With a reputation for speaking his mind and often ignoring the niceties of political correctness, Britain’s chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, has waded into yet more choppy waters with his controversial views on multiculturalism.
In the very first paragraph of his recently published book, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society (Continuum Books, 2007), he unhesitatingly sets the stage for what’s to come, by stating: “Multiculturalism has run its course, and it is time to move on. It was a fine, even noble idea in its time. It was designed to make ethnic and religious minorities feel more at home in society, more appreciated and respected, better equipped with self-esteem and therefore better able to mesh with the larger society as a whole. It affirmed their culture. It gave dignity to difference. And in many ways it achieved its aims.”
He then goes on to write: “But there has been a price to pay, and it grows year by year. Multiculturalism has led not to integration but to segregation. It has allowed groups to live separately, with no incentive to integrate and every incentive not to. It was intended to promote tolerance. Instead the result has been, in countries where it has been tried, societies more abrasive, fractured and intolerant than they once were.”
Though at times a bit difficult to follow, Rabbi Sacks’ arguments are, for the most part, cogent and thought-provoking.
Not surprisingly, many of the reviewers of his book have been noncommittal, carefully avoiding overt endorsements of his position, while at the same time steering clear of actually criticizing him for opening this sort of discourse in the first place.
However, I did come across one rather extreme reaction that, precisely by way of its ugly diatribe, reaffirmed the very essence of what Rabbi Sacks has been concerned about.
Writing in a blog called Jumah Pulse on Oct. 2, one Husain Al-Qadi called his treatise a “stealth attack on [the] Muslim community.”
“It is no secret,” he comments, “that when people shout about the failure of multiculturalism today, what they actually mean is the perceived failure of the Muslim community to integrate into wider society.”
He ends by warning the Jewish community that “there are thousands of Muslims who are keeping records of every statement of venom and every publication that contributes to the unfolding crime upon crime against the whole Muslim community.”
Rabbi Sacks’ book is provocative, and so it should be. But regardless of whether one regards him as courageous or reckless for drawing attention to the blemishes of multiculturalism, he demands of us no less than an open and honest reappraisal of a construct that may well be obsolete as we move toward a civil society for the future.
