ISLAM:
There are 2 very relevant articles at the end of this post. Both are
from the Times, the first an editorial and the second a Comment
article, by the Usama Hasan mentioned in the editorial:- 1. The
battle is on for Muslim hearts and minds. 2. The Islamic Reformation.
You might want to consider giving them wider exposure. I lived in
both Iran and Indonesia before they were taken over by fanatics. In
more than 7 years, I never experienced a single incident resulting
from a twisted version of Islam. And I don't know anyone who did. I'm
an atheist with many theist friends (and relatives). God help us to
achieve this everywhere and for everyone. (Irony).
TERRORIST CLAIMS: There may
well be a rational case for it but it still grates when it's reported
that ISIS 'claims' rather than 'admits' responsibility for horrific
crimes. The explanation, I understand, is that ISIS believes it helps
them to take responsibility for attacks carried out by other
nutters.
RESPONSE TO TERRORISM: Here's an idea - Why not cancel the
irreligious consumerist excess which is Christmas? And at least rid
us of all the bloody ads that first appeared weeks ago.
SPOKEN FRENCH:
All the media attention has reminded me I'm not a fan of this,
disliking its nasality. Which you might think is rich, coming from a
Scouser. But I shed my (Gaelic-influenced) pronunciation many years
ago, without really trying. That said, I had a French partner for 8
years and I adored her accent when she spoke English. I still would
if she hadn't decided to quit Spain to go back to France. But before
doing so, she managed to teach me how to pronounce the French 'u'
sound. And I taught her how to say Natalie Wood properly.
MALE LIES: I
read recently that one of the favourite untruths of men trying to bed
women (not much of a challenge these days, I suspect) is that they own an upmarket sports car. I once gave a lift to
a young woman to a party in my Morris 1000 (GT, 4-wheeled model, as I
used to say) and managed to convince her I had a Porsche Carrera in
my garage, kept for special occasions. But there was no malevolent
intent beyond humour, as she was a friend's girlfriend. It was
embarrassing to have to tell her I was joking. But she was OK.
FINALLY
. . . THE IBERIAN PENINSULA FROM SPACE: Project Nasa has produced
stunning fotos of Spain and Portugal from 1,000, 500 and 250 metres.
Click here to surprise yourself with how green the west and north of
Spain are. Not to mention wet at times.
1. The
battle is on for Muslim hearts and minds
How do we
condemn atrocities carried out in the name of Islam without
alienating the majority of moderate Muslims? Of all the people
killed by terrorism last year, 51 per cent were slaughtered by just
two organisations: Boko Haram and Islamic State. Although white
supremacists have killed more Americans this year than any other
extremist group, nearly all global terrorism is committed by people
claiming to act in the name of Islam.
That’s
the reality. A second reality is that once all the victims of the
Paris attacks have been named, many more Muslims will have been
killed than carried out the attacks: the two Saadi sisters
celebrating a birthday, the Algerian violinist stopping off at a
restaurant on his way home, the Moroccan architect dining out with
his new wife, and so on and bloodily on. Muslims were also the
victims of attacks on Nigerian mosques earlier this year by Boko
Haram, on peace demonstrations in Turkey by Isis, and on the Hazaras
minority in Afghanistan by the Taliban. If Muslims are the principal
perpetrators of terror, Muslims are also the most terrorised.
The coexistence of these two realities creates a problem in agreeing
on the causes of extremism and how to tackle it.
The problem is
easily posed: how do you identify, challenge and destroy the basis of
Islamist terror without implicating and alienating millions of
Muslims? It is a dilemma that western governments with large Muslim
minorities have been blundering around for the past decade. And
there’s an added complication — to most non-Muslims the link
between a religion and violence committed in its name is beyond
doubt. But to many Muslims such a link appears to single them out. So
when, as this week, a French Muslim of Tunisian descent tells
reporters that Isis are “fascists” and that their actions “have
nothing to do with Islam”, are we to congratulate him or contradict
him?
Every person with a gob on them seems to know why terrorism
happens. This week Ken Livingstone, new political life breathed into
him by Corbyn’s zombie leadership, was across the airwaves blaming
western foreign policy. Somehow he had not noticed the paucity of
Islamist attacks on American targets. The veteran Trot and posterboy
for the LRB-reading classes, Tariq Ali, opined that Middle East
terror would go on as long as, among other things, Israel existed, so
it was rather pointless bemoaning it. Better, one presumed, for us to
try to persuade the Jews of Israel to give up their state than to
persuade the Islamists to give up their suicide vests and butcher’s
knives.
I am not
sure how influential such throwbacks are, but something I was
involved with the week before the Paris attacks worried me. I had
been invited to address a conference at the School of Oriental and
African Studies on the question of Muslim integration. I was talking
on the subject of free expression. At one level it was a brave
attempt by lay Muslims to get people of different beliefs to debate
with Islamic scholars and academics. But, comparing notes with other
guest speakers as well as my own experience, I soon realised that the
secondary agenda, intended or not, was an attack on the whole idea of
deradicalisation. It was apparently just another aspect of western
prejudice against Muslims — the true cause of terrorism.
So
Professor Christopher Bagley, a Muslim convert, said that calls for
integration represented “a strong undercurrent of racism and
xenophobia regarding religious minorities”.
Dr Rizwaan Sabir, a
lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, attacked the moderate
Muslim Qulliam Foundation which was being “used as a strategic
asset by the British state to undermine political Islam at home and
abroad”.
Dr Katherine Brown, of King’s College London,
opposed “counter radicalisation efforts that unreflectively presume
that western society and feminism had benefitted Muslim women”,
when their real problems were “discrimination, poverty and
Islamophobia”.
For Waqas Tufail, of Leeds Beckett University,
counter-terrorism was “fundamentally racist by explicitly targeting
specific minority groups and ultimately leads to the further
alienation and marginalisation of an already demonised and
criminalised group”. Note here how the word “criminalised”
makes being a criminal something that is thrust upon you rather than
chosen.
Chris Allen, from Birmingham University, was the most
ingenious of all. In his “Tackling Extremism, Reinforcing
Islamophobia” talk he seemed to suggest that the very way in which
politicians talked about tackling Islamophobia “reinforced the
public’s fears and anxieties about Islam”.
This is so
misconceived that it’s hard to know where to start. But whatever
the government says or does, this is the stuff being taught to young
people with barely a challenge in colleges, universities and
community centres. It’s the approach that says, in essence, that
Muslims are victims of an Islamophobia that caused radicalisation and
that consequently any attempt to deal with radicalisation which does
not admit this is, in itself, Islamophobic.
This is the warped
context in which many well-educated young Muslims will view the
government’s Prevent strategy to tackle extremism. It is one thing
to subject the entire population to electronic surveillance — if
there’s rigorous independent scrutiny I can live with that. It’s
another thing — as has been mooted — for the state to go around
banning preachers from the internet, vetting people from working with
children because of their perfectly legal political views, and
drawing up blacklists and banning orders on non-violent (if horrid)
groups which are mostly Muslim. These acts will be seen as
restrictions on basic freedoms and will become the focus of
resistance. They are manna from heaven for the decadent academic
critics of government who, as I have seen, believe that their enemies
are almost anyone but Islamist extremists.
But I worry that these
acts are the greatest gift to the recruiters of jihadists. Look, they
will say, how shallow is the kufr’s commitment to freedom!
Better, much better, to wage a war of ideas on campuses and in
schools, against the apologists and relativists. Fight speech with
better speech, idea with better idea.
As Quilliam’s Usama Hasan
showed in The Times yesterday[below] there are people around who will be
good allies in this fight and who have as much to lose.
2. Give us
time: this is Islam’s reformation
People
often ask when Islam will have a reformation. The truth is that Islam
is in the middle of a reformation right now — which arguably began
in the nineteenth century. The Christian Reformation took several
centuries, so we need to allow Islam time to adapt to the modern
world.
The
Ottoman royal decrees of 1839 and 1858 abolished poll taxes on
non-Muslims and gave equal citizenship rights to Jews, Christians and
Muslims. This was followed by the scrapping of traditional Islamic
punishments as well as ending the death penalty for apostasy from
Islam. Isis follows a fundamentalist and selective reading of
scripture which is ahistorical and heretical. They are linked to
Islam and the Koran in the way the Ku Klux Klan and Anders Breivik
are linked to Christianity and the Bible.
The
overwhelming majority of Muslims detest Isis, and are its daily
victims. Anti-Muslim bigots and Islamist extremists ironically agree
that Isis somehow represents Islam: it is essential that we don’t
play into the hands of extremists, whether Islamist or far right,
with this false assertion.
The
Islamist movements of the 20th century, representing just one of many
possible expressions of political Islam, were rooted in anti-colonial
sentiment but became dominated by fundamentalism and anti-western
hatred, derailing progress towards a genuine reformation.
Thinkers,
theologians and activists in Muslim-majority nations are contributing
to the reformation, often at great danger to themselves from
intolerant, militant extremists. The issues they are grappling with
include universal human rights; shared values with other religions
and philosophies; gender-equality; the status of minorities; the
separation of mosque and state; a critique of Islamic scripture; and
the promotion of scientific and rational thinking. What all of them,
and I, agree on is that Islam needs to be reconciled with the modern
world and interpretations of Islam need to be normalised.
To quote
one of these reformers, the Turkish scholar Recep Senturk: “The
[Ottoman] declaration of 1839 may be seen as the first Islamic human
rights declaration in the modern sense . . . [and when the UN’s
Universal Declaration of Human Rights was announced in 1948] Turkish
scholars of Islamic law, such as Kazim Kadri and Ali Fuat Basgil,
said that it was consistent with Islamic law and thus deserved the
support of Muslims . . . The work of ancient prophets and
philosophers can be seen as achievements towards a universal concept
of [the] human.”
Although
the Ottoman reforms of the mid-19th century introduced equality for
Jews, Christians and Muslims, and abolished traditional punishments
such as stoning to death, flogging, amputation and even crucifixion,
it is the fundamentalist regimes of the 20th and 21st centuries that
have reinstated some of these abhorrent practices. These regimes
include those of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, northern
Nigeria — and now Isis.
The Muslim
women’s movement Musawah (meaning “equality” in Arabic)
campaigns for gender-equality in Muslim family law. It is beginning
to have an effect. In 2004, the millennium-old Mudawwana code of
family law in Morocco was updated to the “New Mudawwanah”, which
gives women more rights.
The
leading Sunni theologian Abdullah bin Bayyah recently launched a
global movement for the “Promotion of peace in Muslim societies”
and has been especially critical of Isis. He has also endorsed a
“shared values” approach to modern citizenship, where religious
and secular ideologies work towards common goals in everyday life.
The newly
launched Raif Badawi Freedom Foundation calls for the promotion of
fundamental liberties such as freedom of speech, expression and
religion in the Arab world.
The task
of reformation is primarily for Muslims. However, friends of the
Muslim world who would like to see a genuine enlightenment within
Islam, can help by promoting genuine reformers and challenging
extremists and their apologists. It is also important that
fundamental liberties are supported, especially against the military
dictators, absolute monarchs and fundamentalist theocrats in the
Muslim-majority world: this will empower reform-minded theologians,
thinkers and activists to help to bring about change. Too many are
forced into silence by intimidation, imprisonment or assassination by
regimes that enjoy varying degrees of western support.
The good
news is that Muslim intellectual discourse is moving in the right
direction and the barbarism of Isis has helped enormously to
undermine the extremist narrative. The Islam of the future, if it is
to survive, will be based on liberty, equality and fraternity: a
fitting tribute to this week’s martyrs of Paris.
Usama
Hasan is an imam, and senior researcher in Islamic Studies at the
Quilliam Foundation think tank
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