Belief isn't everything

[T_i_B]

We pay a high price for the current predilection for defining people primarily by their religions

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1548890,00.html

Anti-racism used to mean treating people equally. Differences in skin colour or religious faith counted for little when set against the universal claims of common humanity. No cliche was more pleasing to the liberal mind than the assertion that we were all the same under the skin. To say that feminism was fine for whites but not for browns would have been an outrageous assertion of racist values. Now there are different rules for different religions. In the name of the noble virtues of tolerance and broad-mindedness, liberal people have segregated with the enthusiasm of an apartheid police chief and left common humanity out in the cold.

Until the 1980s, people talked about 'blacks'. This was an incredibly broad term which covered not only Afro-Caribbeans (who had large differences of their own), but anyone from the Indian Subcontinent or, at the broadest, anyone with a dark skin. When vastly different peoples were lumped together, it was easy to pull the concept apart. What did the son of a Hindu doctor from East Africa have in common with the daughter of a Jamaican nurse? Nothing it would appear. But the use of 'blacks' or later 'blacks and Asians' made sense. The doctor's son and nurse's daughter may have seemed as distant as it is possible to imagine any two people in Britain being, but they had a common interest in fighting colour prejudice. The Commission for Racial Equality still works on this old notion of solidarity, but everywhere else it is in retreat.

The most exclusive of these scenarios is the religious and, until recently, liberals would have instinctively shied away from the explicit sectarianism. Their caution evaporated in the 1990s. Socialism was dead. A fundamentalist wave was sweeping all the world's religions, and if people believed that religion mattered most to them, segregation by faith could seem the free-thinking thing to do.

As so often, liberal intentions brought reactionary consequences. During the wars of the former Yugoslavia, the victims of oppression objected ferociously to being described as 'the Muslims'. The Serbs weren't called 'the Orthodox' and the Croats weren't called 'the Catholics'. The decision of most diplomats and commentators to call the Bosnians 'the Muslims' was a tacit endorsement of Serbian claims that they were a faction fed by ancient hatreds, rather than citizens of a democratic and multi-ethnic nation facing a murderous assault from the agents of foreign powers. Exiles still remember the jaw-dropping moment on Newsnight when Kirsty Wark insisted on describing a member of the Bosnian government as a spokesman for 'the Muslims'. His protestations that he was, if it was any of her business, a Catholic in his private life got him nowhere.