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Debate on the Address

My Lords, I hope that after so many hours of important political debate, with many useful statistics thrown at us, I shall be forgiven if I begin with a literary allusion. One of the most interesting books of the Renaissance was Tirant lo Blanc, written by a Valencian. It was published in 1490, with an English edition in 1984, yet it is lively and more relevant to us than it may seem, because the early chapters envisage how a Saracen Muslim army lands in this country and establishes itself near Warwick, there to be defeated by someone called the Hermit King of England. It took him six weeks to do so. I mention this to recall that we in Europe have experienced a threat from militant Islam before and that it was defeated. The novel that I mentioned reminds us that in the era of the Renaissance, which was not so very long ago, the threat to Europe from the Ottoman sultanate was so great that one writer suggested that the best course might be to abandon Europe to Islam altogether and take our civilisation to the newly discovered Americas. The threat then was of a large, well directed conventional army—as we would now put it—bent on expansion and equipped with magnificent guns, such as the monster cannon made by a Hungarian engineer, Urban, which the great Gibbon blamed for the fall of Constantinople itself in 1453. It was an army supported by a large and effective navy, and of course those institutions were the articulation of a traditional empire. Today we have a quite different kind of conflict, with a frenzied minority sect of Islam, al-Qaeda, which operates most unconventionally. Al-Qaeda, so far as we understand, constitutes a small group of armed men whose loyalty is to their own rigorous, if antique, version or vision of Islam. These men want to destroy the West’s position throughout the Islamic world, especially in the oil-producing countries of the Middle East, and in the long run they want to ruin the West itself. They operate through cells, a few of which seem to be linked to the founders, who are still at large on the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Other followers and follower sects seem to have no institutional links with the authors of the movement, but these elements hope to secure their membership of that murderous club through imitation, which may explain the background and motives of the London and Glasgow bombers. Incidentally, those condemned in the recent trial for the murders in the Atocha railway station in Madrid in 2004 were found guilty of planning a radical Islamic republic in Spain, which had a long period of Muslim rule, although admittedly not a radical regime, in the Middle Ages. We can learn about the background of those concerned in the attack on the twin towers in New York by reading a brilliant book, The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, published by Penguin Books—it ought to be in our Library. Perhaps those involved in al-Qaeda and the other undertakings hope to secure in the long run, as the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, put it a week or two ago, a restored and radical caliphate stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. They evidently want to secure that, wherever there are Muslims in what they consider to be infidel countries such as our own, Sharia law should apply to those Muslims, not the laws of the country concerned. Presumably these agitators and conspirators hope to ensure that no press attacks are made on, and probably no jokes are made about, their religion in those countries. Even now, I wonder whether the entertaining speech about Islam by Figaro in Beaumarchais’ play ““The Marriage of Figaro””, on which Mozart’s opera is based, would be acceptable on our stage. There may be a question mark, too, about the basically favourable but very secular remarks made about the life of the Prophet by Gibbon. Al-Qaeda and its offshoots are a movement fuelled by the fact that the copy of western life and western institutions that has been taken to the Muslim world sometimes seems to be a rather shabby version of the original. The movement is helped by its success in securing so much attention in the world’s media. As I understand it, al-Qaeda is a minority within a minority, but it will prosper if it can give the impression that it is doing well, since many weak but otherwise moderate people are always tempted to join a winning side. It may also be helped, inadvertently of course, by statements from our politicians and others, such as that made last week even by the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, that the threat of al-Qaeda and international terrorism must be expected to last for generations. Why are these pessimistic statements made? Is it partly because one of our difficulties is that today we wear our own Christian faith rather lightly, if at all, and are not well equipped to conduct a war of religion? All the same, surely we in the West, with all our power and imagination, our free institutions and our laws, our intelligence and generous tolerance of approach, and the public place we give so enthusiastically to women, not least in your Lordships’ House, can envisage a much shorter time of trouble than is envisaged in these statements, if not perhaps as short a time as the modest weeks needed by the fictional Hermit King in Tirant the White.