What’s extremist about Islam that is not extremist about Christianity?

The parliamentary draftsmen have yet to come up with the wording, but one thing we know already. However the government defines what it now wants to prohibit the spreading by Islamists of an ‘extremist’ message — the new statute will make no reference to the truth or falsity of the message. The focus of the law will be on the likely effect of the message, not on whether it is reliable, or is honestly believed.

This is not unprecedented. When during the second world war the government made it unlawful to spread alarm or despondency, it was certainly no defence to plead that in the circumstances the alarm or despondency was justified. On the contrary. Likewise, a charge of incitement to racial hatred does not admit the defence that the race pilloried is in fact hateful or that the accused believed it to be.

Laws like this must be blind to whether or not a claim may be true or even arguable. They must look only at its effect. That greatly frees our hand in identifying and proscribing the elements in any teaching which spell danger to society.

What are they? Is there a central doctrine in Islamist teaching that makes the ‘mad mullahs’ argument lethal? No open-minded examination of the way an extremist preacher turns a young person into a suicide bomber can avoid the conclusion that there is. It is the doctrine of eternal life.

Very, very few young men or women leading normal lives during peacetime can be persuaded to kill themselves for the general good. It is the fact that the suicide-bomber has been persuaded that in the deepest sense he will not be killing himself, but purifying his soul to begin a new life in Paradise, which gives the idea its attraction. The religious extremist’s nuclear weapon is redemption.

Much has been written, some of it humorously, about the exact number of virgins a young suicide-bomber can expect to deflower on entry into Paradise, but I suspect the deadly appeal of self-destruction plays on the human mind at a deeper and more powerful level than just a simple vision of sugar-candy mountains and perpetual bliss. Guilt is a stronger driver than greed or lust.

Graham Greene would have understood this: the burden of sin, the fear of damnation, and the sense of personal shame felt by those who are persuaded that they have betrayed their God in the way they have lived their lives are enormously powerful. They eat away at contentment; they feed anxiety; they kindle a longing to be purged.

Salvation is therefore a subtler business with a more gripping purpose than simply booking a place in Heaven; and eternal life means more than a reward for virtue. To be (in the Christian metaphor) ‘washed in the blood of the Lamb’ answers not our appetites alone, but also some of our most profound wants and worries. This is why religion often seems to have more of a purchase on those who have become dissatisfied with the way they are living their lives than with the rest. If getting to Heaven were all, then all should be equally attracted.

A religious teacher needs to implant in his disciple two things, shame and hope: shame about the conduct hitherto of the disciple’s life, and the hope of redemption and salvation.

The rest is then easy. A longing for redemption having been implanted, the teacher needs only to spell out how it may be achieved. This gives him immense power over the disciple. ‘Do this to be saved,’ he can teach, and his disciple has the strongest possible reason to obey.

The reward of redemption has, of course, an added advantage from the religious teacher’s point of view. It is completely untestable. If as a reward for obedience to your instructions you promise a man £100, a free holiday, recovery from illness, immunity from prosecution or the power to win friends and influence people — if, in short, you promise him anything or everything on Earth — then you are obliged to make good that promise. Your disciple is able to inquire into your track record as a guarantor of the gains (or deliverer from the evils) you have identified.

But promise a man eternal life, promise him absolution, and of this you can be certain: nobody will ever be able to show that he did not receive these prizes. All he needs (and it is a big ‘all’) is faith: faith in you, faith in your teaching. Once kindled, that faith can never be discredited. For this reason I very much approve of a subtle linguistic change which is now under way in Britain. Speakers, writers and broadcasters are increasingly talking about ‘faith leaders’, ‘faith schools’ and the ‘faith community’. The word ‘faith’ is quietly supplanting the word ‘religious’. This is an excellent development because faith really is what it is all about. ‘Religion’ connotes a body of teaching; ‘faith’ connotes a driving belief in an unprovable promise.

Reading this, it may have occurred to you that I began by talking about the dangerous elements at the core of ‘extremist’ religious instruction, but am now talking about what is central to both mainstream Islam and mainstream Christianity and (to a lesser extent) mainstream Judaism. This slippage is no accident. What unites an ‘extremist’ mullah with a Catholic priest or evangelical Protestant minister is actually much more significant and interesting than what divides him from them.

All three make one quite extraordinary claim: that when we die we do not cease to exist but begin a new life, which may or may not be in Paradise depending upon our obedience in this life to precepts and instructions of which the mullah, priest or minister claims a special knowledge. There could hardly be a more ambitious statement.

What divides the ‘extremist’ mullah from the ‘mainstream’ mullah, priest or minister is, by comparison, philosophically almost trivial. He differs (in fact they all differ) on the exact nature of those precepts or instructions.

That the instructions might include sacrificing your own life or killing innocent people does not, incidentally, divide them. Both mainstream Islam and mainstream Christianity see circumstances in which this might be acceptable to (or demanded by) God, so long as it is for the greater good. An ‘extremist’ mullah teaches no differently.

It follows that if parliamentary draftsmen try to identify in ‘dangerously extremist’ teaching the element which makes it dangerous, they will encounter difficulty until they confront the truth: that what makes extremist teaching dangerous is also the rock on which all our mainstream faiths are founded — salvation. The new crime — if we are to have a new crime — should be to claim that to the question ‘What shall I do to be saved?’ any man can give the answer.