melancholy mood.
In one of those moods I sometimes sigh and think oh, if only this were all there is to multiculturalism. Why, I’d be waving the multi-culti flag as vigorously as any LibDem or Labour front-bench warmer.
Unfortunately, much as we all may admire the outward manifestations of Eastern cultures, we’d do well to remember that their inner essence is at best alien to the West and at worst actively hostile to it.
This isn’t to say that, say, Muslims are always wrong when castigating the West. Godlessness, moral decay, all-pervasive decadence, disintegration of the family, unspeakable lewdness everywhere, materialism – I’ve heard Christian conservatives fume against those very things. Why, I’ve done a fair amount of fuming myself.
Having said all this, the West may be a rotting structure, but it’s the only one we have. Good, bad or indifferent, it’s our life, our family, our culture – it’s, well, us. And Eastern cultures, love them or hate them, are, well, them.
I shan’t quote Kipling on the subject of East and West, but he had a point. It’s debatable which culture is better. It’s undeniable that they are incompatible.
Former RAF officer Mark De Salis tried to bridge the two civilisations in his own person. An executive of an oil-related engineering company, he worked in Libya for six years and enjoyed every minute of it.
Four years into his tenure Mrs De Salis moved back to Cornwall. On general principle, this would suggest that the marriage was rather loosely knit, and indeed Mark acquired a girlfriend, Lynn Howie, a divorced mother of two from New Zealand.
By all accounts this was no casual fling: the couple were looking forward to a life together. In fact, Lynn flew all the way to Libya to spend some time with Mark.
A few days after her arrival the couple went for a romantic picnic in the dunes, where they were found the next day – shot, execution-style, in the back of the neck. The motive for their murder is being investigated, but the authorities plausibly believe that an unmarried couple living in sin had proved more than the delicate Muslim sensibilities could bear.
True enough, the Judaeo-Christian Eighth Commandment also proscribes adultery, and those of us who accept scriptural authority and yet transgress against it repent, hoping that God won’t punish us. Yet we tend to assume that, should God decide to ignore our entreaties, we’ll be punished only at Judgment.
Muslims, by the looks of it, aren’t prepared to defer chastisement or indeed delegate it to Allah. They seem to favour direct and immediate action by humans. The nature of the action varies from the Quran to Hadith.
The former is more lenient: “The woman or man found guilty of sexual intercourse – lash each one of them with a hundred lashes, and do not be taken by pity for them in the religion of Allah, if you should believe in Allah and the Last Day. And let a group of the believers witness their punishment”. Quran 24:2
Now a hundred lashes may kill, but not in each case. That’s why, according to Hadith, which plays the same role in Islam as Talmud in Judaism and patristic texts in Christianity, Mohammed later hardened his position:
“So the Prophet ordered the two adulterers to be stoned to death, and they were stoned to death near the place where biers used to be placed near the Mosque.” Sahih Bukhari 6.79
Stones must have been scarce around the sandy picnic site 50 miles from Tripoli. So the faithful had to resort to 9mm bullets as an acceptable replacement. No doubt they felt good afterwards: Allah had been served.
These days one can’t open the papers without reading about similar acts of faith committed by Muslims, and not just in their own countries. Beatings, lashings, torture, forced marriage, kidnapping, murder, banishment to native villages are the menu from which British Muslim subjects order punishment for infidels and apostates.
It’s essential to realise that, unlike our home-grown criminals who aren’t certifiable psychopaths, the righteous Muslims don’t think they’re doing something wrong. This is what their religion demands and they are faithful to it.
We should remember this when extolling the virtues of multiculturalism. Mix our civilisations all you want, but they’ll never form a homogeneous solution. The fractions will remain strictly separate.
“Mark was a good guy,” remembers the victim’s friend. “He had no argument with Libyan people, he liked and understood them.”
I’m sure Mark De Salis liked Libyans. But perhaps he didn’t understand them as well as he thought – of which he was served an awful reminder.
Couscous, anyone?