Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks: Islam must separate religion from power

The Chief Rabbi has called on Muslims to get used to living as a minority in Britain and to learn to separate religion from power.

Lord Sacks said that neither Muslims nor Christians had yet learnt the lessons inflicted on the Jewish people by the Babylonian exile.

“One of the great advantages of being Jewish is you know how to sing in the minor key,” he said. “We have had 26 centuries of experience ever since the Babylonian exile of living as a minority in the midst of a culture that does not share our views. Christianity and Islam have not had that experience.”

He said that Christianity had learnt toleration but only after 100 years of “knocking the hell out of each other all over Europe”.

He said: “So Christianity went through its experience, Judaism has been through it a long, long time ago and Islam has not yet had that experience.

“I have no doubt that Islam will work its way through to the essential situation that Judaism arrived at and Christianity, namely the substantive separation of religion from power. But there’s no quick way of getting there. It is quite a difficult and painful process within religion.

“Only Muslims can do it. Nobody can tell them from the outside. That would be taken as an affront and I would regard it as morally unacceptable. I do see some wonderful Muslims in this country and elsewhere, in Iraq and even in Iran, going through that process.

"I think some of the Muslim thinkers today are some of the most courageous thinkers I have come across and it is very striking how many of them are women. It is very interesting. So Islam will get there. But I would hope that one of the ways they would get there is just coming to understand how things work in Britain.”

The Chief Rabbi was delivering the annual lecture to the think-tank Theos in London to an audience of politicians, journalists, academics, businessmen and faith representatives.

He warned that Europe’s loss of a tolerant religious culture made it vulnerable to the advance of fundamentalism.

Tolerant religion was “the only strong enough defence with some of the religiosity that is coming our way with the force of a hurricane,” the Chief Rabbi said.

“Let me be blunt. Either we win or the fundamentalists win and that is the challenge. If the fundamentalists win, I wouldn’t hang around too long.”

In his lecture he warned that Europe was dying because the advance of secularism had made people too selfish to have children. Comparing its decline to that of ancient Greece in the third century of the pre-Christian era, he said that the answer lay in the rediscovery of its Judeo-Christian religious roots.

Lord Sacks said that Europe was the world’s most secular region and the only one experiencing population decline.

He argued that civil society needed religion because it sanctifies the family and parenthood, and safeguards against relativism and protects the moral principles on which western freedom is based. The emphasis on consumerism and instant gratification has left little room for the sacrifice involved in parenthood, he said.

Like the people of ancient Greece, Europeans are unwilling to marry or to bring up children.
Related Links

“That is where Europe is today. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.”

He argued that neo-Darwinian attacks on religion — typified by Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion — were leading to a population crisis in Europe.

He said: “Wherever you turn today — Jewish, Christian or Muslim — the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families.

“The major assault on religion today comes from the neo-Darwinians.”

The Chief Rabbi said that being a parent involved a massive sacrifice of money, attention, time and emotional energy.

Referring to an ancient Greek historian to make his point, he questioned where this selflessness could be found in modern Europe.

“In that culture, where will you find space for the concept of sacrifice for the sake of generations not yet born?” he said.

“Europe is dying, exactly as Polybius said about ancient Greece in the third pre-Christian century.”

Lord Sacks added: “Albert Camus once said, ‘The only serious philosophical question is why should I not commit suicide?’.

“I think he was wrong. The only serious philosophical question is, ‘why should I have a child?’ Our culture is not giving an easy answer to that question.”

Lord Sacks, 61, has been Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth since 1991. He was knighted in 2005 for services to the community and interfaith relations and awarded a peerage in July.

The Times