Secular Fanaticism: The New Threat? November 27, 2006

From the Canadian Jewish News:

In the fight against militant Islam, one of the new theories is this: if you force Muslims to look like everyone else, they’ll start acting like everyone else. That thought was the driving force behind the French government’s 2004 decision to ban religious symbols in schools.

It’s also the driving force behind a new bill proposed by the Dutch government that, if passed, would forbid Muslim women from donning facial veils in public, and it’s the reason former British foreign secretary Jack Straw admitted in a recent editorial that he asks Muslim women to remove their veils during conversations with him.

The effort to end fanaticism – religious or otherwise – is always a worthy cause. But inherent in this endeavor is the danger of becoming precisely the fanatic you had hoped to eradicate. In the effort to create uniformity and civic equality, it’s quite possible that what we reward is actually a form of secular fanaticism.

In 1959, Philip Roth posed the question that we should all be asking ourselves right now: who are the real fanatics?

I couldn’t agree more.