Hello and welcome to the Spectator podcast. I'm Freddie Gray. On today's episode, we'll be

discussing the relationship between Islam and violence, asking why Brexit has been the dog that

hasn't barked in this election, and talking about the need for darkness. First up, following

another terrorist attack in London this weekend, Tom Holland says

that Islamist terror comes from a long tradition of brutal supremacism within the Muslim faith.

He joins us now with Christopher de Bel-Egg, author of The Islamic Enlightenment. Tom, in your

cover piece this week, you say that Theresa May says that Islamic violence is a perversion of the Islamic faith,

and you argue that that's actually wrong. Can you explain to us how that's wrong?

I think that although we are now a multi-faith, multicultural society, we do nevertheless

have a single state faith, and that faith is one that believes that religions are in their

essence, peaceful, liberal, and tolerant,

because that's what the vast majority of people in this country, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, whoever, and indeed agnostic or atheist, tend to be.

But to imagine that all religions are necessarily pacific, to imagine that all religions

can be reduced to the kind of platitudes that you hear on thought for the day is, I think,

hugely over-optimistic. And unless we recognise that there are strains within Islam that

absolutely foster violence, just as there are strains that

foster peace, then we're not going to be able to deal, I think, adequately with the terror

threat that we're currently seeing. You talk about recognising the problem. What happens after we

recognise the problem? What do we do once we've recognised that there is a connection between

Islam and violence? I'm in no way saying that this is a panacea, and it may be that

there is no ready solution. But I think that essentially what is going on in global Islam

is in a sense a civil war. And I remember speaking to a journalist in Cairo, who was himself a Muslim, who said that essentially the division in the Islamic world at the moment is between those who believe themselves to be superior to non-Muslims by virtue of being Muslim and those who don't.

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