Will my friend, the writer and historian Tom Holland, get his head chopped off for the things he is saying on Islam: The Untold Story (Channel 4)? My guess is not. If I’d said them, I’m sure I would have done because I have the kind of manner which makes people want to punch my lights out even if all I’ve said is that their mum makes a really lovely apple crumble and by the way is it OK if I help with the dishes?
Holland, on the other hand, has such a fey, wispy, slightly geeky, quintessential English niceness about him that I’ll bet if he stood outside the Kaaba and declaimed to the crowds through a megaphone, ‘I say, you chaps. You do realise that your religion is a frightful farrago of nonsense? That most of it was made up on the hoof long after Mohammed,’ they’d all find it charming, droll and thoroughly unexceptionable.
But this is pure speculation.
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