Should we forget?

My Spanish friend told me of his mother's reaction when she heard about Britain's two minute silence to observe the war dead on 11 November. "That," she said, "is a civilised country." There is something much more humbling about a silence than there is about a cheer, or a trumpet blast, or a "hell yeah".

A few days earlier a German friend had told me how much he liked the red 'poppies' the British wear to mark Remembrance Sunday; the ambiguity of the symbol, he argued, gave a suitably de-politicised badge which the whole country, regardless of political affiliation, could rally around. More attractive too, he argued, than any equivalent in Europe.

Buying a poppy can almost be done on auto-pilot for most of us at this time of year but it also brings on soul searching - many in 1919 thought we should forget, not remember. The line between commemoration and valorisation is surprisingly thin. At my church the two minute silence began with the playing of the Last Post, the beautiful, haunting military bugle call. 'For the Fallen', the poem read to commemorate the day, is only steps from noting 'dulce et decorum est pro patria mori'. But to refuse these rituals on the grounds that they glamorise would be to throw the baby out with the bath water. Far more dangerous that we forget the horrors of war than that in remembering we also do so with some pride in the sacrifice. Sometimes we inherit traditions; sometimes we choose them.

Imam Butt

I don't truly believe I was born into a faith, although my parents did go to church - religion is something I feel free to question and explore how ever I wish to. Every so often I come across a part of the religious experience which chimes, where I feel I can empathise fully with the beliefs of the faithful.

Imam Butt found a chime between his western 'hippie' beliefs in the 1960s and Islamic scholarship, going to live out his adult life with the Pashtun tribes of the Hindu Kush, awed, he suggests, by the extraordinary topography of the area and the peaceful, thoughtful form of Islam practiced there.

Around him times changed, the Swat Valley became dangerous, violent and home to a new breed of extremist Islam. The Imam didn't change with it. A man able to explore his core beliefs through a programme of intense and demanding Koranic study did not change them in the process but found them reinforced in scripture. He took up the struggle against violence and extremism, preserving the way of life he had always believed in.