This article is taken from the February 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Marie Kawthar Daouda has composed a passionate, erudite and elegant cri de coeur on behalf of faith, freedom and beauty. It is a welcome and necessary rejoinder to the cultural and political elites who would impose the credo of victimhood on the rest of us.
The tenets of this socially and morally pernicious ideology — “identity politics” — are established in UK law via the “protected characteristics” of the Equality Act, and enforced via the norms and practices of a growing caste of HR/Diversity functionaries.
The ideology of victimhood operates as an ersatz morality. Once status is conferred by self-appointed “experts”, social, institutional and material advantages often follow. But, as Daouda reiterates throughout her book, there is a high cost to acquiring victim status, namely, the renunciation of one’s personhood as a free-willed agent. This culture of victimhood leaves unchanged the relations between those who confer and those who are awarded such status. It is, in fact, an ideology of the status quo, despite the performative radicalism of its statue-toppling, painting-destroying, trigger-warning-issuing militants.
Accordingly, in her chapters on iconoclasm and Rhodes Must Fall, Daouda introduces an intriguing theological distinction between icon and idol. Icons, she says, are a means through which to see through to the spiritual substance that lies beyond the senses: they are conduits to a deeper vision. Idols, in contrast, have all their meaning invested in their materiality: depth of vision, or a “seeing through” to an immaterial plane, is not their purpose.
Astutely, Daouda goes on to point out that the Rhodes Must Fall activists at the University of Oxford are, in effect, idolising Cecil Rhodes, fetishising what they have made into an idol. Conversely, those who originally commissioned the statues of Rhodes merely wished to honour a public figure whose actions would subsequently inspire gratitude as well as hate.
In the past, iconoclasm has often been a marker between different political orders, or a symbolic act within a collective uprising, e.g. the toppling of statues of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad (2003), or of Stalin in Budapest (1956). By contrast, today’s statue-topplers seem more like moral toddlers who want to “thcream and thcream” in true Violet Elizabeth Bott fashion. Demanding the removal of artefacts is not a sign of political dynamism or moral clarity. Quite the opposite: it is a symptom of a moribund culture which has become detached from the very ground for such life-affirming virtues.
For many of us, the result of today’s valorisation of the victim is not a more just world, but a world with less moral or aesthetic content. What is more, it hosts a younger generation which — tragically, and largely through education — has been culturally and morally disinherited. Daouda is a lecturer in French at Oriel College, Oxford, and is clearly animated by a moral vision of education when she identifies her purpose in writing this book:
to show that in order to ensure the survival of a cohesive and united Britain, the younger generation must be educated into understanding the complexities of history and given the tools to create their own part in the continuing story — not as resentful members of categories of victims but as persons following their hopes and dreams and building the kind of society that they want to leave the next generation.
As moral autonomy and aesthetic freedom are frontline casualties of competitive victimhood, so it is refreshing to read a defence rooted in the riches of theology and aesthetics. Drawing on these traditions, Daouda presents compelling interpretations of literature, anthropology and history to show how, for example, contemporary “decolonising” discourse offers no new lens with which to access historical authenticity, but only flattens the rich interpretations of colonial encounters that already exist — even if the academic will to engage with such work sadly does not. Instead, as Daouda notes, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race utilises literary sources only as a tool for conversational closure.
There are two caveats to be made: one superficial and the other more substantive. Daouda’s case is at its most persuasive when drawing on her own areas of scholarly interest and, yes, love, whereas the examples she takes from contemporary media discourse sometimes detract from the underlying, deeper logic. This is unsurprising, since current affairs commentary tends be fixated upon the present. On the other hand, examples derived from philosophy and literature tend to have greater longevity. Thankfully she relies more on the latter than the former.
The more substantive criticism is that in places Daouda falls into setting up the Enlightenment as a straw man. Like others seeking to defend faith or the need for cultural conservatism (with which I sympathise), Daouda conflates the philosophical insights of the Enlightenment with the rejection of religion and the repudiation of traditional culture, suggesting that self-grounded philosophy and the triumph of rationality over faith have necessarily impoverished rather than enriched our culture. Whilst I agree with the sentiment, there is surely no straight line of causation between Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social and today’s “Contract of Social Justice”, as Daouda implies.
It is also somewhat extreme to suggest that Rousseau claimed nothing innate was worthwhile. His conceptualisation of the social contract, heavily emphasising what is socially constructed, was prompted, in part, by the earlier Renaissance travel writers which Daouda discusses. (She notes that they afforded more agency to non-Europeans than their social justice counterparts.)
These writers presented fresh questions arising from the encounter of the universality of man posited by Christianity with growing knowledge about human societies that were decidedly “other” — socially and culturally — than those emerging from Europe.
Did the move from state of nature to state of civil society itself necessitate the relinquishing, and later outright contemptuous rejection, of the Christian faith? The answer is yes, according to the logic of Daouda’s presentation of the Enlightenment. I remain unconvinced. Whilst Denis Diderot in France may have been stringently anti-clerical and anti-monarchy, in Germany Immanuel Kant was more nuanced. Jonathan Israel’s caution against seeing the Enlightenment as a single movement seems apt. It could plausibly be argued that many Enlightenment thinkers sought to extend universality from a religious plane to that of society — far from overthrowing religion tout court.
Nonetheless, this book is much needed because it carefully counters the depredation of our moral and cultural traditions. Daouda’s work is part-polemic, part-autobiography and partly a love letter to France, Britain and their civilised national characters.
