Islamophobia is a virus that helps the smallest people feel bigger
DUBLINERS of a certain age will remember the old Meath Hospital on Long Lane off Clanbrassil Street, and the Adelaide Hospital nearby, off Bride Street. Like most Irish hospitals they have a denominational history, specifically Protestant, which continues in Tallaght Hospital when they amalgamated. It would be naive to tint any Irish confessional history with rose colour. But my memory of those places as they came to the end of their days in the inner city in the 1970s and 80s is that they were well respected by the local people, who were overwhelmingly Catholic and, largely still practising.
It was all the more jarring that during this Advent, when He is awaited, a female patient was reported to have refused care from two different Muslim doctors in Tallaght, the first of whom was identifiable by her hijab. The hospital correctly refused to comment on the care of an individual patient. But lest the point be lost, that patient’s daughter went on RTÉ’s Liveline on December 11. It was discordant bile. The importance of the rant was not how appalling it was, but regrettably how close it is to part of the popular mood.
It is a curious thing that as religious belief retreats across Europe, bigotries associated with it are enjoying a renaissance. Now popes no longer preach crusades, they teach peace as do leaders of practically every other Christian denomination. Pope Francis inaugurated the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy on December 8. I do not believe he would refuse treatment from a Muslim doctor. But there’s the thing. The Tallaght patient’s daughter, who carried her mother’s views stridently onto the airwaves, made it clear she “didn’t subscribe to any religious beliefs”. This strain of Islamophobia is not a new pathology, it is very old. The difference is, that separated from the once prevailing religious beliefs it subsisted or coincided with, it flourishes nonetheless. Hatred, a parasite, finds its home in any available host.
It’s Tallaght hospital now, but its roots are in Dublin’s inner city. It was formerly in the immediate shadow of St Patrick’s Cathedral. There, when Ireland’s first president Douglas Hyde’s — a protestant — funeral took place in 1949, the poet Austin Clarke wrote of Costello, his Cabinet, / In government cars, hiding / Around the corner, ready / Tall hat in hand, dreading / Our Father in English. Better / Not hear that ‘which’ for ‘who’ / And risk eternal doom.
Time and circumstance have changed but a guttural instinct to ‘other’ people who are different, remains. It simply takes new forms and finds other targets.
In a world scarred by hatred rooted in religion, or which religion is used as an excuse for, we might reflect on the universality of faith. Since last Thursday, great invocations, the ‘O’ Antiphons have been sung daily in Christian liturgies around the world. Each is a prayer to Him, who is awaited. Today the last is sung. “O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Expected of the nations and their Savior. Come and save us, O Lord our God.” Tomorrow we wait no longer.
That universality, inherent in any concept of God is paralleled by the Declaration of the rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaimed in Paris in 1789 and the Declaration of Human Rights declared again in Paris, in 1948. The Emmanuel who will come tomorrow said “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”. This he told his disciples “is the first and great commandment.” The second is “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” There is no God without neighbour, no universal right without a sense of the universal equality of all humanity.
In contrast, there is something extraordinarily enabling about every act of inclusion. Very soon I hope, we will have the opportunity to welcome Syrian refugees to Ireland. This year Ireland led the world by changing its constitution in a referendum and providing for equal marriage. Momentarily, if only through saccharine singing, we are about to turn our thoughts to tomorrow’s ‘silent night’ in Bethlehem.
Is it irony or blasphemy that as we lose faith, parodied as superstition in opposition to reason, Europe is increasingly defined by islamophobia and anti-Semitism again? Immigrants, including those from other European countries, often don’t fall far behind in the list of the resented and unwanted. For all its changing circumstances, it is always the same. It is irrational fear, a lack of self-confidence, often accompanied by ruthless opportunism that fires racism and sectarianism. It is a virus that makes small minded people feel threatened by their own inadequacy. Their escape is to vent their own deficiencies on others. You stand taller if you stand over someone else.
It is a sign of the parochialism of public conversation in Ireland that the dichotomy of our time is still identified as between Church and State. John A Costello’s successor Enda Kenny led a charge against the Vatican, only after it and the Catholic Church locally lost its political potency. Kenny’s judgement that it was safe, at last, to kick, was underscored by the equal marriage referendum result. If there are issues of an institutional overhang from the confessional cantonisation of Irish schools and hospitals, the world has moved on. But Ireland has not caught up.
The challenge in the 21st century will not be met by rerunning the politics or arguments of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Instead we face a visceral challenge to the values of Europe which, since the seventeenth century slowly sought, and occasionally succeeded, in providing varying spaces for different outlooks.
The reversals and failings were catastrophic, but over time a shared culture of what at least the ideal would be, grew. Now it is under threat. The threat from without is overstated but the threat from within is under-appreciated. European values, if they exist at all, have only ever been successfully mutilated internally, when we have turned on the Jew, the gypsy or an-other. Reason alone cannot hold the centre ground.
In Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones, a book-long conversation with Séamus Heaney, Heaney speaks of a people “sprung from the awestuck gaze” who “find themselves in a universe that is global, desacralized, consumerist and devoid of any real sense of place of pastness”.
We are sprung from the awestruck gaze and know our acquired indifference is not an ideal. Europe is older, virtually childless in many countries, as aging and depopulation quicken. The world burns carbon unsustainably, in part to keep fewer, older, Europeans in comfort on a continent becoming a nursing home set in a cultural theme park.
What we here think is up-to-date secularism, is out-of-date ideological sterility. Faith, imagination and, as Clarke and Heaney knew, poetry, inspires. Emotion unhinged from reason is dangerous. Reason uprooted from imagination is sterile. If we lose our myths, we lose our way. They are our past and future tense.
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