'One has to speak the truth regardless'

Rory Fitzgerald meets the controversial former Bishop of Rochester and unofficial leader of conservative Anglicans

5 March 2010

Dr Nazir-Ali: 'The EU is the source of much legislation in this country which refuses to respect Christian conscience'

In the August heat of Karachi in 1949 a little boy was born in to a Shia Muslim family. Pakistan was only two years old, a fledgling and chaotic nation, trying to find its way in the world without British rule. Michael Nazir-Ali's mother cannot then have imagined that her baby boy would one day sit in that most British of chambers, the House of Lords. Nor that he would become a prominent Anglican bishop and an eminent Christian thinker.

Nine years before Michael Nazir-Ali was born, London was under attack by the Luftwaffe and Britain was fighting for its life. In 1940, Churchill spoke these immortal words:"I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.

Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation... Hitler knows he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all of Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."

The vicar's house on Giltspur Street in central London was one of many London buildings destroyed by a Nazi bomb during that earlier effort to eradicate Christian civilisation. Perhaps appositely, this is where I met Bishop Nazir-Ali last month.

Standing on Giltspur Street you are waist-deep in history. A vicar of this very church sang the Psalm Miserere in February 1555 as he was led around the corner to Smithfield, where he was burned alive for heresy. During the Crusades this ancient church was re-named in honour of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. How little things change in 1,000 years: in 2010 our conversation was to be dominated by the ongoing tensions with Islam, and schisms in the Christian Church.

Dr Nazir-Ali was Bishop of Rochester until March last year, when he retired. He still lives in Kent with his wife and two children and now ministers to persecuted Christian minorities abroad.

"Christians in this country are becoming aware of the persecutions of Christians abroad. I think partly because they are experiencing something of it themselves," he says.

Dr Nazir-Ali speaks weighty words at a hypnotic pace, each word enunciated with a trace of a soft Pakistani accent. You know that you are in the presence of a profound and incisive mind. I refer to Churchill's speech in 1940 and ask whether he feels that Christian civilisation is now endangered.

"I used to speak of a moral and spiritual vacuum that was created by the catastrophic loss of discourse in terms of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in the public place," he says.

"I think that vacuum is now giving way to a hostility to the Judaeo-Christian worldview. "I am pursuing a twin track on this: on the one hand you have to uphold the Judaeo-Christian tradition as a basis for making the most important moral decisions that need to be made.

"At same time, I am conscious that if present trends continue, we need another strategy... [as] in the last Dark Age, when Christian communities preserved the Gospel learning, and a kind of humanism, so that there were lights in the darkness. I think it would be wise for the churches also to build strong moral and spiritual communities that can survive and flourish in the darkness, and indeed attract other people to themselves. That's the way I have begun to think."

I ask him whether he feels the EU is helping move us toward this "new Dark Age".

"Oh yes, absolutely," he replies. "The EU is the source of much legislation in this country which refuses to respect Christian conscience, which has weakened a public doctrine of marriage, [and] which has compromised the dignity of the human person... A lot of this has its origins in European directives, and we haven't seen the last of it either."

As someone who spent the past 10 years in the House of Lords, he knows a thing or two about the influence of the EU on British law. "One of the things I've discovered is that most legislation in this country is an attempt to domesticate an EU directive... unelected bodies issue these directives. The feeling one gets with the EU is they will get their way whatever the will of the people.

"I think if you look at what has happened to the family, that is an unmitigated evil for this society. It has destroyed security for children, prevents their proper development, and the flourishing that God wants for them... seven million abortions since the passing of the abortion acts: that is an evil."

In 2008 Dr Nazir-Ali hit the headlines when he spoke frankly about Britain's immigration problems, saying that immigrants, "should be willing to adapt to living in a context shaped by traditional British values, which have been largely derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition". Of this episode, he says: "One has to speak the truth whatever the circumstances... My concern is with what attitude [immigrants] have to British society, and British values. Britain has never asked these questions. Ever."

A teenage convert from Islam, Dr Nazir-Ali is profoundly knowledgeable about the Islamic faith.

"The whole issue is grounded in the classical view that there is the house of Islam, and the house of war, and that the duty of good Muslims is to extend the Dar al-Islam, not only through armed jihad but through propaganda and preaching.

"The only exceptions to this were cases where there was a truce, or a treaty. A truce by nature is temporary, and a treaty was always taken by Muslim lawyers [to imply] a tribute from the non-Muslims to the Muslims.

Now, this is not a basis for the future. "This is why Muslims have found it so difficult to be minorities [in non-Muslim states] It is absolutely vital for world peace that Muslims should develop a way of being at peace with the non-Muslim world. The Sharia tradition has to develop formally so that it is recognised that Muslims can be a loyal minority in a non-Muslim polity."

He offers as a paradigm the early Islamic constitution of Medina, which recognised Jews, Christians, pagans and Muslims. But, he says, "on the other hand we know of the conflicts". In early Islam, non-Muslims were only allowed to continue as farmers if they gave half their produce to the Muslims.

"That [the dhimmi paradigm] became the basis for the treatment of Jews and Christians within the Islamic world. Now, which paradigm will Muslims choose: the dhimmi paradigm, or the paradigm of the constitution of Medina? That's a question for Muslims to answer."

I mention that some Christian theologians seem to say that Allah is not the same God as the Judaeo-Christian God. At that question, Dr Nazir-Ali becomes visibly uncomfortable. He pauses a long time, formulating his reply, as if his life depended on the answer.

The terrifying truth is that, in modern Britain, his life could indeed depend on how he answers this question. He knows this well, for he has received death threats in the past, and has been under police protection.

"I would say that Islam has a sense of the God of the Bible but, for various reasons, understands the nature of that God, and God's action in the world, quite differently," he says.

I then ask whether he regards it as an open theological question as to whether they are the same.

He replies quickly: "I don't think that they are the same. Muslims, like everyone else, have some sense of the One God... but the way in which they understand the nature and the work of that God is very different from the Judaeo-Christian way.

"While Islam wants to take power to change the world, Christianity is about turning away from power to change the world. And that has to do with a view of God. We have a God who humbled himself and took the form of a slave, and accepted death. And that is the source of Christian power, the Cross. So, clearly, in any Christian view of polity, and Muslim view of polity, there must be a radical difference."

As to the future of European Christianity, and suggestions that France and Holland may be majority Islamic by 2050 or 2060, he says: "That's a combination of the falling away of Christian belief, a decreasing indigenous population, and an increasing Muslim population.

"So I think there is going to be more tension about this, because these are the two great missionary religions in the world, which is why I think it is very important for Christians and Muslims to come to some common view about how to live together."

Dr Nazir-Ali has sometimes been characterised as a stern figure, but the man I met was warm, humble and softly spoken. On leaving the vicar's house on Giltspur Street, you walk out in to a cosmopolitan city. On the Tube, a kind old Muslim man shows me the way. There's talk of banning the veil abroad, but I see a dignity and beauty in the colourful veil of the Muslim girl sitting opposite me on the train.

For better or worse, we are all in this together now, trying to muddle our way home, as ancient faiths collide with law and ideology in the belly of this great city. This beautiful behemoth, London, has seen it all before. In its sprawling and amiable diversity, it whispers this: let's hope for the best.