President McAleese's hope that Irish people would try to "make Ireland a country of real welcome and a country of celebration of difference" implies, rather piously, that Ireland is deficient in these respects. She was speaking at the 10th anniversary celebrations of the Islamic Cultural Centre, and her comments therefore suggest themselves as referring particularly to Ireland's relationship with its Muslim community.
In a recent interview with Hot Press, however, the Secretary General of the Irish Council of Imams, Ali Selim, said that, contrary to the current belief that Irish society is fundamentally hostile to Muslims, Ireland had "managed to create a comfortable atmosphere for the newcomers, where they found a role for themselves that enabled them to feel that they were at home".
Thus far, there has been a marked tendency for the Islamic issue to provide platforms for those of the indigenous population wishing to exercise personal political grievances and agendas or take their moral superiority for a walk. This has led to all manner of double-think and confusion. For example, the debate some years ago about the French ban on the wearing of the hijab by Muslim schoolgirls brought out the usual Irish secular-liberal elements perceiving an opportunity to attack their own religions-of-origin.
The most favoured construction was to back the French initiative under the guise of protesting the treatment of women under Islamic law. The French objective was not, of course, to protect Muslim women but to curtail the spread of Islam. Irish liberals, however, decided that, since France is incapable of illiberal thought, the suspension of tolerance could be justified by arguing for an "open secular society", whatever that is. In truth they were exercised by the possibility of banning all religious symbols, especially Christian ones, from the public arena. Now, in a different argument, our self-styled liberals are either silent or active on the side of "tolerance".
We have the bizarre spectacle of atheists who have spent their adult lives attacking Christianity, and feminists who never miss an opportunity to condemn Western "patriarchy", springing to the defence of a belief system that rejects everything they believe. Their dishonesty should not surprise us, but we should certainly take notice of their contortions, for we now face an involuted question: is it really possible to "welcome" into our society an illiberal ideology while ourselves remaining true to genuinely liberal principles?
How, for example, is our legal system to deal with the Islamic claim that Muslim men have a right to physically chastise their wives? If we can shift this beyond the remove of liberal-feminist sanctimony, it emerges as a specific, technical question. Do the authorities turn a blind eye? Do we insist on the superiority of Irish law and therefore challenge the claim of Muslims that they must govern themselves, wherever they are, by their own laws? Take a graver matter. When an Islamic "intellectual" says in an Irish university or on Irish radio that the pope has rendered himself liable to execution under Sharia law, should we not point out that not only has the Koran no dominion in Irish society, but that this "intellectual" has committed a crime? Would we tolerate a fervent Christian making an analogous threat against a Muslim cleric? It is, of course, a mistake not to distinguish between Islamist extremists and the wider Muslim community, but the error is understandable when Muslim leaders, by silence or equivocation, fail to establish the demarcation. In this regard, I was uplifted to read reports that, during his most recent visit here, Irish Muslim leaders banned the appalling Anjem Choudary from their Cultural Centre.
This discussion needs urgently to move beyond piety and posturing.
The recent debate about the niqab has been muddied by disingenuous interests seeking to turn this into yet another opportunity for Western self-mortification. The Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, last week attacked the secular mindset which he accused of seeking to ban the niqab because it was a religious symbol. In the debate to which he was alluding - raised by Jack Straw, later supported by Tony Blair - there was no suggestion that the niqab should be banned and it was quite clear that the issue was not religion. The point was to question whether the niqab had itself become a barrier to communication between Muslims and others.
There is a world of difference between banning the hijab and expressing a worry that the full veil may, as Jack Straw said, "make better positive relations between the two communities more difficult". The hijab is an unexceptionable symbol of religious difference, whereas the niqab is both a symbol and a mechanism of isolationism. Liberals, however, insist on seeing things back-to-front: the hijab, because it is an uncomplicated symbol of faith, can be banned without offence to liberal principles, but the niqab, probably because it seems to echo some neurotic strain in their own attitudes to their own culture, is okay.