I cannot help feeling that much of our inability to discuss matters of race and religion is the result of our not having learnt our history correctly, imbibing a variety of myths and legends instead. Despite the separation of myth from history that has been made by academics at the University of Malta and others, it is the legends that continue to be shoved down the public throat, while facts are ignored.

I saw something in the newspapers the other day about a ‘reenactment’ of the day Count Roger the Norman arrived at Mdina, to the cheers of Christian captives and the dismay of the Muslims who kept them underfoot. We were always taught that the Christian captives were the indigenous Maltese and that the Muslims were the colonising Arab ‘foreigners’ who beat them into submission. We were also taught that Count Roger freed the Maltese slaves and threw out the foreign Muslim overlords.

Nobody bothered to ask – perhaps because we are only taught history in a vacuum, as with learning about the Great Siege with absolutely no mention of the Ottoman Empire – why Count Roger would have chased out the Muslims when in Sicily, whence he came, they formed a well-respected part of the Norman Court in Palermo, and continued to live and trade there long after the Norman incursion. I suppose it didn’t fit our reading of the myth.

Yet the man who we get all our information of these events from – Count Roger’s chronicler Goffredo Malaterra – indicates quite clearly that the Christians who came out to greet the Normans, shouting “Lord have mercy on us” in Greek, were not natives of Malta but people who had been captured elsewhere and brought here as slaves. It was the Muslims who were the natives of Malta.

Count Roger did not expel the Muslims and leave Malta to the Christians who had been enslaved, but the very opposite. He loaded the Christian former slaves onto ships and transported them to Sicily, and then to their own lands – because they were not Maltese. And he left the Muslims here, in their own homes, because they were Maltese, in so far as that definition meant anything then. Yes, there were Christian families who were Maltese, but at that time, the Muslim-Maltese families outnumbered them by far. There is a detailed description of this period in the book edited by the medievalist Anthony Luttrell, The Making of Christian Malta.

Unfortunately, Maltese children are taught only the silly myths about how the Maltese were Christians and how Count Roger “saved” them from the nasty foreign Muslims. They are not even taught, because it would undermine this myth, that the Norman Court in nearby Sicily was thronged with Muslims, upon whom the Norman rulers relied for advice.

It is when they go to university to read the relevant disciplines that they are asked to forget all they have been told and to start again with the facts. Yet not all Maltese read these subjects at university, so the rest remain stuck with the falsehoods.

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A new translation of Ernst Gombrich’s wonderful A Little History of the World has just been published. (Gombrich’s The Story of Art is the greatest art history best-seller of all time, with more than four million copies sold so far; everyone who has ever studied art probably has a copy.) In it, he tells the real story of the Chinese Emperor Shih Huang-ti, who in 213BC ordered that all history books should be burnt. His New China project required a clean sweep to be made of the past, and his national curriculum found no room for history, permitting only “useful” subjects. Anyone found in possession of any other sort of book was to be put to death.

It was all in vain. After that emperor’s mercifully short reign, history was valued even more highly than before. Gombrich concludes: “It’s a bad idea to try to prevent people from knowing their own history. If you want to do anything new, you must first make sure you know what people have tried before.” A true knowledge of your history is equally important before you open your mouth to shout about your identity.

Were it not only the Maltese in certain disciplines at tertiary level education who are taught the truth about the progenitors of this population – that they were Muslim immigrants from Sicily, mainly of Tunisian origin, which is why we speak a derivative of Siculo-Arabic – then we would not be up to our necks in this senseless debate. People who deny their origins, even to themselves, always suffer in some way.

* * *

The debate about assisted suicide or euthanasia has started up again in Britain as a bill that would make it permissible for the terminally ill to be helped to die goes through the House of Lords. It has been moved by Lord Joffe. This is the sort of issue that leaves people in a terrible quandary, caught between the personal and the general.

Even if we ourselves would very much like to be given a high dose of something to dispatch us to the afterlife, should we ever be tortured by the last stages of cancer, rather than bear that agony for some days longer until the inevitable “natural” death, we are still aware that making this legal might lead to all kinds of abuse of the vulnerable.

And where do you draw the line, legally? Should the severely depressed, part of whose depression is linked to the desire to die, be helped to do so? Well, I don’t think so – at all. There’s a huge difference between pumping morphine into an agonising person who will not live longer than a few more days anyway – or switching off a life-support machine for someone who has been in a coma for years, and securing enough tablets for an overdose for somebody who is fed-up of being bedridden.

Of course, you can argue that anyone who is not bedridden can get hold of his or her own overdose quite legally from the pharmacy, and then dispatch themselves with no assistance, to become yet another suicide statistic. But that is precisely why legislation leaves room for abuse: the people who need to be assisted to die are the very ones who cannot commit suicide on their own because they are vulnerable. Their vulnerability and their full dependence on others leave them completely exposed.

It’s very, very difficult. Many of us know how terribly distressing it is to see even an animal writhing in agony with no hope of recovery and facing an agonising death. Those who leave their dogs to twist and howl, wracked by pain, instead of having the vet put them down, are considered heartless, cruel and unfeeling. Seeing a beloved pet suffer like this induces panic and the wish to end it.

Those who see beloved relatives in agony just before the end would feel the same way had their emotions not been subjected to the ethical constraints of teachings on the taking of life. Logic and compassion tell us that a quick, potent injection that brings the end quicker is the right step to take because it spares more days of agony to the one who is suffering. But logic and compassion are overridden by the nagging sense that perhaps it isn’t the right step to take, and by the difficulty of squaring this with rules on the taking of life, which are not as clear-cut as we think they are.

Moral philosophers often talk of the “policeman’s dilemma”. A motor accident leaves a lorry driver trapped in his burning cab. He asks a policeman, one of the rescue workers, to shoot him before he burns to death. The policeman shoots him. Was he right, or was he wrong? The absolutists would say that he was wrong. “You can’t take life in any circumstances”.

I am one of those who thinks that the policeman was right to shoot the burning man, and moreover, that he would have been very wrong – cruel and even heartless not to do so. In the film The Last of the Mohicans there is a scene in which the character played by Ralph Fiennes shoots a white man who is being burnt at the stake by native American Indians. Objectively, that was an act of compassion and not an act of murder. The problem with legislating about these matters is this: who is to define compassion, and who would set the limits?

The Bishop of Oxford, writing in The Observer about the bill being debated in the House of Lords, says of the policeman’s dilemma: “I, too, believe the policeman should not be judged wrong to have shot the driver in such circumstances, but it does not follow from this example that we concede a principle, let alone a principle that should be legislated for. Such an example is a boundary situation, an extreme set of circumstances which is the exception to any rule and from which no detailed prescriptions applying to other cases can be given. Thomas Aquinas says that someone starving to death with no other option available except to steal is not guilty of theft, but you can’t legislate for that.”

The Bishop of Oxford goes on to explain that there is a great divide between refusing burdensome treatment because it will do no good (Terri Schiavo; those who refuse to be treated for terminal cancer), or receiving painkilling drugs which have the side-effect of shortening life (large and frequent doses of morphine), and deliberately killing or helping somebody to kill themselves, however extreme the circumstances. “I recognise that those who make their moral decisions simply on the basis of assessing consequences don’t accept this distinction,” he wrote, “but for Christian moral theology, it is absolutely basic, as it has become basic to good medical practice and proper military conduct.”

Would that matters were so clear-cut for the rest of us, we would not end up being more compassionate to animals than we are to humans.