Is Islam Contrary to British Values?

Nigel Farage has made headlines recently for claiming that Muslims in the country ‘do not subscribe to British values’.

These headlines say that Farage was ‘challenged’ for his claim (and this is true to some extent), but he was never challenged to define these values. If he was, he would no doubt say some combination of democracy, free speech and tolerance; in other words, liberalism.

The irony is that Farage undermines these values when he excludes Islam from the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’. Freedom of expression (and not least of which, religion) is one of the defining features of the West. According to theorists like Joseph Henrich (author of The WEIRDest People in the World, and The Secret of Our Success), the free exchange of ideas is arguably what made the West so successful. Excluding individuals based on their beliefs is surely more anti-British than practicing another Abrahamic religion.

A common comeback from this is to say that tolerance cannot be extended to intolerant ideas and Islam, they say, is full of intolerant ideas. The same people that say…