Finding Common Ground
In forums and debates around the world, in books, articles and programmes, Christopher tries to get beyond the polarisations that impede human wellbeing and act as a unifier between cultures and peoples, between the present and the past.
The Unifying Power of Music
Christopher with Michael Berkeley, creator of the BBC classical music show Private Passions. Christopher’s choices when he was Michael’s guest included a setting of Rumi’s poetry, a madrigal commissioned by the Venetian Doge who features in the Lion House and Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, which helped him to come to terms with his mother’s depression thirty years after her death.
Stop Calling for an Islamic Enlightenment
The Guardian
“A party of school-age swimmers takes to the waters of a municipal pool in north London. Among her peers, one Muslim girl stands out – nine or 10 years of age, brown face and eyes under a yellow cap, sliding gingerly into the water in a cotton salwar kameez that prevents the male attendants, the boys in her class, and other random males in the pool, like me, from seeing her prepubescent body. So far as I know, there is nothing in Islam that bars girls below the age of menstruation from showing their legs and tummy in public, but in more conservative households there is a strong distaste for the idea of even partial undress in mixed company at any age. In less understanding circumstances, this distaste could have led to the girl’s withdrawal from her school’s weekly swimming outing, denying her a part of our holistic modern curriculum. But in this case consultations have evidently taken place between parents, school and pool management (has the salwar kameez been washed?), leading to this civilised modus vivendi.”
From ‘Stop Calling for an Islamic Enlightenment’, in the Guardian.
The New Europeans
The New York Review of Books
“There are many factors in Europe’s Muslim crisis, but perhaps the most fundamental is that Islam is never part of any general consideration of values in a successful modern society. Its position is at the margins of society, spoken at rather than engaged with.”
From ‘The New Europeans’, in the New York Review of Books
Unravelling the Riddle of History
“My heart bleeds for those Armenians who are citizens of the Republic of Turkey. In a state that forbids open discussion of the massacres of 1915, it becomes doubly impossible to discuss their ramifications, and the unique people, hybrids with weird overlapping labels, that inhabit the vacuum. It is these people who are forgotten amid the learned mudslinging and parliamentary bills and letters to the editor… there must be in them - shivering in the rags of their identity while the Armenians scream ‘Genocide!’ And the Turks retort ‘No Genocide!’ - a terrible sense that they no longer count for anything at all.”
From Christopher’s book about the conflicted lands of Eastern Turkey, Rebel Land.