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National remembrance days commemorate sacrifice and suffering. Let’s not politicise them.

In my lapel buttonhole I’ve worn a red poppy all week. All of my colleagues have done likewise. That is not unexpected. I serve as Dean of the Royal Air Force College. Unlike nearly all my RAF College colleagues, I am also a Muslim. I chose to embrace the faith of Islam because of its powerful spiritual truths, its emphasis on peace and justice, its racial and ethnic inclusiveness and its charitable spirit towards the poor and needy. And despite recently suffering a hateful Islamophobic tabloid newspaper attack and having received hate mail occasionally from English Defence League types, I simply love being a Muslim. Interestingly, the tabloid “rag” that attacked me did so by using the same basic argument as that of the haters from the EDL. Islam’s values, they insist, are not compatible with the West’s.

Every now and then I also receive criticism from Muslims who naively chastise me for remaining in my job. How can I live with my conscience, they ask, when I am involved in preparing young men and women to fight overseas for Britain? Ironically, the argument of these Muslims is identical to that of the Islamophobes: Islam’s values, they insist, are not compatible with the West’s.

I reject this argument. I consider it equally unsustainable when it is made by Muslim-haters and by Muslims. I consider the values — the assumptions that should form the basis of all ethical behaviour — of both the West and the Islamic world to be strikingly similar.

Both sides fail to see the compatibility of their overarching values. They focus on the failings and shortcomings of “the other” and ignore the fact that, for all humans everywhere, higher values are aspirational in nature and, sadly, never actually practiced by everyone in their own communities at all times. The corruption in both the Western and the Islamic worlds are testament to this. So are the jail inmate populations in both.

Yet no one in either sphere would deny that it is better to have higher values than not to have them, even though the frailties and flaws of human nature rob societies of the ability to function ideally according to their values. Individuals and communities function best, in my view, when they follow the type of clear moral codes found in holy scriptures, but the defects and shortcomings of human nature do not plague only atheists. They trouble everyone. Even those of us, irrespective of where we live, who choose to follow what we believe are God’s rules.

This brings me back to the poppy. I recognise that all communities make mistakes because, after all, they are composed of imperfect humans, some of whom serve as imperfect leaders. Sometimes these all-too-human leaders take their countries to war.

Have all of the West’s wars been perfectly just? Have Britain’s? No, they have not. Have all Islamic wars been perfectly just? No, they have not been either. Both the West and the Islamic world have strict codes governing the morality of warfare, an activity which both identify as being the most destructive of all human actions. Readers might be interested to learn that the Western moral code governing warfare is — again, at a conceptual and aspirational level — strikingly similar to that found within the Qur’an and the Sunnah. It is merely expressed differently.

I am often frustrated by how seldom Western states and Islamic states get things absolutely morally right when they go to war. Moral slips are sadly too frequent. Yet, aware of the unparalleled evils of the Third Reich and other deviant regimes which once chose to set aside morality in war, I remain convinced that it is far better for states to have moral codes governing wars (however idealistic in nature) than not to have them.

Yes, these moral codes governing war are aspirational — much like our wider societal values — but state leaders and armed forces nowadays do try, with varying degrees of commitment and effort, to follow them. In recent decades I have seen some wars waged by Western states which followed the Just War code with commendable strictness. I have occasionally personally questioned the commitment to that code by leaders who have initiated other wars rather more recklessly. I have also seen the same broad range of moral indiscipline in wars initiated by, and sometimes fought between, Islamic states.

What, then, of the soldiers who serve in good faith and perish and suffer in those wars of varying justness? I take the view that the safety and security of the state and its citizens is a solemn and heavy responsibility and that the soldiers, sailors and airmen who choose to risk their lives to protect their compatriots therefore deserve great thanks. War is unquestionably a frightening, bloody business. It is no easier for westerners than for Muslims. For everyone who enters military service believing in the rightness of defending their communities and their values, war remains a cruel and unpalatable activity.

I wear a poppy to offer my respectful thanks to those soldiers, sailors and airmen who died while trying to preserve our country and the wider cause of world peace. They included tens of thousands of Muslims, by the way. I thank them all. Have our servicemen and women sometimes died for wars with political goals that I would personally disagree with? Yes. Should their sacrifice be forgotten, devalued or insulted as a consequence? No, it should not.

With quiet reflection we should see “Poppy Day” as a sad and solemn day of commemoration. We should remember the fallen without adding our judgements of the political circumstances that led those men and women into the horror of war and ultimately, lamentably, to their deaths. There are 364 other days in the year when we can and should peacefully demand that our governments, in whatever country we live (Western or Muslim), desist from any behaviour that falls short of our values. On our national remembrance days, however, we should focus our minds on the human tragedy: the deaths of those who fought for us and the pain of their loss to their bereaved families and friends.

Photo Credits: Getty Images