A misguided dogma that sanitises our heritage

There’s a funny idea that anything smacking of Christianity is inherently exclusionary

Cadbury staged a sheepish retreat yesterday from its attempt to downplay the whole “Easter” part of its annual Easter egg hunt with the National Trust. The company, originally an old British Quaker concern but now American-owned, had tried to go all “Happy Holidays” on Easter by rebranding the event on the grounds that it wanted to “invite people from all faiths and none to enjoy our seasonal treats”.

This is the logic of the “Rhodes Must Fall” mob, the idea that obliterating our history and religious heritage is the only way to be sure no one is offended by it. Other civilisations must think we are totally mad. On a recent layover back from a wedding in Asia, I spent an enjoyable morning in Kuala Lumpur’s Museum of Islamic Arts. Its immense collection, spanning Morocco to Xinjiang, is an object lesson in how to celebrate, rather than sanitise, a nation’s religious heritage.

It takes visitors from the intricate geometric design of north African tiles to the unusual architectural features of Uzbek mosques and the sumptuously illuminated Islamic manuscripts of Persia. Nothing is excluded: the pair of exquisitely carved ivory flip-flops from Mughal India, the sets of Chinese-influenced Turkish ceramics, a 19th-century map of London translated into Persian for travelling aristocrats, which I found myself staring at just days after the Westminster Bridge attack.

Did this effusive celebration of Islamic arts make me, a British Jew, feel offended and excluded? On the contrary, it opened up to me the diverse history and pluralism of a religion that most Britons only ever think about when, in its most vicious and fundamentalist form, it explodes on to our streets.

When it comes to Britain’s heritage, unlike the Malaysians, we are beset by a profound embarrassment and confusion – inclined to think, if in doubt, that censorship is best. There’s a funny idea that anything smacking of Christianity is inherently exclusionary, no matter how much non-Christians might want to participate in it.

I remember my first experience of this misguided dogma: a school crackdown, at the age of 11, on a muchloved end-of-year song sung by leavers from my junior school. About half of the school was Jewish and the song, Bread and Fishes, had a rather Jesus-y theme. So the school authorities, anxious not to offend, banned it. The outcry, from Jew and gentile alike, that we should be excluded from participating in this earnest (though admittedly far from ancient) tradition, in the end prompted some indulgent parents to stage an informal performance in their garden.

Cadbury and other “seasonal egg” makers, might consider it a low-risk option to reduce the prominence of Easter on their products. Instead, they prove that there is one thing more offensive than Christianity in a Christian country, and that’s corporate secularism. Here’s some unexpected hope for underperforming British exports: W H Smith. The chain, once a respectable British bookseller, is now a ragbag of shops filled with cheap stationery, confectionery, tacky greetings cards and ratty carpets (this last theme has spawned a popular Twitter account that posts pictures of Smith’s tired shop carpets from around the country).

Imagine my surprise then, as I strode through an Indonesian airport, upon encountering a gleaming, new branch of none other than Britain’s W H Smith and one, what’s more, largely filled with actual books. Unloved at home, this neglected British brand seemed to have found a new lease of life in Asia.

Smith’s wasn’t the only one. The Body Shop – remember when that was cool in Britain? – had planted its own flag: a massive, shining outlet full of happy tourists. This makes sense. Domestic regulations might have caught up with the brand’s ethos of not testing cosmetics on animals, but Asia certainly hasn’t.

Liam Fox doesn’t strike me as a Body Shop type, but perhaps he can riff on this theme. The Germans have their cars, the French their wine and China almost everything else, but no one will ever beat Britain at shopkeeping. A less uplifting sight greeted me at Bonhams, where I went to wander around the impressive collection belonging to the unfortunate Ormsby-Gore family. The current Lord Harlech, who inherited his title last year, had put the entire contents of his home up for sale to raise cash.

It was a sad sight, all those old family items laid out before strangers: the silver salver given as a wedding gift and signed by members of the regiment; the old riding spurs and epaulettes; the uniforms; ceremonial swords; decoys for duck shoots and cartridge bags.

One American lady, walking around with her English friend, expressed wonder at it all. “Is it Italian leather?” she asked of one item. “I don’t know. It doesn’t much matter,” replied her companion. “We tried to sell some of ours but no one was interested.” Happily, there was at least some interest in Lord Harlech’s items – even the cartridge bags managed £580. Whatever price they fetched, though, the sum of the parts would never be worth as much as the whole.