A young woman graduate I had the pleasure to meet over supper last night spoke with an accent I quickly recognised from my days of reporting on the Troubles n Northern Ireland.
Sarah was her name. She was impressed how I managed to pinpoint her roots to ‘north of Belfast’ and well beyond the city to another town with a name that I thought might define her. “Well, its Derry, or Londonderry, isn’t it, how do you call it? “ I asked teasingly.
For decades Catholics, north and south of the Irish border, spoke only of Derry, while their Protestant antagonists resolutely stuck to the name favoured once by the British Crown and imposed through partition-Londonderry.
If Sarah has been called Bernadette or Victoria, she might have given the game away there and then as to her religious affiliation. But Sarah was pretty neutral in name and experience. “I‘ve grown up, calling it Derry and Londonderry.”
She told me that she owed this to her parents, one a Catholic and another Protestant, and the fact that she had grown up as the worst of the sectarian violence receded. She had been born neither into the loyalist Waterside nor into the nationalist Bogside neighbourhood but “outside the town, in the country.”
Sarah has visited and prayed in Catholic and Protestant churches and had been educated in a non-sectarian school. She had never fought over religion with her friends and had moved from adolescence to university in Manchester without any major trauma, physical or otherwise, wrecking her passage.
We talked, Sarah and I and my friend Richard, as we eat chicken couscous in a Lebanese restaurant along London’s Edgware Road. Ramadam was entering its third week and the street was crowded with groups of Muslims sharing a Shisha pipe after breaking their fast with their permitted evening meal. I reflected on how their quietly stated conviviality contrasted with the loud aggressive drunkenness that pervades parts of London’s west end in the late hours and how difficult it must be for some Muslims to be told to integrate with western ways .
And yet this cultural co-existence in a major capital like London is something we owe to our democracy-one, that despite its imperfections, at its best allows religious freedom, without stoning for adultery, or beheadings while permitting a vigorous debate over how and when our former prime-minister should be brought to account for his sins.
Tony Blair continues to be treated as a war criminal after announcing that he will donate the royalties from his memoirs to war veterans rather than drop to his knees on live TV and beg forgiveness for his part in the deaths of thousands of soldiers and civilians in Iraq. His critics are calling for a boycott of his book and for Waterstones to withdraw its endorsement of any public signings, Will they be burning his book in public next, I wonder.
And an interesting interview in today’s Independent with Timothy Winter-or Sheikh Abdul-Hakim Murad, a Cambridge based lecturer in Islamic Studies, days away from the arrival of the Pope in the UK. Winter claims his conversion to Islam came about the day, as a pubescent young man, he spotted peach juice running off the chin of a teenage French Jewish nudist on a Corsican beach. “I had a moment of realisation: the world is not just the consequence of material forces. Beauty is not just something than can be explained away just as an aspect of brain function.”
He goes on: “In a Christian context, sexuality is seen as a consequence of the Fall, but for Muslims, it is an anticipation of paradise.”
I think future historians may be kinder on Blair, a Catholic, not least for helping allowing young Irish men and women like Sarah to grow up without the fear and prejudice of their grandparents. Lest we forget, he also supported the overthrow of Saddam and the war against Osama bin Laden after Al Qaeda operatives crashed their planes into the Twin Towers believing several virgins awaited them in paradise.
