Our Constitution renders any worries about rulings on crucifixes by the European Court of Human Rights a complete waste of time and energy, yet, despite this, many are those who still feel threatened. Please do not be. Malta is a virtual theocracy as long as our Constitution remains as it is. Although I found that Ian Refalo on last week's Bondiplus was unbelievably and exasperatingly vague and evasive about the subject, ordinary logic decrees that in Malta and Gozo it will take more than the Lisbon Treaty to undermine the Roman Catholic religion's time-honoured supremacy.
Having been assured that the Italian ruling regarding crucifixes is a non-issue I was appalled, to say the least, by what the Imam declared about Sharia law on the same programme. While I am sure that this Muslim cleric means well, I am afraid that there is no way that a supposedly civilised country like Malta is ever going to accept a code of laws that, among other things, happily severs body parts, hangs homosexuals and stones adulteresses while condoning honour killings.
Although I personally do not approve of a Roman Catholic theocracy and would rather live in a secular state, even the vaguest contemplation of introducing this barbarism in Malta would persuade me to give up all hope of ever introducing any social law that goes against the precepts of the Roman Catholic Church and I would be quite happy to continue allowing Archbishop Paul Cremona to call the shots as long as I am assured that there is no way that a code like Sharia can ever be introduced. This is precisely why people are so worried that our Christian symbols could be removed.
In this day and age, Christianity and Islam are at loggerheads. Why that is so is too complicated to explain in this limited column. Suffice it to say that all the aggression and antipathy that was generated by the Crusades a millennium ago has resurrected with a vengeance. Although many think otherwise, Christianity is light years more advanced than Islam. The deep and bitter divide between Shiite and Sunni is as violent as that between Huguenot and Catholic in France except that the massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve took place in the 16th and not the 21st century!
Declarations like that made by the Imam last week simply add fat to the fire. Traditionally, the average Maltese dislikes and distrusts Islam. One only had to take a cursory look at the various blogs to realise that many were those who jumped to the conclusion that the person or persons who instituted the crucifix case was Muslim. That it was a Finnish Agnostic and a woman to boot never entered their heads. With practically all the Middle East and North Africa being Muslim states, notoriously Saudi Arabia, is it at all surprising that the Imam is all for the establishment of an Islamic state here in Malta should the Roman Catholic faith fall by the wayside? Not at all. Malta could easily be considered as Islamic terra irredenta!
By and large ours is still a very tolerant country with a large mosque, a dedicated Islamic cemetery designed by Galizia and, on the whole, a pretty relaxed attitude to other religions.
However, and here lies the crunch, should our European civilisation be threatened in any way by influences and influxes that are diametrically and traditionally opposed to the ones we Maltese fought tooth and nail to preserve for centuries, then, yes, that goodwill and tolerance will find itself out of the window.
Crosses and rosaries are not talismans. They are not good luck charms. They do not ward off evil in themselves but are symbolic of a great western civilisation that predates Christianity itself. Other countries have seen fit to become secular in a bid to minimise fanaticism and religious rivalry and, hopefully, foster religious harmony by treating them all equally; an excellent thing per se but one that the rise of a militant Islam has, in turn, promoted fundamental Christianity for political and social reasons rather than because of the merits of the faith itself, which is why the brouhaha about the ECHR ruling is so vociferous if not hysterical.
I do fear that, like it was in the past, Christianity will be misused. Should the cross again be an In Hoc Signo Vinces in what looks like an inevitable showdown between it and the crescent? One would have thought that these were things that had long been buried and that, in this day and age, religions could and should co-exist quite serenely.
But no; since 9/11 our world has been under serious threat and, please note, not from the boatloads of black Africans but by infiltrations from Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia that fostered the murderously fanatical, religious fundamentalist Osama Bin Laden, a man, or phantom, who for almost a decade now has held the world to ransom.
kzt@onvol.net