TAKE IT OUTSIDE, BOYS

It is slightly disconcerting to see two good friends having it at each other in public, as did Austin Bencini and Kenneth Zammit Tabona over the last couple of days, but it is worse to see them miss the point somewhat.

In my earnest desire to set the dear chaps straight, I thought I'd dedicate a few lines to explaining, patiently, where they went wrong.

First, I'll direct an admonishing finger towards Austin, who seems to have taken umbrage at what he understood to be Kenneth's shock-horror at the mere idea that Sharia law would ever have a chance of being introduced in Malta.

Leaving aside the pretty cogent facts that in the first place, systems in Malta seem to be so resistant to change that it's amazing that they even get around to changing uniforms from summer to winter in the Police Force, and, in the second place, there's no way that a religion-based system would ever replace the current one (vide, for proof, the way the great unwashed rose up as one to express various, sometimes unChristian, sentiments at the silly ECHR judgement) no-one, not even KZT was saying that there was a move to introduce Sharia.

What KZT was, in fact, on about, was the distaste he feels for Sharia in its fundamentalist form, such that he would prefer to carry on being governed by a system of law that embodies Christian base-principles. Given that Christianity, in its un-fundamentalised form, is not a bad value system (yes, I know, I'm using understatement) that is hardly surprising, and given that Sharia, in its fundamentalised form, is a pretty lousy value system (again, the understatement) this again is hardly surprising.

So really, my two buds were not that far apart from each other and I suspect that Austin's hackles were raised by a slight miscomprehension of Ken's choice of phrasing, which was perhaps a bit less elegant than it could have been.

What was missing in both contributions, for diametrically opposing reasons, was the opportunity to pour scorn on the fundamentalist nature of our current system of governance in certain spheres. From Austin's side of the argument, this was because, I suspect, he tends towards a less liberal point of view, while on Kenneth's side, he's said it so often that he probably thinks it needn't be repeated.

The real battle is not between Christianity and Islam, to my mind, it is between liberal Western-like values and Fundamentalism.

This leads me, for now I speak for myself and suspend my teasing of friends, to a position where simultaneously I can show my distaste for the Imam last week who thought that Sharia Law (as he and his ilk interpret it) while at the same time raising one of my eyebrows at the pseudo-Christian posing that xenophobe racists adopt whenever they perceive a threat to their so-called values and then going on to raise the other one at the regression to fundamentalism exemplified by the Rector's transgression on the right of free speech at Tal-Qroqq.

At one and the same time, I can, therefore, ask the Imam to can it, tell the Rector I think he was a twit and opine that the academic staff are craven fence-sitters, while annoying Kenneth Zammit Tabona and Austin Bencini in, I hope, equal measure.