Reversing the Decay of London Undone Britain's chief rabbi on the moral disintegration since the 1960s and how to rebuild more in Life & Culture » By JONATHAN SACKS It was the same city but it might have been a different planet. At the end of April, the eyes of the world were on London as a dashing prince and a radiant princess, William and Kate, rode in a horse-drawn carriage through streets lined with cheering crowds sharing a mood of joyous celebration. Less than four months later, the world was watching London again as hooded youths ran riot down high streets, smashing windows, looting shops, setting fire to cars, attacking passersby and throwing rocks at the police.

Panos Pictures A priest and an imam join with the local community to pray as they begin to clean up the damage in the London borough of Hackney. In the 1800s, in Britain and America, religious and community organizations 're-moralized' those countries.

It looked like a scene from Cairo, Tunis or Tripoli earlier in the year. But this was no political uprising. People were breaking into shops and making off with clothes, shoes, electronic gadgets and flat-screen televisions. It was, as someone later called it, shopping with violence, consumerism run rampage, an explosion of lawlessness made possible by mobile phones as gangs discovered that by text messaging they could bring crowds onto the streets where they became, for a while, impossible to control.

Let us be clear. The numbers involved were relatively small. The lawkeepers vastly outnumbered the lawbreakers. People stepped in to rescue those attacked. Crowds appeared each morning to clear up the wreckage of the night before. Britain remains a decent, good and gracious society.

But the damage was real. Businesses were destroyed. People lost their homes. A 68-year-old man, attacked by a mob while trying to put out a fire, died. Three young men in Birmingham were killed in a hit-and-run attack. While it lasted, it was very frightening.

It took everyone by surprise. It should not have.

Britain is the latest country to pay the price for what happened half a century ago in one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West. In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came: whatever works for you. The Ten Commandments were rewritten as the Ten Creative Suggestions. Or as Allan Bloom put it in "The Closing of the American Mind": "I am the Lord Your God: Relax!"

You do not have to be a Victorian sentimentalist to realize that something has gone badly wrong since. In Britain today, more than 40% of children are born outside marriage. This has led to new forms of child poverty that serious government spending has failed to cure. In 2007, a Unicef report found that Britain's children are the unhappiest in the world. The 2011 riots are one result. But there are others.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women—91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data—is practically absurd and morally indefensible. By the time boys are in their early teens they are physically stronger than their mothers. Having no fathers, they are socialized in gangs. No one can control them: not parents, teachers or even the local police. There are areas in Britain's major cities that have been no-go areas for years. Crime is rampant. So are drugs. It is a recipe for violence and despair.

That is the problem. At first it seemed as if the riots were almost random with no basis in class or race. As the perpetrators have come to court, a different picture has emerged. Of those charged, 60% had a previous criminal record, and 25% belonged to gangs.

This was the bursting of a dam of potential trouble that has been building for years. The collapse of families and communities leaves in its wake unsocialized young people, deprived of parental care, who on average—and yes, there are exceptions—do worse than their peers at school, are more susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse, less likely to find stable employment and more likely to land up in jail.

The truth is, it is not their fault. They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement.

What has happened morally in the West is what has happened financially as well. Good and otherwise sensible people were persuaded that you could spend more than you earn, incur debt at unprecedented levels and consume the world's resources without thinking about who will pay the bill and when. It has been the culture of the free lunch in a world where there are no free lunches.

We have been spending our moral capital with the same reckless abandon that we have been spending our financial capital. Freud was right. The precondition of civilization is the ability to defer the gratification of instinct. And even Freud, who disliked religion and called it the "obsessional neurosis" of humankind, realized that it was the Judeo-Christian ethic that trained people to control their appetites.

There are large parts of Britain, Europe and even the United States where religion is a thing of the past and there is no counter-voice to the culture of buy it, spend it, wear it, flaunt it, because you're worth it. The message is that morality is passé, conscience is for wimps, and the single overriding command is "Thou shalt not be found out."

Has this happened before, and is there a way back? The answer to both questions is in the affirmative. In the 1820s, in Britain and America, a similar phenomenon occurred. People were moving from villages to cities. Families were disrupted. Young people were separated from their parents and no longer under their control. Alcohol consumption rose dramatically. So did violence. In the 1820s it was unsafe to walk the streets of London because of pickpockets by day and "unruly ruffians" by night.

What happened over the next 30 years was a massive shift in public opinion. There was an unprecedented growth in charities, friendly societies, working men's institutes, temperance groups, church and synagogue associations, Sunday schools, YMCA buildings and moral campaigns of every shape and size, fighting slavery or child labor or inhuman working conditions. The common factor was their focus on the building of moral character, self-discipline, willpower and personal responsibility. It worked. Within a single generation, crime rates came down and social order was restored. What was achieved was nothing less than the re-moralization of society—much of it driven by religion.

It was this that the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville saw on his visit to America in 1831. It astonished him. Tocqueville was expecting to see, in the land that had enacted the constitutional separation of church and state, a secular society. To his amazement he found something completely different: a secular state, to be sure, but also a society in which religion was, he said, the first of its political (we would now say "civil") institutions. It did three things he saw as essential. It strengthened the family. It taught morality. And it encouraged active citizenship.

Nearly 200 years later, the Tocqueville of our time, Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, made the same discovery. Mr. Putnam is famous for his diagnosis of the breakdown of social capital he called "bowling alone." More people were going bowling, but fewer were joining teams. It was a symbol of the loss of community in an age of rampant individualism. That was the bad news.

At the end of 2010, he published the good news. Social capital, he wrote in "American Grace," has not disappeared. It is alive and well and can be found in churches, synagogues and other places of worship. Religious people, he discovered, make better neighbors and citizens. They are more likely to give to charity, volunteer, assist a homeless person, donate blood, spend time with someone feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger, help someone find a job and take part in local civic life. Affiliation to a religious community is the best predictor of altruism and empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race.

Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives. Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent. Alexis de Tocqueville saw it then, Robert Putnam is saying it now. It needs religion: not as doctrine but as a shaper of behavior, a tutor in morality, an ongoing seminar in self-restraint and pursuit of the common good.

One of our great British exports to America, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, has a fascinating passage in his recent book "Civilization," in which he asks whether the West can maintain its primacy on the world stage or if it is a civilization in decline.

He quotes a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, tasked with finding out what gave the West its dominance. He said: At first we thought it was your guns. Then we thought it was your political system, democracy. Then we said it was your economic system, capitalism. But for the last 20 years, we have known that it was your religion.

It was the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave the West its restless pursuit of a tomorrow that would be better than today. The Chinese have learned the lesson. Fifty years after Chairman Mao declared China a religion-free zone, there are now more Chinese Christians than there are members of the Communist Party.

China has learned the lesson. The question is: Will we?

—Lord Sacks is the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth
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Boldly modest declaration of faith
For a Fairfax County teenager, middle school represents a major test of her decision to wear a head scarf as a sign of her devotion to Islam
By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 15, 2009




Smar Abuagla steps out her front doo r at 7:20 a.m., her shoulders slightly hunched, her eyes watchful.

Last year when she made this walk to the bus stop on the first day of school, she was wearing black skinny jeans and a short-sleeved T-shirt; her hair was in braids. But this year she's a different Smar. In addition to looser, more modest clothing, her hair is completely hidden under a head scarf.

It is a look that not only sets her apart from most girls at her Reston middle school but also proclaims her as a Muslim, a religious minority in a country that sometimes associates her faith with terrorism and acts of violence.

Most of Smar's friends and classmates have never seen her in the scarf before. Smar, 13, has no idea how they will react.

It's drizzling as she reaches the bus stop, where she huddles under an umbrella. The eighth-grader is normally chatty with an impish grin, but today when a couple of girls she knows slightly walk up, she mutters, "Hi," and rolls her eyes self-consciously. Omigosh, I probably look horrible. Omigosh, everyone's staring at me.

She closes the umbrella.

"Hey, Smar, if you're not going to use that, can I?" one of the girls says. "My hair's getting wet."

Smar silently hands it over.

At her middle school, plenty of the 960 students are from Muslim families. But only three or four of the girls wear head scarves.

Some of Smar's friends didn't even know she was Muslim until she mentioned one day that she spoke Arabic.

"They're like, 'Why? Only Muslim people do that,' and I'm like, 'Yeah, you don't get it?' "

Today, when she arrives at school in her green and black head scarf, they'll get it.

Badge of faith
Smar hated the scarf when she first put it on.

Hijab was required for Saturday Islam classes at her family's mosque, the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS). But the scarf itched. It felt hot. Smar whipped it off as soon as she got outside.

"I was like, 'This is America. You can't make me wear it!' " she recalls.

Although she was born in Sudan, her parents brought her to the United States when she was 3 months old. She speaks fluent Arabic, and her faith is a central part of her life. She follows the requirements for fasting and praying, and she would like to go to Mecca one day.

At the same time, she loves the Jonas Brothers (especially Nick) and vampire books. Her Facebook page declares her admiration for Michael Jackson, fries, her mother and Barack Obama, and it is strewn with pictures of herself, scarfless, hamming for the camera.

For a long time, the question of hijab, worn by many Muslim women to fulfill a religious requirement for modest dress, hovered in the blurry future, along with prom, college and marriage. There is no set time when a girl has to start wearing it. Some start as adolescents; some never do.

Smar's mother, Taysir Ali, who grew up near Khartoum, has always covered her hair. She didn't give it much thought, she says, until after her arranged marriage to Jamal Abuagla, who had been living in the United States since the 1980s. When he brought her here in 1996, she was confronted with all the temptations that Americans face.

"Seeing the kissing, the hugging, I was sweating," says Ali, a vivacious mother of four.

She has never been harassed for covering her hair, she says, not even in the tense days after Sept. 11, 2001, or in the wake of the Nov. 5 shootings at Fort Hood, Tex., where an Army psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, a Muslim, is charged with killing 13 people.

People have always seemed more curious than hostile, Ali says.

But that hasn't been the case for everyone. After the World Trade Center fell and the Pentagon burned, mosques were vandalized, and women in hijab were spit on and cursed at. In a few cases, Muslims were killed.

Eight years later -- even as the Muslim population in the United States has soared to as many as 7 million -- it still can take real courage for a girl to put on a head scarf and venture into a public middle or high school.

"Young boys go to school, and nobody knows they are Muslim, but young girls, with a scarf on their head, it shows clearly that she made a decision to stand out as a Muslim," says Mohamed Magid, the imam at ADAMS. "They suddenly become ambassadors of Islam."

Smar didn't embrace that role until her mother took her and her younger siblings to Egypt this past summer to visit family. Smar noticed immediately that all the women and girls there wore hijab. People stared at Smar's shoulder-length dark hair.

"It felt awkward," she says. "I felt so left out."

She decided to try wearing a head scarf. Her aunt, who lives in Cairo, showed her different styles: double layers of color that frame the face, tight cloth that gathers at the neck or blooms into a floret behind one ear.

Smar returned to Virginia in early September with a rainbow assortment of scarves and a changed attitude.

She had grown used to wearing what she calls "my badge of faith." It was new and exciting, and it made her feel, she says, "modest and confident at the same time."

She knows it makes her parents proud, especially her mother. "She's my rock; she's my base," said Smar, a few days after mother and daughter had returned from Egypt with their fingertips dyed black with matching henna treatments.

In America, the scarf makes her unusual. Smar has never been a follower. "I like being my own person," she says.

Now, with eighth grade starting, she feels ready to show off her new look, regardless of how her classmates might react.

Glad to be green
The long yellow buses pull up to Langston Hughes Middle and deposit hundreds of adolescents. In the sea of uncovered heads, Smar's stands out like an emerald. She hugs friends she hasn't seen all summer.

Eman Kurtu, a skinny Muslim girl with pink braces and frizzy hair, looks at her in amazement, Smar will recall later, and asks, "You're going to wear that for the full year?"

Yes, Smar says.

"Well," Eman says, "at least you can pull it off. I could never do it."

The girls disappear inside the school.

At 3 p.m., Smar bursts back into her family's townhouse. Her mother is stirring a lamb stew that infuses every room with the aroma of cinnamon and cardamom. Smar hasn't eaten today -- she's fasting for Ramadan -- but she doesn't seem to notice the food as she breathlessly reports on the first day.

"For science, I have Miss Love, and I have to write a paper about hurricanes. And you have to sign these papers." She pulls out a sheaf of forms for Ali to fill out.

Only when prompted does Smar recall the effect the head scarf had as she navigated the crowded halls on her first day.

"Oh, yeah, my friend Joey, he saw me, and he had to do a double take." Another boy "actually didn't recognize me, which was kind of shocking. I'm like, 'I was in your second-period Spanish,' and he's kind of like, 'My God, it's Smar. You look really . . . green.' And I'm just like, 'Thank you.' " She got called a leprechaun and a snake charmer, but the teasing was affectionate. Several friends told her she looked great.

Smar is in high spirits as she heads to the bedroom she shares with Smah, her younger sister.

Smah is practicing Beethoven's Ninth on the recorder. Ten years old, she still has a child's body, and when Smar started wearing the scarf, she wrinkled her nose and pronounced herself "out" as Smar's maid of honor.

But now, as Smar sifts through a colorful pile of scarves on her bed, Smah brings out her own outfit, a smock with a matching scarf from Egypt. Soon, Smah declares sassily, she is going to one-up Smar and adopt the hijab in sixth grade.

Smar rolls her eyes. She wishes she could hang out with friends more, but her parents won't allow her go to the mall or to movies unchaperoned. She has never attended a sleepover.

Smar complains that sometimes she feels caged.

"I know I'm going to thank them for this someday," she says gloomily. But for now, "it's kind of bad, like when my friends go to skate night at the mall. I can only go on family outings, which I really hate. At my age, it's not that great because everyone else does their own thing, but I'm stuck being the child that stays at home."

Taunts and tears
The taunts come during the second week of school.

Smar is sitting in her first-period Tech Exploration class, chatting with friends, she will recount later, when she feels something hit her forehead. She looks down and sees an eraser.

"Who did that?" one of her friends demands.

A few seats down, a group of boys snicker. Smar glares at them and flings the eraser back.

"Hey, chill," the guys say.

"No, you don't do that to me," she says.

"Okay, okay, fine," they say, and she lets it go.

But later that day a boy in gym class asks if she is hiding a bomb under her scarf. Another calls her "raghead." Someone throws a pencil at her head; she can't tell who, so she just snaps it in half.

At the end of the day, she comes home and collapses in tears. "I think, like, five things got thrown at me," she says, her voice breaking.

None of it hurt, not even the zucchini hurled at her head by an eighth-grade boy as she got off the bus. But Smar is devastated.

"It's the thought that no one did that to me last year that bothers me," she says. "I don't care if it's a feather or a 50-pound rock; I don't care. No one did this to me last year, and last year I didn't have a head scarf."

If they had tried something like this last year, she says, she would have retaliated. "I can hit just as well as any other boy. My father signed me up for boxing when I was 5."

But this year Smar doesn't know what to do. She doesn't want to tell her closest friends because it will upset them. And if she tells the teachers, she says, "then they'll put out an announcement saying, 'Don't judge people with head scarves,' " which will only make things worse. "I don't want the girls with a head scarf to be hated by everybody."

"My mom said: 'Stick it out. You're going to meet people like this all your life.' But my mom wouldn't know how it is because my mom's been raised in a Muslim country." Smar melts into sobs.

For the first time, she thinks about taking off her head scarf. No one is making her wear it. Her father says he is proud of her decision, but "if today she comes and tells me, 'I'm tired; I just want to be without hijab . . . I'm not going to force her."

Taking it off would offer momentary relief, like sneaking a bite of lamb during Ramadan. "But I know that I'm not going to," Smar says. "I know who I am and I know who I always will be."

Her mother is furious. Tomorrow, when Smar goes to the bus stop, she says, she is going to watch from afar to make sure nothing happens, and if it does, she plans to march over to the school and complain.

But the drama is short-lived: The next day, people are nice to Smar again.

Fear of ridicule
"We're not going to allow skinny jeans this year."

Gasps of horror. A girl jumps up on her chair and points at her denim-clad legs. "See, they're not skinny!"

The ADAMS teachers, young women robed from head to toe in capacious abayas, smile. It's the end of September, and the first day of weekend Islam classes since summer break.

The girls, wearing head scarves along with brightly colored plaids, are asked what they hope to learn about in class. Islamic marriage! The hajj! The Day of Judgment! But the conversation circles quickly back to hijab.

Smar is one of the first girls in the class to become a "full-timer;" the others wear it to the mosque or on special occasions.

"I bring it to school, but I don't wear it," says Rayan Salih, 14.

Shahd Salaheldin, 13, says her older sister was called a terrorist when she put on the scarf. "I was thinking about wearing it, but I heard my friends, people I really do care about, saying, 'There go the ragheads, the towelheads.' I don't have enough self-confidence to do that, you know?"

After class, as the muezzin calls people to prayer, the girls buy a plate of rice and chicken kebab from the mosque's Ramadan holiday bazaar and continue the discussion.

Hijab can't be pushed on a girl, they concur.

"My dad wants me to do it," says Sana Rauf, 14, but her parents are leaving the decision up to her. "They see people who were forced to wear it" and rebelled. "It's like a journey, and a way of life, but you have to find it all by yourself. "

Shahd can only think of a few friends who would accept her in a scarf. "The rest of them would be like, 'I'm not going to talk to you any more because you're Muslim.' I know if I wear it they're going to be like, 'Terrorist! Bombs!' " It's a dilemma. "I know inside that I have to. It's just" -- tears fill her eyes -- "I want to make my parents happy."

Smar tells them about her bad day at school. They are indignant. "You should demand your respect," one tells her. But they don't say how.

Ambassador's burden
On another Saturday at the ADAMS center, Smar hears people talking about how a Muslim man in Texas has done something terrible. The mosque has already denounced his actions, but the news hasn't trickled down to all its youngest members. Smar's mother would like to have kept it that way. The community is horrified by Hasan's actions, Ali says, but she doesn't want Smar to know the details.

No one at school has said anything to her, but the vague information Smar hears at the mosque is upsetting. "Everyone was sad about it," she says. "People lost their lives that day."

She adds: "Islam is a peaceful religion, and it's really sad that people call themselves Muslims" who do such things.

Now, more than ever, she feels the gravitas of her role as an ambassador of her faith.

"It's important for me to be proud of myself and my religion," she says. "It just makes me proud that I get to wear a head scarf and show people."
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