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Religion See other Religion Articles Title: "Islamic Reading Room" insults the memory of William Gladstone It has been announced that the bicentenary of the birth of the Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone is to be celebrated by spending £500,000 on the establishment of an “Islamic Reading Room” in Hawarden, Flintshire. The St Deniol’s Library in Hawarden, which is funded by the national lottery, houses Gladstone’s own collection of over 32,000 items. Many of the books contain Gladstone’s detailed annotations and the Library houses most of Gladstone’s non-political correspondence, speeches and papers which are administered by the Flintshire Record Office. According to St Deniol’s website, “a principal aim of the Gladstone 200 Campaign will be to build and resource an Islamic Reading Room at St Deiniol’s which will enable Christians and others to reach a deeper understanding of Islam and its place in the contemporary world. We want to increase the depth and scope of the collection so that it is a useful resource for Islamic scholars as well.” As every school child once knew, in the days when British history was still taught rigorously in British schools, William Gladstone served as Prime Minister in four separate terms between 1868 and 1894. He is credited with enormous achievements, including policies intended to improve individual liberty and promote political and economic freedom. Gladstone is still regarded as one of the greatest British prime ministers, with Winston Churchill among those citing Gladstone as their inspiration. It is hard to interpret the establishment of an “Islamic Reading Room” to celebrate Gladstone’s bicentenary as anything other than a lottery-funded insult to the memory of one of Britain’s most eminent historical figures. For W E Gladstone was not only a great reforming Prime Minister, he was also a devout Christian and a learned and resolute critic of Islam. Mr Gladstone once brandished the Koran in the House of Commons, announcing with great authority and prescience “so long as there is this book, there will be no peace in the world”. On another occasion, Mr Gladstone referred to the Koran as “this accursed book”. Indeed, Mr Gladstone made many other trenchant criticisms of Islam which were regarded as perfectly reasonable observations, even self-evident truths, in the climate of free speech which prevailed in Victorian England. Tragically, even to quote some of the great Victorian Prime Minister’s other more incisive comments about the “religion of peace” is to risk prosecution for a serious “crime” of “hate speech” in our own benighted era of curtailed freedoms and institutional appeasement of Islam. That very fact is persuasive evidence of the decline of our civilisation since the days of William Ewart Gladstone.
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