In his seminal essay After Ten Years, written at the turn of 1942-1943, the German theologian and anti-Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer diagnosed a profound psychological pathology that regularly overtakes captured elites. He noted that in the face of systemic institutional pressures, individuals do not merely lose their judgment; they surrender their intellectual independence to a collective condition. In such states, Bonhoeffer warned: “The stupid person… is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.” Reason falls on deaf ears, and facts that contradict the prevailing group-think are simply pushed aside as inconsequential.
The modern Western establishment is currently held captive by just such a powerful institutional spell: a persistent conviction that the complex frictions of a morally and ethically splintering society can be permanently smoothed over through the mechanics of public relations, bureaucratic deference and administrative compliance. When faced with deep civilisational or theological contradictions, the modern reflex of our elite is rarely to engage in critical thinking. Instead, it is to retreat into a defensive, self-righteous insulation.
Leaders entrench themselves behind boilerplate statements and tactical retractions, hoping to survive the immediate news cycle by staying on the rehearsed message and then fleeing back to the safety of the elite bubble.
Rarely is this institutional pattern more vividly illustrated than in a single, striking photograph from Lambeth Palace that was recently released. The image caught Archbishop Sarah Mullally presenting a Lambeth Award to Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, the chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council. Standing just three feet away was Ashrafi’s wife, wrapped tightly from head to wrist, with only her eyes visible to the assembled crowd.
The subsequent public backlash followed a predictable contemporary script. When it emerged that Ashrafi had a documented history of praising militant figures, Lambeth Palace scrambled to rescind the honour, issuing a defensive statement citing the cleric’s “past comments”. Yet, in characteristic fashion, the Church establishment said absolutely nothing about the underlying theological implications or the profound asymmetry of the ceremony itself. They treated a civilisational capitulation as a mere administrative oversight. In keeping with the prevailing institutional group-think, the Archbishop has avoided placing herself in front of television cameras or taking live, unscripted questions from journalists. It is the familiar playbook: Go woke, get caught, fake regret, lie low.
It is easy to condemn Dame Sarah for this display of moral incoherence, to treat her as an isolated offender and demand her immediate resignation. I confess that was my first, impulsive reaction. But such a demand misses a fundamental truth: Dame Sarah is, above all, a product of her time. The prevailing norm across Britain’s leadership class, indeed across the elite institutions of the wider West, is one of institutional appeasement, historical atonement and systematic abasement.
For decades, Western elites have insisted on a rapid transition toward absolute multiculturalism, operating on the unexamined hope that diversity would somehow, against all historical odds, work out so long as they kept insisting it would. A core tenet of the modern establishment is that all cultural frameworks are equally good or equally bad. Dame Sarah, as the most senior cleric of the established Church of England, should know better.
What do the sacred texts and classical commentaries of Islam actually say about why a woman is veiled, and what obligations are placed upon the man? The classical Sunni tradition, constructed through the authoritative Koranic commentaries (tafsir) of Al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir, alongside the philosophical treatises of Al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyya, establishes a synchronised social architecture built around four clear rationales for the mandatory veiling of women:
Modesty (Iffah): Rooted in Sura Nur (24:31), women are instructed to guard their private parts and draw their head-coverings over their bosoms, treating the female body as a locus of inherent vulnerability that must be shielded from the male eye.Obedience (Ta’ah): Derived from Sura Ahzab, classical jurists systematically transformed a localised rule originally meant for the household of the Prophet into a universal mandate of female seclusion and spatial partitioning.Social distinction (Tamyiz): Sura Ahzab (33:59) commands women to draw their cloaks tightly “so that they may be recognised and not molested”. In his authoritative commentary, Ibn Kathir explicitly says that this covering distinguishes the “free” woman from slave-girls and the women of the Jahiliyya (the pre-Islamic era of ignorance), “so that it will be known that they are free, and that they are not servants or whores”.The prevention of temptation (Fitna): The underlying assumption is that the mere sight of an uncovered woman triggers an uncontrollable sexual temptation in the male, requiring the door of public female interaction to be closed because the man cannot be trusted to draw the moral line himself. A failure to regulate male sexual impulses is viewed as a threat to social cohesion and communal order.Crucially, this system imposes a parallel set of commandments that men must follow. They must lower their gaze and continuously police their external environments to avoid visual temptation. When this synchronised system of norms is translated into live practice, it inevitably produces an externalised model of social management. By making the woman’s physical covering and spatial isolation the primary guarantor of social order, the responsibility for male purity is offloaded on to the female body. Men are treated as predatory, reactive actors stripped of internal moral agency, driven entirely by external visual triggers. Women, conversely, are reduced to guarded commodities whose basic human freedom of movement and public visibility must be permanently sacrificed to maintain social stability. “Free” they most certainly are not.
Dame Sarah should also be aware of the concrete consequences of these norms for women in the countries where Shariah is the law of the land. Where this externalised policing system runs as the dominant legal framework, it divides women into three distinct categories:
The Elevated Woman: The upper-class wife, safely veiled and secluded within the domestic sphere, protected by her family’s social status but legally subordinate under strict male guardianship laws.The Servant Girl: See, for example, the millions of vulnerable foreign domestic workers migrating from Southeast Asia and Africa under the structural restrictions of the kafala (sponsorship) system. Deprived of basic legal protections and isolated inside private residences, these women are routinely exposed to severe exploitation, wage withholding and physical abuse.The Loose Woman or Whore: The label applied to any woman outside these structural boundaries, rendering her a legitimate object of public harassment. According to a landmark UN Women’s survey, 99.3 per cent of Egyptian women reported having been sexually harassed, demonstrating that external concealment does not guarantee public safety, but instead treats female visibility as a provocation that legitimises abuse. Across major metropolitan transit networks, such as the metros of Dubai, Riyadh, Cairo, and Tehran, authorities run dedicated women-and-children carriages. Public space is literally partitioned, structurally redesigned around the inability of the system to guarantee public safety through internal self-restraint.
Finally, the Archbishop of Canterbury must by now be aware of the impact on women in Britain and the rest of the West of the influx into our societies of millions of men raised to view women in these ways.
In the United Kingdom, the independent Jay Report found that at least 1,400 children had been sexually abused in Rotherham alone, noting that authorities were slow to intervene from an institutional fear of stoking community tensions. Rape-gang perpetrators were disproportionately of Pakistani and South Asian background – “overwhelmingly so” according to Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary.
More recently, Baroness Casey’s national audit of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse presented clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men in the data compiled by multiple British police forces. Data from the Government’s Forced Marriage Unit recorded hundreds of cases where honour-based coercion was used to enforce parallel cultural frameworks within isolated communities.
What is to be done? In continental Europe, nations including France, Belgium, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands have all enacted legislation forbidding the concealment of the face in public. Yet such measures treat the veil merely as a functional security loophole rather than a deep manifestation of an asymmetric social theology. By reducing a profound civilisational difference to a routine policing measure, secular states miss the opportunity to defend the positive, foundational virtues of an open society – namely, the internal moral governance of the individual and the mutual public accountability between men and women.
This is precisely where religious leaders are called to step forward. Instead of pressing on with the one-way accommodation of militant Islam, Dame Sarah could use her platform to defend the core moral genius of the theological tradition of which she is supposed to be the custodian.
In the Christian framework, the ethical responsibility for sexual purity and social order is placed squarely on the individual conscience. Moral rectitude is defined as an internal victory of self-control, exercised within a society of shared public freedom. Christianity presumes that, though sinful, men are morally accountable beings fully capable of respecting the bodily autonomy of women, regardless of how those women are dressed or where they walk. This approach builds a culture of reciprocal respect: men are commanded to honour women as fellow image-bearers of God, and women are empowered to occupy public spaces uncovered, without their human dignity being diminished. The Christian model is in this and many other respects quite different from a system of spatial partitioning and external enforcement.
As Bonhoeffer pointed out later in After Ten Years, structural stupidity is not a permanent congenital defect, but a particular psychological impact of historical circumstances. Because it is an induced state of group-think rather than an absence of intellect, it can be broken. But “only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome it”, Bonhoeffer wrote.
True liberation of our institutions begins the moment a leader finds the moral courage to step outside the consensus, replace passive appeasement with courageous defence and confidently assert the ethical superiority of the Christian inheritance.
In his seminal essay After Ten Years, written at the turn of 1942-1943, the German theologian and anti-Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer diagnosed a profound psychological pathology that regularly overtakes captured elites. He noted that in the face of systemic institutional pressures, individuals do not merely lose their judgment; they surrender their intellectual independence to a collective condition. In such states, Bonhoeffer warned: “The stupid person… is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.” Reason falls on deaf ears, and facts that contradict the prevailing group-think are simply pushed aside as inconsequential.
The modern Western establishment is currently held captive by just such a powerful institutional spell: a persistent conviction that the complex frictions of a morally and ethically splintering society can be permanently smoothed over through the mechanics of public relations, bureaucratic deference and administrative compliance. When faced with deep civilisational or theological contradictions, the modern reflex of our elite is rarely to engage in critical thinking. Instead, it is to retreat into a defensive, self-righteous insulation.
Leaders entrench themselves behind boilerplate statements and tactical retractions, hoping to survive the immediate news cycle by staying on the rehearsed message and then fleeing back to the safety of the elite bubble.
Rarely is this institutional pattern more vividly illustrated than in a single, striking photograph from Lambeth Palace that was recently released. The image caught Archbishop Sarah Mullally presenting a Lambeth Award to Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, the chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council. Standing just three feet away was Ashrafi’s wife, wrapped tightly from head to wrist, with only her eyes visible to the assembled crowd.
The subsequent public backlash followed a predictable contemporary script. When it emerged that Ashrafi had a documented history of praising militant figures, Lambeth Palace scrambled to rescind the honour, issuing a defensive statement citing the cleric’s “past comments”. Yet, in characteristic fashion, the Church establishment said absolutely nothing about the underlying theological implications or the profound asymmetry of the ceremony itself. They treated a civilisational capitulation as a mere administrative oversight. In keeping with the prevailing institutional group-think, the Archbishop has avoided placing herself in front of television cameras or taking live, unscripted questions from journalists. It is the familiar playbook: Go woke, get caught, fake regret, lie low.
It is easy to condemn Dame Sarah for this display of moral incoherence, to treat her as an isolated offender and demand her immediate resignation. I confess that was my first, impulsive reaction. But such a demand misses a fundamental truth: Dame Sarah is, above all, a product of her time. The prevailing norm across Britain’s leadership class, indeed across the elite institutions of the wider West, is one of institutional appeasement, historical atonement and systematic abasement.
For decades, Western elites have insisted on a rapid transition toward absolute multiculturalism, operating on the unexamined hope that diversity would somehow, against all historical odds, work out so long as they kept insisting it would. A core tenet of the modern establishment is that all cultural frameworks are equally good or equally bad. Dame Sarah, as the most senior cleric of the established Church of England, should know better.
What do the sacred texts and classical commentaries of Islam actually say about why a woman is veiled, and what obligations are placed upon the man? The classical Sunni tradition, constructed through the authoritative Koranic commentaries (tafsir) of Al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir, alongside the philosophical treatises of Al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyya, establishes a synchronised social architecture built around four clear rationales for the mandatory veiling of women:
Crucially, this system imposes a parallel set of commandments that men must follow. They must lower their gaze and continuously police their external environments to avoid visual temptation. When this synchronised system of norms is translated into live practice, it inevitably produces an externalised model of social management. By making the woman’s physical covering and spatial isolation the primary guarantor of social order, the responsibility for male purity is offloaded on to the female body. Men are treated as predatory, reactive actors stripped of internal moral agency, driven entirely by external visual triggers. Women, conversely, are reduced to guarded commodities whose basic human freedom of movement and public visibility must be permanently sacrificed to maintain social stability. “Free” they most certainly are not.
Dame Sarah should also be aware of the concrete consequences of these norms for women in the countries where Shariah is the law of the land. Where this externalised policing system runs as the dominant legal framework, it divides women into three distinct categories:
According to a landmark UN Women’s survey, 99.3 per cent of Egyptian women reported having been sexually harassed, demonstrating that external concealment does not guarantee public safety, but instead treats female visibility as a provocation that legitimises abuse. Across major metropolitan transit networks, such as the metros of Dubai, Riyadh, Cairo, and Tehran, authorities run dedicated women-and-children carriages. Public space is literally partitioned, structurally redesigned around the inability of the system to guarantee public safety through internal self-restraint.
Finally, the Archbishop of Canterbury must by now be aware of the impact on women in Britain and the rest of the West of the influx into our societies of millions of men raised to view women in these ways.
In the United Kingdom, the independent Jay Report found that at least 1,400 children had been sexually abused in Rotherham alone, noting that authorities were slow to intervene from an institutional fear of stoking community tensions. Rape-gang perpetrators were disproportionately of Pakistani and South Asian background – “overwhelmingly so” according to Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary.
More recently, Baroness Casey’s national audit of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse presented clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men in the data compiled by multiple British police forces. Data from the Government’s Forced Marriage Unit recorded hundreds of cases where honour-based coercion was used to enforce parallel cultural frameworks within isolated communities.
What is to be done? In continental Europe, nations including France, Belgium, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands have all enacted legislation forbidding the concealment of the face in public. Yet such measures treat the veil merely as a functional security loophole rather than a deep manifestation of an asymmetric social theology. By reducing a profound civilisational difference to a routine policing measure, secular states miss the opportunity to defend the positive, foundational virtues of an open society – namely, the internal moral governance of the individual and the mutual public accountability between men and women.
This is precisely where religious leaders are called to step forward. Instead of pressing on with the one-way accommodation of militant Islam, Dame Sarah could use her platform to defend the core moral genius of the theological tradition of which she is supposed to be the custodian.
In the Christian framework, the ethical responsibility for sexual purity and social order is placed squarely on the individual conscience. Moral rectitude is defined as an internal victory of self-control, exercised within a society of shared public freedom. Christianity presumes that, though sinful, men are morally accountable beings fully capable of respecting the bodily autonomy of women, regardless of how those women are dressed or where they walk. This approach builds a culture of reciprocal respect: men are commanded to honour women as fellow image-bearers of God, and women are empowered to occupy public spaces uncovered, without their human dignity being diminished. The Christian model is in this and many other respects quite different from a system of spatial partitioning and external enforcement.
As Bonhoeffer pointed out later in After Ten Years, structural stupidity is not a permanent congenital defect, but a particular psychological impact of historical circumstances. Because it is an induced state of group-think rather than an absence of intellect, it can be broken. But “only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome it”, Bonhoeffer wrote.
True liberation of our institutions begins the moment a leader finds the moral courage to step outside the consensus, replace passive appeasement with courageous defence and confidently assert the ethical superiority of the Christian inheritance.