The saviour of the world

In Britain public money is being allocated to identify and promote ‘moderate’ Islam, in the hope of discouraging the ‘extremists’ and ‘fundamentalists’ whose supposed misunderstanding of the Faith is, in fact, the version most practised in those societies where it is the majority religion. The result is not likely to be much more than the detachment of a favoured westernised coterie of leaders from the main body of believers. The effects on the State are much more serious: the British government, after two centuries of receding Christian confessionalism, is beginning to endorse a particular interpretation of religious teaching — in the form of ‘moderate’ Islam — and even to offer it endowment. Western liberal thinking has abandoned institutionalised religion in every other sphere, and the notion of a single ‘spirituality’, encompassing all religions, and expressed in categories compatible with the secular values of the prevalent welfare Humanism, has become a familiar aspiration of enlightened opinion. Dr Küng now proposes himself as the intellectual visionary whose dream of the new dawn, in this grandiose volume, will unquestionably be acclaimed by all the usual luminaries. As Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has already declared, the book is ‘a magnificent tour de force by our greatest living theologian’.

Two-thirds of the book comprises a historical survey of Islam. It is factually accurate and thoughtful. But Küng writes with a predetermined agenda: ‘I am not primarily interested in the past but in the present’. The historical analysis turns out to be a gigantic vorspiel to his eventual proposition. This is the creation of a perpetual ‘dialogue’, in which the three religions of Abraham — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — will embrace a ‘complex process of secularisation’, give up interfering with education, and find a common purpose in what must, in the nature of things, be a rather imprecisely expressed spirituality.