by Mehdi Hassan

The Guardian, Monday 2nd April, 2012

It was the Muslims wot won it. To pretend otherwise is naive if not disingenuous. George Galloway could not have triumphed in the Bradford West byelection, with the biggest swing in modern British political history, had it not been for the loud, passionate and overwhelming support of the constituency’s big Muslim population. “All praise to Allah!” the new Respect party MP gratefully proclaimed, via loudspeaker, to his supporters on Saturday.

By the time I gathered the courage to email my friend Mariam for recommendations on local mosques, I had been keeping my secret for weeks. I was a half-closeted Muslim. My conversion to Islam came about with blinding speed and by accident.

For years I felt my emotional connection to God decay, despite all of my Catholic-sanctioned attempts to reawaken even the smallest degree of fervor. Out of desperation, one spring I began to read an English interpretation of the Quran hoping for a fresh perspective on the familiar Judeo-Christian stories. Since I had lost my ability to focus on or feel moved by well-worn Bible passages, I reasoned that if I just read a few chapters of the same stories narrated in a different way, then surely I would find my Catholic faith revived and would return, newly energized, to reading the stories the “right” way.
I never expected that in less than a week I would develop a powerful craving to read to the oft-repeated promises: God is the All-Knowing, the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing, the most Forgiving, the Dispenser of Grace. I never imagined that the poetic articulations of God’s bounty and the precision of His creation would appeal so vividly to my analytical nature, or that the breathtaking language would stand out as supreme above anything I had read before. I am an avid reader and, as an attorney, have been trained to critique language and spot the weaknesses in arguments. And yet by the time I was halfway through the Quran, I realized I could no longer read it as a cultural experiment or as an idle intellectual pursuit or as a gateway back into my Catholic faith.
I was simply reading my book. Even across centuries of time and strained through English interpretations, I knew I was reading words sent down by God. In mere days of reading the first chapter the Quran, my transformation began. I fought it for only a few more weeks, devouring the Quran a second time to be sure, before I said my shahada.
Telling non-Muslim friends was the easy part. Most of my friends were ivory tower progressives who exalted spiritual independence and disdained Islamophobic political rhetoric. A handful of Christian friends offered a few gentle, respectfully worded concerns, but far more often the news was met with excitement and encouragement for my personal journey of discovery. The accolades were ill-fitting and the attention intimidating. In fact, the more I was commended for my bravery, the more it sank in what a scary thing I had done.
Having given the news of my conversion to non-Muslim friends, I then reached out to a few Muslim friends who I was likely to see in the coming months but who remained outside of my closest circle. Here, my apprehension grew into a sense of inauthenticity. Was it even appropriate to contact them out of the blue to say I converted? “Good luck in your new apartment, hey, I converted to Islam!” Or, “How’s the job hunt going? By the way, I’m a Muslim now!” To mollify my awkwardness, I raised the issue flippantly, deflecting my fear with self-deprecating humor, holding myself out like a spectacle to be judged on their terms. I took what had been a deeply personal decision and did my best to downplay it for their consumption.
After I survived those blundering phone calls, there remained the problem of telling Mariam. She had been one of my best friends since our law school years. I had long admired Mariam for being one of the most incisive thinkers I knew, and for devoting so much of her energy to women’s issues in Islamic countries. Over countless lunches, she would recite in detail the latest injustices occurring in parts of the world that had no connection to my suburban American upbringing. Our friendship including bonding over our own versions of feminism, but she seemed to be fighting two battles: the usual sexism of daily American life to which I could relate, and an entirely different arena of patriarchy in the “community” that remained foreign to me.
After years of seeing Mariam as a complex individual, as my smart and interesting friend who could skewer those who support injustice and yet relate compassionately to my mundane complaints about long hours at the office, I pigeonholed Mariam as “my Muslim friend who doesn’t know I’m Muslim.” She became a prototype of what it meant to me to be a Muslim-American woman. From the political causes she undertook to the effortless way she draped a scarf across her shoulders, from the superficial to the meaningful, I saw her as a full and true Muslim. Islam was her right, and no one could take it away from her. In comparison, I was an outsider, a fraud, a silly little girl who jumped into something headfirst and in utter ignorance of the social consequences.
On some level, converting to her religion without her input or blessing called my entire identity as a new Muslim into doubt. I transposed all of my insecurities on her and feared she would question my choice in the same keen way that she analyzed her cases. And I, of course, would lack the answers to defend my conversion. What if I had misunderstood the Quran? Scholars spend lifetimes pouring over this layered text, and here I had sped through it in a matter of weeks and embraced it instantly. I had never even stepped foot inside a mosque! Would she expect me to say “inshallah” around her, or would I sound ridiculous for suddenly speaking Arabic phrases?
Every aspect of my struggle with my new spiritual identity found a foil in Mariam, and I was too intimidated to approach my friend until months had passed. I was going nowhere on my independent hunt for a mosque, for something beyond reading in my solitary apartment and browsing websites with incomprehensible prayer instructions. I hadn’t required any help in deciding whether to convert, but now that I identified myself as a Muslim (however ill-fitting the description felt) I needed guidance on how to be one. And so I sent Mariam an email with no explanation. “I’m looking for a recommendation on a mosque in the area. Any ideas?”
My phone rang shortly after. I knew it would be her and my voice was unsteady as I answered. Never one to mince words, Mariam asked me outright why I inquired about a mosque. I remember responding in the light, laughing tone I’d used with my more casual Muslim friends but my voice caught in my throat. Mariam asked me why I converted. My reasoning sounded inadequate to my ears, “I read the Quran…and…it seems true to me. Especially by the time I got towards the end, where it’s so powerful and even in English the words are unlike anything a human being could create, I realized this had to be divinely inspired. It couldn’t be from man, it had to be from God.” I remember my words spilling out one over the other and my voice trembling. I cut myself off for fear of sounding even more naïve that I felt sure I already did.
A few moments of silence passed, and when she spoke again I heard the emotion in her voice. She told me how ecstatic she was to hear the news and immediately a weight removed itself from my chest. At last, I could freely discuss my conversion with a friend who understood the beauty and the mystery of that miraculous book.
In time, Mariam became my Quran study buddy and living Cliff-Notes guide to “the community.” She invited me to celebrate my first Eid with her family, and provided an anchor of sanity when all of the adjustments grew overwhelming. Of all our shared moments, I always remember that first day we spoke openly about our love for the Quran as one of the turning points of my conversion. I entered that conversation lacking any claim to my own “Muslimness,” and while it would be misleading to suggest that with a snap of Mariam’s fingers I cemented a new identity, it did mark the first time that we talked as two lawyers, two women, and two friends, like always, but now also as two Muslims.

(Photo Credit: Yutaka Tsutano)
Natalie Abraham is an attorney and a recent convert to Islam. She wrote this article using a pen name.

http://www.altmuslimah.com/a/b/mca/4542/

Hundreds of thousands of piligrims pray at Mecca's Grand Mosque. Photograph: Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images

From: The Guardian, Tuesday 24th January 2012

The hajj, subject of a new exhibition at the British Museum, shows that a respect for other faiths is central to Muslim tradition

Karen Armstrong

Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith – even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity. Recent terrorist atrocities have seemed to confirm this received idea. But if we want a peaceful world, we urgently need a more balanced view. We cannot hope to win the “battle for hearts and minds” unless we know what is actually in them. Nor can we expect Muslims to be impressed by our liberal values if they see us succumbing unquestioningly to a medieval prejudice born in a time of extreme Christian belligerence.

Like Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Sikhs and secularists, some Muslims have undoubtedly been violent and intolerant, but the new exhibition at the British Museum – Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam – is a timely reminder that this is not the whole story. The hajj is one of the five essential practices of Islam; when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out the central principles of their faith. Equating religion with “belief” is a modern western aberration. Like swimming or driving, religious knowledge is practically acquired. You learn only by doing. The ancient rituals of the hajj, which Arabs performed for centuries before Islam, have helped pilgrims to form habits of heart and mind that – pace the western stereotype – are non-violent and inclusive.

In the holy city of Mecca, violence of any kind was forbidden. From the moment they left home, pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, to swat an insect or speak an angry word, a discipline that introduced them to a new way of living. At a climactic moment of his prophetic career, Muhammad drew on this tradition. Fleeing persecution in Mecca in 622, he and the Muslim community (the umma) had migrated to Medina, 250 miles to the north. Mecca was determined to destroy the umma and a bitter conflict ensued. But eventually Muhammad broke the deadly cycle of warfare with an audacious non-violent initiative.

In March 628, to general astonishment, he announced that he was going to make the hajj. This meant that he had to ride unarmed into enemy territory, yet 1,000 Muslims accompanied him. The pilgrim party narrowly escaped being massacred by the Meccan cavalry, and eventually entered the sacred territory of Mecca where they simply sat down beside their camels and refused to move. Knowing that they would lose all credibility if they slaughtered pilgrims on this holy ground, the Meccans negotiated a truce and Muhammad accepted humiliating conditions that filled the Muslims with dismay. But the Qur’an proclaimed that this apparent defeat was a “clear triumph” because, like Jews and Christians, the Muslims had acted in a spirit of peace, self-restraint and forbearance. Two years later, hostilities ceased and the Meccans voluntarily opened their gates to the prophet.

Clearly the Qur’an did not despise Jews and Christians; this affinity with “the people of the book” was also central to the Muslim cult of Mecca. The Arabs firmly believed that they, too, were children of Abraham, because they were the descendants of his eldest son Ishmael – a regional view shared by the Bible. It was said that Abraham and Ishmael had rebuilt the Ka’bah, the sacred shrine of Mecca, when it had fallen into disrepair, had dedicated it to their God, and then performed the rites of the hajj. Many Arabs thought that Allah, their high God, was the God worshipped by the people of the book, and Christian Arabs used to make the hajj pilgrimage to the Ka’bah alongside the pagans.

The Arabs had no conception of an exclusive religious tradition, so they were deeply shocked when they discovered that most Jews and Christians refused to consider them as part of the Abrahamic family. The Qur’an still urged Muslims to respect the people of the book and revere their prophets, but decreed that instead of facing Jerusalem when they prayed, as hitherto, they should turn towards the Ka’bah built by Abraham.

Like Abraham, who had not belonged to a closed-off cult, they would take no pride in an established institution and, as Abraham had done, focus on the worship of God alone. Hence the Muslim hajj is all about the Abrahamic family – not Muhammad himself. Pilgrims re-enact the story of Hagar and Ishmael, symbolically returning to the era that preceded religious chauvinism.

Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders. But the British Museum’s beautiful presentation of the hajj can help us understand how the vast majority of the world’s Muslims understand their faith. Socrates, founder of the western rational tradition, insisted that the exercise of reason required us constantly and stringently to question received ideas and entrenched certainties. The new exhibition can indeed become a journey to the heart of Islam and also, perhaps, to a more authentic and respectful western rational identity.

British and Afghan forces on patrol in Afghanistan's Helmand province. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

by Simon Jenkins

The Guardian 27 December 2011

What do Britons “want” in the coming year? An ambassador to Washington was once asked the question on radio and replied, “That’s very kind of you, a box of candied fruits would do.” Such humble responses are now out of date. As the season of goodwill slithers into that of New Year’s resolution, the urge to tell the world how to behave seems uncontrollable.

We can suppress a yawn at David Cameron’s sermon on Christian values and Ed Miliband claiming the Helmand army is making Britain “secure, peaceful and happy“. More troubling is the foreign secretary,William Hague‘s, declaration on Facebook of a Christmas ambition to increase “international pressure on Syria … push Burma in the right direction … improve the situation in Somalia … and protect women’s rights in the Middle East” among other uplifting goals.

The phraseology may seem in place beneath portraits of Pitt and Palmerston, but how must it play with its intended recipients? Imagine the Indian foreign minister sending Britons a Christmas message deploring their addiction to knife crime, or Japan’s expressing his dismay at Britain’s broken homes, or Pakistan’s decrying Ulster sectarianism as “unacceptable”. I am sure Hague would tell them to mind their own business.

Britain’s assumption of an ancestral role in passing judgment on Kipling’s “lesser tribes without the law” seems genetically embedded. Hague might as well have been quoting from The White Man’s Burden, how he must “fill full the mouth of famine / And bid the sickness cease”, even if it meant watching “sloth and heathen Folly / Bring all your hopes to nought”. His tour of the horizon boasted of “saving lives” in Libya, but he was more detached over Syria. He glided past Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, preferring the clearer ethical waters of Sudan, Somalia, Burma and Muslim women’s rights.

None of the areas of Hague’s concern had anything to do with Britain, let alone being within Britain’s sovereign domain, nor have they been for over half a century. The power has gone. The legitimacy has departed. Only the language of implied command echoes through the Foreign Office’s post-imperial dusk.

That echo is far from an irrelevance. It has conditioned surely the most catastrophic decade in British foreign policy since the 1930s. Another soldier died in Helmand over Christmas, where soldiers will go on dying, to no clear purpose, until 2014. Another hundred Iraqis died in Baghdad bombings, the outcome of Britain’s shared incompetence in restructuring Iraq. Meanwhile, around 5,000 have died in Syria, screaming against the double standard that toppled regimes in oil-rich Iraq and Libya but leaves Syria to empty sanctions and emptier rhetoric.

Over this last decade Britain’s national sovereignty has not been remotely threatened by any other state, yet its government has adopted a stance of hectoring and often open belligerence towards much of the Muslim world. British forces have been sent to ill-judged and ineptly fought wars that have left British cities in a state of perpetual terrorist alert. It is hard to think of any gain to Britain’s foreign interests that has come from these wars – apart from a possible anticipated oil deal in Libya.

The reason goes back in part to Lady Thatcher‘s commitment to “hug close” to Washington in the later years of the cold war. The hug came to be a suicide embrace, since most of the subsequent mistakes have derived from America’s over-reaction to 9/11, leading to mendacious excuses and wars of regime change and destabilisation. Whatever the evils of the Ba’athist and Taliban regimes, they cannot have justified such colossal loss of life, dislocation and destruction. Today we hear the same warlike language towards Iran. Do we really think the security of the region or the lot of the Iranian people can possibly be improved by future British or US military action? The Libyan intervention removed a dictator at relatively small cost, but how is that Nato’s business, any more than it is to dispose of dictators in Africa and Asia?

With the end of the nuclear threat, a revived resort to war as a foreign policy response seems to run deep in British and American psyches. Television programmes and bestseller lists are fixated on the two world wars. Britons consume tales of past horror and cruelty. We excuse a harping on the trenches, on Hitler, on D-Day and on the blitz as a warning to each generation that these were “the wars to end all wars”. Like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they are portrayed as exemplary deterrents against the use of such dreadful weapons ever again.

I begin to wonder. The west’s readiness to resort to violence in the aftermath of the cold war suggests something more sinister. The publicity now accorded to political oppression anywhere in the world is a standing casus belli for the military elites of Nato, the UN, the US and Britain. Not a day passes without some global horror being presented to the west’s interventionists with a demand that “something must be done”.

Pity is a noble urge, but its effect is not always wise. Contemplating the outcome of the second world war, Hannah Arendt warned pity could “possess a greater capacity for cruelty than cruelty itself”. It becomes the ubiquitous pretext, the excuse. How often is the cruelty of Saddam or the Taliban used to justify western atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan? How many more Syrians must die, a BBC reporter asks, “before we do something?” The something is, of course, the ever desirable war.

Most citizens regard war as a car crash, a random, irrational event that just happens. They do not see it as the outcome of a political process to which as democrats they are party. War may still be occasioned by pity, clothed in the language of humanitarianism, but it has become a casual, media-guided and exploited pity. A lot of people have a lot of money at stake in pity, and it goes far beyond the UN’s emergency relief fund.

Hence the suspicion that the obsession of so many Britons with past violence and present cruelty is no longer deterring them from risking its repetition, but the opposite. It makes them ready, almost eager, for more. The path from the cosy interventionism of a Christmas-tide foreign secretary to the sabre rattling, drone-killing, suicide bombing and destruction of the last decade is not as wide as might seem. Such intervention is not so much the white man’s burden as his morbid thrill

By Gary Younge

The Guardian, 18 December 2011

Every effort must be made to thwart those who seek to embellish and distort America’s lamentable legacy in Iraq

On 19 November 2005 a US marine squad was struck by a roadside bomb in Haditha, in Iraq’s Anbar province, killing one soldier and seriously injuring two others. According to civilians they then went on the rampage, slaughtering 24 people. They included a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair and a three-year-old child. It was a massacre. “I think they were just blinded by hate … and they just lost control,” said James Crossan, one of the injured marines.

When he heard the news, Major General Steve Johnson, the American commander in Anbar province at the time, saw no cause for further examination. “It happened all the time … throughout the whole country. So you know, maybe, if I was sitting here [in Virginia] and heard that 15 civilians were killed I would have been surprised and shocked and done more to look into it. But at that point in time I felt that it was just a cost of doing business on that particular engagement.”

Eight soldiers were originally charged with the atrocity. Charges against six were dropped, one was acquitted and the other is awaiting trial. We know this because a New York Times reporter found documents from the US military’s internal investigation in a rubbish dump near Baghdad. An attendant was using them to make a fire to cook smoked carp for dinner.

The article ran on the same day that Barack Obama announced the withdrawal of American troops last week, hailing the almost nine-year war a ”success”, resulting in “an extraordinary achievement” that the troops can look on “with their heads held high”. And so it is that America moves on, casting evidence of its war crimes in the trash, holding nobody accountable and choosing to understand defeat as victory and failure as success.

While the departure of American troops should be greeted with guarded relief (guarded because the US will maintain its largest embassy in the world there along with thousands of armed private contractors), every effort must be made to thwart those who seek to embellish and distort their lamentable legacy. You’d think that would be easy. The case against this war has been prosecuted extensively both in this column and elsewhere. (The argument that the removal of Saddam Hussein somehow compensates for the lies, torture, displacement, carnage, instability and humans rights abuses is perverse. They used a daisy cutter to crack a walnut.)

This war started out with many parents but has ended its days an orphan, tarnishing the reputations of those who launched it and the useful idiots who gave them intellectual cover. Nobody has been held accountable; few accept responsibility.

In any case, they could not have done it alone. It was only possible thanks to the systemic collusion of a supine political class and a jingoistic political culture, not to mention a blank cheque from the British government. When the war started, almost three-quarters of Americans supported it. Only politicians of principle opposed it – and there were precious few of those. When Nancy Pelosi was asked why she had not pushed for impeachment of Bush when she became speaker in 2006 she said: “What about these other people who voted for that war with no evidence … Where are these Democrats going to be? Are they going to be voting for us to impeach a president who took us to war on information that they had also?”

Today, withdrawing the troops is about the only truly popular thing Obama has done in the last two years. Polls show more than 70% support withdrawal, roughly two-thirds oppose the war, and more than half believe it was a mistake. But there is a difference between regretting something and learning from it. And while there is ample evidence of the former, there is little to suggest the latter.

According to Christopher Gelpi, a political science professor at Duke University who specialises in public attitudes to foreign policy, the most important single factor shaping Americans’ opinions about any war is whether they think America will win. This solipsistic worldview is hardly conducive to the kind of introspection that might translate remorse into redemption.

It’s a mindset that understands the war in Vietnam as being wrong not because an independent country was invaded, flattened, millions murdered and thousands tortured. It was wrong because the US lost.

And it pervades the political spectrum. Even when the war’s critics slam the blood and treasure squandered, they usually refer only to American lives and American money. This is also the way pollsters frame it. A recent CBS poll asked: “Do you think removing Saddam Hussein from power was worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?” (50% no, 41% yes), and “Do you think the result of the war with Iraq was worth the loss of American lives and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?” (67% no, 24% yes). The cost to Iraqis simply does not feature.

“It is the end for the Americans only,” wrote Emad Risn, argued an Iraqi columnist in a government-funded newspaper. “Nobody knows if the war will end for Iraqis too.” And few Americans seem to care. It’s been some time since Iraq featured at all on the nation’s priorities, let alone high. Rightly Americans fret about the fate of veterans returning to a depressed economy with a range of both physical and mental disabilities. But Iraqi civilians barely get a look-in.

According to the New York Times report, among the discarded testimony was an interview with Sergeant Major Edward Sax. “I had marines shoot children in cars, and deal with the marines individually, one on one, about it because they have a hard time dealing with that.” When they told him they didn’t know there were children on board he told them they were not to blame, claiming killing would impose a lifelong burden on them.

Progressives, seeking to link the economic collapse to military misadventure, often argue that nation building should begin at home, not in Iraq, thereby – wittingly or not – transforming Iraqis in the public imagination from victims of illegal warfare to recipients of illicit welfare. Without any apparent irony, Obama marked the end of the occupation by calling on others not to meddle in Iraq’s internal affairs.

The combined effect of all of this is like breaking someone’s jaw with your fist only to bemoan the excruciating pain that has been visited on your hand.

America is not alone in this. Amnesia and indifference are the privileges of the powerful. It is for the Kenyans and Algerians to recall the atrocities committed by the British and French under colonialism while the colonisers remain in flight from their history. “The essential characteristic of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common,” wrote the 19th-century French philosopher Ernest Renan, “and must have forgotten many things as well.”

No wonder then that a recent Pew poll found that despite all the evidence to the contrary 56% of Americans said they thought the invasion had succeeded in its goals while the number of those who think the invasion was the right decision stands at its highest in five years. The cost of doing business always seems more reasonable when someone else is paying the price.

By Daliah Merzaban

Before I genuinely began to cultivate and nurture my relationship with God, I regarded the five daily prayers that Islam enjoins on believers as laborious. It seemed impractical to expect that I would be able to stop what I was doing during my busy work schedule to take time out and pray.

Working as a news wire journalist, I was often spending upwards of 10 hours a day in the office or at conferences, interviews and meetings, barely able to make time for a lunch break. If I wasn’t working, my time was divided between house chores, errands, family and friends, and exercise. I was punctual with everything in my life, except that I was late five times a day.

In my mind, it was not viable to expect that I could wake up before the crack of dawn to pray the early-morning prayer, fajr, otherwise I would be too tired to work effectively later that morning. It also seemed inefficient to interrupt my work meetings to pray duhr, the mid-day prayer, and asr, the afternoon prayer.

Making the sunset prayer maghrib was often a challenge because the window to pray is typically quite short and coincides with the time between finishing work, having dinner and returning home. So, in effect, the only prayer that was feasible for me to pray on time was isha, the evening prayer. For most of my life, thus, I would at best pray all five prayers in the evening, or skip prayers here and there to accommodate my immediate commitments.

Without realizing it, my inconsistency and approach to praying trivialized the principle behind performing prayers throughout the day. I believed in God and loved Him, but on my own terms, not on the terms very clearly set out in the Quran and Prophetic teachings. Yet praying the five daily prayers, at their prescribed times, is the backbone of being a Muslim; we cannot stand upright in our faith without them. It is one of the essential practices that God has called on those who endeavor to live in Islam, a state of existence whereby a human strives to live in submission to God.

When I came to truly understand the importance of prayer, the realization was both overwhelming and quick. It dawned on me that if I was not fulfilling this precondition, then I really could not claim to be Muslim. Even if I desired to have a solid connection with the Almighty I was not taking the necessary steps to do so. I promptly reoriented my life and it has now been a year and a half that I have not intentionally missed a prayer time, whether I am in the office, mall, grocery store, out with friends or travelling.

Looking back, I see how wrong I was about the impracticality of Islamic prayers, which are succinct and straightforward notwithstanding their resonance. When I moved from trying to fit prayers into my life to fitting my life around my prayer schedule, I instantly removed a great deal of clutter from my daily routine. Since regular prayer promotes emotional consistency and tranquility, I began to eliminate excess negativity and cut down on unnecessary chitchat, helping me be more focused, productive and patient.

Over a short period of time, what amazed me was how easy and fluid the prayers became. Performing the early-morning prayer actually gave me a burst of energy during the day and, gradually, the prayers that I had initially perceived as cumbersome became an essential facet of my routine. With God’s help, I would find ways to make a prayer regardless of the hurdles. While in Canada for the summer, I would often catch duhr prayer in a department store fitting room, with the help of a handy Islamic prayer compass application on my iPhone.

“‘Verily the soul becomes accustomed to what you accustom it to.’ That is to say: what you at first burden the soul with becomes nature to it in the end.”

This is a line drawn from a magnificent book I am in the process of reading by great Islamic thinker Al-Ghazali, entitled “Invocations and Supplications: Book IX of the Revival of Religious Sciences.” Al-Ghazali describes a series of formulas, drawn from the Qur’an and Hadith, which we can repeat to help us attain greater proximity to the divine and purify our hearts.
At each turn in my quest to enrich my faith, I have found that what at first appears difficult becomes easy when performed with sincerity. Soon after I reoriented my life to revolve around prayer, the five prayers felt insufficient in expressing my devotion. I examined Hadith, or the traditions of Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, and discovered there were optional prayers I could add to my routine. Since then, I have not let a day pass without praying them.

To supplement my prayers, I have integrated various zikr, or remembrance and mentioning of God, into my days. Zikr, including repeating such phrases as “la illa ha il Allah” (There is no God but God), habitually draws our attention back to God.

Among the many rich invocations mentioned in Ghazali’s book is this one which I have started to incorporate. As we leave our houses each day, if we say “In the name of God” (Bismillah), God will guide us; when we add “I trust in God” (Tawakalt al Allah), God will protect us; and if we conclude with “There is no might or power save with God” (La hawla wa la quwwata illa billah), God will guard us.

I suppose to an outsider, these acts of devotion can appear a bit obsessive, and I have had a couple of people say this to me. Yet it is an obsession with the greatest possible consequences that can improve rather than disintegrate one’s disposition. The more time I devote to God, the greater the peace of mind I find filling my life and the more focused I become on what is important — such as treating my family and friends honourably, working hard in my job, giving charity with compassion and generosity, and maintaining integrity.

Remembering God throughout the day, through prayer and invocation, truly does polish the heart as Hadith teaches; you erase obstructions that would impede faith in its purest form.

“Truly when a man loves a thing, he repeatedly mentions it, and when he repeatedly mentions a thing, even if that may be burdensome, he loves it,” writes Ghazali.

Daliah Merzaban is an Egyptian-Canadian journalist, editor and economic analyst with a decade of experience in the Gulf region, Egypt and Canada.

Source: Dew Point

• By Syed Hamad Ali, Special to Weekend Review

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad was voted Britain's most influential Muslim by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Jordan

For a man who is apparently Britain’s most influential Muslim, Shaikh Abdul Hakim Murad has rather unorthodox views on the way Islam is presented in the Western media. “I don’t think Islam is ever covered,” he tells Weekend Review.

“I have never actually seen an article in a Western newspaper that covers the core aspects of Islamic religion that are of significance to Muslims themselves. The focus is exclusively on social, economic and political dimensions of the religion. I have done interviews with journalists who say they don’t want to talk about the religious dimensions of Islam. That’s just the nature of modern Britain, unfortunately — we are going through a very secular period.”

Is there an Islam fatigue in Britain? “I think it’s not just an Islam fatigue,” he says. “It’s that people have been told everything about Islam except what makes it significant to Muslims themselves, which is often why they are so mystified.”

I am sitting with Murad — also known as Dr Timothy Winter — in his office at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University. Around us on both sides are shelved an ocean of books, including many on Islam and religion with titles such as Ibn Batuta and Islam and Taoism, some in distant foreign languages (Murad speaks Arabic, Persian and Turkish).

While he is speaking, I wonder whether this rather bookish, almost quintessential scholar of the Oxbridge type could really be Britain’s most influential Muslim, as voted by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, based in Jordan. It has compiled a list of 500 most influential Muslims in the world.

Murad himself dismisses his lofty new title. “It’s a little bit of silliness, isn’t it?” he asks. “I don’t know how you could rank such people. I am sure if you would ask most Muslims in England they would certainly name other people. They wouldn’t have heard of me.

“My interests are rather abstract, philosophical and academic. Most Muslims in Britain are interested in more practical bread and butter issues. So I think it was probably a curious misunderstanding that led them to put my name on the list.”

A Muslim celebrity he may not be like the boxer Amir Khan or singer Yousuf Islam, but Murad is certainly a well-respected figure among Muslims, not only in Britain but also internationally, as a leading Islamic scholar. He holds a number of prestigious titles, including director of the Sunna Project, secretary of the Muslim Academic Trust and director of the Anglo-Muslim Fellowship for Eastern Europe.

Last year he helped set up the Cambridge Muslim College, which trains imams for mosques in the United Kingdom. Murad is also very active in the local community and is heading a new mosque-building project in Cambridge, set to replace the present one which is stretched to capacity, with worshippers being forced to pray on the street outside.

Born in 1960, Murad converted to Islam at the age of 19. Back then, many people in Britain did not know much about the religion. The reaction from others to his new faith was one of curiosity. “The main concern was that I might have joined a cult,” he says. “That I was being manipulated by some evil puppet master, which was a fear among middle-class parents at the time. It was an age when cults were spreading very fast in Western countries. But as soon as it became clear that’s not what I was interested in, I think their anxieties receded.”

Compared to Britain’s total Muslim population, estimated at 2.4 million, converts form a small percentage at an estimated 60,000 to 70,000.

However, one odd bit of fact about converts in this country is that they sometimes keep their Islamic faith a secret by not telling others, according to Murad.

He attributes this strange phenomenon partly to an English sense of reticence. “We call them submarines,” he explains. “People who are under the surface and are practising the religion, including praying and fasting. But their close friends and family don’t know.”

For instance, Murad knows one professor at Cambridge University who has been a Muslim for 30 years and comes to the mosque when he can but his colleagues at the university aren’t aware he is a Muslim. Then there is a Christian clergyman who converted to Islam but hasn’t told his wife because he is sure she wouldn’t understand and would divorce him and he would end up losing the children.

But while the case of some converts can at times be rather awkward, Murad himself has lived quite a colourful life as a Muslim. Since graduating from Cambridge University with a first-class honours in Arabic in 1983, he travelled to Egypt, where he studied Islam at the renowned Al Azhar University. He lived for three years in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, before returning to London to study Turkish and Persian. Murad is at present the Shaikh Zayed Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University.

Muslims are sometimes criticised for apparently having developed a “victim mentality” — and some prominent Islamic thinkers have also kind of agreed with this. Does Murad concur?
“I don’t find that particularly among Muslim communities,” he says. “The kind of Muslim leaders who the media notice may well think that Muslims are being unfairly singled out. That the West didn’t come to their rescue in Bosnia, the West has been indifferent to their fate in Palestine, the West did something to Iraq that it would never have done to, say, Spain under General Franco. That it is behaving in a cavalier fashion in Afghanistan. That it supports unpopular autocratic regimes throughout the Muslim world — and therefore the West is generically hostile to Muslims and victimises them. I think that is a ridiculous oversimplification.

“There are some Muslims who resent the fact that so many of the victims of Western foreign policy have been Muslims. But I don’t think that is the prevailing view of most mosque-going Muslims in the UK. They are more interested in immediate bread and butter issues of getting jobs, educating their children and finding their way into society.”

Alongside his passionate defence of Britain’s Muslim community, Murad is known for speaking eloquently about those who have gone to the extreme within the religion. I ask him how he would argue, using religion, against these people who find themselves at the radical fringe?

“Well, one has to do it using the traditional instruments of Muslim debate, which are Quran and Hadith quotations with reference to the past consensus of the scholars of the religion,” he says. “That debate is easily won because the radicals very seldom have a very proper religious education.

“Bin Laden is an engineer, Zawahiri is a medic. The typical profile of the radical Islamist is not that he is an expert on Islam, rather it is that he is somebody with a Western technical type of education who is sufficiently incensed by Western policies that he is using an Islamic language misunderstood to justify what is essentially a temper tantrum.”

In Bombing Without Moonlight: The Origins of Suicidal Terrorism, Murad argues that an Islamist suicide bomber is very much a by-product of a Westernised mindset and is in fact an alien phenomenon to the religion of Islam when viewed from a historical context. In the book, he notes how many on both sides will furiously deny an “Islamism with Western roots”. Suicidal militancy is, he points out, entirely absent from the Islamic scriptures. But shouldn’t one be weary of labels such as “moderate” Islam because it gives the impression of some type of “Islam lite” that people should be following? In other words, it is as if there is something wrong with following the religion in its fullness.

“Yes, you may say we have two alternatives,” he says. “We have the alternative of being Muslim extremists or being extremely Muslim. And I don’t accept the category of moderate at all because it is far from clear. Because when it is used usually by Western pundits and politicians, what is intended is anything other than a form of Islam that politically doesn’t obstruct present Western policies. And I don’t think that is a helpful way of developing a meaningful sense of priorities within a religion. So I don’t use this category ‘moderate’ Muslims at all. I think the ongoing face-off between radicals and the mainstream is a face-off between heresy and orthodoxy. Those are the terms which are more indigenous and authentic than ‘moderation’ and ‘extremism’.”

This brings the discussion back to where this interview started: the great Islam debate in the media. Murad believes there is little point in expecting a more accurate account of Islam in the British tabloid press. Instead, he tells me what worries him is that among the educated classes in the UK, who, to some extent, conduct their conversation through the more respectable broadsheets, there is an unwillingness to acknowledge that non-Western cultures may have definitions of happiness and human flourishing which could be worthy of respect and have a right to exist.

“There is something implicitly totalitarian about the assumption that the value set esteemed by Westerners must alone be right,” he says. “This comes from the universalism of the Enlightenment, which thought that ‘man’ was a single sort of subject and about whom large generalisations could always be offered.”

More recently, he acknowledges, such thinking has come under a good deal of attack. “But that does not seem to have percolated to the public sphere,” he says, “where it is assumed that the West alone can define ‘universals’, such as ‘universal human rights’, even though philosophically Western thinkers have an increasingly hard time establishing any universals at all. Some thinkers, such as Gavin D’Costa, Geoffrey Stout — and, I think, Slavoj Zizek — are very aware of this paradox. D’Costa’s new book holds that everything Westerners say to other cultures can be reduced to variations on ‘Be like us’. That’s not entirely accurate, of course.”

Clearly, it would be wrong to put the entire burden of blame on the shoulders of the West. Murad believes part of the problem is the reluctance so far of Muslim states and agencies to encourage a broader and more thoughtful cultural discussion in the West which is rooted in a better understanding of Muslim culture.

He gives the example of the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan, whose Alliance of Civilisations at times seems to attempt such an effort. But if Middle Easterners really wish to be better respected in the West, he believes they need to engage in deep and extensive cultural investment. “The Arab League, or the OIC, should direct resources to creating something like the British Council,” he says, “or the Goethe Institute, with landmark institutions in Western capitals which promote a correct understanding and a healthy dialogue. At the forefront should be teaching the Arabic language. Unless the Muslim world engages in better public diplomacy on behalf of its culture, it cannot expect to be better understood and respected.”

Syed Hamad Ali is an independent writer based in Cambridge.

For more information or to make donations, log on to www.cambridgemosqueismoving.org.uk

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad

From: The Guardian 12 October, 2009

O you who believe! Let not your wealth nor your children distract you from remembrance of Allah. Those who do so, they are the losers. (63:9)

This verse in the Qur’an is an invitation for humanity to make a relatively small effort in this world, in return for the eternal reward of the hereafter. It is a call to save ourselves from becoming fixated on our wealth and on providing our children with the latest gadget and games, which ultimately are mere distractions from our remembrance of the creator.

But humans are short-termist; we think primarily of our pleasures now rather than the harmony and serenity of the world to come. Chapter 102 of the Qur’an says that we are distracted by competing in worldly increase, until we finally end up in our graves where we will be questioned about our excesses.

Does this mean that it is wrong to own things? Of course not, as money and offspring can be positive things in the life of a believer, and we do of course have basic needs which need to be met. But we must remember that the pleasures of consumption are quickly gone, while lasting benefit comes only from using our wealth to uphold the rights of others; namely the orphan, the traveller, and the needy. Wealth is thus truly ours only once it has been given away.

Those who are genuinely distracted by worldly increase, and who make it an end in and of itself rather than as a means towards something better are in effect guilty of a form of idolatry. Ours is an age that has made idols of the great banks and finance houses, driven to frenzy by competition amongst billionaires who are kept awake at night by the thought that a rival might make a business deal more quickly than them. A banker who can asset strip companies and throw its employees out onto the street is someone who is in the grip of an obsession that has thrown him beyond of the normal frontiers of humanity.

Neo-classical economics has traditionally focused on four things: land, labour, capital and money, the first three of which are finite, while the fourth, money, is theoretically infinite, and is therefore where human greed has been particularly focussed. Thus arose a system where someone could, with approval, set up a bank with only £1, and then lend £100 using property and other assets promised by others as security.

The lender now has £100 including interest, which they earned by just sitting there and doing nothing. On the basis of this £100, they can then lend £1000, and on and on, until the cancerous growth lubricated by greed becomes so huge that it leads to a fundamental breakdown in the system. Such a system based on usury, with interest as the bizarre “price of money” which itself becomes a commodity, was once prohibited by all faiths. People had a simple and natural intuition that the commoditisation of a measurement of value would open the door to trading in unreal assets, and ultimately to a model of finance that would destroy natural restraints and even, potentially, the planet.

In the classical Islamic system, by contrast, money is the substance of either gold or silver. With a tangible and finite asset being the only measure of value, there is a great deal more certainty about the value of assets and the price of money. This basic wisdom was though not just a theoretical ideal; it succeeded. Muslim society at its height was mercantile, and it was successful. Never was money assigned its own value and never was it seen as an end in and of itself.

Since the abolition of the gold standard however, theoretical limits on the price of money were removed. Last year’s meltdown, whose final consequences were unguessable, was a sign of the inbuilt dangers of a usurious world. Humans are naturally short-termist but in times of crisis we must take stock. As with the related environmental crisis, now is the time to be smarter and more self-restrained. The believer is in any case allergic to the mad amassing of wealth, since he or she expects true happiness and peace only in the remembering of God and in the next world.

Now is the time to think seriously about finding an economic system to replace the one whose dangers have just been revealed. Upon the conquest of Mecca, a verse of the Qur’an was revealed commanding people to give up what remained of their interest-based transactions, upon which a new system based on the value of gold and silver was initiated.

Those who relied so heavily on the old system would of course have been unable to understand a system without banking charges, but not only was such a system created but a successful civilisation was created using these ideas.

Last year we peered into the abyss; now we must apply self-restraint and wisdom, before complete catastrophe ensues.

The Kaaba at night

In the center of Masjid al-Haram you see the Kaaba. A simple cube like structure made of dark rough stones with white chalk filling the fissures. At the first sight a shiver runs through you and you wonder in amazement … This plain and empty structure is the center of our faith, prayers, love, life and death?

You question in admiration; Where have I come? What is this place?

What you see is the antithesis of your visual imaginations of the Kaaba. Some might perceive a sacred place to be an architectural splendor whose ceilings are covered in silent beauty or it could be a sacred tomb housing the grave of an important person – a hero, a leader or prophet! But No! – instead it is an empty room. It reflects no architectural skill, beauty, art, inscription or quality; and no graves are found here. There is nothing specific that captures your attention or feelings except a yearning pulling you towards the Kaaba.

You will realize that there is nothing here to disturb your thoughts and feelings about God. The Kaaba, which you want to embrace, is a gateway for your feelings to ascend to the heavens and connect with your creator. This is something you were unable to achieve in your world filled with distractions and fragmentation. Before you could only theorize, but now you can see the “absolute”, the one who has no direction – Allah! He is every where.

How fortunate it is to that the Kaaba is empty! It reminds you that you are at the Kaaba to start a pilgrimage. It is not your destination. Moreover, it is a guide to show you the destination.

Having decided to move toward eternity, you begin the Hajj by moving around the Kaaba. It is an eternal movement towards Allah not towards the Kaaba. The Kaaba is the beginning and not the end. It is the place where Allah , Ibrahim , Mohammed and other great people will meet you. You will be present there only if your mind is not preoccupied with self-centered thoughts. You must be one of the people! Everyone is dressed in the same special garments and is being honored as guests of Allah. He has more enthusiasm toward humanity than any one else. However, the Kaaba the house of Allah is called the “house of people”.

“Behold! The first sanctuary appointed for humankind was that at Bekka (Mecca), a blessed place, a guidance to all people.”  (Quran 3:96)

If you enter this house while still being attached to your material self you will miss the sacredness of this house.

Mecca is called “Baite-Atiq”. Atiq represents being free! Mecca belongs to nobody. It is free from the reign of rulers and oppressors; therefore, no one controls it. Allah is the owner of Mecca while the people are its residents.

Under the provisions of travels, a Muslim is allowed to shorten his prayers if traveling at least forty miles away from his home. But at Mecca, regardless of where you are from or how far you have traveled, you devote yourself to the complete prayer. It is your land, your community and you are safe. You are not a visitor, but you are at home.

Before coming to Mecca, you were a stranger, exiled in your own land. But now, you have joined the family of humanity. Humankind, the dearest family of the world, is invited to this house. If you as an individual are “self centered”, you will feel like a homeless stranger lost with no shelter and no relatives. Therefore, shed the self distinctive tendencies. You are now prepared to enter the house and join this family. You will be welcomed as an honored guest of  Allah.

As you enter this house visualize Prophet Ibrahim  who was considered a radical for his times. Rejecting all the idols of his forefathers, he oriented his loved and obedience to the One True God. With his own hands and along with his son, Ismail , he built the Kaaba. A structure that symbolizes the singular nature of Allah in the world.

The building is uncomplicated. Black rocks of “Ajoon” are laid on top of each other. There is no design or decoration involved. Its name, Kaabah, means a “cube” – but why a “cube”?

Why is it so simple and lacking in color and ornamentation? It is because Almighty Allah has no “shape”, no color and none is similar to Him. No pattern or visualization of Allah that man imagines can represent Him. Being omnipotent and omnipresent, Allah is “absolute”.

Although Kaaba has no direction (because of its cubic shape), by facing the Kaaba when performing prayers, you choose Allah’s direction and face Him. Kaaba’s absence of direction may seem difficult to comprehend. However, universality and absoluteness prevails. The six sides of the cube encompasses all directions and simultaneously their sum symbolizes no direction!

“Unto Allah belongs the east and west, and wherever you turn you will be facing Allah.” (Quran 2:115)

When praying outside of Kaaba you must face it. Any structure except the Kaaba directs north, south, east, west, up or down. Kaaba is an exception; it is facing all directions while it is facing none. Truly a symbol of Allah, it has many directions yet it has no particular direction.

Toward the west of Kaaba there is a semi-circular short wall which is arching towards the Kaaba. It is called Ismail’s Hagar. Hagar signifies lap or skirt. The semi lunar wall resembles a skirt.

Sarah, the wife of Ibrahim had an Ethiopian maid called Hagar. She was a poor and humble servant of Sarah, who was given to Ibrahim  in order to bear him a child. Here was a woman who was not equal to Sarah’s noble stature yet Allah connected the symbol of Hagar’s skirt to His symbol, Kaaba.

The skirt of Hagar was the area in which Ismail was raised. The house of Hagar is there. Her grave is near the third column of the Kaaba.

What a surprise since no one, not even prophets, are supposed to be buried in mosques but in this case, the house of a maid is located next to Allah’s house! Hagar, the mother of Ismail is buried there. The Kaaba extends toward her grave.

There is a narrow passage between the wall (Hagar’s skirt) and the Kaaba. When circumambulating around Kaaba, Allah commanded that you must go around the wall and not through the passage.

Those who have submitted them selves to the oneness of Allah and those who have accepted His invitation for Hajj touch this skirt when circumambulating the Kaaba. The grave of a maid and a righteous mother is now a part of the Kaaba; it will be circumambulated by man forever!

Allah, the Almighty, in His great and glorious Divinity is all self-sufficient. He needs no one and nothing. Nevertheless, among all His countless and eternal creatures, He has chosen one, humankind, as the noblest of all of them.  and from among all slaves: a black maid!

The weakest and most humiliated one of His creatures was From among all humanity He has chosen: a woman, from among all women: a slave, given a place of dignity next to His own house.

The Unknown Soldier has been so chosen in the community of Islam!

The rituals of Hajj are a memory of Hagar. The word Higrah (migration) has its root in her name as does the word Mahajir (immigrant). “The ideal immigrant is the one who behaves like Hagar.” (Saying of Mohammad )

Higrah is what Hagar did. It is also a transition from wildness to civility and from denying the truth to accepting the Ultimate Truth.

In Hagar’s mother- tong her name means “the city”. Even the name of this Ethiopian slave is symbolic of civilization. Furthermore, any migration like hers is a move toward civilization!

Hagar’s grave is in the midst of man’s circumambulation of Kaaba. You, the mohajir (immigrant), who has detached himself from everything and accepted Allah’s invitation to go to Hajj, you will  devote your circumambulation of the Kaaba to Allah and at the same time you will be paying homage to the grave of a African maid.

It is difficult to realize. But for those who think they live in freedom and defend humanism, the significance of these incidents transgresses the scope of their understanding!

Adapted from a section of the book “Hajj” by Dr. Ali Shariati. Translated by Dr. Ali A. Behzadnia

A Muslim Foodbank... because some people can't eat

by Abarahim Appel

September 30, 2011

from www.altmuslim.com

It was announced recently that 40,000 Bank of America employees are being laid off. My heart feels broken over the news. It seems like every time there is a chance that we as a country can pull together and work through this, something else knocks us back down a couple of notches.

The economic news is compounded by the fact that before these layoffs, 15 percent of our country was already in poverty. That is 46.2 million people. It is the highest number in 52 years. Also, statistics are showing that 2 million more Americans slipped into “deep poverty”, defined as making a mere $11,000 a year. And while 7 percent of the United States currently lives in this statistic; the 15 percent above that line live in “normal” poverty, while close to 10 percent of the country is without any work at all.

Studies also showed this week that in my own beautiful California, the poverty rate rose for the fourth straight year. 16.3 percent of the state is in poverty, the highest in the nation. Across the country, Mexican-Americans and African-Americans have been hit the hardest by this economic downturn. Forbes magazine calls this time in history “the great African-American depression.” Today The African-American community has a staggering 1 out of 5 people unemployed.

I remember when I converted to Islam, just after 9/11. We talked often, back then, about how the majority of Muslims in the US were African-American. We wanted America to see the hypocrisy of the War on Terror. But the recession is now starting to show our hypocrisies.

To be clear, African-Americans and Mexican-Americans are part of their own American history. But we as American Muslims need to decide if we are one ummah or not. I remember a popular Muslim t-shirt that proclaimed Malcolm X’s defense of equality for Palestinians. I have not seen anything recently about Malcolm’s life work of equality for the oppressed, especially considering that the non Afro-Muslim community is especially affluent. The result is racism, as well as economic prejudices fighting for more influence within the community’s thoughts.

Perhaps now we need to talk about how our Muslim community carries some guilt in being greedy and not caring about the poor. Not just the really poor, but even the poor who work for you. And lets talk about the poor who visit your Masjid, the one you donated to help build. The one you pay hundreds of dollars to send your kids to. Now you may not want to hear it. You may now be looking to find the article blasting Mubarak and his corruption. But this is our corruption. We are making our American Muslim identity now. And how we relate to ethics, society and the poor will create more of our identity than will almost anything else we do as a community.

We as a community have ignored the growing sections of Muslim greed. I have heard more Muslims talk about kicking out black people from their homes in Detroit, then serving the poor. We often forgive, or look the other way. Maybe we are seduced by the beautiful masjid that these same rich donors helped build. We think “anything for Dawah.” But I feel Islam is being corrupted by the “bling”. We praise the Saudis more than we praise Abdul Sattar Edhi who devotes his whole life to the poor, and without any support from an “Islamic state.” We have lost track of what is really Islamicly important: being a source of comfort to the oppressed. Not just in Palestine, but the orphans, homeless and the poor nearest you.

Let me pray Jummah in a shack if it means we have more resources for the poor, the sick, the hurt the unemployed, the addict. Let us stop building beautiful walls and start building a more beautiful Ummah.

We speak of the Sunnah, but follow only what makes us powerful and comfortable. What ever happened to the part of the sunnah where prophet Muhammad gave away everything. Ate little so others could eat? Is it more convenient to have beards on men and cloth on females heads then to follow a life’s passion of improvement and service? But the poverty and service is the sunnah.

Let us instead work to be a humble and one with those ignored and devoured by their own economy. That would be sunnah.

Abrahim Appel is a writer currently covering Mexico and Mexico City for the California paper, Mundo Latino World. He studied Ethnic studies and Journalism at Cal State Fullerton, in Southern California. He spends too much on hookah to be a scholar of Islam, but believes his opinions are still valid.

from: The Guardian, Monday 17th October 2011

Half of all hospitals are failing to meet basic standards in care for the elderly. The Care Quality Commission’s recent findings are, shockingly, no shock to anyone. As a letter to the Guardian the following day pointed out, these were exactly the findings of a report commissioned by the secretary of state for health in 1998. Thirteen years later, nothing has changed. Outraged reports accumulate on the shelf, gathering dust.

Extraordinary advances in medical technology continue, but we make painfully little progress – even some signs of deterioration – in something much cheaper, and surely much easier in healthcare: the quality of relationships. As the commission’s chair ruefullycommented, “kindness and compassion cost nothing”.

Inevitably, the report prompted soul-searching in the days afterwards; many members of the public described very painful stories of the care their elderly parents received in their last years.

Joan Bakewell, interviewed on Radio 4′s Today programme, pondered the impact of the decline of religion, asking who now teaches kindness as she learned it in Sunday school.

It’s an interesting point, but sadly not one I suspect that stands up to scrutiny. Religious institutions have been revealed to have a patchy – and that is being charitable – record on kindness. No, I think there is something very important at stake here that is not about secularisation but about marketisation – how all our patterns of thought are now modelled on the transactions of the market.

“What do I get out of this relationship?” is now regarded as a perfectly legitimate question, as if relationships are simply a kind of investment portfolio. The language of trade, finance and commerce has infiltrated how we understand our lovers, our friends, our neighbours and those for whom we work. Social capital, social skills – this is using the language of the market to describe relationships and the values and the inspiration that sustain them.

Much of this marketisation has neatly reinforced individualism’s aspirations to freedom and autonomy. But there is a problem. It’s blindingly obvious and yet ignored: it doesn’t give a full account of human experience. There are large chunks of our lives when we are either being cared for or we are caring for others. Caring for others cannot be totted up according to a calculus of cost and returns.

Dependency – others on us or us on others – is a central part of life. It is not something to be ashamed of and avoided at all costs. Care cannot always be easily shoehorned into the gaps in a busy life of consuming and working. This is why ultimately this cultural pattern of marketisation is so cruel: it makes shameful what is an inescapable part of human experience. It denigrates and belittles the qualities needed to care, such as patience and gentleness. Worst of all, marketisation ensures that everyone arrives at the challenge of being a carer with an almighty shock, and often a sense of “Why did no one warn me?”.

That’s what having children felt like for me. I felt I had been ambushed by something for which I was totally unprepared emotionally: the 24/7 dependence of a child and how that compromised all my aspirations to independence and achievement.

Now, it feels my age group is being ambushed again; we are all wondering and worrying about how one cares for elderly parents, how one deals with their dying and deaths. Their needs are often far more unpredictable than, but just as emotionally fraught as, the first experience of parenthood.

All of this hits women particularly hard because their socialisation for centuries has been bound up with expectations to care; only in the past few decades have some of those assumptions been unpicked.

But in their place, marketisation’s model of care is to buy it at the lowest possible cost. It says everything about our culture that caring is paid so badly and requires minimal training.

Compare how the two forms of care have been treated over the past 20 years: there has been a gradual and grudging reluctance to make the adjustments necessary to care for children (increased leave and part-time working), while the care of the elderly in an ageing society has been doggedly postponed – we simply don’t want to think about it.

Care for children fits into a marketised understanding of relationship: we talk of “investing” in our children. The state sees children as important because of their future worth to the economy as labour. But in this marketised mindset, the elderly have no economic value; they are perceived as a burden. The only values ascribed to the elderly are found – as recently celebrated in some grey power list – in silver-haired celebrities still working such as David Attenborough.

That’s a harsh form of exceptionalism in a culture of implicit contempt for the elderly’s frailty, dependence and intense vulnerability. What we have lost is the perception of the value of human experience beyond the busyness of the peak years of life; something captured by Milton in the final line of On His Blindness, “they also serve who only stand and wait”.

As the numbers of elderly increase and their last years are dominated by chronic ill health, their care will become ever more demanding in terms of resources and time. But tackling the policy implications is dependent on challenging these deeply ingrained cultural attitudes.

There is another set of reasons why we don’t find it easy to talk about the care of the elderly: many of them are in the final years of their lives. They are living very intimately with death. And that is the one big taboo of our age. We are the opposite of the Victorians: we are very open about our fascination with sex and very closed about death.

So, many of the elderly end up in hospitals – many with conditions for which there is no cure – and face only a protracted decline. A health system fixated on cure and prevention struggles inadequately with the process of dying, with the needs for kindness and comfort rather than for complex medical intervention, and with dying’s enormous repercussions for relationships. A fifth of all NHS beds are taken up by end-of-life care at huge cost, yet surveys show that hospital is often the last place where the frail and dying want to be. It is also where people are often most dissatisfied: more than half of all complaints to the NHS are about end-of-life care.

What we have lost is any concept of honouring the elders, respect for their frailty, and recognition that supporting their final years before death is important for all of us – that death is a part of what makes all of our lives meaningful.

This is what Steve Jobs so bravely articulated in his remarkablespeech to Stanford graduates in 2005 when he put death centre-stage. First, he referred to death as “useful”, and then he went on to remind his audience about something that these young adults were probably reluctant to acknowledge on the day of graduation: that they would all age and die. It is the one universal human experience. And, finally, he claimed that death “is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent.” Coming from an inventor fascinated by change, there could be no higher praise. It’s the kind of insight which challenges the cultural blindness which is crippling our capacity for compassion.

The superstar uses pop music to praise Islam and advocate for political change in the Middle East. [facebook.com/maherzain

By Sean Foley

The Atlantic, 10 August 2011

Ramadan 2011 coincides with two significant events for the people of the Middle East. The first—Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s appearance in a Cairo courtroom—has received plenty of coverage and was seen as emblematic of a new Egypt in which even the highest officials are accountable to the law. The second event will get less attention in the West, but also comes out of the political movements that have transformed the Arab World in the last seven months: Lebanese superstar singer Maher Zain is set to release his new music video, “Ya Nabi Salam Alayka” (“Oh Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon You”).

Washington analysts have overlooked the political significance of the pop singer, who—like the Bob Dylan of the ’60s—represents a new generation of Arabs: Young people who want a new society and a newnizam (political system) in which Arabs no longer have to choose between modernity and Islam, and where neither Islam nor the West can be used to justify autocracy. The importance of a change of nizam can be seen in the chief demand of demonstrators from North Africa to the Persian Gulf: “al-sha’b yuridu isqat al-nizam,”which means, “The people want to overthrow the system.”

Few artists understand the yearning for change in the Arab World better than Maher Zain. Born in Lebanon but raised in Sweden, Zain studied aeronautical engineering and partnered with an Arab singer/songwriter who had also migrated to Sweden, Nadir Khayat (known as “RedOne”). The two men traveled to New York, where they worked in the city’s music industry with some of its brightest young stars. Khayat played a key role in the rapid emergence of Lady Gaga and went on to become one of America’s top music producers, working with Akon, Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson.

On the album’s cover, Zain is dressed as if for an R&B concert—but is seated in quiet Islamic prayer.

Zain’s New York period and his work with Khayat served him well when he produced his debut album,Thank You Allah. Released in November 2009 (little more than a year before the start of the Arab Spring) and featuring a good many songs sung in Zain’s excellent English, it was a surprise commercial success. In a musical competition organized in January 2010 by Cairo’s Nogoom FM (the most-popular radio station in Egypt), the album’s second track, “Ya Nabi Salam Alayka,” was voted as the best religious song for 2009, beating out work by more-established singers. Zain’s March 2010 concert in Cairo drew fans from Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and the United Kingdom. Many leading personalities in the Egyptian music industry also attended the concert.

Thank You Allah went on to sell well throughout the Muslim world, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, in 2010 and 2011. In Malaysia, the album earned eight platinum awards from Warner Music Malaysia in 2010 and was declared the top selling album in the country for the decade. (Approximately 120,000 albums were sold in a country of approximately 27 million people.) That same year, Zain was the most googled personality in Malaysia. In 2011, Thank You Allah earned a double platinum award from Sony Music Indonesia. By May 2010, the record had earned the top position on Amazon.com’s digital charts in the world music category.

On the album’s cover, Zain wears jeans, a black jacket, and a dapper cap—all items appropriate to a rhythm and blues concert—but is seated in quiet Islamic prayer. That combination is emblematic of the theme of the album that faith in Islam, God (Allah), and personal dignity are the answer to the systematic challenges facing modern Muslims. But the moral message of his music is clothed in a pop idiom immediately recognizable to the young. While Zain sings in Arabic and has released songs in French, Malay and other languages, most of his work is in English. These songs are integral to a global marketing campaign that seeks to reach fans via social networking sites, YouTube, and other internet media platforms. In a July 2011 interview in the British lifestyle magazine Emel, Zain noted that the internet was both “revolutionary” and the “biggest blessing” for Muslim artists, since they face considerable obstacles in getting Islamic-themed music on radio and television. The internet allowed him to bypass traditional media and publicize his work directly to people around the world.

Deftly taking advantage of opportunities offered by the internet, Zain was the first Muslim artist to reach a million fans on Facebook; today, he boats 2.5 million fans. Collectively, his YouTube vides have received more than 50 million hits. Released in 2010, “In Shah Allah” (“God Willing”) has been downloaded more than 11 million times on YouTube. Two other videos—“The Chosen One” (2010) and “Palestine Will Be Free” (2009)—have been downloaded more than 4 million and 2.5 million times, respectively. He harnessed this popularity offline with an ambitious touring schedule in 2010 and 2011, that has seen him regularly performing to sold-out concert venues throughout Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and, interestingly, North America.

In his videos and songs, Zain eschews the traditional, glamorized image of pop stars, instead presenting himself as an ordinary person standing out from the crowd only because of his musical talent—given to him by Allah. He also specifically calls on Muslims to avoid blaming all of their problems on the West and to realize their own role in shaping their situation. Indeed, as he very clearly realizes, his music has deep roots in the West.

One of his most striking songs is “Palestine Will Be Free.” The video uses animation to depict an apocalyptic urban landscape torn apart by Arab-Israeli violence, with live-action Zain singing amid the carnage. In the penultimate scene of the video, we see a young school girl holding a stone in front of an Israeli tank. The image is meant to invoke a clash between David and Goliath or might versus right. But it also has specific meaning for many Arabs: It is a reminder of the famous picture from the First Palestinian Intifada of a Palestinian child holding a rock above his head to throw at a nearby Israeli tank. But in Zain’s video, the girl drops the rock, stands defenseless in front of the Israeli tank, and implicitly puts her faith in Allah that her personal will is stronger than the mighty Israeli tank. Her faith is rewarded. As she moves forward, the tank withdraws.

Within months of the release of Thank You Allah and Zain’s concert in Cairo, revolts began throughout the Arab world. These revolts employed strategies akin to those laid out in Thank You Allah. Through the sheer size of their demonstrations, protestors challenged governments in Tahrir Square and elsewhere, and forced police to withdraw in a manner recalling the way the little girl forced the withdrawal of the Israeli tank in “Palestine Will Be Free.” Nor did the protestors insist on blaming the West. Their message was not the message of Osama bin Laden. They also used Facebook, other social media, and YouTube to “market” their message (and circumvent mainstream media) in a manner reminiscent of the campaign Zain used to market his songs. On February 12, democracy protestors achieved their goal in Egypt when Hosni Mubarak had to leave office—an event that signaled the birth of a new nizam, one in which even powerful politicians may be brought into an Egyptian court of law to defend their official actions.

None of this is to suggest that Maher Zain’s work caused demonstrations or the trials of former Egyptian officials, but Zain’s songs clearly reflected a widespread feeling of discontent and a desire for a different future. His awareness of that discontent and of the need for hope is an element of his popularity—epitomized by an Egyptian fan at his Cairo concert in March 2010 who was quoted saying that she loved the “revolutionary feel” of his music.

Zain tapped into this same feeling of discontent and the need for hope in the first song he released after the start of the Arab Spring, “Freedom.” He premiered the song in Malaysia in March 2011 and dedicated it to peoples fighting for freedom in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and all other countries. Sung in English, the song thanks God for giving friends and neighbors—young, old, women, and men— strength to hold hands and demand an end to oppression. The song enunciates a dream for a new Muslim society, in which people will no longer be prisoners in their homes or be afraid to voice their opinions in public. While Zain acknowledges that the dream of a new society has yet to be fulfilled, he promises his listeners that they are on the verge of achieving it, that God is with them, and that He will not let them fail. Throughout the video of the song, we see images of Arab flags and protestors peacefully challenging their governments in the Arab World.

Significantly, Zain’s call for reform extends to the United States. In “The Chosen One” we see Zain singing about the Prophet Muhammad while walking through Bakersfield, California. According to the website of Zain’s record label, Awakening Records, the video is intended to educate the world about the Prophet Muhammad and to respond to attacks on him through cartoons and on Facebook. In a striking scene, we see a young boy with a baseball cap and glove race across a living room and catch a baseball thrown to him by his veiled mother. The city is filled with social problems: homelessness, alcohol and drug addiction, impoverished elderly, abandoned animals, and ethnic tensions. (In the opening scene, Zain’s neighbor, a blonde white woman, dumps garbage on his front porch.) Yet, up until the concluding scene, it is not Zain who addresses these problems: others do. Finally, however, Zain notices that his unfriendly neighbor is sick. He makes vegetable soup for her. Zain is of course displaying his compassion and humanity here, but he is also invoking a well-known story about the Prophet Muhammad. For years a woman dumped garbage on his home until one day it stopped. Rather than rejoicing, the Prophet sought to see what had happened to the woman and offered to help her when he realized that she was sick.

The Prophet Muhammad and the hope he offers the world are central to Zain’s second video shot in the United States, “Ya Nabi Salam Alayka,” which is set for its official premiere this week. In it we see Zain sporting his trademark dapper hat and hip-hop clothes while walking through the major streets and railroad tracks of one of America’s premier cities, the hometown of President Barack Obama: Chicago, Illinois. He is flanked by the city’s famous skyline and he sings a salutation in Arabic to the Prophet Muhammad—a salutation widely known as salawat. By choosing a city that is in many ways at the center of the nation’s geography and nizam, Zain is implying that Muslims and their faith have something tangible to contribute to the world’s lone superpower—despite the ongoing presence of Islamophobia in American life.

As analysts and scholars seek to better understand the Arab World in the twenty-first century, they would be well advised to pay close attention to the lyrics of Zain and other artists whose words embody the aspirations of millions of Muslims in the Middle East and the wider world. If in a sense what the media has dubbed “The Arab Spring” is a replay of the West’s 1960s, Maher Zain is the Bob Dylan of this new situation. Zain understands that Western music has entered the consciousness of all the world’s young, and he realizes further that Western “love songs” can easily be transformed into sacred music—just as, once long ago, the deeply erotic “Song of Songs” was transformed into a poem about the soul and its longing for God. For Zain, the road to “revolution”—to a new nizam—is not to be found in politics or in angry rhetoric. Rather, surprisingly, it is deeply embedded in the themes, structures and chordal sounds of the West—so long as the listener understands that this music has undergone, via Zain’s lyrics and Muslim identity, a profound change of subject.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/08/maher-zains-hip-but-pious-soundtrack-to-the-arab-spring/243191/

'As we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I tire of the negative stereotypes and constant suspicion and hostility that members of British Muslim communities have had to endure.' Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

From The Guardian, Friday 9th September 2011.

On 17 September 2001, George Bush paid a visit to the Islamic Centre of Washington. “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” declared the US president. “Islam is peace.” Muslims might have been its biggest victims, but the war on terror wasn’t conceived as a war on Islam. In recent years, however, a growing number of rightwing ideologues have exploited the terror threat to push the argument that Islam is as at war with the west. Backed by well-funded thinktanks, these individuals are no longer “fringe” voices. Take Patrick Sookhdeo, a Christian pastor who reinvented himself as a terrorism expert after 9/11. He is quoted approvingly four times in the 1,500-page “manifesto” of the Norwegian killer Anders Breivik. Why? Sookhdeo has dismissed the “myth of moderate Islam”, says Islam is a “religion and political ideology that puts our British way of life in grave danger” and believes “everything about the west is inimical to Islam”.

The ravings of a crank? In fact, Sookhdeo’s book, Global Jihad, is on a recommended reading list for the UK Defence Academy’s higher command and staff course 2011. The pastor himself has been used by the MoD to give “higher level training” to British military commanders preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.

Then there is Robert Spencer, the co-founder of the EDL-linked organisation Stop the Islamicisation of America which, according to the Anti-Defamation League, “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda”. Breivik’s manifesto cited Spencer 64 times. Yet the latter has been invited to advise the FBI on counter-terrorism and his book, The Truth About Mohammed: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion, has featured on the FBI’s reading list for new recruits.

It is easy to blame crude, anti-Islam propagandists like Sookhdeo and Spencer for the increasing levels of alienation, disillusionment and distrust inside Muslim communities across the west. But the real question is why have the US and UK governments given such influence to preachers of hate and division? Whatever happened to winning hearts and minds?

Western Muslims have been seen exclusively through the prism of counter-terrorism. Sensitive issues of integration and community cohesion have become entangled in the securitised discourse of the war on terror. Here in the UK, the effect has been a chilling of speech inside Muslim communities. I have lost count of the number of British Muslim students, activists and imams who have told me of their fear of being labelled as extremists or terrorists if they dare take an unconventional, unorthodox or radical position on a political or religious issue. It is ironic, if depressing, that a doubling of the number of Muslim MPs in parliament and the appointment of a Muslim woman to the cabinet has been matched by a narrowing of the range of opinions and views expressed by ordinary British Muslims in public.

For example, many Muslims have melted away from the antiwar movement, which they collaborated in creating. There is a growing belief that dissent by politically active Muslims has not just been stigmatised, but criminalised. From new laws cracking down on the so-called “glorification of terrorism”, to the excessive sentences handed out to British Muslim teenagers protesting against Israel’s Gaza war, to the use by counter-terrorism police of 150 surveillance cameras in just two Muslim areas of Birmingham, the past decade has seen ordinary Muslims disproportionately targeted by the authorities. A damning report by the Institute of Race Relations in 2009 described the last government’s prevent counter-extremism strategy as “an elaborate structure of surveillance, mapping, engagement and propaganda. Prevent has become, in effect, the government’s ‘Islam policy’.”

Meanwhile, the media’s coverage of British Muslims has been particularly pernicious. In 2008, a Cardiff University study of 1,000 newspaper articles revealed that references to radical Muslims outnumbered references to moderates by 17 to one. The most common nouns used in relation to British Muslims were terrorist, extremist, militant and Islamist.

The term “Islamist” – one I have, admittedly, used myself – is especially problematic. It obscures more than it illuminates. The tyrannical Taliban government of Afghanistan was Islamist – yet so too is the elected government of Turkey; Hizb ut-Tahrir is an Islamist organisation – but so is the Muslim Council of Britain. I too have been lazily denounced as an “Islamist” by my critics – despite having long ago declared my opposition to an “Islamic state” – and subjected to a barrage of Islamophobic abuse online. I am often told by anxious and fearful Muslim friends to “be careful” or to “stop being so outspoken”; they worry for my safety and job security.

I love this country. There is no better place in Europe to live as a Muslim. But, as we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I too tire of the negative stereotypes and constant suspicion and hostility that members of British Muslim communities have had to endure.

Perhaps all is not lost. Last month, Tariq Jahan, whose son was murdered during the riots, won plaudits for his calm and dignified response. What made Jahan such an unlikely British hero – especially on the pages of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express – is that he is a British Muslim (and a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir). After I visited his home in Birmingham, a friend of the family told me: “Thanks to Tariq, we’re all seen in a different light now – not in a negative light, not just as terrorists.” But there is still a long way to go. Ten years on, British Muslims must stand up and be counted. Our struggle against demonisation is far from over.

by

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad (Tim Winter)

[Based on a lecture given to a conference of British converts on September 17 1997]

It is said that the 19th century French poet Mallarm can only be fully understood by those who are not French, because they read him more slowly. Converts to Islam, the subject of this essay, can perhaps claim the same ambiguous advantage in their reading of the Islamic narrative. Several consequent questions impose themselves: can the clarity of vision brought by novelty outweigh the absence of a Muslim upbringing? Is adoption a more culturally fertile condition than simple son ship? Has the dynamism of Islamic culture after the initial Arab era owed everything to the energy of recent converts, with their own ethnic genius: the Persians, and then, pre-eminently, the Turks; and if so, might the appearance of converts in the West presage a larger revival of the fortunes of an aged and tired Islamic ummah.

I hope to return to these interesting queries at a later date. Here, I shall confine myself to the issue that presents itself most sharply to those British people who, like myself, have boarded the lifeboat of Islam. The issue is the question of British Muslim identity.

Who is a British Muslim is an easy question: it is anyone who follows Islam and holds a U.K. passport. This is at once the easiest and probably the only workable definition. The more teasing question, which I wish to raise in this article, is: what is a British Muslim? The query raises two problems related to belonging. What does it mean to be a British person who belongs to Islam? And, what does it mean to be a Muslim person who belongs to Britain? How do we map the overlap zone in a way that makes sense, and is legitimate, in terms of the co-ordinates of both of these terms?

Clearly, by virtue of the first definition, the British Muslim population, all 1.5 million of it, divides into three groups. Firstly, and least problematically, there are men and women whose cultural formation was not British, but who have migrated to this country. This essay will not touch centrally on their own particular struggle for self-definition, which is quite different to that addressed by converts.

Secondly, there are the children of the first group, and occasionally now their grandchildren. These people are usually seen to be torn between two worlds, but in reality, the British world has shaped their souls far more profoundly then they often recognise. Modern schooling is designed for a culture that puts an increasing share of acculturation and upbringing, as opposed to the simple inculcation of facts, on the shoulders of schoolteachers rather than of parents. Muslims who have moved to this country have done so at precisely the time when British education is also going into the business of parenting; most Muslim parents do not recognise the fact, but Muslim children in this country always have a third parent: the Education Secretary. Even those second-generation Muslims here who claim to have angrily rejected Britishness are in fact doing so in terms of types of radicalism, which are deeply influenced by Western styles of dissent. Most noticeably, they locate their radicalism not primarily in a spiritual, but in social and political rejection of the oppressive order around them. Their unsettled and agitated mood is not always congenial to the recent convert, who may, despite the cultural distance, feel more comfortable with the first rather than the second generation of migrants, preferring their God-centred religion to what is often the troubled, identity-seeking Islam of the young.

Thirdly, we have the smallest group of all: the convert or so-called revert community. This group is highly disparate, and it is not clear that one can make any meaningful generalisations about it at all. Almost by definition, a British person who is guided to Islam is an eccentric of some kind: one of the virtues, perhaps, of the British is that eccentrics have always been nurtured or at least more or less tolerated here. But the overall pattern is confusing. One can offer certain sociological generalisations about British people who become Buddhists, or evangelical Christians, or Marxists. But the present writer’s experience with new Muslims is that no discernable patterns exist which might shed light on the routes by which people awaken to the truth of Islam. This failure to discern patterns can only be described as lamentable, for were we to discern such patterns, they could immediately be exploited for d’awah purposes. The most we can say is that a clear majority of converts to Islam in Britain are from Catholic rather than Protestant or Jewish backgrounds. Within this group, in my experience the only clergy that convert are Jesuits; I am not aware of a single member of another religious order that has become Muslim.

Other than this very general and not terribly helpful observation, few patterns are discernable, and our missionary efforts, never very coordinated, flounder accordingly.

But whatever the processes, and we may be wise to accept traditional invocations of divine providence and guidance, which transcend and make irrelevant any sociological pattern-finding, this third group among British Muslims confronts certain sharp problems of self-definition. Egyptian, or Indonesian, or Indian Muslims becoming British do so slowly, perhaps over two or three generations. The identity problems can be sharp: in particular, there can be painful challenges to the hopes and expectations of parents. But the process is gentle in comparison with the abrupt jolt, which typically welcomes the convert. The signposts of the universe are not adjusted slowly, but all at once.

The initial and quite understandable response of many newcomers is to become an absolutist. Everything going on among pious Muslims is angelic; everything outside the circle of the faith is demonic. The appeal of this outlook lies in its simplicity. The newly rearranged landscape upon which the convert looks is seen in satisfying black and white terms of Them versus Us, good against evil.

This mindset is sometimes called “convertitis.” It is a common illness, which can make those who have caught it rather difficult to deal with. Fortunately, it almost always wears off. The only exceptions are those weak souls who imagine that the buzz of excitement caused by their absolutist, Manichean division of the world was a necessary part of Islamic piety, or even that it has some spiritual significance. Such people are often condemned to wander from faction to faction, always joining something new, in an attempt to regain the initial excitement engendered by their conversion.

Most new Muslims, however, soon see through this. A majority of people come to Islam for real spiritual or intellectual reasons, and will continue with their quest once they are inside Islam. Becoming Muslim is, after all, only the first step to felicity. Those individuals who adopt Islam because they need an identity will be condemned to wander the sectarian and factional hall of mirrors, constantly looking for the perfect group that will give them their desperately needed sense of specialness and superiority.

But actions are by intentions. A hundred years ago the founder of the Anglo-Muslim movement, Imam Abdallah Quilliam in Liverpool, was writing that those British people who convert for Allah and His Messenger would, by the grace of God, be rightly guided. Those who convert for any other reason are in serious spiritual trouble. Just as the namaz [salaat] prayer is invisibly invalidated if the niyya [intention] at its outset is not correct, similarly, Islam will not work for us unless we have entered it in faith, out of a sincere questing for God’s good pleasure. If things are not going right for us, if we find no delight in our prayers, if Ramadan simply makes us hungry, if we cannot seem to find the right mosque or the right company to take us forward, then we would do well to start by examining our intentions. Did we become Muslims only, and purely, to bring our souls to God? Other reasons: solidarity with the oppressed, admiration for Muslims we know, desire to join a group, the love of a woman – none of these are adequate foundations for our lives as Muslims deserving of Allah’s grace and guidance. Imam al-Qushayri says that spiritual aspirants are only deprived of attainment when they neglect the foundations. So we need to look within, and if necessary, renew our faith, following the Prophetic Sunnahh. Renew your iman, a celebrated hadith enjoins.

So what are we? Statistically, perhaps fifty thousand people. But once we have taken the plunge, and enjoyed the feel of Islam, and come to know through experience, rather than through reading books, that Islam is a way of sobriety, dignity, poise and rewarding spirituality, what exactly is our self-definition? When we meet family and friends who are not Muslim, how do we carry ourselves? Do we treat Islam as a great secret? A discreet eccentricity that we hope people will not be so crude as to mention? Or, on the contrary, something we wear on our sleeves, feeling that it is our duty constantly to steer the conversation back into sacred quarters, confronting people with Islam, that they might have no argument against us at the Resurrection?

More generally, what is our view of the wider world of unbelief, which, despite the breathless predictions of some of our co-religionists, continues to grow more powerful and more prosperous? How much of it can we affirm, and how much of it must we publicly or privately disown?

We can, of course, take the easy way out, and avoid engaging with these questions, by retreating from the mainstream of society, and consorting only with Muslims. But this is not so easy. We need to be employed, since this is pleasing to God; and we need to maintain good ties with our relations, since this is also enjoined in the Sunnah. Wa sahibhuma fi dunya m’arufan. Keep company with them both in the world in keeping with good custom, says the Qur’an to converts who have unbelieving parents. And the Sunnah explains that non-Muslim parents have significant rights over their Muslim children.

But more significantly even than this, to solve the problems thrown at us and at our identity by the real world outside the mosque gates, we need to engage regularly with non-Muslim society. But for this, there would be no effective d’awah. People do not hear the word of Islam, generally, by being shouted at by some demagogue at Speakers Corner, or by reading some angry little pamphlet pushed into their hand by a wandering distributor of tracts. They convert through personal experience of Muslims. And this takes place, overwhelmingly, at the workplace. Other social contexts are closed to us: the pub, the beach, the office party. But work is a prime environment for being noticed, and judged, as Muslims.

There is nothing remotely new in this. Islam has always spread primarily through social interactions connected with work. The early Muslims who conquered half the world did not set up soapboxes in the town squares of Alexandria, Cordoba or Fez, in the hope that Christians would flock to them and hear their preaching. They did business with the Christians; and their nobility and integrity of conduct won the Christians over. That is the model followed by Muslims, particularly the Sufis, down the ages; and it is the one that we must retain today, by interacting honourably and respectfully with non-Muslims in our places of work, as much as we can.

If this is clear, then my initial question still begs a response. What is a British Muslim? What manner of creature is he, or she? The public consensus has clear ideas about other British identities: British Anglican, British Jew, British Asian Muslim or Hindu: all these are recognised categories and a certain community of expected response governs interactions between the majority and these groups. The Anglo-Muslim, however, is not a generally recognised type.

My own belief is that the future prosperity of the Anglo-Muslim movement will be determined largely by our ability to answer this question of identity. It is a question mainly for converts, but which many of whose dimensions will come to apply also to second-generation immigrant Muslims here, who have their own questions to ask themselves and this culture about what, exactly, they are.

To frame a response, I think it is useful to step back a little, and consider the larger picture of Islamic history of which we form a very small part. I mentioned earlier that Islam usually spread through the utilisation of commercial opportunities as opportunities for d’awah. That picture is one of the most extraordinary success stories in religious history. Compare, for instance, the way in which the Muslim world was Islamised to the way in which the Americas were Christianised. Islamisation proceeded with remarkable gentleness, at the hands of Sufis and merchants. Christianisation used mass extermination of the native Americans, the baptism of uncomprehending survivors, and the baleful scrutiny by the Inquisition of any signs of backsliding. A more extreme contrast would be impossible to find.

Perhaps no less extraordinary than this contrast is its interesting concomitant: Christianisation brought Europeanisation. Islamisation did not bring Arabisation. The churches built by the Puritans or the Conquistadors in the New World were deliberate replicas of churches in Europe. The mosques constructed in the areas gradually won for Islam are endlessly diverse, and reflect and indeed celebrate local particularities. Christianity is a universal religion that has historically sought to impose a universal metropolitan culture. Islam is a universal religion that has consistently nurtured a particularist provincial culture. A church in Mexico City resembles a church in Salamanca. A mosque in Nigeria, or Istanbul, or Djakarta, resembles in key respects the patterns, now purified and uplifted by monotheism, of the indigenous regional patrimony.

No less remarkable is the ability of the Muslim liberators to accommodate those aspects of local, pre-Islamic tradition, which did not clash, absolutely with the truths of revelation. In entering new lands, Muslims were armed with the generous Koranic doctrine of Universal Apostleship; as the Koran says:

“To every nation there has been sent a guide.”

This conflicts sharply with the classical Christian view of salvation as hinging uniquely on one historical intervention of the divine in history: the salvific sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. Non-Christian religions were, in classical Christianity, seen as demonic and under the sign of original sin. But classical Islam has always been able and willing to see at least fragments of an authentic divine message in the faiths and cultures of non-Muslim peoples. If God has assured us that every nation has received divine guidance, then we can look with some favour on the Other. Hence, for instance, we find popular Muslim poets in India, such as Sayid Sultan, writing poems about Krishna as a Prophet. There is no final theological proof that he was one, but the assumption is nonetheless not in violation of the Koran.

Even among Muslim ulema, who had not been to India, we find interestingly positive appraisals of Hinduism. For instance, the great Baghdad theologian al-Shahrastani, in his Book of Religions and Sects, had access to enough reliable information about India to develop a very sophisticated theological reaction to Indian religion. He accepts that the higher forms of Hinduism are not polytheistic. He notes that that although the Hindus have no notion of prophecy, they do have what he calls ashab al-ruhaniyat: quasi-divine beings who call mankind to love the Real and to practice the virtues. He names Vishnu and Shiva as examples, and speaks positively of them. He focuses particularly on the veneration of celestial bodies: the sun, the moon, and the planets. The reason why he fixes on these practices is that they seem to situate Hinduism within a recognisably Koranic paradigm. The Koran mentions quite favourably a group known as the Sabeans, who were by the second century identified with various star-worshipping but still vaguely monotheistic sects in Mesopotamia. The Sabeans are tolerated in Islamic law, although they are less privileged than the Jews and Christians, a position reflected in the ruling in Shari’ah that a Muslim may not marry their women or eat their meat.

Shahrastani explicitly assimilates many Hindus to this category of Sabeans. They are to be tolerated as believers in One God; and will only be punished by God if, having been properly exposed to Islam, they reject it.

Another example is supplied by the great Muslim epic in China. Those who believe that Muslim communities can only flourish if they ghettoise themselves and refuse to interact with majority communities would do well to look at Chinese history. Many of the leading mandarins of Ming China were in fact Muslims. Wang Dai-Yu, for instance, who died in 1660, was a Muslim scholar who received the title of Master of the Four Religions because of his complete knowledge of China’s four religions: Islam, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Many of the leading admirals in the navy of the Ming Empire were practising Muslims.

In China, mosques look very like traditional Chinese garden-temples, except that there is a prayer hall without idols, and the calligraphy is Koranic. In some of the most beautiful, you will find, as you enter, the following words in Chinese inscribed on a tablet:

Sages have one mind and the same truth. In all parts of the world, sages arise who possess this uniformity of mind and truth. Muhammad, the Great Sage of the West, lived in Arabia long after Confucius, the Sage of China. Though separated by ages and countries, they had the same mind and Truth.

In these examples from India and China, we see a practical confirmation of Islam’s proclamation of itself as the final, and hence universal, message from God. In a hadith we learn:

“Other prophets were sent only to their own peoples, while I am sent to all mankind.”

It is not that the Koranic worldview affirms other religions as fully adequate paths to salvation. In fact, it clearly does not. But it allows the Muslim, as he encounters new worlds, to sift the wheat from the chaff in non-Muslim cultures, rejecting some things, to be sure, but maintaining others. In Islamic law, too, we find that shara’li man qablana, the revealed laws of those who came before us, can under certain conditions be accepted as valid legal precedent, if they are not demonstrably abrogated by an Islamic revealed source. And Islamic law also recognises the authority of urf, local customary law, so that a law or custom is acceptable, and may be carried over into an Islamic culture or jurisdiction, if no Islamic revealed principle is thereby violated. Hence, we find the administration of Islamic law varying from country to country. If a wife complains of receiving insufficient dower from her husband, the qadi [judge] will make reference to what is considered normal in their culture and social group, and adjudge accordingly.

All of these historical observations have, I hope, served to make quite a simple point: Islam, as a universal religion, in fact as the only legitimately universal religion, also makes room for the particularities of the peoples who come into it. The traditional Muslim world is a rainbow, an extraordinary patchwork of different cultures, all united by a common adherence to the doctrinal and moral patterns set down in Revelation. Put differently, Revelation supplies parameters, hudud, rather than a complete blueprint for the details of cultural life. Local mindsets are Islamised, but remain distinct.

This point is obvious to anyone who has studied Islamic thought or Islamic history. I reiterate it today only because some Muslims nowadays reject it fiercely. Those who come to Islam because they wish to draw closer to God have no problem with a multiform Islam radiating from a single revealed paradigmatic core. But those who come to Islam seeking an identity will find the multiplicity of traditional Muslim cultures intolerable. People with confused identities are attracted to totalitarian solutions. And today, many young Muslims feel so threatened by the diversity of calls on their allegiance, and by the sheer complexity of modernity, that the only form of Islam they can regard as legitimate is a totalitarian, monolithic one. That there should be four schools of Islamic law is to them unbearable. That Muslim cultures should legitimately differ is a species of blasphemy.

These young people, who haunt our mosques and shout at any sign of disagreement, are either ignorant of Muslim history, or dismiss it as a gigantic mistake. For them, the grace and rahma of Allah has for some reason been withheld from all but a tiny fraction of the Ummah. These people are the elect; and all disagreement with them is a blasphemy against God.

We cannot hope easily to cure such people. Simple proofs from our history or our scholarship will not suffice. What they need is a sense of security, and that, given the deteriorating conditions of both the Muslim world and of the ghettos in Western cities, may not come readily. For now, it is best to ignore their shouts and their melodramatic but always ill-fated activities. Our psychic problems are not theirs; and theirs can never be ours.

Islam is, and will continue to be, even amid the miserable globalisation of modern culture, a faith that celebrates diversity. Our thinking about our own position as British Muslims should focus on that fact, and quietly but firmly ignore the protests both of the totalitarian fringe, and of the importers of other regional cultures, such as that of Pakistan, which they regard as the only legitimate Islamic ideal. So far, however, we have been too busy restating the initial question with which this chapter opened, and defending its legitimacy, to propose any substantive answer. It is time now to attempt a brief sketch of what I construe our cultural position and prospects to be.

As I have tried to emphasise, Islam’s presence in Britain is not an Islamic problem. Islam is universal, and can operate everywhere. It is not an Islamic problem, but it may be a British problem. Europe, alone among the continents, does not have a longstanding tradition of plurality. In medieval Asia or Africa, in China or the Songhai Empire, or Egypt, or almost everywhere, one could usually practice one’s own religion in peace, whatever it happened to be. Only in Europe was there a consistent policy of enforcing religious uniformity. The reason for this lay of course in the Church’s theology: unless you had some part in Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, you were in the grip of original sin, and hence were an instrument of the devil. Medieval Catholics were even expected to believe that unbaptised infants would be tormented in Hell forever. Given that absolute view, it was only natural that Europe constantly strove for religious uniformity.

Britain, as part of the European world, has traditionally suffered the same totalitarian entailments in its history. Hence, although it has always been possible to be a Christian in a Muslim country, it was against the law to be a Muslim in Britain until 1812, with the passage through parliament of the Trinitarian Act. Nonetheless, three centuries before that, with Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy, England cut itself off from formal submission to Vatican doctrines; and from that time a type of religious diversity has been, within severe constraints, at least a possibility. In fact, Britain was the first major European country to break with the medieval European tradition of absolute religious conformity. Perhaps it is because of this fact that exclusivist and xenophobic political manifestations are less common in Britain today than in most Continental countries. The National Front is a lunatic fringe party in the U.K., whereas its equivalents regularly scoop twenty percent of the votes in some regions of France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and Austria.

When England threw off the Papist yoke, opportunities arose for questioning ancient errors of understanding, which had been introduced into Christianity by the Church Fathers. These opportunities, however, were not properly grasped. The English Reformation was an attempt not to extirpate bid’ah in the Muslim sense, and return to the religion of Jesus of Nazareth, which had been distorted by the Church on the basis of the Hellenising agendas of the anonymous gospel authors, but to reform the doctrines and liturgy of the medieval church. Hence the reformers did not attempt to return to the simple monotheistic worship of the Apostles, but, in the Book of Common Prayer published in 1549, created a new vernacular liturgy based largely on medieval trinitarian and incarnationist precedents.

This English willingness to challenge tradition, however, was to have immense repercussions. Despite the lack of awareness of the instability of the gospel texts, as revealed by 20th century scholarship, for the first time Europeans, and notably Britons, were questioning the innovations of the Church magisterium, and attempting to grope back towards the faith revealed by God to His prophet Jesus, upon whom be peace.

One repercussion of the Reformation on our ancestors was the revival of a mystical tradition, whose most obvious manifestation was the Cambridge Platonists. English mysticism has usually been of a moderate type: one thinks of the Cloud of Unknowing, or Julian of Norwich. Extreme feats of asceticism, or extravagant and obsessive preoccupations with visions and miraculous happenings, have never been part of the English style of spirituality. The Cambridge Platonists drew on this moderate mysticism, but insisted that mystical inspiration must work hand in hand with rational judgement, and with sound doctrine derived from the Scriptures. This position, which influenced John Locke in particular, again evinces the English style of religion: profound but not verbose, rational but not rationalistic, and scriptural but not literalistic.

This very English approach to religion in due course led to serious questions being asked about the centrepiece of medieval Christian dogma: the Trinity. Milton, and later John Locke himself, are known to have held discreetly Unitarian beliefs, having been unable to find convincing justification for trinitarian and incarnationist views in the Scriptures. Locke’s close friend Newton was even more frank, writing of the vehement universal and lasting controversy about the Trinity … Let them make good sense of it who are able. For my part, I can make none.

The period around the Civil War threw up many Englishmen who were likewise concerned about the distortion of the teachings of Jesus by the Church; and the term Unitarian comes into being sometime during this period. But side by side with this tradition of dissent, and in often obscure ways interacting with it, went an even more revolutionary change: improved information about the Blessed Prophet of Islam.

The medievals chose to remain in ignorance about Islam. For them, Muslims were summah culpabilis: the sum of everything blameworthy. Knights from Britain had been at the forefront of the Crusades. The sack of the Muslim city of Lisbon in 1147 during which perhaps 150,000 Muslims were massacred, was largely the work of soldiers from Norfolk and Suffolk. But the same quest for simplicity and honesty which made the Reformation possible, also made of England the first country in Europe where medieval images of Islam could be challenged.

To an extent, which we cannot now determine, largely because an excess of sympathy with either Islam or Unitarianism could result in the dissenter being hung, drawn and quartered, new perspectives on Islam informed and reinforced the discreet Unitarian movement. This is implied by the title of Humphrey Prideaux’s hate-filled book of 1697, which he called, The true nature of Imposture, fully displayed in the life of Mahomet … offered to the consideration of the Deists of the present age.

Prideaux is clearly implying that some radical Dissenters were being drawn towards Islam, and he is writing his polemic to hold back that tide. But a far clearer insight into this process is supplied by another author, a certain Henry Stubbe.

Stubbe is the first European Christian to write favourably of Islam. In fact, he writes so favourably that we can only conclude that he had thrown off the heritage of Christianity, and privately adopted it. He was educated at Westminster and Oxford, and worked as a physician in Warwick, and as personal physician to King James. His biographer Anthony Wood described him as the most noted person of his age that these late times have produced. He died in 1676, after being accused of heresy, and spending some time in prison.

Stubbe was a child of the Civil War, and the spiritual chaos of the Interregnum prompted him to question the official tenets of his inherited Anglicanism. He was also a scholar, who had mastered Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and was fully conversant with the new critical scholarship on the Bible. Putting all these gifts together, and thanks to his friendship with Pococke, the Laudian Professor of Arabic in Oxford, he wrote a book, which for the nineteenth century would have been advanced, but which for the seventeenth is positively astounding. Just the title alone gives some hint of this:

“An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, and a Vindication of him and his Religion from the Calumnies of the Christians.”

The book begins with a chapter demonstrating how the message of Jesus Christ has been perverted by the Church. He stresses the fact that Jesus, upon him be peace, had remained faithful to the Mosaic Law, and would have been horrified by the idea that later generations might use his name to justify the eating of pork, for instance. He says, of the Disciples:

They did never believe Christ to be the natural Son of God, by eternal Generation, or any tenet depending thereon, or prayed unto him, or believed the Holy Ghost, or the Trinity of persons in one Deity … The whole constitution of the primitive Church Government relates to the Jewish Synagogue, not to the Hierarchy. The presbyters were not Priests, but Laymen set apart to their office by imposition of hands . . . Nor was the name of Priest then ever heard of. He concludes that the sacraments of the Church, particularly baptism and the Eucharist, are pagan rituals introduced into Christianity several decades after Christ.

Stubbe then provides a chapter on a brief History of Arabia and the Saracens, followed by four on the Prophet. Chapter Eight is a vindication of the Prophet; chapter 9 is a vindication of Islam, and chapter 10 explains the moral necessity of the doctrine of Jihad.

His polemical intentions throughout are clear: he constantly shows Islam to be a purer and more rational form of religion than Christianity. Here is Stubbe, for instance, summahrising the Prophet’s teaching:

This is the sum of Mahometan Religion, on the one hand not clogging Men’s Faith with the necessity of believing a number of abstruse notions which they cannot comprehend, and which are often contrary to the dictates of Reason and common Sense; nor on the other hand loading them with the performance of many troublesome, expensive and superstitious Ceremonies, yet enjoining a due observance of Religious Worship, as the surest Method to keep Men in the bounds of their Duty both to God and Man.

And a little further on he adds:

Let us now lay aside our prejudices … Their Articles of Faith are few and plain, whereby they are preserved from Schisms and Heresies, for although they have great diversity of opinions in the explication of their Law, yet, agreeing in the fundamentals, their differences in opinion do not reach to that breach of Charity so common among the Christians, who thereby become a scandal to all other Religions in the world. Their Notions of God are great and noble, their opinions of the Future State are consonant to those of the Jews and Christians. As to the moral part of their Religion . . . we shall see that it is not inferior to that of the Christians. And lastly, their religious Duties are plainly laid down, which is the cause that they are duly observed, and are in themselves very rational.

He allocates an entire chapter to show the moral significance of the Jihad. This chapter is perhaps the most remarkable in the entire book, since it had long been a Christian ide fixe that Islam could only spread by the sword. He goes to some length, quoting travellers to the Ottoman Empire, to show that Christian minorities are usually protected better under Muslim rule than under the rule of their fellow Christians. He observes, for instance:

It is manifest that the Mahometans did propagate their Empire, but not their Religion, by force of arms . . . Christians and other Religions might peaceably subsist under their Protection . . . it is an assured truth, that the vulgar Greeks live in a better Condition under the Turk at present then they did under their own Emperors, when there were perpetual murders practised on their Princes, and tyranny over the People; but they are now secure from Injury if they pay their Taxes. And it is indeed more the Interest of the Princes & Nobles, than of the People, which at present keeps all Europe from submitting to the Turks.

Having sung Islam’s praises in these terms, Stubbe could hardly expect to publish his book. He published several others, but this one languished discreetly in manuscript form until 1911, when a group of Ottoman Muslims in London rescued it from obscurity and published it.

At least six manuscripts did, however, circulate in a more or less clandestine fashion. No fewer than three of them were preserved in the private library of the Revd John Disney, who at the beginning of the 19th century shocked the established church by publicly converting to Unitarianism. Some historians have suggested also that Gibbon was familiar with the work. For instance, Stubbe observes:

When Christianity became generally received, it introduced with it a general inundation of Barbarism and Ignorance, which over-run all places where it prevailed.

And Gibbon, several decades later, closes his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with the words:

I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion. Gibbon himself was known for his private scepticism about Trinitarian dogma.

Stubbe’s book, as I have said, is the work of a brave pioneer. But it is also a considered reflection upon the religious instabilities of the interregnum period, which generated it. It shows a sensitive and immensely cultivated English mind shaking off the complications of old dogma, using modern scholarship to reconstruct the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and of the Prophet Muhammad. Instead of something exotic, we see here a very English kind of religion expressing itself. Stubbe is spiritual, but not superstitious. He likes simplicity: the blank, Puritan wall of the mosque rather than the elaborate stone metaphors of Catholicism or of the dizzyingly high Anglicanism of Charles. He values wholesome morality that is pragmatic rather than irresponsibly idealistic: so he commends polygamy, and shows the moral dangers of legally imposed monogamy. He regards with distaste traditional Christian strictures on the flesh – a century beforehand, Englishmen had rejected the arguments for a celibate clergy and had firmly quashed monkery as both unnatural and parasitic. For Stubbe, the Prophet’s approach was in accord with nature: the love of woman is as natural as the love of God. The Prophet, like the great Hebrew patriarchs, showed that sacred and profane love can and indeed must go together.

A generation earlier, John Donne had suffered passions for both woman and for God; and found his religion finally unable to reconcile the two. His early poems are among some of the most touching, and also sensual, love poems in the English language. Later, as Dean of St Paul’s, he realised that he must renounce the flesh as the instrument of the Fall and the perpetrator of original sin. Hence his agonising, tragic spiritual career, renouncing the flesh to serve God, composing poems wrapped in his winding sheet: Donne’s great Muslim soul caught in the flawed dialectic of a theology that regarded spirit and body as eternally at war.

Stubbe is also drawing on a particularly English pragmatism in his treatment of the Jihad. Far from regarding the Islamic institution of the just war as a reproach, he extols it, contrasting it with what he regarded as the insipid and irresponsible pacifism of the unknown New Testament authors. Stubbe is an English gentleman of a generation that had known war, and knew that there are some injustices in the world that cannot be dissolved through passive suffering, through turning the other cheek. He had sided with Parliament during the civil war, holding, with Cromwell, that the righteous man may sometimes justly bear the burden of the sword. An admirer of Cromwell, he became an admirer of the Prophet. For him, the Prophet was not a foreign, exotic figure: his genial vision of human life under God exactly conformed to what a civilised Englishman of the seventeenth century thought necessary and proper. In Stubbe’s work, in other words, we find a vindication of Muhammad as an English prophet.

There is more that can be said about the convergence of Islamic moderation and good sense with the English temper. Tragically, the rise of Dissent in England coincided also with the rise of nationalism and xenophobia, which reached its intoxicating heights with the empire of Queen Victoria and the Edwardians. Under such Anglocentric and frankly racist banners, sympathy with Islam became once more a receding possibility. But there were exceptions. Perhaps the most celebrated was that most English of intellectuals, Carlyle. Carlyle, like Stubbe two centuries before, was a free spirit, unhampered either by obsessions with Trinity, or modern delusions about the ability of material progress to secure human happiness.

On May the 8th 1840, in a stuffy lecture room in Portman Square, London’s intellectual elite were hearing Carlyle speak about the Prophet. They had anticipated the usual invective; and they were astonished to watch him holding up the Prophet as a heroic, adventurous figure, whose sacrifices had brought a natural theism to his people, and had much to teach a materialistic Victorian England. The climax came when the lecturer cried:

Benthamee Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this God’s world to a dead brute Steam-engine . . . if you ask me which gives, Mahomet or they, the beggarlier and falser view of Man and his Destinies in this Universe, I will answer, it is not Mahomet.

Stung to the quick, John Stuart Mill leaped to his feet, and cried out:

No!

Carlyle was lecturing on The Hero as Prophet; and again we see the English realism towards the use of force, which had made possible the creation of the British Empire, inspiring a more positive appreciation of the Prophet of Islam. The great Christian blindness towards Islam has always been the belief that there can be only one type of perfection, namely the pacifist Jesus, who taught men to turn the other cheek, and who said, Resist not him that is evil. For minds nurtured on such an image, the hero-Prophet is a difficult figure to comprehend. In the Far East, of course, there is no such mental block. Spirituality and the cultivation of the martial arts there went hand in hand. The love of women was also seen as a necessary part of this ethos. The samurai tradition in particular, of the righteous swordsman, a meditator who was also a great lover of women, ensures that a Japanese, for instance, will have few difficulties with the specific genius and greatness of the Prophet of Islam. But for Christians, there is no such model, although knightly ethics in the early Middle Ages, learned from Muslims in Spain and Palestine, dimly suggested it. But even for the Crusader knights, the ideal of celibacy was often accepted: the Knights Templar, for instance, a monastic warrior order, who were influenced enough by Islam to comprehend the importance of a sacred warriorhood, but who never quite got the point about celibacy.

With Carlyle, the Hero as Prophet, or the Prophet as Hero, reveals itself as a credible type for the English mind. And Carlyle’s insistence on the moral exaltation of the Prophet who transcended pacifism to take up arms to fight for his people was understood by at least one later British writer: George Bernard Shaw. For Shaw, as for Carlyle, there was no doubt about the correct answer to Hamlet’s question.

Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.

Edmund Burke had already pointed out that “for evil to triumph, it is enough that good men do nothing.” Shaw, like Carlyle, recognised that this principle calls into question the Gospel ethic of passivity in the face of suffering and injustice. Let me read to you a few words from Hesketh Pearson’s biography of the generally post-Christian Shaw:

For many years (this was 1927), Shaw had been meditating a play on a prophet. The militant saint was a type more congenial to his nature than any other, a type he thoroughly sympathised with and could therefore portray with unfailing insight. In all history the one person who exactly answered his requirements, who would have made the perfect Shavian hero, was Mahomet.

In his diary for 1913, Shaw himself wrote:

I had long desired to dramatise the life of Mahomet. But the possibility of a protest from the Turkish Ambassador – or the fear of it – causing the Lord Chamberlain to refuse to license such a play, deterred me. And so, as Pearson records, he wrote Saint Joan instead.

Perhaps we can close this brief parenthetic summary of the convergence between British martial theory and traditions and Islam, with a final insight; this time offered by Colin Morris, former head of the BBC in Northern Ireland:

The false prophet is a moralist, he tells the world how things ought to be; the real prophet is a realist, he tells the world how things really are.

Let us try to sum up the above arguments. Firstly, Islam is a universal religion. Despite its origins in 7th century Arabia, it works everywhere, and this is itself a sign of its miraculous and divine origin. Secondly, the British Isles have for several hundred years been the home of individuals whose religious and moral temper is very close to that of Islam. To move from Christianity to Islam is hence, for an English man or woman, not the giant leap that outsiders might assume. It is, rather, simply the logical next step in the epic story of our people. Christianity, formerly a Greek mystery religion advocating a moral code against the natural law, is in fact foreign to our national temperament. It is an exotic creed, and it is now fatally compromised by its positive view of secular modernity. Islam, once we have become familiar with it, and settled into it comfortably, is the most suitable faith for the British. Its values are our values. Its moderate, undemonstrative style of piety, still waters running deep; its insistence on modesty and a certain reserve, and its insistence on common sense and on pragmatism, combine to furnish the most natural and easy religious option for our people.

I should close by saying that nothing in what I have said is intended in a jingoistic sense. That the British have a convergence with Islam is to the credit of our people, certainly. But I am not commending any smug ethnocentrism; precisely because Islam itself came to abolish a tribal mentality. Islam is the true consanguinity of believers in the One True God, the common bond of those who seek to remain focussed on the divine Source of our being in this diffuse, ignorant and tragic age. But it is generous and inclusive. It allows us to celebrate our particularity, the genius of our heritage; within, rather than in tension with, the greater and more lasting fellowship of faith.

[Currently, he is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He studied at the universities of Cambridge and al-Azhar, Egypt, and has also translated a number of Islamic works including Imam al-Bayhaqi's The Seventy Seven Branches of Faith (Quilliam Press, 1992).]

- The Guardian – Saturday 6th August 2011

Donald Reeves

Europe needs a grassroots movement to tackle the threat of Islamophobia

“We must expose this racist ideology drawn from nazism, in which Muslims have now become the new Jews of Europe…”

Following the events of 22 July in Norway – when Anders Behring Breivik, driven by a hatred of Islam, killed 77 people – there have been ample expressions of outrage, analysis and commentary, but little indication as to what must to be done to prevent Islamophobia spreading.

Before 22 July, the Soul of Europe, together with the Soest Forum of Religions and Cultures (a German Muslim archive institute), had begun planning how to interrupt, undermine and dismantle Islamophobia. Beginning in France, Germany, UK and Scandinavia, we are establishing a coalition across Europe of institutions and organisations which are already engaged with Muslim communities. Our aim is to deepen, broaden and strengthen the foundations of those bridges between Muslim and non-Muslims, particularly among the younger generations – above all in practical ways.

One way is to develop patterns of solidarity. For instance: when a religious building is vandalised, whether a mosque or a church or a synagogue, communities will come together to condemn these actions. For condemnation to be effective, more than words are needed. Much depends on the slow, patient building of relationships.

Another way is for local communities to speak up on behalf of others, not least when Muslim communities complain of intimidation and harassment by police. These interventions emerge from relationships that have been established over time. Local politicians and religious leaders – vicars, imams and rabbis – will have to watch their backs. These actions will be seen as divisive among their own constituencies and congregations.

As Marwan Muhammad, director of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, told the Soul of Europe: “We are scapegoats and are blamed for all of Europe’s problems.” Muslim communities need to be invited in from the cold. There should be no “them” and “us”. We are all “us”. Umar Mirza set up the Dutch website We’re Here to Stay as “an attempt to create an alternative space … a way of providing a stage upon which the voices of young Muslims can be heard”. Dutch Muslims are not going anywhere. The Netherlands is their country, their home.

From among the many different European Muslim communities there are those who are saying: “Enough. We have had enough of discrimination, of being crudely stereotyped, of being scapegoats – of being victims.” These men and women are not “extremists”. In a debate on Britishness set up by the London-based Young Muslim Voices, a definition was agreed: a cosmopolitan country where people are respectful of different faiths and backgrounds.

Expressions of outrage are no longer enough. There needs to be a grassroots movement across Europe to stand up to those who peddle bogus religious justifications, resurrecting memories of the Crusades; to expose the racist ideology drawn from nazism, in which Muslims have now become the new Jews of Europe; and to tackle the myth of “Islamification” and those who claim to be defending western civilisation, Christian and secular, from conquest by Muslim immigration and the spread of sharia law.

Interreligious dialogue is just one of the links between different religions and religious communities. At a conference I recently attended, a speaker described interreligious dialogue as taking place on the top floor of a high-rise building while on the ground floor a fire was raging out of control. So it is time for those of us who cherish dialogue of every sort to join those who are trying to put the fire out.

Dawud Wharnsby once wrote in one of his songs:

We use so many words but have so little to relay
as angels scribble down every letter that we say.
All the viral attachments sent and passionate insults we vent
It’s easy to be arrogant behind user passwords we invent.
But on the day the scrolls are laid, with every word and deed displayed,
when we read our accounts, I know, for one, I’ll be afraid.

That day I’ll be so afraid to read. (Album: The Prophet’s Hands, 2003)

One of the tragedies of the Internet is that it strips away much of the social contract we have put into place in order to make our interactions more pleasing and less confrontational. If someone upsets us online or gives an opinion we disagree with, there is no physical danger in refuting them, in calling them an idiot, a kaafir or any other host of names. If someone quotes a scholar we happen to believe is a “sellout,”or gives us a sport statistic about a player we don’t particularly like – many of us have no problem publically labeling the elderly knowledgeable scholar as a sellout and making sure the world knows through vile vocabulary that we think the player sucks. Of course when we insult them, we do not acknowledge that we are neither knowledgeable scholars nor professional sports players.

We would not say these things in front of the people we’re talking about; if these were our parents, we would adamantly make excuses and prevent gossip. So why do our fingers move fluidly to vent insults, accusations and even high-level political analysis about events that we have merely done a few Google searches on?

A few months ago, a young brother from my community was killed in a train accident while walking. Readers on the local newspaper’s website casually commented that it may have been his fault if he wasn’t watching the train coming. This was on the day of his death. Would they have said this to the face of his crying mother? Would they have spread this thought outside the funeral, so everyone within listening distance could hear? We would hope none of them would have the cruelty to do this. But by typing their comments on the Internet, this is exactly what they have done.

Similarly, many young Muslims youth throw accusations against Muslim scholars, spend hours online insulting Sunnis,Shi`ites, Ikhwanis, Sufis, Salafis, Tableeghis, Deobandis, and every other flavor of the Muslim spectrum one can imagine. Many actually dedicate a portion of their day updating their Facebook status, insulting so-and-so through a clever blog post, warning others, listing out their faults – all this with the conviction they have “enjoined the good and forbidden the evil!” And don’t deny it, many of us cannot resist commenting on websites, or Facebook statuses, where our Islamic political, social, economic, creedal, and legal opinions – usually set in stone – are MORE sacred than the other because “we learned it from a teacher.” Yet the majority of us did not have any formal, conclusive training in the Islamic sciences – which even if we had, would not justify the bitter tone and behavior.  As Imam Suhaib Webb says, “We are like firemen arguing about what hose to use, while the house burns down.”

What we must realize is that when we take part in this culture of debate, arguing, than arguing again, day after day after day, we are slowly devastating our own hearts. On social networks we feel a rush of adrenaline waiting for the counter-argument or foreign person to respond. We create intellectual forums then wait like vultures to check another person’s clearly messed up thinking to respond back with a counter-proof: “That’ll show them!” That AWESOME feeling after a lengthy response is not enjoining good or even productive: we are simply letting OUR nufoos (our souls and desires) tear apart the heart and run wild to see if they can prove ascendancy over someone else.

In order to truly understand the psychology behind this, we will approach this from two angles. First, let us see what the Qur’an tells us about this behavior. Secondly, we will explore a few points that can remind us why and how we need to stay away from this culture.

Let us examine Surah Luqman:

“O my son! Establish regular prayer, enjoin what is just, and forbid what is wrong: and bear with patient constancy whatever betide thee; for this is firmness (of purpose) in (the conduct of) affairs.

And swell not thy cheek (for pride) at men, nor walk in insolence through the earth; for Allah loveth not any arrogant boaster.

And be moderate in thy pace, and lower thy voice; for the harshest of sounds without doubt is the braying of the donkey.” (Qur’an, 31:17-19)

Benefits of the Passage:

1. We see that Luqman orders his son to enjoin good, forbid evil, and be patient. Why does he tell him to be patient? Because anyone who TRULY takes on the job of enjoining good and forbidding evil in a society will be faced with calamities, trials, and tribulations. I assure you, being overweight, being sleepy, or having hurting fingers in the morning as a result of excessive typing and online arguing is NOT the calamity Luqman is discussing. Rather, he is telling his son to remember that people will end up physically oppressing you if you stand up for what is right, and to be ready to bear that trial patiently.
2. Luqman tells his son not to “swell one’s cheek” in pride or be insolent. Yet, when we tell people that Shaykh X is a sellout, and that “I don’t take from him,” or that “He is not a traditional scholar so I would ignore what he says,”we have done just that. We have attempted to establish our superiority over a learned person with our words and have demonstrated our own intellectual bankruptcy. We could not counter the proof, so we fell to countering the man. As Muhammad al-Shareef once stated: “When one proof fails, a person often falls back to anger. Anger is not a proof.”
3. Finally Luqman tells his son to be “moderate in his speech, and lower his voice.”

What is the purpose of lowering one’s voice? So that one is not displaying one’s words to everyone in the vicinity, and bothering them with our displays of arrogance. Yet, every single time we write something publicly (including on this blog), we are displaying words for all to see. We are yelling at the entire world, asking the world to witness our words. Are we going to ask the world to witness us calling to good things? Or will we ask the world to witness us defaming scholars, insulting this group of Muslims or that group of people who we’ve decided are not Muslims? Will we spend our time showing the world how the Prophet ﷺ lived? Or show the world how we have our own personal problems, inadequacy issues, and a need to demonstrate how we are on the “right path” and all others need to fall in line?

We all need to seriously evaluate our souls in this culture of online argumentation and identify why we spend our time the way we do. A few realizations we must begin to change include:

Continuously leaving controversial and provoking messages in our online personalities, whether through networks, forum posts or blog comments. This is NOT “forbidding the evil”; this is opening a gate for evil. Any trained mental-health professional will point out that this is attention-seeking behavior from a person who wants to feel like they are making a difference and are important. Ask yourself do I need to respond? What would Prophet Muhammad ﷺ do?

While the refined soul wants to do dhikr (remembrance) of Allah (swt), the diseased soul wants others to do dhikr of itself. It feels proud that it has stood against evil by posting YouTube links, by invoking walaa wal baraa (loving and hating for the sake of God) and by invoking creedal differences we barely understand to excommunicate entire groups from being Ahl-As-Sunnah (people of the Prophetic way). In all our interactions, we must make Allah our focal point, not ourselves.

The soul thinks it is making the world a better place, but it is simply trying to make itself feel useful through the use of the Internet and is involving itself further and further in argumentation. Al-Awza’i said: “When Allah desires ill for a people, He opens the door of argumentation for them and prevents them from doing good deeds.”

An online action is no different than one which is written down with a pen and signed, and sent to the receiver. The act is witnessed by the Honored Scribes, the angels who write our deeds, and is recorded in the scrolls of our actions, and will be present for us to read on the Day of Judgment. An online insult against a person, a scholar, or simply an acquaintance has the same weight as a letter would. To think otherwise is a deception from Shaytan.

We are not God’s police on the Earth. We are His worshippers and the representatives of the Prophet ﷺ.  Would the Prophet ﷺ spend his time telling everyone that Group X is not doing a good job for the Ummah and Group Y is better? Would he spend his time insulting scholars? Did he even curse the people of Ta’if who threw stones at him? Rather, he ﷺ would reflect on the revelation and build Muslim men and women through constructive, productive coaching in real life, rather than gain retribution for every wrong against him. And this is a man ﷺ whose words were heavier than ours, yet even he did not stoop to argumentation.

If we are not ready to stand before historic imams: Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn ul Qayyim, or contemporary shuyukh Albani, Qaradawi, Yasir Qadhi, Hamza Yusuf, Taqi Uthmaani, Suhaib Webb  – or any of the ‘ulama, jama`ahs or senior students of knowledge (that we like to discredit) – on the Day of Judgment, with the Angels of Allah and Allah’s Might before us and say:“Ya Allah – My word against his, this imam/sheikh/person is an innovator and led people astray, and I was your servant and I called to Your way with sound understanding that exceeds his” – then we should keep our mouths SHUT. I am not referring to scholarly differences of opinion that are dealt with through the referencing of proofs and legal methodology. I am referring to the bickering of people that many often resort to in judging the sacrifices, efforts, and studies others have made to serve Allah and further his deen.

Our own identity crises can make us feel we need to belong to a stronger group that is “correct” which in turn may encourage our online behavior in seeking conflict, being difficult and wasting everyone’s time. Many people feel alone, especially online, and to seek strength they resort to joining those who mock other groups. Their nafs feels it is better than other misguided people and revel in the pride that it is on a better path. This is dangerous thinking and needs to be checked.

We may have anger or emotional issues that we need to vent online to feel better. We may leave comments in the hopes of people thinking better of us, or for some other inadequacy that we seek to fulfill. It would behoove us to quickly do an examination of ourselves and our online personalities. Our various online anonymities allow our true selves to come out and act in ways that our common sense prevent us from doing in real life. So now you need to ask yourselves, why am I typing that? Who is it really for? Me, or them?

Lastly, we may just need to “get a life!” It is possible that you want to serve the deen, be involved in daw`ah, helping our communities and societies through Islamic values, but do not know how. The solution is relatively simple: get involved in local masaajid, your communities, engage with real people, serve your people and get away from the internet.

Additionally, seek knowledge for the sake of God, not for the sake of argumentation. I recommend searching this website’s Islamic Studies section for more on seeking knowledge, as well as reading a broad range of Islamic books. Study Islam in depth, pick a field and specialize in that area. Finally, read the Qur’an more often – after wudhu, Book in hand, computer switched off.

The threat of the nafs glorifying itself is an ever-present threat to every writer, speaker, and presenter who shares information about Islam. All of us must consistently take caution, advice, and spend time with people who discourage argumentative behavior and know us well enough to remind us of our own weaknesses, so that we do not let such behaviors manifest themselves in our lives. Many of us are surprised that the internet remembers everything. But to a Muslim, we should already know that nothing we do, type or utter ever escapes the pen of the angels who write, or the sight of Allah (swt). As Dawud Wharnsby says, when we are handed our accounts, will we be afraid to read?

It’s comforting, perhaps, to dismiss Anders Behring Breivik as nothing more than a psychotic loner. That was the view of the Conservative London mayor, Boris Johnson, among others. The Norwegian mass killer’s own lawyer has branded him “insane”. It has the advantage of meaning no wider conclusions need to be drawn about the social context of the atrocity.

Had he been a Muslim, as much of the western media concluded he was immediately after the terrorist bloodbath, we can be sure there would have been no such judgments – even though some jihadist attacks have undoubtedly been carried out by individuals operating alone.

In fact, however deranged the bombing and shooting might seem, studies of those identified as terrorists have shown they rarely have mental illness or psychiatric abnormalities. Maybe Breivik will turn out to be an exception. But whether his claim that there are other members of a fascistic Christian terror network still at large turns out to be genuine or not, he has clearly fostered enthusiastic links with violent far-right groups abroad, and in Britain in particular.

Those include multiple contacts with the Islamophobic English Defence League, which has repeatedly staged violent protests against Muslim communities. “You’re a blessing to all in Europe,” Breivik apparently told EDL supporters in an online message, hailing “our common struggle against the Islamofascists”. Whatever Breivik has done, he hasn’t done in isolation.

Of course the Norwegian killer’s ideology, spelled out in mind-numbing detail in his 1,500-page online manifesto, is both repulsive and absurd. Its main focus is hatred of Islam and Muslims — who he wants deported from Europe — rooted in a self-proclaimed Christian conservatism. He declares himself hostile to “cultural Marxism”, while being both pro-Israel and antisemitic, and a champion of anti-Muslim rage from India to the Arctic circle.

The killer has evidently absorbed the far right’s shift from the language of race to the language of culture. But what is most striking is how closely he mirrors the ideas and fixations of transatlantic conservatives that for a decade have been the meat and drink of champions of the war on terror and the claim that Islam and Islamism pose a mortal threat to western civilisation.

It’s all there: the supposed Islamisation of Europe, the classic conspiracism of the “Eurabia” takeover fantasy, the racist hysteria about the Muslim birthrate, the inevitable clash of civilisations, the hatred of “multiculturalism” and the supposed appeasement of Islam by the European elite, which is meant to have fostered a climate where it’s impossible to speak about immigration.

All these themes are of course staples of conservative newspapers, commentators and websites. So naturally, exponents of one or more of these tropes are quoted liberally by Breivik, from Bernard Lewis andMelanie Phillips to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Mark Steyn.

Phillips, a Daily Mail writer, has complained of a “smear”. But an article of hers Breivik cites at length described the former Labour government as guilty of “unalloyed treachery” for using mass immigration to “destroy what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place” – Breivik’s feeling precisely.

None of these writers is of course in any way sympathetic to the carnage carried out in Norway last week. But the continuum between the poisonous nonsense commonplace in the mainstream media in recent years, the street slogans of groups like the EDL and Breivik’s outpourings is unmistakable.

The same phenomenon can be seen across European politics, where the rise of rightwing Islamophobic parties from France and the Netherlands to Norway and Switzerland has encouraged the centre-right establishment to play the Islam card, wrap itself in “Christian” values and declare the chimera of multiculturalism an abject failure.

It’s hardly surprising that some on the parliamentary right have recognised Breivik’s ideas as their own: the Italian Northern League MEP Mario Borghezio described them as “100% good”. But the same neoconservative zealots who have always insisted that non-violent (Muslim) “extremists” must be cast out because they legitimised and provided a “conveyor belt to terrorism” have now been hoist by their own petard.

That is exactly the role many of their own ideologists have been shown to have played in the case of the butcher of Utoya. When David Cameron denounced multiculturalism in February, he also announced – to the delight of the EDL – that the British government would now be taking on the “non-violent extremists” because they influenced those who embraced violence.

Don’t expect the Islamophobic conspiracists to get the same treatment. Breivik is an isolated case, it will be said. In reality, as Europol figures demonstrate, the overwhelming majority of terror attacks in Europe in recent years have been carried out by non-Muslims. In Britain, a string of recent convictions of would-be anti-Muslim terrorists has underlined that Breivik is very far from being just a Norwegian phenomenon.

Lower-level violence and intimidation continues unabated: last week on the day of the Norwegian massacre, in an entirely routine incident, a mosque in Luton was vandalised and spray-painted with a swastikaand EDL slogan. The rise of Islamophobia in Europe and the US is the manipulated product of a toxic blend of economic insecurity, unprotected mass migration and the consequences of a decade of western-sponsored war in the Muslim world: from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pakistan to Libya.

It has become the new acceptable form of racism – far outstripping in opinion polls the level of hatred for any other religious or racial group, and embraced by those who delude themselves that anti-Muslim bigotry has nothing to do with ethnicity – and even represents some sort of defence of liberal values.

For those who failed to deliver decent jobs, wages and housing, and encouraged employers to profit from low-wage migrant labour, how much easier to scapegoat minority Muslim communities than deal with the banks and corporate free-for-all that triggered the crisis? The attempt to pathologise last Friday’s slaughter and separate it from the swamp that spawned it can only ratchet up the danger to all of us.

By Sarah Wildman

A rally protesting against proposed ‘Ground Zero Mosque’, New York, on 22 August 2010. Photograph: Rex Features

From: The Guardian, Thursday 28th July 2011

In the early hours of Friday’s massacre in Oslo, the initial working assumption of news-watchers, journalists and bystanders was that this was likely the work of Islamic jihadists. That it was not took some time to trickle out: news reports published as late as Saturday included compiled condemnations of the attacks by Muslim leaders, and comparisons to other al-Qaida-type terrorist acts. That the attack was, in fact, masterminded by Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian with a murderous vendetta against multiculturalism, progressive government and a penchant for US Islamophobic blogs, reflects the strange distorting mirror of the current immigration and national identity debate going on in Europe and America.

What began, over a decade ago, as a far right assault on immigration policies of European countries from within (think Vlaams Belang in Belgium, the Front National in France, the FPO in Austria, to the rantings of Geert Wilders in Holland) has been exported to the United States where our ultra-conservative bloggers have handily repackaged that material. Though we in the US have not had the same economic conversations about immigration and Muslim communities – European concerns began with so-called “guest workers” who became permanent residents – the Oslo murders tragically expose a well-integrated transatlantic network of fear and hatemongering.

Among other references in his 1,500-page “manifesto”, Breivik quotes favourably Robert Spencer, who runs the Jihad Watch website,Pamela Geller, who, via her Atlas Shrugged blog, was a key player in the controversy over the Cordoba House’s “Ground Zero Mosque” in 2010, and Bruce Bawer, whose book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West From Within warns of the intent of Muslim immigrants to Arabise Europe.

In recent hours, each of these authors has condemned the links journalists have made to their work and the killings in Norway, calling the connections ludicrous – likening them, in statements by Gellerand Spencer, to Charles Manson using the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter” as a plan for his murders.

They continue to claim their cause is just, that Islam remains a menace, though they fear a blow to their cause – yet, all without acknowledging this terror was wrought by a man who took their words to their most extreme conclusion. Spencer writes:

“The Breivik murders are being used to discredit all resistance to the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. But we’re stealing it back … Islamic texts and teachings, and frequently imams, directly exhort their followers to commit acts of violence. I do not. Nor does anyone else in the counterjihad. There is nothing Breivik could conceivably have read here as a justification for killing anyone. There is plenty in the Qur’an and Sunnah that jihadists can and do use as justification for murder.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bawer mourned that:

During the hours when I thought that Oslo had been attacked by jihadists, I wept for the city that has been my home for many years.

But once he realised this was not the scenario, Bawer’s sympathy with the victims apparently dissolved into dismay at the probably setback to those who oppose Muslim immigration.

“When it emerged that these acts of terror were the work of a native Norwegian who thought he was striking a blow against jihadism and its enablers, it was immediately clear to me that his violence will deal a heavy blow to an urgent cause.”

Of course, neither Spencer, nor Geller, nor Bawer put the gun in Breivik’s hands. And while the New York Times highlighted the issueof these blogs’ influence on Breivik, their Islamophobic discourse is far from an exclusively American problem. We’ve just taken it and run with it.

What we’re seeing in the US is a successful, almost mainstream, re-imaging and repackaging of the panic of European Islamophobia, of the sort that’s oft spouted by far right groups from Austria, to France, to the United Kingdom. In the year since the so-called Ground Zero Mosque furor, when campaigners brought in Europeans like Geert Wilders to march for their cause, a group of conservative Americans have become increasingly vocal in their opposition to public displays of Muslim life, from opposition to mosques (which has coincided with an increase in arson attacks) to warning calls that sharia law is soon to replace our justice system.

Partly, the success of our bloggers’ ideology stems from America’s vigorous free speech laws. On this side of the Atlantic, first amendment rights are guarded, rightfully, zealously and carefully. We can be more aggressive in our stances. But partly, their success comes from their very visibility: Geller, Spencer and, especially, Bawer are more mainstream in the US dialogue on Islam than their counterparts in Europe. Bruce Bawer’s op-ed was published in the venerable Wall Street Journal. Pamela Geller is a regular on talkshows, from right to left. Their positions, like it or not, have found an audience and gained traction, if not wholesale legitimacy, in the US context. Their work has enabled Americans like Juan Williams, the former NPR correspondent who was fired for telling FoxNews he finds Muslim travellers on planes frightening, to bounce back with his new book, Muzzled.

It’s not just talking heads, but politicians: as Peter Beinart pointed out in the Daily Beast this week, Herman Cain, a Republican candidate for the presidency, has said he would not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet, should he be elected. Cain may be a wildcard, but he’s not alone: other Republicans – including Tim Pawlenty and Newt Gingrich – have expressed equally rightwing positions on Islam, expressing fear about the “Islamicisation” of America and setting themselves up as defenders against sharia law. Those messages legitimise Islamophobia, and provide a drumbeat for action for those inclined to hear it that way.

This is the ideological underpinning that motivates militias and terrorists. The Norway attacks, it might be said, were the work of a militia of one, a single man with the deranged idea that he had to destroy his society to save it.

Spencer, Geller and Bawer each create the impression that western civilisation is under threat. It was not always this way. The United States once resisted that European narrative – both because we are a country of immigration and because many Muslim immigrants came in at a higher socio-economic and educational level, while a large proportion of American Muslims were converts from Christianity. Muslims in the US were, for these reasons, perceived as better integrated into our multicultural society. But that perception has changed.

As these blogs flog these issues, day after day, a siege mentality in certain corners of the extreme right is now pervasive: our culture, they say again and again, is being Islamicised. If we don’t defend ourselves, the implication is that “we” will be overtaken and “our” culture will disappear. Is it not justifiable, then, in such a rhetorical atmosphere, to ask: if you are promoting the idea that people are facing an alien invasion, is it not reasonable to assume that there will be those who hear that as a call to arms?

It is hard to feel much sympathy for these writers, as they complain of their maligning in the mainstream press. Sympathy, in any case, is beside the point, for in fact, they thrive on the marginalisation.

The second cause is the global political conflicts in which Muslims are seen as occupying the center stage. Incessant news and events depicting individuals committing terrorist acts, with their religion specifically highlighted in the media if they are Muslims, constantly plays on the minds and emotions of the American people. The worst act of terrorism in its history occurred in New York on September 11, 2001. It was carried out by a few foreign miscreants from the Middle East with Muslim names and had roots in the Arab-Israeli conflict. While it shook the world, it sent chills down the spines of the Muslim inhabitants of America. They were hit the hardest just by name association. They walked the streets under suspicious and disdainful eyes and are still struggling to reclaim their rightful place in the American society.

We are living in an era sequential to global communism. The phobia which dominated that era was the fear of the great Bolshevik conspiracy, which would undermine our freedoms and individual liberties. The product of that phobia was the Cold War, generating thousands of nuclear weapons, sufficient to obliterate human race many times over and which gave birth to scores of dictators all over the world, who subjected their countrymen to tyranny and humiliation. The succeeding era would not pass without a phobia to decorate it with.  Islamophobia readily served the purpose. The bogey of the worldwide Islamic khilafa replaced that of the Communist conspiracy and is beginning to inflict the psyche of the American public. If there are any people, who are unaware of this khilafa “conspiracy”, it is the Muslim people themselves.

The Phobia and its Profile: The Mosque Controversies:

Proposals to build mosques to serve the religious needs of Muslims countrywide have brought out deep-rooted prejudices even from the members of the clergy, from California to Wisconsin to New York. Acts of vandalism against the Muslim places of worship such as in Tennessee proliferated. In Sheboygan, Wisconsin a Muslim doctor who owned a store type building proposed to convert the property into a place of worship for hundred or so of Muslims. The place was close to the hospital he worked in. A public hearing brought out some of the patients he had treated and had faith in, who spilled out venom against Islam, a faith they had no knowledge of. It shook the wits out of him and many of the citizens. In Manhattan, Muslims had been praying at Burlington Factory House at Park51 a makeshift mosque for a year before the Cordoba House proposal. On Fridays the congregation at Farah Mosque nearby would spill over on the street for want of sufficient accommodation. It was not a matter of “desecrating” Ground Zero but a matter of dire necessity and equal rights under the constitution. The proposal became such a big controversy that everybody from the president to the governor to the archbishop to the Jewish Defense League weighed in. It was made to look as though the proposed Cordoba House was a monument of Muslim “triumphalism” at Ground Zero.

Ban the Sharia Legislations:

The campaign against the Cordoba House project was started in a blog “Stop Islamization of America”, a xenophobic campaign, playing on the aforementioned fears of people, of the perceived impending transformation of the country’s religious face and its cultural profile. This is an outrageous presumption and a wildly imaginary scenario. Exact statistics are lacking but according to a study conducted by the American Jewish Committee there are 2.8million Muslims in America, while many Muslim organizations have been claiming that the total number stood at about six million. This makes the range of percent population to be from 0.9 to 1.9%. The true number may be closer to the lower figure than the higher one. Of the total population, the practicing Muslims may be less than half that number, scattered over a continent and among the population of 308.7 million. What a force for the Islamization of the United States of America!

The force behind this anti-Sharia tirade is an Arizona lawyer: David Yerushalmi, a White supremacist, an anti-Islam hate monger and the founder of the “Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE)”. He argues that whites are genetically superior to Blacks.  He wrote: “Some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones.” He urged that the United States must declare war on Islam and all Muslim faithful. This puts him in the same category in hate mongering, as the likes of Meir Kahane, Baruch Goldstein, Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz and Peter Emerson. He had pushed legislation in 2007 to make adherence to Sharia a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Sadly, it is him and the likes of him, who are driving the conservative legislative agenda in this country. He is either the author of or the consultant for most of the anti-Sharia bills, which have been introduced. The American legislators, who have been led onto this path by people like Yerushalmi, in the name of patriotism, should realize that their actions are mutilating the values and the principles on which this country was founded.

A majority of the anti-Sharia bills is considered to be, in the main, innocuous and inconsequential, emotive rather than practical, save SB1028, the State of Tennessee bill as originally proposed, which would have dangerously violated the basic human rights of Muslims, guaranteed in the constitution, by criminalizing the day to day acts of worship. The other acts of legislation have been rightly branded as: “A Solution in Search of Problem”. However, there are some very complex legal implications, which cannot be overlooked.

Sharia, meaning “the way” or “the path” encompasses many disciplines such as ritual worship, moral principles, trade, charity, dietary rules, monetary transactions, matrimony, inheritance as well as criminal law. Many of the Sharia rules have been absorbed into cultural norms and adherence to them is almost subconscious, such as the dietary rules. Although ritual worship is an essential part of religion, some Muslims pray and some don’t and those who pray would do so even under the shadow of a guillotine. The criminal law (the Sharia penal code) is in abeyance in a majority of the Muslim countries, as secular criminal laws have taken its place. The laws of marriages, divorce and inheritance are in general followed, except that polygamy is now obsolescent among the common people. Most of the laws of Sharia, including the penal code, bear striking similarity to the laws of the Old Testament (Halacha) and those followed in early Christian communities. Reformist movements in Judaism and the Church in Christianity have amended those laws but since in Islam there is no Church, Pope or “reform” authority, the Sharia has remained immutable, except where the rules are amenable to ijtehad (dialectical derivation).There is a corpus of exegesis in Sharia law but its implementation however, has been effected with a varying degree of laxity.

As for the criminal law, it must be noted that Muslims have lived under secular laws for ages without protestations. There are only two countries where Sharia law is applied, albeit selectively: Saudi Arabia and Iran.  American Muslims have therefore no qualms about living under the law of the land. Civil laws however are a different matter. Let us take the example of India, home to 161 million Muslims (13.4%) among a total population of 1.2 billion. The criminal law is the law of the land and is applicable to every resident. Muslims are not clamoring for the imposition of hudud, qisas or ta’dhir (elements of religious criminal law).  In civil matters, Muslims are allowed to follow their own “personal law” or opt for the secular law. Western countries would do well to consider this precedence.

The Archbishop of Canterbury had proposed a similar procedure for the British courts, where arbitration, with the consent of the contestants, would amiably settle disputes without burdening the courts with costly trials and litigations. In any case, in the matters of divorce, inheritance, child custody and child support, the parties would have an option between the Sharia and the secular laws, whichever they think serves their interests best. This kind of arrangement, if mutually agreed upon by the parties and allowed by the courts, does in no way threaten the integrity and the tranquility of the society; it may on the other hand enhance them. Nevertheless, we must ensure that the women’s rights and the children’s welfare are safeguarded by the courts in the best way possible. There will be times when the Sharia will serve women better than the states’ laws. In California recently a court ruled that meher payment (a contractual sum payable to a woman by her husband on divorce under the Sharia) violated the state law prohibiting spouses from “profiteering” from divorce. Loss to the woman in this case is obvious. In general the interests of the citizens as well as of the state would be best served when the courts are independent and have discretion — not obligation — in when to reference religious laws and when not to do so.

“Foreign” Law and the U.S. Courts:

In many states legislation prohibiting the courts from considering “foreign” law or international law is being pushed with a vengeance. This raises a number of very complex legal issues, involving international treaties and trade. Compliance with international treaties, when ratified, is vouchsafed in the U.S. constitution and may be outside the jurisdiction of any one state. However, there may be areas of trade and labor laws, where complications may arise and hamper businesses of American companies.

In the U.S. courts presently marriages contracted abroad and under the Sharia are recognized, so are divorces executed abroad. The integration of many immigrant families is based on this provision. In the matters of matrimony, parenthood, inheritance and execution of wills disputes do arise in courts and could not be settled without reference to “foreign” laws. There is a serious concern that the ramifications of ban on foreign law now or in the future may put strains on the justice system and adversely affect the social structure of the American society.

Islamophobia, the Underlying Reason:

It is hard to believe that the proponents of the ant-Sharia bill of Tennessee, as it was originally written, were unaware of its unconstitutionality. Clearly, their intent was provocation and their motive was historic religious prejudice. It is not uncommon in the American history and in the history of many other countries for hate groups to arise in certain political and economic circumstances and by their actions and rhetoric malign the very society whose wellbeing they claim to protect.

It was said after 9/11 that “history begins now” or words to that effect. How true! Muslim Americans have been living in the full glare of history ever since, with their faces lit with bewilderment, although some governmental agencies, the top political leadership of both the parties, the law enforcement agencies and the leadership of almost every faith have helped to take the attention away from them. We still remember with gratitude the president of the United States’ visit to a mosque in the aftermath of the tragic event and the kind words uttered. This brought out what was good in the American people and averted a possible catastrophe. We appeal to the same good nature of the American people not to heed to bigotry, prejudice and electoral polemics. America will lose its soul if it succumbs to religious intolerance. It will lose its reason for being.

Muslims in America are a highly diverse community, consisting of almost every race, ethnicity and culture, including a large indigenous section. Among them are doctors, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and workers, enriching the economy with their contributions. There are Nobel laureates such as Ahmed Zewail news anchors such as Fareed zakaria and many sports celebrities. There are highly regarded congressmen and mayors in many cities.

Muslim contribution in highlighting the moral values is an asset to the society, which should not be ignored. The mosques are not a threat to anybody but beacons of light. They are centers of spiritual uplift as well as of education, social activism, moral reformation and charity.  Most mosques have prison visit programs, which have resulted in transforming many individuals into productive and law-abiding citizens. Many mosques in the inner cities have food pantries, counseling and crisis management programs.  Above all they curtail social ills. Consider a man who comes to the mosque to pray early morning, early afternoon, late-afternoon, at sunset and at night, five times in Twenty-four hours, to renew his commitment to God. What are his chances of committing unsocial acts in between his prayers? If two million people do this in a society, is the society better off or worse?

You describe yourself in your TEDx talk as an agnostic. Some people see agnosticism as wishy-washy indecision. What does it mean to you?

Ah, but that wishy-washy hang-dog I-don’t-know-ness is not agnosticism at all. That’s just evasiveness. Real agnosticism is a solid intellectual position. It’s a recognition of human limitation. A position of great integrity (okay, you can accuse me of hubris right here!) And a fine safeguard against the inhumanity of certainty. Unless you are under the illusion that the bearded old man up on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is anything other than a visual metaphor, no matter how divine his musculature, you really have no idea exactly what God might be. When the issue is God, or the Divine, or whatever term you want to use, we’re talking about something that is by definition beyond human comprehension. It is the ultimate unknowable, and that’s its grandeur. That’s the whole point! [laughs] So to argue about the existence or the nonexistence of God is absurd — very humanly absurd, but absurd all the same — since it can be neither proved nor disproved. There are times, I think, when most of us get what I call a glimmer, maybe an intimation of something larger. But to go from intimation to certainty — that’s really presumptuous. As an agnostic, I acknowledge the limitations of my knowledge. I’m not saying “I don’t know” so much as “that is unknowable,” at least by me. It’s a position of inquiry rather than belief.

Does that make you a non-believer?

On my blog, The Accidental Theologist, which I describe as “an agnostic eye on religion, politics, and existence,” one commenter wrote: “I can’t believe you don’t believe in anything!” (Actually, she used capital letters and lots of exclamation marks, but please don’t reproduce that…) And I was a bit shocked by that comment until I realized that it’s true, I don’t believe in things. I may believe that this thing or that is so. But this is just another way of saying “I think that,” or “I feel that,” or “Perhaps,” or “Maybe.” It’s an attitude toward exploring the world, always aware of how easy it is to project what one already thinks into what one sees. This is where the former psychologist in me comes into play, I guess — though in fact I’m not sure there’s any such thing as a “former” psychologist. Just as lapsed Catholics remain deeply involved with Catholicism — the novelist Graham Greene is a wonderful example — so too being a psychologist informs how you see the world, no matter if it’s no longer your profession.

So when it comes to faith…

Well, let’s put it this way: my faith is in inquiry. I try to see as much of what’s there as I can, rather than seeing only part of what’s there in order to find confirmation of what I already think. That way of seeing — looking for confirmation — is far too common, especially when it comes to religious texts. It’s a search for certainty, and a flight from uncertainty. So if you are threatened by paradox, and if you do not have a feel for metaphor, and if uncertainty drives you crazy, then fundamentalism is for you. But then that, to me, is essentially anti-religious. Because as I see it, the essence of religious experience lies not in dogma but in poetry: in metaphor, in paradox, and yes, in uncertainty. That is, I think doubt is essential to faith. If you take a leap of faith, it really is a leap, a leap into the unknown. But if you’re absolutely certain about it, if you are convinced you are in possession of The Truth — the kind that inevitably comes with that capital “T” — then there’s no element of faith involved. You’ve simply closed your mind to thought. Real faith is admirable because there’s a humility, a vulnerability to it. In much the same way you place your faith in a person, you can never be absolutely sure. This is what we mean by trust, and it strikes me as wonderful. Where certainty terrifies me, uncertainty seems to me to touch the best of what is human in us.

Why did you set out to read the Koran in the first place?

It was an essential part of the research for the biography of Muhammad I’m now writing. In the past, I’d read the Koran several times the way I described early on in the talk, almost casually (though with cigarettes instead of popcorn). But last year it was a matter of integrity as a biographer that I read it as seriously as I could, because these are the words that we can be most sure Muhammad spoke. It’s a matter of faith whether you consider them directly the words of God or you think them inspired by the idea of God, but since most of them were written down while Muhammad was still alive or very shortly after his death, we can be reasonably sure he spoke them. All the other statements we have from him — in what’s known as the Hadith, or the reports on his words and practice — weren’t written down until later, anywhere up to three or four generations after his death, just as the words of Jesus in the Gospels weren’t written down until two or three generations after his death. So the Koran was, to my mind, the closest I could get to Muhammad. Lots of motives have since been ascribed to me, some wonderful and some not so wonderful, but my real motive was research: the attempt of a biographer to bridge fifteen centuries and come as close as I could to the man himself.

You spoke about the musicality of the Koran in your talk, and it seemed very similar to poetry’s most fundamental building blocks: rhythm, tone, and the intrinsic ambiguity of words. I was curious: what role does poetry play in your own life?

I once had an ongoing argument about poetry at Yaddo, the writers colony in Saratoga Springs, where four of us would go on these long walks — three poets and me, the non-fiction writer. And inevitably we’d get into these discussions of what constituted poetry. They tried to persuade me that if my prose were broken into lines, it would read as poetry, and I’d say “No, no, poetry’s on a different level altogether, it’s a different way of thinking.” But though I write prose, I can’t imagine living without poetry. Without T.S. Eliot, for instance, or the metaphysical poets. I like that word metaphysics: literally, beyond physics. Because it seems to me that there is no real sense of religious experience — of metaphysics — without poetry. That is, without metaphor. Religion at its best is metaphor. And this is why fundamentalism is not only so dangerous, but also so dull. It dulls the mind. It insists on the literal. It dumbs down the sense of the holy. All the great religious texts are poetic, which is why they resonate in the mind, why they’ve grasped the human imagination for so many centuries. They reverberate through our cultures. Think, for instance, of how William Tyndale’s version of the Bible, the King James, is part and parcel of western culture, of how many classic book and movie titles it’s provided, for a start. And yet line by line, it isn’t a great translation. The original Hebrew is limpidly simple and lucid, while the King James is almost archaically complex. But it has an enormous beauty and poetry of its own. Basically, Tyndale rewrote the Bible into his concept of what it should be, into a sixteenth-century European music and grandeur, and he did it so well that for most westerners, Tyndale’s bible is the Bible. The Koran hasn’t found its Tyndale, though A.J. Arberry made a valiant effort, so English-speakers don’t have a parallel sense of its poetry, which is one reason it’s so easy to misrepresent it. If you can’t feel the poetry — if you ignore the metaphors and are deaf to the music and the allusiveness (not elusiveness, allusiveness) — then you’re stuck with a ghastly, deadening literalism.

Why did you use the word “tourist” in your talk? The French word étranger comes to mind–a stranger, a not-belonger. Is that what you were referring to?

In a way, yes. My agnosticism turns out to be a very interesting perch from which to look at the volatile interplay of religion and politics, which has always fascinated me. It places me both inside and outside at the same time. And sometimes it places me in a profound existential dilemma. Right now, for instance, this agnostic Jew has just spent the last two weeks trying to fathom, in words, the pivotal gnostic moment of Islam, which is the night on Mt. Hira when Muhammad received the first Koranic revelation. This is one of history’s central mystical moments. It is beyond explanation, yet it has to be addressed. So I’ve been trying to put into words what I know cannot be put into words. I’ve been trying to understand what I know is beyond understanding. It’s almost an absurd thing to even try, and yet I feel I must in order to bring it over to non-Muslim western readers, who are of course whom I’m primarily writing for.

How did you come to speak Arabic?

I lived in Jerusalem for thirteen years, working as both a journalist and a psychologist, and in the late seventies, took off and wandered around the Sinai for a year. I love the high desert, and one of the many anomalies of my life is that I now live contentedly — to my astonishment — at sea level in rainy Seattle. I spent a lot of time with the Beduin in that year in the Sinai, and then got very involved in the issue of Beduin land rights in the Negev, so I picked up Arabic as I went along. I was never fully fluent in it, though, and it’s gone by now. You need to live inside a language to keep it alive in your head, and for the past thirty years I’ve lived in the United States — that is, inside English.

You noted in your talk that the Koran is only the Koran if it is in Arabic. Can you speak to that claim, and also to the idea that Arabic and the Koran are inextricably linked?

This is one of the tenets of Islam, and previously, I’d thought it was just that — an item of faith which there was no point trying to understand. But now I have a sense of why this is so. The Koran says again and again that it’s “a message from God in your own language, in pure Arabic,” and you get the very strong feeling while you read it that there was a thirst for it — that while God had spoken, as it were, to the Jews in Hebrew and to the Christians in Greek, now it was the turn of the Arabs, and that the Arabic of the Koran would be as central to the formation of Arab identity as the Hebrew of the Old Testament had been to the formation of Jewish identity. Here was God speaking directly to the people of Mecca and Medina, in a shared frame of reference, telling Muhammad what to say: “Tell them that…” “Remind them of this…” “Let them remember that…” The impact in creating a sense of collective Arab identity was immense.

Since 9/11, we hear the word “jihad” a lot. What is your impression of the idea of “jihad” from reading the Koran?

Generally, when the word “jihad” or some grammatical form of it is used, it’s in the sense of struggle — the struggle to come nearer to God. It’s an internal struggle: to be the best person you can be, the best Muslim you can be. Most of the time that any kind of warfare is involved, other words are used. But sometimes they get confused, and that should come as no surprise. The Koranic revelations were not instantaneous; they were spread out over a period of twenty-two years, and so they include contradictions. But how could that possibly be surprising to anyone who has ever read, say, the first two chapters of the Bible, which give mutually exclusive accounts of the creation of men and women? Either they were created together on the sixth day as in Chapter One of Genesis, or Eve was created out of Adam’s rib as in Chapter Two. So the Bible starts with a stunning contradiction. What I find especially interesting here is that the Koran is subjected to tests of consistency and morality that are rarely applied to either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. For instance, the violence in the Book of Deuteronomy is ignored by most devout Christians and Jews. They simply skip over the sections that call for annihilating whole peoples. If you want to analyze the Koran on the basis of the Geneva Convention, then the least you can do is analyze both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in the same way. I guarantee you will be shocked. These are ancient texts. They are not twenty-first century models of peaceful coexistence. So there is a lack of context in the current political discussion of Islam, a lack of willingness to look at Jewish and Christian traditions in the same light. As a result, Islam is being singled out and demonized. The vast majority of Muslims worldwide do not support terrorism or radical fundamentalism, and see it as a distortion of Islam. Highly respected Islamic leaders have condemned terrorism again and again, calling it anti-Islamic, but their condemnations never make the news, precisely because they challenge accepted stereotypes. The power of stereotypes is that they’re easy. They require no thought. They’re kneejerk reactions. So there is the absurd assumption that over a billion Muslims worldwide endorsed a terrible act of terrorism committed by eighteen people on 9/11, even though those eighteen people were acting in clear violation of the faith they so vehemently declared. Yet when a fundamentalist Christian kills a doctor providing legal abortion, do we then say that Christianity endorses murder? When the Vatican protects pederasts, do we then say that Catholicism advocates child abuse? When Bible-spouting Jewish settlers in the West Bank shoot Palestinian farmers, do we then say that this is a principle of Judaism? So there are two possibilities here: either we stereotype equally — equal rights for stereotypes, you might say — or we do our best to abolish them. On all sides. And that starts with confronting the basic ignorance and laziness of thought behind them.

Many Americans–and many lawmakers I would argue–know very little about the culture of Islam. What are some of the largest misunderstandings about Islam that need light shed upon them?

First, the image of Islam as one huge monolith, which ignores the vast range of opinion and interpretation within Islam, and the opposition of the majority to the extremist minority. Second, the persistence of this meme that there’s a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and “the West,” an idea that doesn’t stand up to any kind of serious analysis. To start with, so many westerners are Muslim, and then, as Eliza Griswold showed in her recent book The Tenth Parallel, where Islam and Christianity really do clash is in neither the Middle East nor the West but in Africa — a clash that’s really about power and money, not faith, which is being manipulated for political and economic ends. Basically, there is no clash of religions in principle. We talk about the Judeo-Christian tradition, but it’d be more precise to call it the Judeo-Christo-Islamic tradition. The Koran emphasizes that it’s renewing the message of the Torah and the Gospels, rephrasing and reapplying it in a different cultural context. So instead of seeing Islam as something radically different from Judaism or Christianity, I think we need to be able to see it as most Muslims themselves conceive of it: as a continuation of Judaism and Christianity.

What would you say to someone who claims that at its very core, Islam is a religion of violence, vengeance and extremism?

The same thing that I’d say to anyone who says that about Judaism or Christianity. Look, it’s been argued by the “new atheists” that religion is evil because so much evil has been done in its name. But you could just as well argue that love is evil because so much evil is done in the name of love. It’s what you do in the name of religion that matters. Religion can always be manipulated. It can always be simplified to the point of travesty — made literal, deadened, fossilized, carved in stone, dehumanized. But it doesn’t have to be. Now I want to stress that what I’m going to say here is hugely simplistic, but perhaps one could say that there are two major ways to be religious. One of these is to expand the sense of self in awe, and wonder, and gratitude, and humility. The other is to close oneself in behind high walls of absolute certainty and righteousness. The one expands your sense of the world and other people. The other circumscribes it, using dogma to wall off the “believers,” whatever faith they profess, against the rest of the world. These are two rough trends of religious personality, and clearly, agnostic though I am, I’m with the former. The latter is so narrow-minded, so absolutist, that at its extreme, it can easily lose all sense of humanity. It’s a travesty of what both Jesus and Muhammad preached. In fact I can’t imagine that either man would be anything but utterly dismayed at some of what is being said and done in their names today. I can point to an enormous amount of good done in the name of religion — to liberation theology and the social justice movement, for instance — so I can’t explain violent fundamentalism by saying that religion is at fault, just as I can’t explain Samuel Johnson’s definition of patriotism as “the last refuge of scoundrels” by saying that nationalism is at fault. Though there again, I’m agnostic [laughs], and much prefer internationalism.

So can you imagine a path that will bring peace to the Middle East?

I can’t right now, but that just means I have a limited imagination. We can start, though, by getting rid of the image of doves fluttering all over the place and everybody falling onto each others’ shoulders and calling each other brother and sister. Peace is far more mundane than that. It’s the absence of war. It’s people not being killed. It’s the willingness to live and let live. And that will do just fine. There’s no love lost between Germany and England, but they’re at peace after two utterly devastating wars in the first half of the twentieth century. There’s even less love lost between Israel and Egypt, but their peace treaty has lasted thirty years, despite all provocation. It’s nobody’s ideal image of peace, but however uneasily, it’s lasted. So let’s think in terms of pragmatic, real-life peaceful relations, which once seemed as impossible for both England and Germany, and Egypt and Israel, as for Israel and Palestine right now. True, I can’t see how the Israel-Palestine conflict can be resolved, but here’s the thing: if I stop believing that it’s possible, then I help make it impossible. If I lose faith in the possibility of peace — and I use the word ‘faith’ advisedly — then basically I’m aiding and abetting the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict. I’m yielding to despair. And this I refuse to do. Almost a definition of despair is that you can’t imagine yourself into the future. It’s a lack of imagination. We have to be able to imagine a future, and work towards it.

Can you tell us a bit more about the book you’re writing now, the biography of Muhammad?

It’s always tricky to talk about a book while you’re still writing it, since it hasn’t taken full shape yet. But while there have been several excellent books about Jesus as a revolutionary thinker committed to social justice, there’ve been no such books about Muhammad, at least for the non-Muslim reader, and I think seeing him from this point of view is long overdue. Above all, I want to get a real feel for him as a person, and to emphasize the astonishing narrative arc of his life. I’m using the earliest biographical sources as well as modern scholarship, and combining them with an interdisciplinary approach — history, cultural anthropology, psychology, Middle East studies, and of course comparative religion — all of which I hope allow me to see him more fully, with a fresh eye, not as an iconic figure but as the complex man he really was.

– Q&A conducted and transcribed by Kevin St. John

See Lesley Hazleton’s TED lecture “A Jewish Agnostic Explores the Quran” on this link:    http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/lesley_hazelton_on_reading_the_koran.html

Back in 2008 a Florida couple running a small business that throws children’s parties bought two costumes that looked like Tigger and Eeyore on eBay from a firm in Peru for $500. When Walt Disney saw the characters advertised online, it threatened legal action for an infringement of copyright laws and presented the couple with a seven-point demand to cease and desist.

The couple complied with all but one – instead of sending the costumes to Disney to be destroyed, they sent them back to Peru for a refund. “We needed the money,” explained Marisol Perez-Chaveco, whose family was on public assistance. This was too much for Disney, which responded with a million-dollar lawsuit plus costs.

One would think that a company dedicated to marketing itself as the wholesome home of eternal childhood would regard such a heavy-handed approach as an own goal; as though the magic castle was home not to family fun but a faceless corporation ruthlessly pursuing small family businesses. But for Disney that is precisely the point. They want people to witness the ferocity with which they pursue their interests (they once threatened to sue a daycare centre for painting Minnie, Micky and Goofy on its walls) pour encourager les autres.

After a week in the West Bank participating in the annual Palestine Festival of Literature, you get the feeling Israeli security services are using the same public relations team as Disney. We were kept several hours at the Israeli-Jordan border while three Britons with Turkish and Arabic sounding names were held for questioning.

At the West Bank-Israel crossing on the access highway to Nazarath, only brown-skinned people had their passports held. Our final event in the village of Silwan – an evening of poetry, literature and Palestinian rap – was a riot. Literally. Local youth responded to Israeli teargas with a hail of stones. The British consul, who was to attend, turned back halfway. The rest of us, holding onions to our noses to counter the gas, walked past burning tyres, smoking skips and bricks strewn across the road, to the venue. By the time we got there, most people had fled.

The point isn’t that they should have treated us better because we were foreign. But rather, if this is how they treat foreigners who they know have a voice, imagine how they treat locals. Families with small children waiting for hours before putting the entire contents of their car in shopping trolleys and wheeling that through security so they can get home. Grown men and women being shouted at by teenagers with guns. We got only a glimpse. And even that was an eye opener.

The intimidation, humiliation and harassment that emerge from these encounters are not byproducts of a broader strategy. Like Disney’s legal warnings, they are central to the strategy itself. Occupation on this scale and for this length of time can only prevail by a consistent and persistent effort to crush the spirit of the occupied.

Meanwhile, Tinker Bells sprinkle their fairy dust to blur the view or to beautify the ugly. Witnesses are told they either didn’t really see what they saw, only saw what they wanted to see, should have seen something else as well, or should have gone somewhere else where they could have seen worse.

Elsewhere, a vigorous marketing campaign ensures that when the strip-searching is done the first thing you see when you pull up your trousers are tourist posters of religious sites against azure skies saying “Welcome to Israel”.

Since 2005, a massive rebranding campaign has taken place to dispel Israel’s reputation for religiosity and war and portray it instead as the home of “creative energy”. The trouble is, since then there has been the bombing of Lebanon, the Gaza blockade, the attack on aGaza aid flotilla, and the escalation of illegal settlements.

To suggest that Palestinians are equally responsible for this state of affairs would suggest the two sides hold equal power to shape events. They don’t. No matter how many rhetorical checkpoints get thrown up, there are some basic facts you just cannot get around. Israel is the occupier; Palestinians are the occupied.

That justifies nothing, and explains a great deal. Israel does not have to be the worst place on Earth for the occupation to be worthy of condemnation. Nor can its actions or existence be understood in isolation from western foreign policy and Europe’s history of antisemitism. Similarly, Palestinians do not need to be beyond criticism for their right to resist occupation to be considered valid.

At the first cabinet meeting after the 1967 war Israel’s justice minister, Yaakov Shimshon Shapira, asked: “In a time of decolonisation in the whole world, can we consider an area in which mainly Arabs live, and we control defence and foreign policy? Who’s going to accept that?”

The truth is that while much of the world didn’t like it, they were prepared to accept it for several decades. That seems to be changing. Israel’s power is not in question. But its influence is clearly waning. Polls show a significant shift in Europe towards support for Palestinians. In September, the UN general assembly looks set to support the recognition of a Palestinian state within its 1967 borders.

Whether such a solution is even possible at this stage is an open question. Through its land grabs and settlement building Israel has created an ugly patchwork out of the West Bank, which is sewn together with a range of separate and unequal ID cards, access roads and car registration plates for Israelis and Palestinians that would be difficult to unpick without the whole thing unravelling.

Israel’s refusal to talk to Hamas and the effective emasculation of Fatah has left it with no one with any credibility to negotiate with. The Palestinian Authority – an authority without any real authority – is regarded by most as simply another layer of occupation. Last week the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said he opposed another armed uprising. But the truth is that Fatah wasn’t behind the last uprisings, and would be incapable of leading any more. Through the entire week, Abbas’s name did not come up once.

In this regard, the Israeli occupation has been a victim of its own success on its own terms. It has not so much provided security for a Jewish state as created a fortified country in which non-Jews live as a majority either as second-class citizens or not as citizens at all.

“The continuation of the occupation guarantees the nullification of Zionism,” argued the historian Professor Yehuda Bauer last week, the day before a demonstration of prominent Israelis against the occupation. “That is, it rules out the possibility that the Jewish people will live in its land with a strong majority and international recognition. In my eyes, this makes [Israel's] government clearly anti-Zionist.”

A Palestine that is independent, non-contiguous and home to thousands of foreigners who do not respect its laws is not viable. Given the trajectory of Israeli domestic politics, an Israel that reverses the expansionist impulses of the past 44 years in return for peace is not likely. The status quo is neither sustainable nor desirable. Something has to give.

One need not embrace Palestinian self-determination to challenge this situation. A simple demand for equality and human rights for Palestinians will do.

But after some time witnessing Egypt’s uprising the author had a revelation. Arabs had humanity and a range of attributes to go with it: humour, subtlety, sophistication, conviviality and, yes, anger – the full complement. “So who were these impostors gathered in Tahrir Square?” he asked, seeing his prejudice confronted by reality. “They were smiling and laughing, waving witty banners.” Though he didn’t mention them, many women were present too. And most of the weaponry on display, from teargas to tanks, was either made in, sponsored or subsidised by America.

The events of the last month in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere have challenged the way the west thinks of the Arab world (and how the Arab world thinks of itself). What remains to be seen is the extent to which these ongoing events confront the way in which western powers view themselves and their relationship to the Middle East.

Over the last decade in particular, the Arab world has increasingly been depicted in the west as a region in desperate need of being tamed so that it can be civilised. It has been portrayed as an area rooted in religious fervour, where freedom was a foreign concept and democracy a hostile imposition. Violence and terrorism was what they celebrated, and all they would ever understand. Liberty, our leaders insisted, would have to be forced on them through the barrel of a gun for they were not like us. The effect was to infantilise the Arab world in order to justify our active, or at least complicit, role in its brutalisation.

While this view has been intensified by the 9/11 terror attacks, the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq, it was not created by them. “There are westerners and there are Orientals,” explained the late Edward Said, as he laid out the western establishment’s prevailing attitude to the region at the turn of the last century, in his landmark work . “The former dominate, the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another western power.”

So the sight of peaceful, pluralist, secular Arabs mobilising for freedom and democracy in ever greater numbers against a western-backed dictator forces a reckoning with the “clash of civilisations” narrative that has sought to overwhelm the past decade. It turns out there is a means of supporting democracy in this part of the world that does not involve invading, occupying, bombing, torturing and humiliating. Who knew?

Evidence of this dislocation between expectation and reality went way beyond the pages of Time magazine. Where the west predicted chaos in the aftermath of Hosni Mubarak‘s departure, protesters came to sweep up the rubbish in Tahrir Square. When women in headscarves (those supposedly submissive victims whom the French government pledges to rescue from themselves) were embroiled in physical confrontations with the Tunisian state, France sided with the state.

In the crude Manichean struggle between political Islam and democracy invented by a wrongheaded strand of western liberalism, it was the Muslim Brotherhood that marched for freedom while the self-appointed defenders of the Enlightenment prevaricated for tyranny.

Last week Tony Blair said Mubarak was “immensely courageous and a force for good“. On Sunday he said Mubarak’s departure could be a “pivotal moment for democracy in the Middle East“. The man charged by the major world powers with bringing peace to the region can’t make up his mind whether he is for despotism or democracy from one week to the next.

Such are just some of the contradictions, hypocrisies, tensions and inconsistencies of the west’s policies towards the region over the last month.

Where the west’s self-image is concerned the principal casualty has been the insistence that it is an honest broker seeking to expand democracy, peace and freedom in the region and anxious to avoid meddling in any nation’s internal affairs. This was never true. “We are in Egypt not merely for the sake of the Egyptians,” the former British prime minister Arthur Balfour told the House of Commons in 1910. “Though we are there for their sake, we are there also for the sake of Europe at large.” But in the postcolonial era it was repeated often enough on both sides of the Atlantic that western leaders started to believe it themselves.

So the truth is that the west was already involved. It is simply not credible to arm a dictator for 30 years and then claim neutrality when opposition mounts against him.

The west supports democracy when democracy supports the west. But Egypt further proves that, for the west, freedom is a question of strategy not principle. That’s why, while most of the world looked on at the throngs in Cairo with awe and admiration, western leaders eyed them with fear and suspicion. They know that if the Arab world gets to choose its own leaders, those leaders would be less supportive of everything from rendition and Iran to Iraq and the blockade of Gaza. The west’s foreign policy in the region has not simply tolerated a lack of democracy, it has been actively dependent on dictatorship.

Moreover, it became apparent that while the west has been deeply complicit in what has happened in the region, it was not even remotely in control of what would happen next. Indeed, it was barely relevant. The protesters saw the US neither as the primary problem nor the solution. Washington’s preferred option of replacing Mubarak with Omar Suleiman in return for the promise of democracy at some unspecified future date revealed how little it understood what was happening in Egypt. This would have been the equivalent of a huge US social movement ousting Bush only to find him replaced by Dick Cheney.

But nor apparently did the US fully understand the tenacity of the monster it had created. Mubarak’s final national address was not just a rebuff to the demonstrators but also to the White House, which apparently had no idea what he was going to say until he’d said it. The problem wasn’t that Washington had no horse in the race, but that its horse was lame – and when it bolted, it dragged the US into a ditch.

While the west has been wrongfooted, its ability to influence events has not been extinguished. Mubarak’s departure was a massive achievement. However, revolution demands not only the upending of the old order but the establishment of a new one. Removing a man is one thing; transforming a system is quite another.

“Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793,” wrote Albert Camus, referring to Louis XVI’s execution after the French revolution. “But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty for ever.”

The west’s credibility in the region has been terminally damaged. But while it lacks influence, it still has power. The king has fled. But the kingmakers still wait in the wings.

The dinner party bigot’s attack on Islam as a creed can all too easily become an excuse for an attack upon an ethnic group

No one actually comes out and directly says “I hate Muslims” – at least, not on the liberal dinner party circuit that was the target of Lady Warsi’s speech. Conversations generally begin with the sort of anxieties that many of us might reasonably share: it cannot be right for women to be denied access to education in some Islamic regimes; the use of the death penalty for apostasy is totally unacceptable; what about the treatment of homosexuals? The conversation then moves on to sharia law or jihad or the burqa, not all of it entirely well informed. Someone places their hands across their face and peers out between their fingers. Another guest giggles slightly. Someone inevitably mentions 9/11. Later, guests travel home on the tube and look nervously at the man in the beard sitting opposite.

The problem Warsi identifies is the problem of slippage. What can begin as a perfectly legitimate conversation about, say, religious belief and human rights, can drift into a licence for observations that in any other circumstance would be regarded as tantamount to racism. Like the 19th-century link between anti-Catholicism and racism towards the Irish, one can easily bleed into the other.

“I treat the Islamic religion with the same respect as the bubble-gum I scrape off my shoe,” suggested one contributor to the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, in response to Warsi’s speech. Another offered the following charming observation: “I don’t care what the good or bad Baroness has to say about anything at all. I give her no credence nor voice. She is a person of faith so in my book a skinwaste.” I cannot think of a single other group in our society about whom such vile remarks would be in any way socially acceptable. And OK, these are comments whose surface grammar is about Islam and religion. Nonetheless, the level of invective is very obviously personal.

The worst sort of dinner party bigot may talk about Islam as a faith but – nod, nod, wink, wink – we all know what they mean. Just as we know that when the British National party celebrates the Christian heritage of this country it is using Christian as code for “not Muslim”. In many cases, Muslim can easily become a euphemism for brown. Prejudice like this is a dance of the seven veils that allows just enough insight into one’s true meaning and just enough deniability.

None of which is to silence any sort of attack upon religious faith per se. Polly Toynbeewas right that “Muslims must accept the right of others to criticise religions without smearing any critic as a racist”. While this is undoubtedly the case, the flip side is also true: that the attack upon Islam as a religious creed can easily become an excuse for an attack upon one ethnic group. It is vital that we find a better way of charting a course between these two dangerous snares.

One of the tests for flushing out prejudice from robust but legitimate critique is the extent to which complexity is allowed to enter into the picture. The dinner party bigot may never have been to a mosque or read the Qur’an, but he already knows what he thinks. Life is always simple for the prejudiced. Indeed, the very point about a prejudgment is that it is a conclusion reached before the complexity of the world is allowed to make any difference. The facts are forced to fit a pre-formed picture. What about Islam’s historic contribution to science? What about the significant number of women who have become heads of state in Muslim countries – Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh? So much of this is ignored in the rush to find Islam guilty of crimes against humanity. The good critic, on the other hand, doesn’t need to oversimplify in order to make their point. And with so much at stake, rhetorical flamboyance needs to be handled with care.

The other difference between robust critique and what is tantamount to bullying has to do with the power relations between those involved. The Muslim community in this country is generally more socially disadvantaged and has less access to the levers of power. British Muslims do worse at school than any other faith group, they are more likely to be unemployed and live in poorer housing. It is generally from communities such as this that the prosperous and the powerful find their scapegoats.

This is also why the growing idea that there is in this country such a thing as Christianophobia – an equivalent to Islamophobia – is such total nonsense. Following Warsi’s comments, the usual suspects of the Christian right have waded in with another rendition of “what about us?” What about those nice Christian B&B owners who have just been fined for sticking to their sincerely held beliefs about gay couples not sharing a bed under their roof? But the power relations here are altogether different. With bishops in the House of Lords by right, with the monarch being head of the Church of England, with the long history of Christianity shaping our values and culture, Christians are not a persecuted minority, however much they may feel misunderstood.

Islamophobia is the moral blind spot of 21st-century Britain. Warsi got the emphasis wrong in placing responsibility for this at the door of hostility to religion per se – though the tone of that debate is sometimes a proxy for much uglier sentiments. David Hume was right: reason is a slave to the passions, especially our darker ones. The real driver is that otherwise polite people have given themselves permission to be racist. Now is the time to disturb the cosy rules of the dinner party and speak up against the bigots. There may well be a row. You might not get invited back. But so what?

By Tariq Ramadan

It is important for Muslims to have a discussion about fatherhood while keeping in mind the ever-fragile state of Muslim families. We need to re-assess the language we use and the ontological assumptions we make when we speak about the role of the father because often, the problem doesn’t just lie with the crisis but the way we deal with it.

Muslims naturally feel inclined to place the mother at the centre of the process of raising children, unwittingly ignoring the father’s role. Islamic tradition does stress the role of the mother. For example, when asked who a Muslim should love most, the Prophet Muhammad said, “Your mother, your mother, your mother and then your father.” It is also said that paradise lies at the feet of the mother. As a result, we tend to focus on the father as an individual, not as someone who should and can play a central role within his family.

When we assess issues from an Islamic perspective, we categorise everything according to “rights” and “duties”. We speak of the rights of the man, the rights of the woman, the duties of the man, the duties of the woman. This mentality is dangerous. It reduces issues to black and white, right and wrong absolutes. This approach is more prevalent than we realise. We must take from all the human sciences that can deal with family problems.
Another problem in our approach is the idealism. We speak about an idealised past and idealised families which have nothing to do with reality, whether it be now or the history of our ancestors. Muslims must realise we may be Muslims but we live in Western societies and therefore, face the same problems as other families.

There are various reasons why we are facing this crisis of the family.

Immigration

Immigration is a very difficult process because it involves uprooting oneself from a familiar cultural environment and transplanting oneself in a foreign land. Many immigrants fear that if they adapt to their host culture, they will lose their own. This rarely lasts because the peer pressure and constant bombardment of the host culture inevitably has an effect on children. We have to find healthier and more comfortable ways to effectively interact with the dominant culture.

Unemployment

Many Muslim fathers are unemployed. The inability to fulfill the traditional role of bread-winner and protector destroys the self-confidence of a father in a very profound way. This is not just a Muslim problem. In fact, many problems face by European-Muslim families have nothing to do with Islam so why do we remain afraid to search for solutions outside our faith?

What is the way forward?

We need to creatively tap into Islamic values for solutions because that is what Muslim families are most likely to be receptive to. The father is more than just an individual. He can play an important role, far beyond that of just the financial protector. The Prophet Muhammad himself was a role model as a father. When his own daughter would come to him, he would stand up out of respect for her, as people in traditional societies often do. We have forgotten these aspects of the Prophetic example. We are replacing these values with an obsession with enforcing rights and duties. That is what is destroying the spirit of the family.

But what does fatherly authority mean in the Islamic tradition? Is it all about saying yes or no to the actions of your children? Many fathers miss the opportunity to educate their children and accompany them through life. An absentee father spends long hours working or engaged in voluntary community service, at the expense of time with his family. Muslims keep saying the Islamic tradition cares for wholesome family life but Muslims themselves are having a difficult time upholding these values because we have lost our grasp of what it means to be a good Muslim and a good parent.

Fathers have poor relationships with their children. There is lack of dialogue, tenderness and affection. Also, feeling uncomfortable in his social surroundings can add to disengagement at home as he tries to grapple with his insecurities. We need local and dynamic social policies which will counter this problem. For example, in the Mauritan Islands, a scheme is underway whereby fathers are told their children will be taken care of if fathers attend training workshops several times a year.
Muslim families need to share experiences with those who share the same problems. We need to be open and learn from different sources, including non-Muslim ones. We need to take the best from mainstream psychology and social studies and incorporate these into solutions custom-made to help Muslim families. We don’t necessarily have to integrate into society by abandoning our heritage but rather, integrate the positive things we learn from society into our lives.
What we need to do is not to name and shame mosques or families. Don’t look for the guilty people – look for solutions. We need grassroots workers working between families and mosques, people who are rooted in Islam and connected to reality.

Resources on fatherhood: Fatherhood Institute

Dr. Tariq Ramadan (Born 26 August 1962, Geneva, Switzerland) is a Swiss academic. He is Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University (Oriental Institute, St AntonyÕs College ). He is also teaching at the Faculty of Theology at Oxford. He is at the same time Senior Research Fellow at Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan). Through his writings and lectures he has contributed substantially to the debate on the issues of Muslims in the West and Islamic revival in the Muslim world. Visit www.TariqRamadan.com

The planned Islamic centre is not at Ground Zero, nor is the nearby strip club. It’s un-American to take such offence

Last Friday, in New York, I discovered a strip club near the site of the planned Islamic centre, described by its opponents as “the mosque at Ground Zero”. As pole dancers gyrated with all the sizzling eroticism of a weary Wal-Mart checkout assistant at the end of a long shift, I asked the burly front-of-house man – Scott, from Brooklyn – whether they had faced any protests about this profanation of hallowed ground. Had any Fox News commentators, for example, been beating an angry path to their door? Well, he replied, one or two passers-by had raised objections since the controversy erupted about the Islamic centre. “People are entitled to their opinions,” said Scott, but the “New York Dolls” Gentlemen’s Club had been here for 30 years and the folks working in it had to make a living.

Now a strip club at the memorial site of the worst terrorist atrocity on American soil would truly be a profanation. Though obviously not comparable to a strip club, planting a large new mosque directly on that site would nonetheless show an acute lack of sensitivity. Nine years on, the place where the twin towers stood is still a building site, but in a nearby exhibition you can see the plans for a commemorative ensemble of pools, trees and a museum, as well as a soaring new “freedom tower”. As at the sites of Auschwitz, Katyn, Hiroshima or Ypres, so in the footprint of the World Trade Center, historical tact and commemorative mission should override all other considerations.

But here’s the point: the strip club on Murray Street is not “at Ground Zero” any more than the site of the planned Islamic centre, a former Burlington coat factory in Park Place, is “at Ground Zero”. They are, respectively, three and two blocks away. Neither would be visible from the World Trade Center memorial site, which may in some important if secular sense be considered hallowed ground. In New York, two blocks is a country mile. By the time you get to Park Place, there is no doubt that you are already somewhere else, amid the city’s habitual huggermugger craziness, with the Amish Market on the corner selling Amish BBQ chicken, Amish fettucine and Amish sushi – all of them as authentically Amish as I am Chinese.

Then the critics of the proposed centre in Park Place – sorry, “Ground Zero Mega Mosque” – go on about dubious sources of funding and suspect statements by its principal protagonist, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. And so, they say, it should be built further away. The leap of illogic is as big as any leap of faith. Were the centre to have terrorist sources of finance, or radical, bloodthirsty Islamist leadership, it should be stopped anyway, whether it is two blocks away from Ground Zero or 200.

In the event, these claims too turn out to be twisted, or absurdly thin. The anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller, for example, has a characteristic rant on her website, arguing that Rauf was associated with a Malaysian peace group which funded the Gaza aid flotilla. Her headline: “Ground Zero Imam Rauf’s ‘Charity’ Funded Genocide Mission”. The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart did a fine riff on this kind of guilt by association, pointing out that the second-largest shareholder in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox News, is Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal – who is associated with the Carlyle Group, which has done business with the Bin Laden family, “one of whose sons – obviously I’m not going to say which one – may be anti-American”.

In a clumsy, provocative comment during a television discussion soon after 9/11, Rauf said that US policies had been “an accessory to the crime that happened” and that Osama bin Laden was “made in the USA”. That was wrong, and offensive. But it has to be put against the rest of his words and deeds, which have been devoted to promoting a gentle Sufi version of Islam compatible with a free society. I’m not a huge fan of his kind of interfaith waffle, but if the Muslim world were comprised entirely of Raufs, we would not have the problems we face today – and there would have been no 9/11 attacks. That is why the state department has been funding him to travel round the Middle East explaining American Islam.

There is therefore no reasonable objection to this Islamic centre, with its mission to promote peace, love, interfaith dialogue and swimming, being built in Park Place. Yet in the runup to the US mid-term elections on 2 November, senior politicians, pundits and even supposed opponents of religious discrimination are either condemning it or ducking out with weasel words. Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives, denounced the scheme, saying: “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington.” Fox star Bill O’Reilly says it should not be built because “Muslims killed us on 9/11″. Sarah Palin famously tweeted ”Peaceful Muslims, please refudiate” (sic). Facing a tough re-election race even Harry Reid, the Democrat majority leader in the Senate, distanced himself from President Obama’s cautious endorsement of Muslims’ constitutional right to build the centre.

Most grotesquely, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League insists it should be moved. Talking of the relatives of 9/11 victims who oppose it (though some other relatives support it), Foxman says “their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorise as irrational or bigoted”. An organisation established to combat bigotry thus comes out in defence of … bigotry. And the upshot of all this is that, in a Pew poll this August, 51% of Americans asked said they opposed the building of the centre near the World Trade Center site.

There is now no good way forward. If it goes ahead, it will be a constant bone of contention. If it is moved, more Muslims will believe radical Islamists when they say: “You see, we told you so – America is Islamophobic.” Either way, America is doing something extremely stupid. As if it did not have enough problems of its own, it is conspiring to give itself a problem which, up to now, it has not had – or at least, has had much less than most European countries.

Yes, there have been a few home-grown American jihadists, but there is a lot of evidence that American Muslims are generally better integrated, and more supportive of the state in which they live than most of their European counterparts. There are several reasons for this, but one of the biggest is the First Amendment tradition of free speech and freedom of religion, which is now at issue in those blocks just up the road from, but not at, Ground Zero.

That great tradition, which Scott, the doorman at “New York Dolls”, seems to have understood better than Foxman, Gingrich or Reid, says: this is America, where Geller can rant, strippers can grind, Christians, Jews and Muslims can pray – and Stewart can make fun of them all. This is America, where no one has the right not to be offended. For God’s sake, America, don’t catch our European disease.

Monday 6 September 2010, by Tariq Ramadan

Sakineh …

Fifteen years ago I called for a halt to the so-called “Islamic” penalties—corporal punishments, stoning or the death penalty—in Muslim majority countries. The purpose of my appeal was to launch an inter-Muslim debate on the founding texts, the ways in which they are applied, and the social realities that must be taken in account in applying them. It would have taken the form of a full-scale moratorium leading to a wide-ranging debate in the Muslim world.

Many in the Muslim-majority countries—scholars (ulamâ), intellectuals and simple believers—understood and supported this approach. Others, Nicholas Sarkozy and Bernard-Henri Lévy among them, rejected it out of hand with “shock and dismay.”

Today, as international headlines focus on the possible stoning in Iran of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the French government has proposed a “moratorium” on capital punishment. The Parisian weekly Politis pungently noted that France has now come around to my position—without admitting it. A fascinating turn of events: either yesterday’s scandalized moralists have lost their minds (the very people who labeled me as crazy at the time), or they have finally adopted a reasonable, just and consistent position.

The issue can only be handled, and the reductive, biased and even populist interpretations of the Islamic penal code (hudûd) dealt with preventively. Only an approach that involves the broadest spectrum of Muslim scholars, intellectuals and citizens is likely to lead to concrete results in majority Mulsim societies—providing we actually wish to bring about a true reform.

I oppose and condemn such penalties in any contemporary society, whether in the petro-monarchies, in Iran, or in the poorest countries of the Middle-East, Africa or Asia. For they stand, in the name of Islam, in violation of justice, of dignity and of human rights in societies where judicial systems lack transparency when they are not totally corrupt; or where religion is used for political purposes, or to distinguish themselves from the West. Thus I oppose, and naturally condemn, the stoning of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. It must not take place; it cannot take place.

But I will not sign the petition launched by several French intellectuals. I do not doubt the sincerity of the majority of the signatories, but we must not be misled by the intentions of its main instigators, the Bernard-Henri Lévys, the Marek Halters and the Sihem Habchis—founder of Ni putes, ni soumises—of the French intellectual elite.

Past masters of selective indignation and media manipulation, they now attempt to paper over their guilty silence on other issues. Iran, the West’s (and Israel’s) worst enemy, must be attacked and not the wealthy hereditary kingdoms and oil-rich sheikhdoms where stoning and judicial killing are practiced with impunity. Not a word about the innocent people ofGaza, nary a petition for the pacifists of the Peace Flotilla. Their hyper-selective condemnations and their political manoeuvres are quite simply stomach turning!

…The Roma…

No less stomach turning is the “lawful” decision to deport the Roma, with the apparent approval of a majority of French citizens—another crudely political gambit by a president who, with dwindling support on the right, the left and in the center, is using dangerously populist policies to troll for votes in the murky waters of the extreme right.

A few days ago France’s president proclaimed the distinction between “Citizens” and “citizens”, between “old stock” citizens and the rest, who are liable to be stripped of their citizenship; the measure is supported by a majority. Which takes us back to the era of citizenship by appearance, where some people were more French than others, where some French people were subject to scrutiny, and to potential surveillance… French people who are not quite French. Jean-Marie LePen can only be rubbing his hands: the president is promulgating a policy that the extreme right has been promoting for forty years.

All is not well in France; fear stalks the land. How pleasing it is, then, and encouraging, to hear politicians and intellectuals lash out at the shame and disgrace of these policies. How pleasing, and still more encouraging to see the Catholic hierarchy and some Protestant dignitaries raise their voices in protest against the politics of exclusion and mass deportation, and firmly condemn the government’s treatment of the Roma. To these bishops and priests, to these men and women, whether well-known or anonymous, we say: you are the pride and dignity of our country, the guardians of its contemporary and historical conscience.

But where have the leaders and the representatives of the Muslim organizations all gone? Where are the promoters of cultural diversity? Why can we not hear their condemnations, their criticisms; why are they not supporting the Roma in their quest for equal rights and full recognition? How can French citizens with a conscience, with a religion, an ethical sense, possibly remain silent in the face of policies that can only be described as inhumane and disgraceful? What fear stops them from condemning the inacceptable? What reduced intelligence causes them to react as Arabs, Blacks or Muslims only when they are dealing with issues involving Arabs, Blacks or with Islam? Their silence is not only without honor; it is a disgrace.

… Pakistan

Flooding, landslides…death, exile, emergency shelters. Images of devastation, horror and sadness… Tens of thousands of dead, millions of homeless, tens of millions displaced. And yet international support has been slow in coming, as though held back by some mysterious form of intertia. The UN and international NGOs have issued repeated calls to underline the seriousness of the disaster and to mobilize urgent support. But that support is still far short of what is needed.

Pakistan’s image on the international scene is anything but positive. The country has been linked to the Talibans, to Islamic extremism and to violence. Even in the midst of natural catastrophe, Pakistan seems unable to touch the West’s heart or the international conscience. Six years after the tsunami that ravaged principally Indonesia but affected thousands of Western tourists—and whose long-term impact appears less grave than awaits Pakistan—we note that human solidarity and commitment can be influenced far more by variables such as the politics of emotion or today’s favorite trend rather than by an informed, universal conscience.

It is as if certain “stereotyped” humans have lost their humanity, as if they were less worthy of rescue and assistance than others. What we see before us is frightening, and yet it is tangible; so real and so true. We can criticize all the powers of the world, all the media, the entire world itself. But in the final anaysis, both question and answer are to be found in each individual conscience. What drives my moral indigation, and my sense of solidarity? My commitment and the causes I support? Is it my social, community, political or religious affilation, or the common dignity of the world’s women and men? Am I capable of seeing, beyond skin color and national origin, styles of dress and length of beard, the essential, the intrinsic value and the distress of my fellow humans, or am I the plaything of the kind of emotive attachments that measure how deserving are the victims by how much they resemble me?

To rephrase Montesquieu’s question three centuries later, how can one be Pakistani? Good question; sad truth. Solidarity knows no color, no religion, no class. When natural catastrophe strikes, no hair-splitting is necessary. We must support those in need in the most effective way possible. Pakistan needs our support, as does India and China. History will record our dignity only if we have recognized their dignity as no less than ours.

Neither categories nor selectivity; with humanity and determination.

[This article was reproduced with kind permission of Prof. Tariq Ramadan, from the Author's own website, www.tariqramadan.com]

This is a Downing Street “clarification”. When the deputy prime minister says illegal, he means legal. When he says disastrous, he means brilliant. When he says black, he is fumbling for the word white.

On Wednesday Nick Clegg stood at the dispatch box and described the Iraq war as “the most disastrous decision of all” and the invasion of Iraq as “illegal”. Downing Street hurriedly explained that what he actually meant was that the invasion was a triumph of British arms and as lawful as driven snow.

Earlier in the week, the head of MI5 at the time of the war, Lady Manningham-Buller, had vindicated Clegg’s statement. So, too, had earlier evidence from Lord Goldsmith, the then attorney general. To Downing Street, this was of no matter. Clegg was caught between the whirring flywheel of truth and the crashing gears of a mendacious diplomacy. He was torn to shreds.

The Liberal Democrat leader appears to have come unqualified to the task of high office. When pushed against the wall by the arch-warmonger, Jack Straw, he showed himself a serial truth-teller. While this handicap may not be insuperable at home, in foreign affairs it is a killer. Clegg was supposed to lie under political torture, and failed.

David Cameron, who is intelligent enough to agree with Clegg, was in a difficult position. He was visiting Barack Obama in Washington at the time. He knows, with the US president, that Afghanistan is the next most disastrous decision after Iraq. The two men can say that in private, but not in public. There they have to present Afghanistan as a great victory for Nato, a triumph of liberal interventionism. Britain and the US are marching to war shoulder to shoulder against Johnny Taliban and the mussulmen. Defeat is not an option.

Cameron and Obama have emerged from this first bilateral meeting as sensible men who must somehow navigate their respective ways from an inherited war to an honourable peace, amid a western foreign policy that has spent a decade drenched in sophistry.

Commentators are often asked to predict history’s verdict on a particular era, and are well advised to decline. But it is hard not to see western policy in the first decade of the 21st century as sunk in a morass of folly. It was subcontracted to a defence lobby desperate for a role, which it found in exploiting weak leaders by playing on the ideology of fear.

As a result, at the end of the decade western states found themselves spending more money to become less safe, with their global interests more at risk than at the start. The legacy of the victory over communism was squandered. In Britain, policy failed the Ernie Bevin test, that a citizen should be able to buy a ticket at Victoria station and go anywhere he damn well pleases.

This has applied not just to the blood-thirsty horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan. It has applied to the stance taken against other peoples opposed to these wars, such as Iran and Pakistan. It has led the US and Britain into contentious relations with the entire Muslim world, fuelling anti-western sentiment not only across Asia but, as Manningham-Buller pointed out, among Muslim populations within the west. The last decade has seen an entire foreign policy elite lose the art of friendship. Bred under the communist threat, the west’s leaders craved a mighty enemy and found it by exaggerating the threat from militant Islam and elevating terrorist gangs to the status of state enemies.

As a result, British policy has relied on one outdated premise after another. It relies on the collective security of Nato, long detached from its supposed purpose and entombed in the citadels of Kabul. It relies on Trident submarine missiles, on an “out of area” fleet and on aerial combat jets, all archaic cold war deterrents. It has an obsession with nuclear weapons that has bred an equal obsession in countries that lack them. Yet it can barely afford a helicopter.

The enmity of states has given rise to the deployment of other counter-productive crudities, such as sanctions on Iran, trade barriers against the developing world and the exchange of rhetorical abuse, beloved of George Bush and his amanuensis, Tony Blair. These two seemed at times to mimic Plato’s tyrants, “always stirring up some war or other in order that the people may require a leader”.

The past decade has been an age of pretence, of the US pretending to police the world, of Britain pretending to be its deputy, of Europe pretending to be America, of Russia pretending to an empire, and of China pretending wealth can substitute for democracy. Europe’s Lisbon treaty pretended it could fashion a new state from the crooked timber of Europe’s national identities and economies, bringing the common currency close to collapse.

Bush and Blair treated the world as an enemy – “He who is not with us is against us”. From French surrender monkeys to Chinese traders, from Latin American drug growers to British computer hackers, from international lawyers to UN mediators, every alien was a suspect foe. Foreign policy lurched into paranoid mode. Guantánamo filled with victims and ludicrous sums were spent on security. The world responded in kind. Airports became nests of xenophobia.

This was nowhere better demonstrated than in Blair’s dreadful January appearance before the Chilcot inquiry, which now meekly claims to be unconcerned with the legality of the Iraq war (so what is it concerned with?). All evidence has testified that the war was a mistake and undermined Britain’s security. Blair’s contradictory display of pro-war self-delusion, arrogance and folly should be a textbook video for any school of 21st-century statesmanship.

Though Cameron’s public remarks on foreign policy so far have seemed reactionary, especially on the war, he learns fast, and is comfortable at summits and in bilateral encounters. His preamble to this week’s successful visit to Washington rejected the past emphasis on a special relationship and recognised that Britain was a “junior partner” but a partner “of choice”. It had its own view of the world. Subsequent confused signals over an Afghanistan withdrawal have hinted that Britain may at last realise some leverage over US war policy.

Everyone wants to leave Afghanistan, the only question being how and when. Britain has more than a stake in this. To leave only the US hopelessly fighting the Taliban would visit on Washington an even lonelier defeat than is implied by the current talk of a phased withdrawal. Obama is on a painful hook. It is for Britain to help him off it without the senseless slaughter of more soldiers.

The prize before these two leaders is now great, of bringing the mendacious bravado of the past decade into line with reality on the ground. It is to end two unnecessary wars and rebuild trust with a Muslim world that has no more interest in the pestilence of terror than does the west. It is to accept that the world is not a place of blocs but of individual states, each with divergent interests and fears. It is to realise colossal savings in defence spending and to shift the emphasis of foreign policy from state-sponsored paranoia to global trade and prosperity.

Clegg is right. So if Cameron cannot yet tell the truth, he can at least mean what Clegg says.

This article was written by Simon Jenkins and was first published in The Guardian, 22 July 2010. Read the original article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/22/clegg-truth-iraq

The initial and quite understandable response of many newcomers (to Islam) is to become an absolutist. Everything going on among pious Muslims is angelic; everything outside the circle of the faith is demonic. The appeal of this outlook lies in its simplicity. The newly rearranged landscape upon which the convert looks is seen in satisfying black and white terms of: them versus us; good against evil.

This mindset is sometimes called convertitis. It is a common illness, which can make those who have caught it rather difficult to deal with. Fortunately, it almost always wears off. The only exceptions are those weak souls who imagine that the buzz of excitement caused by their absolutist, Manichean division of the world was a necessary part of Islamic piety, or even that it has some spiritual significance. Such people are often condemned to wander from faction to faction, always joining something new, in an attempt to regain the initial excitement engendered by their conversion.

Most new Muslims, however, soon see through this. A majority of people come to Islam for real spiritual or intellectual reasons, and will continue with their quest once they are inside Islam. Becoming Muslim is, after all, only the first step to felicity. Those individuals who adopt Islam because they need an identity will be condemned to wander the sectarian and factional hall of mirrors, constantly looking for the perfect group that will give them their desperately needed sense of speciality and superiority.

But actions are by intentions. A hundred years ago the founder of the Anglo-Muslim movement, Imam Abdullah Quilliam, in Liverpool, was writing that those British people who convert for Allah and His Messenger would, by the grace of God, be rightly guided. Those who convert for any other reason are in serious spiritual trouble. Just as the salah (i.e. prayer) is invisibly invalidated if the niyyah (i.e. intention) at its outset is not correct, similarly, Islam will not work for us unless we have entered it in faith, out of a sincere quest for God’s good pleasure. If things are not going right for us, if we find no delight in our prayers, if Ramadan simply makes us hungry, if we cannot seem to find the right mosque or the right company to take us forward, then we would do well to start by examining our intentions. Did we become Muslims only, and purely, to bring our souls to God? Other reasons: solidarity with the oppressed, admiration for Muslims we know, desire to join a group, the love of a woman – none of these are adequate foundations for our lives as Muslims deserving of Allah’s grace and guidance. Imam al-Qushayri says that spiritual aspirants are only deprived of attainment when they neglect the foundations. So we need to look within, and if necessary, renew our faith, following the Prophetic Sunnah. Renew your iman, a celebrated Hadith enjoins.

So what are we? Statistically, perhaps, fifty thousand people. But once we have taken the plunge, and enjoyed the feel of Islam, and come to know through experience, rather than through reading books, that Islam is a way of sobriety, dignity, poise and rewarding spirituality, what exactly is our self-definition? When we meet family and friends who are not Muslim, how do we carry ourselves? Do we treat Islam as a great secret? A discreet eccentricity that we hope people will not be so crude as to mention? Or, on the contrary, something we wear on our sleeves, feeling that it is our duty constantly to steer the conversation back into sacred quarters, confronting people with Islam, that they might have no argument against us at the Resurrection?

More generally, what is our view of the wider world of unbelief, which, despite the breathless predictions of some of our co-religionists, continues to grow more powerful and more prosperous? How much of it can we affirm, and how much of it must we publicly or privately disown?

We can, of course, take the easy way out, and avoid engaging with these questions, by retreating from the mainstream of society, and consorting only with Muslims. But this is not so easy. We need to be employed, since this is pleasing to God; and we need to maintain good ties with our relations, since this is also enjoined in the Hadith. “Keep company with them both in the world in keeping with good custom”, (31:15) says the Qur’an to converts who have unbelieving parents. And the Hadith explains that non-Muslim parents have significant rights over their Muslim children.

But more significantly than this fact, to solve the problems thrown at us and at our identity by the real world outside the mosque gates, we need to engage regularly with non-Muslim society. But for this, there would be no effective d‘awah. People do not hear the word of Islam, generally, by being shouted at by some demagogue at Speakers Corner, or by reading some angry little pamphlet pushed into their hand by a wandering distributor of tracts. They convert through personal experience of Muslims. And this takes place, overwhelmingly, at the workplace. Other social contexts are closed to us: the pub, the beach, the office party. But work is a prime environment for being noticed, and judged, as Muslims.

There is nothing remotely new in this. Islam has always spread primarily through social interactions connected with work. The early Muslims who conquered half the world did not set up soapboxes in the town squares of Alexandria, Cordoba or Fez, in the hope that Christians would flock to them and hear their preaching. They did business with the Christians; and their nobility and integrity of conduct won the Christians over. That is the model followed by Muslims, particularly the Sufis, down the ages; and it is the one that we must retain today, by interacting honourably and respectfully with non-Muslims in our places of work, as much as we can.

If this is clear, then my initial question still begs a response. What is a British Muslim? What kind of creature is he/she? The public consensus has clear ideas about other British identities: British Anglican, British Jew, British Asian Muslim or Hindu: all these are recognised categories, and a certain community of expected response governs interactions between the majority and these groups. The Anglo-Muslim, however, is not a generally recognised type.

My own belief is that the future prosperity of the Anglo-Muslim movement will be determined largely by our ability to answer this question of identity. It is a question mainly for converts, but, which many of whose dimensions, will come to apply also to second-generation immigrant Muslims here, who have their own questions to ask themselves and this culture about what, exactly, they are.

To frame a response, I think it is useful to step back a little, and consider the larger picture of Islamic history of which we form a very small part. I mentioned earlier that Islam usually spread through the utilisation of commercial opportunities as opportunities for d‘awah. That picture is one of the most extraordinary success stories in religious history. Compare, for instance, the way in which the Muslim world was Islamised to the way in which the Americans were Christianised. Islamisation proceeded with remarkable gentleness at the hands of Sufis and merchants. Christianisation used mass extermination of the native Americans, the baptism of uncomprehending survivors, and the baleful scrutiny by the Inquisition of any signs of backsliding. A more extreme contrast would be impossible to find.

Perhaps no less extraordinary than this contrast is its interesting concomitant: Christianisation brought Europeanisation. Islamisation did not bring Arabisation. The churches built by the Puritans or the Conquistadors in the New World were deliberate replicas of churches in Europe. The mosques constructed in the areas gradually won for Islam are endlessly diverse, and reflect and indeed celebrate local particularities. Christianity is a universal religion that has historically sought to impose a universal metropolitan culture. Islam is a universal religion that has consistently nurtured a particularist provincial culture. A church in Mexico City resembles a church in Salamanca. A mosque in Nigeria, or Istanbul, or Djakarta, resembles only in key respects the patterns, now purified and uplifted by monotheism, of the indigenous regional patrimony.

No less remarkable is the ability of the Muslim liberators to accommodate those aspects of local, pre-Islamic tradition, which did not clash, absolutely with the truths of revelation. In entering new lands, Muslims were armed with the generous Qur’anic doctrine of Universal Apostleship; as the Qur’an says: “To every nation there has been sent a guide”, (35:24).

This conflicts sharply with the classical Christian view of salvation as hinging uniquely on one historical intervention of the divine in history: the salvific sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. Non-Christian religions were, in classical Christianity, seen as demonic and under the sign of original sin. But classical Islam has always been able and willing to see at least fragments of an authentic divine message in the faiths and cultures of non-Muslim peoples. If God has assured us that every nation has received divine guidance, then we can look with some favour on the Other.

Those who believe that Muslim communities can only flourish if they ghettoise themselves and refuse to interact with majority communities would do well to look at Chinese history. Many of the leading mandarins of Ming China were in fact Muslims. Wang Dai-Yu, for instance, who died in 1660, was a Muslim scholar who received the title of Master of the Four Religions because of his complete knowledge of China’s four religions: Islam, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Many of the leading admirals in the navy of the Ming Empire were practising Muslims.

In China, mosques look very like traditional Chinese garden-temples, except that there is a prayer hall without idols, and the calligraphy is Qur’anic. In some of the most beautiful, you will find, as you enter, the following words in Chinese inscribed on a tablet:  “Sages have one mind and the same truth. In all parts of the world, sages arise who possess this uniformity of mind and truth. Muhammad, the Great Sage of the West, lived in Arabia long after Confucius, the Sage of China. Though separated by ages and countries, they had the same mind and Truth.”

In these examples from India and China, we see a practical confirmation of Islam’s proclamation of itself as the final, and hence universal, message from God. In a hadith we learn: Other prophets were sent only to their own peoples, while I am sent to all mankind.

It is not that the Qur’anic worldview affirms other religions as fully adequate paths to salvation. In fact, it clearly does not. But it allows the Muslim, as he encounters new worlds, to sift the wheat from the chaff in non-Muslim cultures, rejecting some things, to be sure, but maintaining others. In Islamic law, too, we find that shara‘ liman qablana, the revealed laws of those who came before us, can under certain conditions be accepted as valid legal precedent, if they are not demonstrably abrogated by an Islamic revealed source. And Islamic law also recognises the authority of ‘urf, local customary law, so that a law or custom is acceptable, and may be carried over into an Islamic culture or jurisdiction, if no Islamic revealed principle is thereby violated. Hence, we find the administration of Islamic law varying from country to country. If a wife complains of receiving insufficient dower from her husband, the qadi (judge) will make reference to what is considered normal in their culture and social group, and adjudge accordingly.

All of these historical observations have, I hope, served to make quite a simple point: Islam, as a universal religion, in fact as the only legitimately universal religion, also makes room for the particularities of the peoples who come into it. The traditional Muslim world is a rainbow, an extraordinary patchwork of different cultures, all united by a common adherence to the doctrinal and moral patterns set down in Revelation. Put differently, Revelation supplies parameters, hudud, rather than a complete blueprint for the details of cultural life. Local mindsets are Islamised, but remain distinct.

This point is obvious to anyone who has studied Islamic thought or Islamic history. I reiterate it today only because some Muslims nowadays reject it fiercely. Those who come to Islam because they wish to draw closer to God have no problem with a multiform Islam radiating from a single revealed paradigmatic core. But those who come to Islam seeking an identity will find the multiplicity of traditional Muslim cultures intolerable. People with confused identities are attracted to totalitarian solutions. And today, many young Muslims feel so threatened by the diversity of calls on their allegiance, and by the sheer complexity of modernity, that the only form of Islam they can regard as legitimate is a totalitarian, monolithic one. That there should be four schools of Islamic law is to them unbearable. That Muslim cultures should legitimately differ is a species of blasphemy.

These young people, who haunt our mosques and shout at any sign of disagreement, are either ignorant of Muslim history, or dismiss it as a gigantic mistake. For them, the grace and rahmah (mercy) of Allah has for some reason been withheld from all but a tiny fraction of the ummah (Muslim community). These people are the elect; and all disagreement with them is a blasphemy against God.

We cannot hope easily to cure such people. Simple proofs from our history or our scholarship will not suffice. What they need is a sense of security, and that, given the deteriorating conditions of both the Muslim world and of the ghettos in Western cities, may not come readily. For now, it is best to ignore their shouts and their melodramatic but always ill-fated activities. Our psychic problems are not theirs; and theirs can never be ours.

Islam is, and will continue to be, even amid the miserable globalisation of modern culture, a faith that celebrates diversity. Our thinking about our own position as British Muslims should focus on that fact, and quietly but firmly ignore the protests both of the totalitarian fringe, and of the importers of other regional cultures, such as that of Pakistan, which they regard as the only legitimate Islamic ideal.

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad graduated from Cambridge University with a double-first in Arabic in 1983. He then lived in Cairo for three years, studying Islam under traditional teachers at Al-Azhar, one of the oldest universities in the world. . Since 1992 he has been a doctoral student at Oxford University, specializing in the religious life of the early Ottoman Empire. Shaikh Abdal Hakim is the translator of a number of works, including two volumes from Imam al-Ghazali’s Ihya Ulum al-Din He appears frequently on BBC Radio and writes occasionally for a number of publications, including The Independent; Q-News International, Britain’s premier Muslim Magazine; and Seasons, the semiacademic journal of Zaytuna Institute

http://www.monthly-renaissance.com/issue/content.aspx?id=66

http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/default.htm

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By Gary Younge

The Guardian, Sunday 4^th July 2010

Last Wednesday newly released documents revealed evidence that, in a less degraded political culture, would have produced a scandal. The Chilcot inquiry heard that the then attorney general, the government’s chief legal adviser, explicitly warned Tony Blair that an invasion without further United Nations approval would be illegal.

“In view of your meeting with President Bush, I thought you might wish to know where I stand on the question of whether a further decision of the UN security council is legally required in order to authorise the use of force against Iraq. My view remains that a further [UN] decision is required,” wrote Lord Goldsmith. As if further clarification were necessary, a handwritten note, assumed to be written by Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser, David Manning, warned: “Clear advice from attorney on need for further resolution.”

Unable to say he hadn’t been told, Blair instead behaved as though English had just become a foreign language. “I just don’t understand this,” he wrote in the margins. The very next day he flew to Washington and told George Bush he was “solidly with the president” regardless of what the UN did. Put bluntly, it is irrefutable proof that the British prime minister was willing to flout international law.

A few hours after the document’s release, across the Thames in a sweaty room in Lambeth, the Labour leadership contenders went through their paces. Each argued that under their guidance the next Labour government would listen so that it could learn, and inspire so that it could lead. Each paid homage to fairness, equality and empowerment while struggling to differentiate themselves. The lack of ventilation in the room and engagement from the stage induced a strange compulsive torpor. You couldn’t look away because there was nowhere else to look, but you couldn’t listen because they spoke in a parliamentary patois that mixed English with some obscure institutional inflection. It was as though Charlie Brown’s teacher were standing for leader of the opposition, her words turning to an unintelligible drone by the time they reached the back of the hall.

You would think there might have been a connection between these two events. The inquiry marked another crucial moment in an investigation that is revealing the true extent of duplicity and criminality within a Labour government that led up to an unpopular and calamitous war; the hustings are a bid by members of that self-same party to renew its credibility and purpose after a crushing defeat at the polls.

But in two fetid hours, Iraq never came up. Not a single candidate uttered its name from the podium and not a single question about it came from the floor. The whole evening was like a cross between Seinfeld andFawlty Towers – a show about nothing in which nobody mentioned the war.

That many of us who opposed the war and still oppose the occupation find this problematic is no surprise. It was the most defining personal political choice of the decade and, ethically speaking, not a remotely tough call. The fact that it was illegal adds judicial finality to a moment of moral clarity; but even within the law, it would have been wrong. The ramifications were not only predictable but predicted. Hundreds of thousands murdered, even more displaced, the unleashing of sectarian violence. Getting that wrong speaks to a major, murderous error of judgment.

True, it had come up in previous leadership debates, and will undoubtedly come up again. But the frontrunner, David Miliband, would like us all to move on and, if Wednesday is anything to go by, seems to be getting his way.

“You’ve punished us enough about Iraq,” he told Labour voters before the election. “The purpose of these elections is how we build a better tomorrow,” he told the Telegraph at the weekend. “Not how we debate a better yesterday.”

This is a curious piece of logic. The best indication of what people will do with power is to look at what they did when they had it. For what we do tomorrow is inevitably bound up with what we did yesterday. People who made grievous errors yesterday shouldn’t be trusted to make intelligent decisions tomorrow unless they are able to account for their mistakes today. In truth they haven’t been punished even nearly enough. They should be in jail.

The attempt to paint those who still raise these arguments as obsessives mired in paradigms past misses both the point and an opportunity. The point is that the occupation is still going on, and the other war to which it is inextricably bound, in Afghanistan, is still going wrong. “The essential characteristic of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common,” wrote the 19th-century French philosopher Ernest Renan. “And must have forgotten many things as well.” But in the past people had the decency to at least wait until things had finished happening before they started forgetting them.

The opportunity Iraq provides is to understand what went wrong in government as a means to restoring trust within the party and the country, which would be indispensable for any serious effort to commence an ideological, moral and political renewal. There are, without doubt, many other vital issues. But there are few that encapsulate the issues Labour needs to grapple with, whether you supported the war or not.

Among other things, Iraq raises the following questions: What does a Labour government do when it is presented with facts that contradict its convictions? How does it respond when most of the country demands that it change course? When have the candidates put their consciences before their careers? What internal democratic mechanisms exist within the Labour party to check the will of a determined leader? How does it deal with dissenters and dissent within its own ranks? How would a Labour government respond when it has clearly made a mistake?

It is not the only prism through which Labour’s period in office can or even should be examined; but it is the only one that brings together those fundamental questions in one issue.

In an ideologically crowded field, it also provides a rare distinction between the candidates. There’s only so long they can ignore this elephant in the room before it takes a dump on the carpet. Andy Burnham is proud to have supported it; Diane Abbott is proud she didn’t; David Miliband regrets supporting it and even having the issue raised; Ed Miliband and Ed Balls weren’t in parliament for the vote and, while neither spoke out against it, now say it was wrong. But the other reason why it is important is because it is unavoidable.

When giving examples of why Labour should listen more, a few candidates mentioned the 10p tax rate, an important subject to be sure but not the one that produced the largest demonstration in the history of the country or killed anybody. When asked about whether Labour had got the balance right between civil liberties and protecting the country from terrorism, David Miliband recalled sitting in Downing Street on 7 July 2005 and asking himself: “Could we have done anything to prevent this?” Well they could have not invaded Iraq, which every investigation has shown was the primary thing that made Britain a target.

It is precisely because the issue is so toxic that the poison must be drawn. For only then can Labour be dragged from its sick bed and stand for something more than just elections.

On 5 January 2009 the Israeli army rounded up around 65 Palestinians (including 11 women and 11 children under the age of 14) in Gaza, several of whom were waving white flags. After handcuffing the men and stripping them to their underwear, the soldiers marched their captives 2km north to al-Atatra and ordered them to climb into three pits, each three metres high and surrounded by barbed wire. The prisoners were forced to sit in stress positions, leaning forward with their heads down, and prohibited from talking to one another. On their first day they were denied food and water. On the second and third, each was given a sip of water and a single olive. On the fourth day the women and children were released and the men were transferred to military barracks.

It was just one of the stories to emerge from the UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict conducted by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone. The report accused Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes and “possibly” crimes against humanity. But in a conflict that saw 10 Israeli soldiers and three civilians killed compared with about 1,400 Gazans, Goldstone was particularly scathing about Israel’s “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population” – which he said amounted to “collective punishment”.

The Israeli government and the pro-Israel lobbies concentrated their displeasure not on the substance of Goldstone’s report but the essence of his identity. Branded a “self-hating Jew”, he was effectively barred from his grandson’s bar mitzvah after the South African Zionist Federation threatened to picket it. The prominent US constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz has described Goldstone as a “despicable human being”, “an evil, evil man”, “a traitor to the Jewish people” and the UN’s “token court Jew”.

Then this month came “revelations” from an Israeli newspaper that, as a judge under the apartheid regime, Goldstone sentenced black people to death. This, according to Israel’s government, discredits not only Goldstone but everything he discovered about Gaza and, by association, international criticism of the occupation. “Such a person should not be allowed to lecture a democratic state defending itself against terrorists, who are not subject to the criteria of international moral norms,” argued the Knesset Speaker, Reuven Rivlin.

“Although he was involved in clear racist activity, he had no problem writing such a report,” said the chairman of the Knesset’s state control committee, Yoel Hasson, who called Goldstone a hypocrite. Not to be outdone, Dershowitz (a strident advocate of torture) has now likened Goldstone to the Nazi geneticist Josef Mengele.

This crude one-downmanship in identity politics has no winners and many losers. Facts about racism in the past cannot excuse realities about racism in the present. Playing off the legacy of South Africa’s townships against the plight of the captives of al-Atatra seeks not to alleviate the suffering of either group but in effect to dismiss them. But for all the hyperbole and absurdity, there are important principles at stake about who can claim moral authority, on what basis, and to what end.

Let’s start with the most obvious. This is a cynical ploy by the Israeli government to divert attention from the findings of the UN report. Government officials have almost said as much. A foreign ministry official described the investigation by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth as “explosive PR material”. Hasson claims: “Had [the Israeli foreign ministry discovered this earlier], it would have greatly helped us in our activity against the report.” But the report is about Gaza, not Goldstone. Having lost control of the message, Israel is now trying to shoot the messenger.

That Israel would try to do so on the backs of black South Africans is a laughable indication of its desperation. For if Goldstone was complicit in apartheid’s crimes, then Israel was far more so. Israel was South Africa’s principal and most dependable arms dealer. As we learn elsewhere in the Guardian today, it even offered to sell the South African regime nuclear weapons.

“Throughout the 70s and 80s Israel had a deep, intimate and lucrative relationship with South Africa,” explains Sasha Polakow-Suransky, author of The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa. “Israel’s arms supplies helped to prolong the apartheid regime’s rule and to survive international sanctions.” No criticism of Goldstone’s complicity from representatives of the Israeli state can be taken seriously that does not acknowledge and condemn Israel’s even greater support of the self-same system.

But just because the Israeli government wants to change the subject doesn’t mean that we have to. Goldstone’s apartheid record matters. For the left to claim it doesn’t, simply because he came up with a conclusion about Gaza that they agree with, would also be cynical. Appointed senior counsel in 1976, the year of the Soweto uprising, Goldstone rose through the South African judiciary during one of apartheid’s most vicious periods. While in power he ordered the execution of two black South Africans and turned down the appeals of many others.

“A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times or by omission or by silence,” wrote the late Trinidadian intellectual CLR James in The Black Jacobins, “shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.”

Goldstone’s claim that faced with a “moral dilemma” he thought “it was better to fight from inside than not at all”, is inadequate. Not only did he uphold apartheid laws, he enforced them. This is not a question of 20:20 hindsight: many in a similar position at that time chose a more principled stand. Both morally and professionally he had other options, and he is compromised by not having taken them.

But his record did not end with apartheid. While he may not have led the drive to a non-racial democracy, he followed it eagerly. When the system started to collapse, he fully embraced change. Nelson Mandela asked him to chair the commission into public violence primarily because he was trusted by both sides. As such, he was an archetypical transitional figure. After that he went on to produce respected reports into the ethnic conflicts in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. So while his credibility as a human rights advocate might be diminished, it is by no means destroyed.

Finally, there is the insidious role that Israel has attempted to play as ideological gatekeeper for acceptable political behaviour among Jews. The attempt to tarnish any criticism of Israel, regardless of its merits, as unjust is untenable; to castigate them as un-Jewish is deplorable. “What saddens me today is that any Jew who speaks out with an independent voice, especially with the conduct of the state of Israel, is regarded as a self-hating Jew,” says retired South African constitutional court justice Albie Sachs, who is also Jewish. “Why should someone be made to choose between being a Jew and having a conscience?”

Gary Younge’s book Who Are We – and Should It Matter in the 21st Century? is published on 3 June

Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, Thursday 8^th April 2010

The west’s proudest export to the Islamic world this past decade has been democracy. That is, not real democracy, which is too complicated, but elections. They have been exported at the point of a gun and a missile to Iraq and Afghanistan, to “nation-build” these states and hence “defeat terror”. When apologists are challenged to show some good resulting from the shambles, they invariably reply: “It has given Iraqis and Afghans freedom to vote.”

As British electors don democratic finery and troop to the polls next month, elections in both war-torn countries are looking sick. Last month’s poll in Iraq, blessed (or cursed) with a Westminster-style constitution, has failed to yield a coherent government. It appeared to show the incumbent prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, just beaten by his predecessor, Ayad Allawi. If so, it would be a remarkable case of a developing world democracy actually ejecting a sitting leader. In that respect, Iraq would be ahead of Britain, where the opposition must lead by at least 10 percentage points to be certain of power.

For the time being, Baghdad’s government has been in abeyance. The Sunni militias, reportedly backed by al‑Qaida, have returned to the streets, and the death rate is again soaring. Kurdistan is all but a separate country, and the odds are on the Sunnis being forced back into a semi-autonomous region. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died and millions been driven from their homes – including almost all Iraq’s ancient population of Christians. The import of democracy has so far just inflamed local tension and fuelled fundamentalism. Like precious porcelain, elections were exported without instructions on their care. In the absence of adequate security, they are little more than tribal plebiscites.

At least in Iraq western troops are leaving the country to its fate. The west’s guilt at the mayhem left behind will start to diminish with time. People will blame George Bush and Tony Blair, leaving them, as they wish, to render their account not to the Iraqis but only to God.

In Afghanistan, a similar saga has been running for nine years, and is growing ever more tragic. Last year saw the deaths of more Afghans (2,412) and more western troops (520) than since the 2001 invasion. Nato is locked in a struggle to hold Helmand province for the government of the president, Hamid Karzai, against insurgents who can wait as long as they like to defeat the hated invaders.

Nato is only now seeking control, nine years on, of the country’s second city of Kandahar, in which the Taliban is dominant and the president’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is the power broker. Karzai is said to have told local elders that there will be no assault on Kandahar “without their permission”. If Nato cannot negotiate a deal over the city, rather than reduce it to rubble, its mission is surely doomed.

The fact that Hamid Karzai was elected, by whatever dubious means, seems to infuriate western leaders. Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and their respective foreign ministers rage and telephone and pay visits and expostulate. The repetitive criticism hurled at Karzai for being corrupt and in the pocket of drug lords has become near comical, not least because of his eccentric response. Last week he threatened privately to swear allegiance to the Taliban himself (which might solve many problems).

The west is constantly telling Karzai to “clean up his act” or, as the New York Times harrumphs, “stop doing whatever he and his aides choose”. This is not because there is any likelihood of his obeying, but to help make the domestic case for the war look less shaky. As the joke in Kabul goes, as long as the west pretends to uphold his regime, Karzai must “pretend to be Swedish”. He is America’s exhibit A for world democracy. The idea that he might regard himself as the elected representative of the Afghan people, warts and all, with a future to consider and his neck on the line, is beyond consideration.

Democracy in both America and Britain is coming under scrutiny these days. Quite apart from the antics of MPs and congressmen, it is said to be sliding towards oligarchy, with increasing overtones of autocracy. Money and its power over technology are making elections unfair. The military-industrial complex is as powerful as ever, having adopted “the menace of global terrorism” as its casus belli. Lobbying and corruption are polluting the government process. In a nutshell, democracy is not in good shape.

How strange to choose this moment to export it, least of all to countries that have never experienced it in their history. The west not only exports the stuff, it does so with massive, thuggish violence, the antithesis of how self-government should mature in any polity. The tortured justification in Iraq and Afghanistan is that elections will somehow sanctify a “war against terrorism” waged on someone else’s soil. The resulting death and destruction have been appalling. Never can an end, however noble, have so failed to justify the means of achieving it.

The high-minded attacks on corruption in Muslim states from London and Washington is futile. In most countries corruption is the lubricant of power. Nor is the west that clean. Britain showered corruption on the Saudis to obtain arms contracts. The activities of American firms in “rebuilding” Iraq were wholly corrupt. In 2001 the British in Kabul – in the person of Clare Short no less – were put in charge of suppressing Afghan opium, fuel of most of that country’s corruption. Britain allowed it to continue, when the Taliban had been in the process of stamping it out.

The Tories and Liberal Democrats are dishonest to say that the Afghan war is justified “provided” Karzai ends corruption, stops rigging elections, and trains his army and police. None of this will happen, and is merely cover to avoid saying what these politicians know to be true – that British soldiers are dying for a dud hypothetical.

As Britons go the polls, they should challenge their candidates to justify what is being done in their name. A system of government that they have spent two centuries evolving and still not perfected is being rammed down the throats of poor and insecure people, who are then hectored for not handling it properly. Why should they? The invasions of their countries was not their choice. They did not ask to be a model for Britain’s moral exhibitionism. They did not plead for their villages to be target practice for western special forces.

Karzai is told he will lose Nato protection if he continues to associate with drug dealers and warlords – many of whom appear to be his relatives. He knows – as we know – that this is bluff. There can be no counter-insurgency without a client regime. Obama and Brown need him as much as he needs them.

Amid this bluff the only certainty for Karzai is that, one day, Nato will get fed up and leave him to his fate, as it is now leaving Maliki in Baghdad. If he wants to live, he must make his peace with Afghans, not Americans, and that means on Afghan terms. Free and fair elections and a stop to corruption will have no part to play in that survival game. Democracy has been greatly oversold.

Audhu billahi min ash shaytanir rajeem! Bismillah ir Rahmanir Raheem!

Al hamdu lillahi rabbil ‘alameen. Was salaatu was salaamu ‘alaa ashrafil anbiyaee wal mursaleen. Sayidinaa wa nabi’na wa moulanaa Muhammadin wa’ala aalihee wa sahbihee wa sallim.

‘Amma b’ad:

وَلْتَكُن مِّنْكُمْ أُمَّةٌ يَدْعُونَ إِلَى الْخَيْرِ وَيَأْمُرُونَ بِالْمَعْرُوفِ وَيَنْهَوْنَ عَنِ الْمُنْكَرِ وَأُوْلَـئِكَ هُمُ الْمُفْلِحُونَ                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         “Wal Wal takunN minkum ummatunN yad’auna ilal khayri wa ya-muruna bil ma’rufi wa yanhona ‘an il munkar Wa ulaaika hum mul muflihoon”

“Let there arise out of you a group of people inviting to all that is good, enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong: They are the ones to achieve success”

(Surah 3 Ali ‘Imran Verse 104).

Dear sisters, brothers, respected elders and learned colleagues, assalamu’alaykum!

This ayah is the essence of Islam. Being able to give criticism, being able to take criticism and being able to act on that criticism is what Islam is all about. So it’s not just about talking, it’s about doing. Islam is dynamic; it’s no use just making fancy speeches and not acting upon what we say! And this is what I’m going to talk about today, insha Allah.

If someone loves you, they will be critical sometimes! And if they see a fault in themselves, they’ll try to correct themselves as well. Just think, if someone tells you to your face that your breath smells, do they hate you or do they love you? The alternative is someone keeping quiet in front of you and telling fifty other people and they are laughing behind your back!

When I was young, I came to this country as a child, about nine years old. I was very close to my father but had he had to part with me because he desired for me good education and a better life than the life he had.

So I was brought up by my older brothers in this country. And believe me, it’s completely different to being brought up by your parents, because you feel you have a right over your parents whereas your brothers, well it’s not easy at the best of times. However, they did their best and may Allah (s) reward them and their wives for looking after me.

At that age, as you know, it’s easy to get into bad habits with your peers at school and I was no exception. I started smoking with a friend of mine to see what it was like. Unfortunately (or rather, fortunately), I got caught and my brothers were very strict and told me off really sternly. However, both of them themselves were smokers! Although I was too young to say anything to them and stopped smoking because I was really scared, they realised that if they didn’t give up themselves, it would send out the wrong message.

Therefore, the next day, they threw away their last packet of Benson and Hedges. Never to smoke again!

This act of theirs has left an indelible mark on me and I have remembered it ever since.

This is what Islam in action is all about. When the Companions used to leave each other, they would recite:

“Wal asr, innal insaana la fikhusr, il alladheena ‘amanu wa amilu salihaati  wa tawaso bil haqqi wa tawaso bi sabr .”

This is the famous surah, Al Asr. Allah (s) swears by time that insaan (humankind) is in a state of loss (we are all losers because we are wasting time). Apart from those who believe and do good deeds and admonish others with the truth and bear with patience that which comes their way. You see, the Companions (r) were totally focussed on the hereafter, their only mission was to spread the deen and so they admonished each other to do this wherever they went.

Last year, I was driving up to Keele for the Jumu’ah prayer with my brother and he said to me: “Why do you give khutbahs every week when it doesn’t really make a difference!”

I thought this was quite a silly observation at the time, but later I realised that every week we give reminders and we talk about punishments and rewards and if I’m totally honest, I would be upset if no one was following my advice! I get upset at myself sometimes talking the talk and not being able to walk the walk…

So today, I don’t want to be judgemental, but I DO want you to monitor yourselves. You must ask yourselves this question:

“Is Islam a personal matter like the other religions or is it more than that?”

Don’t belittle yourselves, and don’t belittle your deen. It’s not just another religion –  IT’S A WAY OF LIFE!

You are VERY IMPORTANT MUSLIMS, especially in this university environment where you are the future intellectuals. You are the future surgeons, saving lives with the idhn (permission) of Allah (s). And more importantly, you are the ambassadors of the Prophet (s).

You see, before Muhammad (s) came, people were lucky enough to have Prophets sent to them to remind them. Every time things went too far, a Prophet would come. But after Muhammad (s), this came to an end. Now, we have to fend for ourselves.

But let us look at this positively! Allah (s) trusts this ummah to deliver His message. Subhan Allah, this is a great honour.

What is more, all the world’s eyes are on us Muslims. Islam is under scrutiny. Why? Because the Shaytan and the friends of Shaytan are afraid of Islam.

Remember! The sunnah of Allah does not change, the sunnah of the Prophets does not change and the sunnah of the Devil does not change.

Why is there no media anger against other faiths? Because there’s always ONE TRUTH.

So we are Muslims entrusted with the truth! This is for us a great honour, but also a great responsibility.

Before people buy into your arguments, they look at you. Your behaviour, your character, your habits, what you do with your spare time, how you dress, what kind of friends you hang around with, your taste in clothes, what you listen to…

So before a non Muslim friend says to you “Hey Abdul, my man! How comes you flirting wiv dat girl man! I fought you said all females are your sistaz”, you have to wake up and scrutinise yourself!

You see, people buy people before they buy the product. Believe me, I’ve been in business since 1980 when I left school!

So if you work for Vodafone, how you interact with the customer will decide the customer’s perception of Vodafone! If you are polite and caring, they will forget that Vodafone is a huge company greedy for your money!

But there’s nothing wrong with the product you’re selling! ISLAM is a great product, it’s The TRUTH!

What is wrong is that WE’RE very bad salespeople!

Now if you think about the image of Islam, it’s at an all time low. People associate everything negative with Islam! What is more, ALL attention is on Islam and Muslims.

Again, let’s look at this positively, let’s use the interest to our advantage. Let’s show the world the characteristics of a Muslim.

A few weeks ago, someone left a baby at one of the local mosques. The baby died. Even now there are flowers and teddy bears where the baby was found.  The media descended on the mosque. Mosque, baby, illegitimate relationship, Muslims!

Just think, one act of fornication and all this! But think about how this started. The two perpetrators didn’t meet all of a sudden and the baby was born. They must have met somewhere or been introduced by someone. What I’m saying is that it must started from something very small. The eyes meet, when they shouldn’t, then it leads to another thing, then another; each time, the person thinks it’s only a bit of harmless fun. Until it’s too late.

This is why Allah (s) says in the Holy Quran “La takraba az zina!” “Don’t even come near fornication!”

Cigarettes, drugs, alcohol have to be bought to be consumed, whereas your passions, your lower self is with you all the time. It needs CONTROL. This is why in Islam, there is no free mixing between the sexes.

Many non-Muslims even know about this! So when they see disparity between us and our deen, they mock us, we are easy prey for the tabloids!

There was a time when non-Muslims would deposit money with Muslims with long beards, the longer the beard, the more trustworthy the Muslim! But not today!

But youngsters! I have good news. All this can change! Because you are the ones most capable of change. This is in the middle of the Quran, you have the likes of inspirational surahs such as Surah Maryam, Surah Yusuf, Surah Kahf.

A young girl barely 13 or 14 years of age is given the responsibility of giving birth to a great Prophet and taking on all of her peoples’ taunts and mockery. You girls and boys are the ones Allah addresses when He wants change. The older you get the more resistant you are to change. It’s no use teaching me something, you’ve heard the saying ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’!

Yusuf (p) was a youngster but he controlled his lower passions. The woman offered herself to Him but He refused. He preferred to go to prison than to participate in obscenity. He was young, in His prime.

Ibraheem (a) was a young man, taking on all His family, His father and His tribe.

The people in the Cave were young men, the word used is feti. The word for chivalry is futuwwa, being honourable, kind, helping, caring. So youth is connected to being chivalrous, not the opposite as is the case with many youngsters today.

But, let me remind you, it isn’t cool to walk around like a gangster.

Luqman the Wise (may Allah be pleased with Him) gives advice to his son: “Don’t walk about the earth as if you own it, don’t raise your voice like the eyoning of a donkey, an ass!”

I want you to take this advise and IMPLEMENT it. Don’t hang around shouting and chatting, don’t disturb other students, especially in the library.

When I was studying here at Keele as a mature student, trying to finish off essays in the library IT section was impossible sometimes because of some sections of students chitting and chatting and using foul language! And you know, most of the time, the noise was made by Pakistani students! Because I could understand Urdu I could understand Punjabi, Mirpuri, Pathohari, I knew what they were saying, and I’m almost deaf in one ear!!

In this country, a lot goes on that is bad. For example, promiscuity and drinking, pornography to name a few of the evils. However, one thing this country does have is the RIGHT TO CHOOSE.

In contrast, in some parts of the Muslim world, especially in villages, where people are illiterate and have little or no knowledge of Islam, there is a lot of jahilliyya (ignorance). And also because there is bigotry from the males, sex is treated as taboo and a lot of wrong goes on.

However, in this environment, we are educated. And what is more we have a choice: We can engage in these evil practices OR we can turn away.

Each one of you who is young has strong passions at this stage of your lives. This is a blessing from Allah (s). However, this blessing has to be controlled. The Prophet (s) prescribed MARRIAGE. If you love a sister, marry her, Allah will do the rest. If you can’t, stay away from sisters and fast. Fasting will help you to control your carnal desires.

You can research into details regarding these issues. I don’t have time to delve into these so please forgive me for being short and blunt.

Simply put, you cannot afford to think of the next life as being a great distance away. Bring it into this life, think of it as close to you as your shadow. Sometimes, the childish and scary ways are more effective. For example, when we were little kids, if we didn’t behave, we were warned to close our ears and listen to the sound of the hellfire. When we did this, we were reminded that this is what Allah (s) has in store for us if we didn’t do as we were told.

So, we must use all means to think of the hereafter. The Prophet (s) Himself was not just a Bashir (giver of glad tidings), He was a Nazir (Warner) as well.

We must also remember that our bodily parts will testify against us if we have misused them in this life. This is in Surah Yaseen. How can this be? Because in the next life, it will be IMPOSSIBLE to speak lies, people will not be able to say anything BUT THE TRUTH.

Furthermore, we will be resurrected in the state that we leave this world. So think about what your last act should be in this world, reading the Qur’an, listening to a nasheed or listening to a vulgar song.

Yes, of course it’s not easy, there is peer pressure etc. But then again, the better the person you want to become, the harder you will have to work. But THE GREATER THE REWARD! There is a hadith of the Prophet (s) that talks of the seven categories of Muslims who will be given the shade on the Day of Judgement when there will be no shade for anyone. And one of these will be a young man who said no to the seduction of a rich woman for the sake of Allah (s).

Again, I emphasise that it is not easy. After all, how long can you stay away from your peers? But, stay away we must, again using simple techniques. We have to be strong and NOT BE NAIVE. Would you jump into a well if someone asked you, would you kill someone at someone’s order? No you wouldn’t! So why follow other people’s silly advice when you should know better? You are undergraduates, post graduates, thinkers, not primary school kids!

We cannot and MUST not compromise on the deen. We cannot dilute this great way of life.

Why do we have to be so proactive? Because, no new religion is to come after Islam and no new Prophet is to come after Muhammad (s)

So it is our duty, whether we like it or not to speak out when we see something un-Islamic going on. This goes for everyone, young and old. If you old, you have no reason to be passive and think “Oh well, nothing will change, so why should I do anything?” WRONG! We are not the ones to bring about the change- it is Allah (s)! Our duty is only to tell off, (wa ma ‘alayna ilal balaagh). Allah will take care of the rest! Think about the hadith of the Prophet (s) who said that when the Angel of Death was told to destroy a community, He came back and said that there was a pious man who was always worshipping! What should he do? Allah (s) replied: Destroy this community and start with him first! Meaning that this man was passive, he did not enjoin the good and forbid the wrong. He was of the opinion that religion is a personal affair.

So you must realise dear elders that we must tell someone when the other brother, son or daughter is wrong because this criticism is LOVE. You must not be embarrased. These are your daughters and sons, your duty doesn’t end with your blood relations, it continues to those related to you through the deen!

The Prophet (s) said: “Be with your brother when he does good and when he does bad.” One of the companions was puzzled, he asked “Ya Rasul Allah (s)! I can understand being with my brother when he is doing good but what do you mean be with him when he is doing bad?” The Prophet (s) explained that you must tell him off when he is wrong!

FINALLY TO FINISH OFF:

To the Youngsters:

Treat this mosque like the cave that the youngsters ran away to and found the solace and Mercy of Allah (s)! Come to the mosque, come to the committee members, ask them for any help. Talk to anyone you feel comfortable to talk to. Don’t worry about your mistakes, we all make mistakes, it is part of human nature to make mistakes, but a bigger mistake would be to not learn from our mistakes.

To the Mosque Committee Members:

Appoint the right people, take on responsibilities, work with each other. Don’t be harsh with your sisters and brothers, listen to them, overlook their minor faults, help them in a positive way. Let’s also try to get learned scholars here to get the message across and answer questions! Don’t chase the youngsters away from the mosque, they should be attracted and made to feel safe here. They should feel safe from your hands and your tongue. Remember! The Prophet (s) was gentle with the believers hareesun ‘alaykum, he was Rauf, He had compassion for the Muslims.

So, I admonish you and I admonish myself! Criticise, take criticism and act on that criticism! That is the way of Islam.

May Allah give you, me and all Muslims the quwwa (power), the tawfeeq (ability) and the himma (strength) to be able to do this and be the best ambassadors of Islam.  Ameen.

ARABIC KHUTBAHS, then salah.

Tuesday 23rd February 201o

Let us agree on this: we live in pluralistic societies and pluralism is an unavoidable fact. We are equal citizens, but with different cultural and religious backgrounds. So, how can we, instead of being obsessed with potential “conflicts of identity” within communities, change that viewpoint to define and promote a common ethical framework, nurtured by the richness of diverse religious and cultural backgrounds? After all, a pluralistic society needs a strong and effective ethics of citizenship in order to face up to both its internal challenges (diversity, equal rights, racism, corruption, etc) and international challenges (economic crisis, global warming, migrations, etc).

Here’s one principle for reaching that goal: an ethics of citizenship should itself reflect the diversity of the citizenship. For while we agree that no one has the right to impose their beliefs on another, we also understand that our common life should be defined in such a way that it includes the contributions of all the religious and philosophical traditions within it. Further, the way to bring about such inclusion is through critical debate.

When it comes to the new Muslim presence in western countries, that critical debate is hard to achieve. Islam is perceived as a “problem”, never as a gift in our quest for a rich and stimulating diversity. And that’s a mistake. Islam has much to offer – not least when considering how individuals in politics and business have recently been behaving, within the limits of the law, but with a clear lack of ethics.

Islamic literature is full of injunctions about the centrality of an education based on ethics and proper ends. Individual responsibility, when it comes to communicating, learning and teaching is central to the Islamic message. Muslims are expected to be “witnesses to their message before people”, which means speaking in a decent way, preventing cheating and corruption, and respecting the environment. Integrity in politics and the rejection of usurious speculation in economics are principles that are pushing Muslim citizens and scholars to explore new avenues that bring public life and interpersonal ethics together.

More broadly, the Muslim presence should be perceived as positive, too. It is not undermining the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian ethical and cultural roots of Europe. Neither is it introducing dogmatism into the debate, as if spiritual and religious traditions automatically draw on authoritarian sources. They can operate within both the limits of the law and in the open public sphere. On the contrary, the Muslim presence can play a critical role in thinking about our future and shaping a new common narrative. It can help recall and revive some of the fundamental principles upon which the cultures of Europe are based.

To put it another way, Muslims remind their fellow citizens that one cannot simply get rid of older ethical traditions and replace them with a supposedly neutral rule of law or by impartial values formed in a free market. To agree on the rule of law, equality and democratic transparency is surely not enough. Contemporary crises within societies, and at the international level, remind us we need more ethics in our public life, not merely more efficiency.

Whether we can agree on the content of a common ethic is another question entirely. But this is where critical and indepth debates should take place, and it’s in this way that the issue of our plural future together should be determined. That future cannot be shaped by superficial discussions of national identity, values or Britishness. Similarly, we must stop treating diversity as a hindrance, for it should be exactly the opposite. Rather, an ethics based on our common citizenship must be forged from a serious and profound engagement with the meaning of our common humanity.

• Read the Citizens Ethics pamphlet in full here

February 1, 2008

‘Don’t teach children patriotism’

Nicola Woolcock

Patriotism should be avoided in school lessons because British history is “morally ambiguous”, a leading educational body recommends.

History and citizenship lessons should stick to the bare facts rather than encouraging loyalty to Britain when covering subjects such as the Second World War or the British Empire, the Institute of Education researchers said. Teachers should not instill pride in what they consider great moments of British history, as more shameful episodes could be downplayed or excluded.

The slave trade, imperialism and 20th century wars should be taught as controversial issues while students are deciding how they feel about their country, the report says.

Three quarters of teachers felt obliged to tell students about the danger of patriotism. The survey suggested neither pupils nor teachers wanted patriotism endorsed by schools.

Historians said last night, however, that it was impossible to teach the subject without patriotism or a recognition that British values were rooted in the past.

The report criticises the current drive to use citizenship lessons as a way of promoting pride in being British and developing a sense of belonging. It said: “To love what is corrupt is itself corrupting, not least because it inclines us to ignore, forget, forgive or excuse the corruption. And there’s the rub for patriotism.

“Countries are morally ambiguous entities: they are what they are by virtue of their histories.”

The authors added: “It is hard to think of a national history free from the blights of warmongering, imperialism, tyranny, injustice, slavery and subjugation, or a national identity forged without recourse to exclusionary and xenophobic stereotypes.”

Alan Johnson, the former Education Secretary, announced last year that pupils aged 11 to 16 would have compulsory lessons in British history. Ethnicity, religion, race and national identity will be taught, through studying immigration, the Commonwealth, the Empire and devolution, extending the popular vote and women’s rights.

Gordon Brown said at the time: “There is a golden thread that intertwines the unshakeable British commitment to liberty with another very British idea: that of duty and social responsibility.”

But Dr Hand, the co-author of the report, said: “Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both called for a history curriculum that fosters attachment and loyalty to Britain, but the case for promoting patriotism in schools is weak.

“Are countries really appropriate objects of love? Loving things can be bad for us, for example when the things we love are morally corrupt. Since all national histories are at best morally ambiguous, it’s an open question whether citizens should love their countries.”

The institute – part of the University of London – asked nearly 300 pupils aged 13 to 14, and 47 teachers, in 20 London schools, how patriotism should be handled. About 94 per cent of teachers and 77 per cent of teenagers said that schools should give a balanced presentation of opposing views. Fewer than 10 per cent felt patriotism should be actively promoted.

However, 19 per cent of teachers and 16 per cent of teenagers thought schools should support patriotic views when expressed by pupils.The historian Tristram Hunt said of the institute’s report: “I think it’s a very immature approach to the topic. The point is not whether history was right or wrong from a 21st Century liberal-left perspective. It’s about teaching students to understand the mindset and context of our forebears.

“The real problem isn’t that our children are being indoctrinated with patriotism, but that they don’t know enough British history.”

Ambiguous times

1750-1830 The Industrial Revolution: exploitation of the poor versus great wealth creation and growth

1807 Abolition of the slave trade. Britons were both practitioners of the trade and responsible for abolition

1947 Indian independence and Partition. How well did Britain manage its withdrawal from the sub-continent?

2003 Iraq war: was it liberation or occupation?

Ian Burama

The Guardian, Saturday 5 December 2009

Switzerland has four mosques with minarets and a population of 350,000 nominal Muslims, mostly Europeans from Bosnia and Kosovo, of whom about 13% regularly go to prayer. Not a huge problem, one might have thought. Yet 57.5% of Swiss voters opted in a referendum for aconstitutional ban on minarets, allegedly because of worries about “fundamentalism” and the “creeping Islamisation” of Switzerland.

Are the Swiss more bigoted than other Europeans? Probably not. Referendums are a measure of popular gut feelings, rather than considered opinion, and popular gut feelings are rarely liberal. Referendums on this issue in other European countries might well produce startlingly similar results.

To attribute the Swiss vote to ban minarets – an idea that was promoted by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, but by none of the other political parties – to “Islamophobia” is perhaps to miss the point. To be sure, a long history of mutual Christian-Muslim hostility, and recent cases of radical Islamist violence, have made many people fearful of Islam in a way that they are not of Hinduism, say, or Buddhism. And the minaret, piercing the sky like a missile, is easily caricatured as a fearsome image.

But if the Swiss and other Europeans were self-assured about their own identities, their Muslim fellow-citizens probably would not strike such fear in their hearts. And that might be the problem. It was not so long ago that the majority of citizens in the western world had their own unquestioned symbols of collective faith and identity. The church spires that grace many European cities still meant something to most people. Few people married outside their own faith.

Until recently, too, many Europeans believed in their kings and queens, flew their national flags, sang their national anthems, were taught heroic versions of their national histories. Home was home. Foreign travel was for soldiers, diplomats, and rich people. “Identity” was not yet seen as a problem.

Much has changed, thanks to global capitalism, European integration, the stigmatisation of national feeling by two catastrophic world wars, and, perhaps most importantly, the widespread loss of religious faith. Most of us live in a secular, liberal, disenchanted world. The lives of most Europeans are freer now than ever before. We are no longer told what to do or think by priests or our social superiors. When they try, we tend not to take any notice.

But there has been a price to pay for our newly liberated world. Freedom from faith and tradition has not always led to greater contentment, but, on the contrary, to widespread bewilderment, fear, and resentment. While demonstrations of collective identity have not entirely disappeared, they are largely confined to football stadiums, where celebration (and disappointment) can quickly boil over in violence and resentment.

Populist demagogues blame political, cultural, and commercial elites for the anxieties of the modern world. They are accused, not entirely without reason, of imposing mass immigration, economic crisis, and loss of national identity on ordinary citizens. But if the elites are hated for causing our modern malaise, the Muslims are envied for still having faith, for knowing who they are, for having something that is worth dying for.

It is unimportant that many European Muslims are just as disenchanted and secular as their non-Muslim fellow-citizens. It is the perception that counts. Those soaring minarets, those black headscarves, are threatening because they rub salt in the wounds of those who feel the loss of their own faith.

It is not surprising that anti-Muslim populism has found some of its most ferocious supporters among former leftists, for they, too, have lost their faith – in world revolution, or whatnot. Many of these leftists, before their turn to revolution, came from religious backgrounds. So they suffered a double loss. In their hostility to Islam, they like to talk about defending “Enlightenment values,” whereas in fact they lament the collapse of faith, whether religious or secular.

There is, alas, no immediate cure for the kind of social ills exposed by the Swiss referendum. The Pope has an answer, of course. He would like people to return to the bosom of Rome. Evangelical preachers, too, have a recipe for salvation. Neo-conservatives, for their part, see the European malaise as a form of typical Old World decadence, a collective state of nihilism bred by welfare states and soft dependence on hard American power. Their answer is a revived western world, led by the United States, engaged in an armed crusade for democracy.

But, unless one is a Catholic, a born-again Christian, or a neo-con, none of these visions is promising. The best we can hope for is that liberal democracies will muddle through this period of unease – that demagogic temptations will be resisted, and violent impulses contained. After all, democracies have weathered worse crises in the past.

That said, it would surely help if we had fewer referendums. For, contrary to what some believe, they do not strengthen democracy. They weaken it by undermining our elected representatives, whose job is to exercise their good judgment rather than voice the gut feelings of an anxious, angry people.

• Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009

From: The Guardian, Monday 30th November 2009

It wasn’t meant to go this way. For months we had been told that the efforts to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland were doomed. The last surveys suggested around 34% of the Swiss population would vote for this shocking initiative. Last Friday, in a meeting organised in Lausanne, more than 800 students, professors and citizens were in no doubt that the referendum would see the motion rejected, and instead were focused on how to turn this silly initiative into a more positive future.

Today that confidence was shattered, as 57% of the Swiss population did as the Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) had urged them to – a worrying sign that this populist party may be closest to the people’s fears and expectations. For the first time since 1893 an initiative that singles out one community, with a clear discriminatory essence, has been approved in Switzerland. One can hope that the ban will be rejected at the European level, but that makes the result no less alarming. What is happening in Switzerland, the land of my birth?

There are only four minarets in Switzerland, so why is it that it is there that this initiative has been launched? My country, like many in Europe, is facing a national reaction to the new visibility of European Muslims. The minarets are but a pretext – the UDC wanted first to launch a campaign against the traditional Islamic methods of slaughtering animals but were afraid of testing the sensitivity of Swiss Jews, and instead turned their sights on the minaret as a suitable symbol.

Every European country has its specific symbols or topics through which European Muslims are targeted. In France it is the headscarf or burka; in Germany, mosques; in Britain, violence; cartoons in Denmark; homosexuality in the Netherlands – and so on. It is important to look beyond these symbols and understand what is really happening in Europe in general and in Switzerland in particular: while European countries and citizens are going through a real and deep identity crisis, the new visibility of Muslims is problematic – and it is scary.

At the very moment Europeans find themselves asking, in a globalising, migratory world, “What are our roots?”, “Who are we?”, “What will our future look like?”, they see around them new citizens, new skin colours, new symbols to which they are unaccustomed.

Over the last two decades Islam has become connected to so many controversial debates – violence, extremism, freedom of speech, gender discrimination, forced marriage, to name a few – it is difficult for ordinary citizens to embrace this new Muslim presence as a positive factor. There is a great deal of fear and a palpable mistrust. Who are they? What do they want? And the questions are charged with further suspicion as the idea of Islam being an expansionist religion is intoned. Do these people want to Islamise our country?

The campaign against the minarets was fuelled by just these anxieties and allegations. Voters were drawn to the cause by a manipulative appeal to popular fears and emotions. Posters featured a woman wearing a burka with the minarets drawn as weapons on a colonised Swiss flag. The claim was made that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with Swiss values. (The UDC has in the past demanded my citizenship be revoked because I was defending Islamic values too openly.) Its media strategy was simple but effective. Provoke controversy wherever it can be inflamed. Spread a sense of victimhood among the Swiss people: we are under siege, the Muslims are silently colonising us and we are losing our very roots and culture. This strategy worked. The Swiss majority are sending a clear message to their Muslim fellow citizens: we do not trust you and the best Muslim for us is the Muslim we cannot see.

Who is to be blamed? I have been repeating for years to Muslim people that they have to be positively visible, active and proactive within their respective western societies. In Switzerland, over the past few months, Muslims have striven to remain hidden in order to avoid a clash. It would have been more useful to create new alliances with all these Swiss organisations and political parties that were clearly against the initiative. Swiss Muslims have their share of responsibility but one must add that the political parties, in Europe as in Switzerland have become cowed, and shy from any courageous policies towards religious and cultural pluralism. It is as if the populists set the tone and the rest follow. They fail to assert that Islam is by now a Swiss and a European religion and that Muslim citizens are largely “integrated”. That we face common challenges, such as unemployment, poverty and violence – challenges we must face together. We cannot blame the populists alone – it is a wider failure, a lack of courage, a terrible and narrow-minded lack of trust in their new Muslim citizens.

Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss citizen, is professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University. His most recent book is What I Believe

By John Pilger

5^th November 2009

In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the “unique features” of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power “which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country”.
Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”. In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” – a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.

Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother’s eight siblings used the word “stock” a great deal. You either came from “good stock” or “bad stock”. It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock – that we had what was called “the stain”.

One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. “Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!” she said. And we did – until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our “bad stock”. There was outrage. “Your son,” my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, “is no better than a damn communist”. She promised never to speak to us again.

The Australian silence has unique features.

Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sandhills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: “We are civilized today and they are not.” “They”, of course, were the Aboriginal people.

My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. We had to smash down the gate to get in.

The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence.

Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: about how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country.

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.”

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That’s the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name.

The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn’t give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: “Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It’s a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name.” That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name.

During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know.”

What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated.

One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American  who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda — “public relations”, or PR. “What matters,” he said, “is the illusion.” Like Kevin Rudd’s stage-managed press conferences outside his church, what matters is the illusion.  The symbols of Anzac are constantly manipulated in this way. Marches. Medals. Flags. The pain of a fallen soldier’s family.  Serving in the military, says the prime minister, is Australia’s highest calling. The squalor of war, the killing of civilians has no reference. What matters is the illusion.

The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror and in a massive increase in Australia’s military arsenal. Long range cruise missiles are to be targeted at our neighbours. The Rudd government and the Pentagon have launched a competition to build military robots which, it is said, will do the “army’s dirty work” in “urban combat zones”. What urban combat zones? What dirty work?

Silence.

“I confess,” wrote Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, over a century ago, “that countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.”  We Australians have been in the service of the Great Game for a very long time. Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed – that sanctifying blood sacrifice in colonial invasions is meant to prepare us for the next one?

When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a ‘training team’, requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: “Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government.”

Two versions. One for us, one for them.

Menzies spoke incessantly about “the downward thrust of Chinese communism”. What has changed? Outside the church, Kevin Rudd said we were in Afghanistan to stop another downward thrust. Both were lies.

During the Vietnam war, the Department of Foreign Affairs made a rare complaint to Washington. They complained that the British knew more about America’s objectives than its committed Australian ally. An assistant secretary of state replied.  “We have to inform the British to keep them on side,” he said. “You are with us, come what may.”

How many more wars are we to be suckered into before we break our silence?

How many more distractions must we, as a people, endure before we begin the job of righting the wrongs in our own country?

“It’s time we sang from the world’s rooftops,” said Kevin Rudd in opposition, “[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and] I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom…”.

Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie.

In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter asked this question: “Why is the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of Stalinist Russia well known in the West while American criminal actions never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

In Australia, we are trained to respect this censorship by omission. An invasion is not an invasion if “we” do it. Terror is not terror if “we” do it. A crime is not a crime if “we” commit it. It didn’t happen. Even while it was happening it didn’t happen. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.

In the arsenal of freedom we have two categories of victims. The innocent people killed in the Twin Towers were worthy victims. The innocent people killed by Nato bombers in Afghanistan are unworthy victims. Israelis are worthy. Palestinians are unworthy.  It gets complicated. Kurds who rose against Saddam Hussein were worthy. But Kurds who rise against the Turkish regime are unworthy. Turkey is a member of Nato. They’re in the arsenal of freedom.

The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an “arc of instability” that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere — from China to the Horn of Africa. In fact, an arc of instability does indeed stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this “full spectrum dominance”. More than 800 American bases are ready for war.

These bases protect a system that allows one per cent of humanity to control 40 per cent of wealth: a system that bails out just one bank with $180 billion – that’s enough to eliminate malnutrition in the world, and provide education for every child, and water and sanitation for all, and to reverse the spread of malaria. On September 11th, 2001, the United Nations reported that on that day 36,615 children had died from poverty. But that was not news.

Journalists and politicians like to say the world changed as a result of the September 11th attacks. In fact, for those countries under attack by the arsenal of freedom, nothing has changed. What has changed is not news.

According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup has taken place in the United States, with the Pentagon now ascendant in every aspect of foreign policy.

It doesn’t matter who is president – George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush’s wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to “annihilate”. Iran’s crime is its independence. Having thrown out America’s favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn’t occupy anyone else’s land and hasn’t attacked any country — unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America’s behalf.

In Australia, we are not told this. It’s taboo. Instead, we dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs.

This is modern propaganda in action, using a kind of reverse racism – the same way it deploys gender and class as seductive tools. In Barack Obama’s case, what matters is not his race or his fine words, but the power he serves.

In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: “The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst… We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum.”

Compare that with Rudd’s words the other day. “I make absolutely no apology whatsoever,” he said, “for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia … a tough line on asylum seekers.”

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term “illegal immigrants” is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear – they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.

The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire. But that’s not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, “turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe”.

Why isn’t this spelt out? Why have weasel words like “border protection” become the currency of a media crusade against fellow human beings we are told to fear, mostly Muslim people? Why have journalists, whose job is to keep the record straight, become complicit in this campaign?

After all, Australia has had some of the most outspoken and courageous newspapers in the world. Their editors were agents of people, not power. The Sydney Monitor under Edward Smith Hall exposed the dictatorial rule of Governor Darling and helped bring freedom of speech to the colony. Today, most of the Australian media speaks for power, not people.  Turn the pages of the major newspapers; look at the news on TV. Like border protection, we have mind protection. There’s a consensus on what we read, see and hear: on how we should define our politics and view the rest of the world. Invisible boundaries keep out facts and opinion that are unacceptable.

This is actually a brilliant system, requiring no instructions, no self-censorship. Journalists know not what to do. Of course, now and then the censorship is direct and crude.  SBS has banned its journalists from using the phrase “Palestinian land” to describe illegally occupied Palestine. They must describe these territories as “the subject of negotiation”. That is the equivalent of somebody taking over your home at the point of a gun and the SBS newsreader describing it as “the subject of negotiation”.

In no other democratic country is public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia. Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family - babies, grannies – are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone.

Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a “right to exist” in the Middle East: only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister ofb Australia fawning over its leaders.

In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken impunity attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy.

Are we? Or are we a murdochracy.

Rupert Murdoch set the media war agenda shortly before the invasion of Iraq when he said, “There’s going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better get it done now.”

More than a million people have been killed in Iraq as a result of that invasion - “an episode”, according to one study, “more deadly than the Rwandan genocide”. In our name. Are we aware of this in Australia?

I once walked along Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. The atmosphere was wonderful. People sat in cafes, reading. Musicians played. Poets recited. Painters painted. This was the cultural heart of Mesopotania, the great civilisation to which we in the West owe a great deal, including the written word. The people I spoke to were both Sunni and Shia, but they called themselves Iraqis. They were cultured and proud.

Today, they are fled or dead. Mutanabi Street has been blown to bits. In Baghdad, the great museums and libraries are looted. The universities are sacked. And people who once took coffee with each other, and married each other, have been turned into enemies. “Building democracy”, said Howard and Bush and Blair.

One of my favourite Harold Pinter plays is Party Time. It’s set in an apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are drinking good wine and eating canapés. They seem happy. They are chatting and  affirming and smiling. They are stylish and very self aware.

But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive and unjust, for which the people at the party share responsibility.

There’s a fleeting sense of discomfort, a silence, before the chatting and laughing resumes.

How many of us live in that apartment?

Let me put it another way. I know a very fine Israeli journalist called Amira Hass. She went to live in and report from Gaza.  I asked her why she did that. She explained how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen when she saw a group of German women looking at the prisoners, just looking, saying nothing, silent. Her mother never forgot what she called this despicable “looking from the side”.

I believe that if we apply justice and courage to human affairs, we begin to make sense of our world. Then, and only then, can we make progress.

However, if we apply justice in Australia, it’s tricky, isn’t it? Because we are then obliged to break our greatest silence – to no longer “look from the side” in our own country.

In the 1960s, when I first went to South Africa to report apartheid, I was welcomed by decent, liberal people whose complicit silence was the underpinning of that tyranny. They told me that Australians and white South Africans had much in common, and they were right. The good people of Johannesburg could live within a few kilometres of a community called Alexandra, which lacked the most basic services, the children stricken with disease. But they looked from the side and did nothing.

In Australia, our indifference is different. We have become highly competent at divide and rule: at promoting those black Australians who tell us what we want to hear. At professional conferences their keynote speeches are applauded, especially when they blame their own people and provide the excuses we need. We create boards and commissions on which sit nice, decent liberal people like the prime minister’s wife. And nothing changes.

We certainly don’t like comparisons with apartheid South Africa. That breaks the Australian silence.

Near the end of apartheid, black South Africans were being jailed at the rate of 851 per 100,000 of population.  Today, black Australians are being jailed at a national rate that is more than five times higher. Western Australia jails Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure.

In 1983, Eddie Murray was killed in a police cell in Wee Waa in New South Wales by “a person or persons unknown”. That’s how the coroner described it.  Eddie was a rising rugby league star. But he was black and had to be cut down to size. Eddie’s parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, launched one of the most tenacious and courageous campaigns for justice I’ve known anywhere. They stood up to authority. They showed grace and patience and knowledge. And they never gave in.

When Leila died in 2003, I wrote a tribute for her funeral. I described her as an Australian hero. Arthur is still fighting for justice. He’s in his sixties. He’s a respected elder, a hero. A few months ago, the police in Narrabri offered Arthur a lift home and instead took him for a violent ride in their bullwagon. He ended up in hospital, bruised and battered. That is how Australian heroes are treated.

In the same week the police did this - as they do to black Australians, almost every day - Kevin Rudd said that his government, and I quote, “doesn’t have a clear idea of what’s happening on the ground” in Aboriginal Australia.

How much information does the prime minister need? How many ideas? How many reports? How many royal commissions? How many inquests?  How many funerals? Is he not aware that Australia appears on an international “shame list” for having failed to eradicate trachoma, a preventable disease of poverty that blinds Aboriginal children?

In August this year, the United Nations once again distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa. We discriminate on the basis of race. That’s it in a nutshell. This time the UN blew a whistle on the so-called “intervention”, which began with the Howard government smearing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory with allegations of sex slavery and paedophile rings in “unthinkable numbers”, according to the minister for indigenous affairs.

In May last year, official figures were released and barely reported.

Out of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of four possible cases were identified. So much for the “unthinkable numbers”. Of course, child abuse does exist, in black Australia and white Australia. The difference is that no soldiers invaded the North Shore; no white parents were swept aside; no white welfare has been “quarantined”. What the doctors found they already knew: that Aboriginal children are at risk - from the effects of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world’s richest countries.

Billions of dollars have been spent – not on paving roads and building houses, but on a war of legal attrition waged against black communities. I interviewed an Aboriginal leader called Puggy Hunter. He carried a bulging brief case and he sat in the West Australian heat with his head in his hands.

I said, “You’re exhausted.”

He replied, “Look, I spend most of my life in meetings, fighting lawyers, pleading for our birthright. I’m just tired to death, mate.” He died soon afterwards, in his forties.

Kevin Rudd has made a formal apology to the First Australians. He spoke fine words. For many Aboriginal people, who value healing, the apology was very important. However, the Sydney Morning Herald published a remarkably honest editorial. It described the apology as “a piece of political wreckage” that “the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away… in a way that responds to some of its supporters’ emotional needs”.

Since the apology, Aboriginal poverty has got worse. The promised housing programme is a grim joke. No gap has even begun to be bridged. Instead, the federal government has threatened communities in the Northern Territory that if they don’t hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied the basic services that we, in white Australia, take for granted.

In the 1970s, Aboriginal communities were granted comprehensive land rights in the Northern Territory, and John Howard set about clawing back these rights with bribery and bullying. The Labour government is doing the same. You see, there are deals to be done. The Territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, especially uranium. And Aboriginal land is wanted as a radioactive waste dump. This is very big business, and foreign companies want a piece of the action.

It is a continuation of the darkest side of our colonial history: a land grab.

Where are the influential voices raised against this? Where are the peak legal bodies? Where are those in the media who tell us endlessly how fair-minded we are? Silence.

But let us not listen to their silence. Let us pay tribute to those Australians who are not silent, who don’t look from the side – those like Barbara Shaw and Larissa Behrendt, and the Mutitjulu community leaders and their tenacious lawyer George Newhouse, and Chris Graham, the fearless editor of the National Indigenous Times. And Michael Mansell, Lyle Munro, Gary Foley, Vince Forrester and Pat Dodson, and Arthur Murray.

And let us celebrate Australia’s historian of courage and truth, Henry Reynolds, who stood against white supremacists posing as academics and journalists. And the young people who closed down Woomera detention camp, then stood up to the political thugs who took over Sydney during Apec two years ago. And good for Ian Thorpe, the great swimmer, whose voice raised against the intervention has yet to find an echo among the pampered sporting heroes in a country where the gap between white and black sporting facilities and opportunity has closed hardly at all.

Silences can be broken, if we will it. In one of the greatest poems of the English language, Percy Shelley wrote this:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep has fallen on you
Ye are many – they are few

But we need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place. The major western democracies are moving towards a corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war.

This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

How do we change this? We start by looking beyond the stereotypes and clichés that are fed to us as news. Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge, we should storm what he called the Bastille of words. Tom Paine did not have the internet, but the internet on its own is not enough.

We need an Australian glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice, disobedience. It was Edmund Burke who spoke of the press as a Fourth Estate. I propose a people’s Fifth Estate that monitors, deconstructs and counters the official news. In every news room, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.

The public are not the problem. It’s true some people don’t give a damn – but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films. What people want is to be engaged – a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilised and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness.

This is already happening in countries in Latin America where ordinary people have discovered a confidence in themselves they did not know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded.

“The struggle of people against power, “wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

In Australia, we have much to be proud of – if only we knew about it and celebrated it. Since Francis McCarty and Mary Palmer landed here, we’ve progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the world’s first 35-hour week, only because pensions and a basic wage and child endowment were pioneered in New South Wales.

In my lifetime, we have become one of the most culturally diverse places on earth, and it has happened peacefully, by and large. That is a remarkable achievement – until we look for those whose Australian civilisation has seldom been acknowledged, whose genius for survival and generosity and forgiving have rarely been a source of pride. And yet, they remain, as Henry Reynolds wrote, the whispering in our hearts. For they are what is unique about us.

I believe the key to our self respect - and our legacy to the next generation - is the inclusion and reparation of the First Australians. In other words, justice. There is no mystery about what has to be done. The first step is a treaty that guarantees universal land rights and a proper share of the resources of this country.

Only then can we solve, together, issues of health, poverty, housing, education, employment. Only then can we feel a pride that comes not from flags and war. Only then can we become a truly independent nation able to speak out for sanity and justice in the world, and be heard.

I’ve been considering some of the larger features of the architecture of the Sīrah recently and I find – and I’m sure most Muslims find this when they open its pages – an extraordinary immediacy to the story that it tells.

Some stories – classic stories – of course are timeless; people are still enthralled by Homer, by Shakespeare, but the Great North Legends. There’s something different when we look at the Sīrah of the Prophet (saw) as well as being a great yarn, it seems to leap out of the pages at us with an alarming immediacy.

Sometimes when I get a moment or two to think, I try to work out what it is that makes that story so immediate. In the context of this meeting one might invoke most obviously, something that’s very obviously there – hard wired into the logic boards of the Prophetic drama – but which we tend not to think about, which is that we take the story to a cosmic struggle between ‘The One’ – la ilaha ill Allah – and the superstitious many of the Arabs.

We take it to the heroic story whereby selfishness in terms of local, tribal vendettas which had been plaguing Arabia for a thousand years are replaced by the principle of a single law applicable to everybody. We tend to think of it in those terms – in terms of Tawhīd and in terms of sharī’a. But there’s another dimension that was clearly important to many of the protagonists themselves which is an economic dimension to the sīrah.

When you consider the divine wisdom in sending the seal of the Messenger (saw) to that, then and there you recognize first of all, the magnitude of the divine estimation of the man (saw) because he really was up against it. Sent to a people mā unthira abā’uhum – whose forefathers had not been warned, taking them from one end of the religious spectrum – polytheism – to the other end – monotheism; taking them from lawlessness to strict lawfulness; taking them from a belief in nothing in particular to a belief in life after death, so, many extraordinary challenges he met and successfully faced. But one of them that we tend not to focus on is the fact that the divine wisdom sent him to a community that was mercantile.

We think of the 7th Century Arabs as wondering Bedouin hanging about the desert, stories around the campfire not caring too much about higher things. But the reality of the sīrah is that it’s essentially an urban story, and it’s a tale of two cities, and the hijra is a city from a mercantile, plutocratic immoral elite, to a new space that is to become a zone for the muhājirīn and for the masākīn and for the poor and for the mustad’afīn. We tend to ignore this as Muslims frequently, that the reason for the struggle is for the mustad’afīn, not for waving a particular flag, but for the mustad’afin – for those who are made weak.

So he sent the Prophet (saw) to – we can’t really use the word ‘capitalist’ because it’s so long ago – but to a strongly mercantile, selfish, detribalising community – the Qureysh. That is where the divine wisdom has chosen to place this final, Jewel – like soul.

And we find this is a community where tribal ties are breaking down; religion is not taken seriously by too many people. It’s kind of like modern, Western religion – it’s a civic religion – you have your own faith, your own little community, and your own little festivals, and your funny little superstitions stories. In the public space, what counts is money and certain types of civic relationships. The religious thing is kind of like ‘your tribe does this, and your deity does etc. we don’t care if you’re worshipping Al-‘Auza Armanāt or Hubal, it’s really the public concern. What really is the centre of the city of Mecca and what people really worry about is the economic reality. If you threaten that then you’re really a trouble maker.

Mecca before Islām is the city in where Umāya ibn Khalaf can walk past the Ka’ba with his entourage of feudal servants and slaves, and there be no legal contract at all between them.

The Prophet (saw) is sent to that people, and it’s no coincidence that his message begins among the victims of that unjust economic order. Who are the victims? The woman and the slaves are the ones being trampled upon – they’re at the bottom of the heap and they’re the ones who first start to respond. That is axiomatic in Prophetic religion. That’s where the truth tends to spread – not with the rich and the powerful and the prestigious and the famous, but it’s the broken-hearted – the munkasirāt Al-Qulūb – whose hearts are broken by the weight that is pressed upon them by people whose main concerns are farming an extra dollar.

That’s why sometimes in the West – in America for instance – sometimes you hear Arabic expat communities saying ‘why don’t white people become more Muslim?’ because they see all these black people and Hispanics coming into the mosque and they get anxious – they’d really like to see more kind of people like me [Audience laugh]. When you ask them why, they don’t have a terribly good way of expressing what’s actually in their hearts. There are issues of race there, there are issues of self-esteem, and there are some not very nice attitudes that bring that about. But the reality is, if you look at the sīrah and you look at the Prophetic nature of divine providence in the ages, that’s where the spiritual wealth is distributed.

In an unrealistic, competitive, cruel, computer-obsessed society – it’s amongst those people that you will find the soft hearts that will respond to the truth. The African – Americans, the Hispanic Muslims, in Australia there are more Aboriginal converts to Islām than there are white converts to Islam despite the demographic disparities. Latin America – it’s in the flabella’s that the religion prospers, that’s the reality of Tawhīd. Those are the people to whom it appealed, primarily only of course become its destiny is universal. And sometimes those Arabic ex-patriot communities driving their Mercedes and living in the exurbs and really hoping that people assume they’re white – don’t really like to be told that. Often Muslims are just as uncomfortable to be told what the sīrah is really about, as non-Muslims. Because it isn’t about Middle class complacency it doesn’t say you can’t have a car and you can’t have a decent income, and you can’t succeed. It’s not a monastic aesthetical tradition that turns its back on the world. But it does say very sternly that it’s with the people, whose hearts are broken that Allah is with, anā ‘aind Al-munkasirāti qulūbahum – ‘I am with the broken hearted’, as He says (swt) in the hadīth qudsī. That’s where you expect truth to exist.

And in this country that’s what a lot of people can’t understand. They can’t get that some middle=class guy in a big cathedral who goes to Church once a year on Easter Day, might actually not be who God is interested in. And that God is actually interested in precisely the people whom the establishment, ethos and all of the media are least respectful of, which is the toothless old Bangladeshis in the mosque in Brick Lane, which is really where the deep process of spiritual self- noting and the remembrance of Allah (swt) is taking place.
That’s the radicalism of the Prophetic vision. It doesn’t say revolution; it does say, revolutionise the way in which you categorise people. A luminous heart is much more likely to be the old Bangladeshi housewife in the tenement building than the stock broker in his BMW, who sometimes goes to a revivalist Christian Meeting.

That’s the nature of Tawhīd and this is a stern, absolute, Prophetic teaching. Allah is with the oppressed Israelites, not with Far’ūn. Again and again these stories are to remind us of that uncomfortable fact. I find it uncomfortable.
I recently calculated that I’m endlessly grumbling about my academic salaries – we always do – because we work so hard and we do such important things and we get so much less than the doctors, so it’s obviously wrong, but actually I’m in the top 1% of global earners; I told my children and they kind of respected me a bit more when they heard that [Audience laugh] although it didn’t affect their pocket money.

That’s the reality, but where the divine regard truly is, is with those people whom the system really has no time for at all, or regards them as backward people, sexists, homophobes, fundamentalists, useless immigrants, asylum seekers – the most despised people are likely to be where the divine pleasure is most likely to be found.

So where does this leave us? It leaves us contemplating the fact of the hijra: the Prophet (saw) is sent to this mercantile community and his opponents are all millionaires of their time; hard hearted plutocrats. What they really want is not for him to say ‘you can worship your God, as long as you let us worship ours.’ But their deities are linked inextricably to this oppressive system. Their deities are unable to inspire them with the long term vision and the humanity and softness of heart that enables them actually to do something about the people in the street selling the Big Issue.
In our context we have the same sort of Umay ibn Khalaf-type of arrogance, except in our system which is so brilliantly designed; we tend to sweep away from our sight, the reminders that there are victims of the system we have created.

One of the consequences of globalization is that we don’t see the poor; the poor are the ‘third world’ doing the jobs which we have farmed out to them. Why have call centres in London when you can open one in Bangalore and pay them 5% of what you pay them in the UK? And it doesn’t matter if they burn out because they’re being worked too hard, they’re not unionized, they have mental problems, you never get to see that, you just get the nice Indian voice selling you a mortgage, saying ‘Hello, I am Sebastian’ [Abdul Hakim Murad imitates an Indian voice; Audience laugh].
You don’t know that he’s probably really suffering and he’s not allowed to talk to you because there’s an inspector wandering to see they’re on the case all the time and there’s a million other Indians outside waiting to take that job. It’s not very nice.

We all know about Nike shoes and the consequences of globalization. Occasionally these break surface in order to prick our complacency, but generally not enough to make a real difference. We talk about ‘trickle-down economics’ and eventually the ‘third world’ will become like us, but there is the other paradox: the other obsession of Umay on khalaf is that ‘I have a million dinars, next year in shā’ Allah, I’ll make another million,’ and it goes on forever.
And we Muslims tend to be the same. In Abu Dhabi we’ve got a seven star hotel so is it possible to have an eight star hotel? How many more stars can there be? It’s an infinite process because human ambition, human vanity is endless, and we’re never really satisfied.
The hadīth says, low kana lil insāni wādin min dthahab l’temenna an yukūna lahu wādiyan.

If a man had a valley of gold, he would wish that he had two valleys. That’s our nature.
The process of wealth-creation is halāl because it’s Allah’s rizq and we’re grateful for it – there are adāb – and we have a great mercantile civilization has Habib Ali indicated. These are people who couple the da’wa with making a living, but there are limits. There are limits.

The problem with the modern system is that there’s nothing about it that can ever suggest that there’s a limit. Somebody comes up with a book sometimes, like Fred Hirsch’s book Social Limits to Growth, which points out that after a certain point people don’t get happier, as they get richer. And some of you might have seen the headline just two weeks ago where everybody was trying to figure out why it is that although we’re twice as wealthy in this country as we were in 1968, by the conventional indices which of course is basically material indices even, we’re actually less happy.
So what exactly do we mean by progress? How much further can it go before we get even less happy and we’re working much harder are messing up the environment at an ever-increasing rate. Is there something in the system that can genuinely put the brakes on that, and push as into a new, less-greedy, less crazy circle of destruction and increasing  – it seems – unhappiness?

Secularity can’t because secularity only knows matter, and take matter away from it, it’s diminishing. Religion is the alternative to that. All the world’s great religions are alternatives to that.

The sīrah gives you a particular vision because of all of the foundation stories of the world religions, the one that is clearly couched in terms of doing something practical for the mustad’afīn and for the outcast, doing something practical about an oppressive economic order doing something practical about the fact that human beings eventually become diabetics and it’s not ideal. That there is an alternative and the alternative is the hijra to Medina, where an extraordinary different image of humanity is created.

Not a welfare state or the state taking over things that should be a free gift of soft human hearts, not that at all; but rather a society where you don’t see the mustad’afīn unsupported. Where the muhājirīn, when they came from Mecca, immediately the Ansār give them half of what they have; half of my house is yours, half of my wealth is yours, extraordinary things that you would never consider. That’s the vision he had (saw) the hijra is an economic and social fact, as well as a political and ‘tawhīdic’ fact. It’s about moving from unrestrained consumerism and greed, to a social vision in which people genuinely have a reason to make social sacrifices.

Now, it’s time to pray Maghrib and I’m not going to detain you much longer. But the moral of what I’m saying is clear. The internal logic of the system, however efficient, and however ethically sensitive it may claim to be, the internal logic of an ultimately material system is one of endless expansion, and more growth.

We know that there are physical and environmental limits to how much more growth there can be because the resources of the planet are finite.

There is something insane about a model of growth: the West is endlessly pressing on the ‘third world’ because if those third world countries and Thailand and Zimbabwe and Malawi and all of those places had Western lifestyles and levels of consumption, the global environment would collapse over night. We are urging on the third world something that if they actually did, it would kill us all. That’s the lunacy of the system. So we need a long term wisdom – a Prophetic wisdom – we need a prophetic wisdom that is based in these two great principles of the sīrah, one of which is zuhud – us being happy with little – a very, very un-modern ethic – but something that all of us detect at certain times. At Ramadan for example, and genuinely make a sacrifice, and somehow when we lose something and we’ve given it to a good cause – when we’ve not experienced a pleasure – we feel something deeper, more calm in ourselves.

The other principle is the principle of the mustad’afīn – the weak and the outcast who have always been at the centre of the monotheistic message, because Allah (swt) is God of Justice as well as a God of Mercy, and for both of those reasons, He commands us however successful we might be, in our legitimate halāl, mercantile pursuits, to put them at the centre rather than the margins of our concerns. And if the Muslim World, particularly, wealthy people in the Muslim World, actually put this into practice, rather than just endlessly getting angry about the American Empire building or Palestine – if they put that into practice, if even 1/10 of the wealthy in the Muslim World actually paid their zakat – most of the problems in the Muslim World would be overcome and you would see something of the beauty of the Medinan alternative that would overcome so many difficulties in our communities and the knots in our hearts.

So we ask Allah (swt) to soften our hearts, soften the hearts of the wealthy, and to give us true inspiration from this economic dimension of the sīrah of the chosen one (saw).

Al-salām ‘alaykum wa rahmat Allah

Globalised Before Globalisation: The Forgotten History of the Muslim Trader

Date: Wednesday, 7th May 2008
Time: 18:30 – 20:30
Venue: Buckingham Suite, The Britannia International Hotel, Marsh Wall, Canary Wharf, London E14 9SJ

Details: Public Lecture by Habib Ali and Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad. By caravan, sea and on foot, Muslim traders spread wealth and faith throughout the world – from the Silk Road to the Sahara and beyond. Their good conduct and savvy business acumen helped create great societies.  Their peaceful ways won people over. In an age of so-called “disaster capitalism” what is the role of Muslim business people in bringing good ethics and a spiritual consciousness back to what has become a dog-eat-dog world?

Partners: This event is co-organised with Islamic Circles and Wharf Muslim Association.

]]> http://khutbahbank.org.uk/2009/10/globalised-before-globalisation-inspirational-khutbah/feed/ 0 http://khutbahbank.org.uk/2009/08/do-unto-others-inspirational-khutbah/ http://khutbahbank.org.uk/2009/08/do-unto-others-inspirational-khutbah/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:17:42 +0000 Arshad Gamiet http://khutbahbank.org.uk/?p=2900 Do Unto Others

Karen Armstrong

The Guardian, Friday 14th November 2008

The practice of compassion is central to every one of the major world religions – but sometimes you would never know it. Instead, religion is associated with violence, intolerance and seems more preoccupied by dogmatic or sexual orthodoxy.

People don’t even seem to know what compassion is; they imagine that it means to feel pity for somebody, whereas the root meaning of this Greco-Latin world is “to feel with” the other, realising at a profound level that we share the same human predicament. This is crucial at a time when we are bound together – politically, economically, and electronically – as never before but have rarely been more perilously divided.

This is why we have launched a Charter for Compassion. During the next few days, millions of Jews, Christians and Muslims worldwide will be invited to comment, stage by stage, on a draft Charter on a multilingual website. Later, a council of inspirational thinkers representing the different faiths will examine their findings and write the final version. Finally, there will be a large signing ceremony.

The charter will not just be a statement of intent, but will call for practical action: asking preachers, for example, to emphasise the importance of good interfaith relations; calling upon scholars to examine the difficult passages of their scriptures, and asking educators to find ways of presenting compassion to the young as a dynamic, attractive ideal.

Why is this important? Because the religions should be making a major contribution to what must be the chief task of our day: to build a global community where all peoples can live together in mutual respect and where the powerful do not treat other nations as they would not wish to be treated themselves. If we do not achieve this, it is unlikely that we will have a viable world to hand on to the next generation. Any ideology – religious or secular – that breeds hatred and disdain for others is failing the test of our time.

The first person to formulate what has become known as the Golden Rule was Confucius: “Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you.” It was, he said, the central thread that ran through all his teaching and should be practised “all day and every day”.

It requires us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain and refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Every single one of the major faiths has developed its own version of the Golden Rule and has insisted that it is the prime religious duty.

“My religion is kindness,” says the Dalai Lama; faith that moves mountains is worthless without charity, said St Paul; the Golden Rule was the essence of Torah, said Rabbi Hillel: everything else was “only commentary”. The bedrock message of the Qur’an is not a doctrine but a summons to build a just and decent society where there is a fair distribution of wealth and vulnerable people are treated with absolute respect.

The religions also insist that it is not sufficient to confine your compassion to your own group. You must have what one of the Chinese sages called jian ai, “concern for everybody” – honouring the stranger and loving your enemies.

Why, then, do we hear so little about compassion from the religious? Because whether they are religious or secular, people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Certainly the religious traditions have a deeply intransigent strain. But we have a choice. We can either emphasise this intolerance, as extremists and fundamentalists do, or we can make a concerted effort to make the compassionate voice of religion audible in our troubled world.

Do we need God and/or religion to be compassionate? Of course not. That is why we hope that atheists and agnostics, instead of berating religion (a policy that, as history shows, tends to make religious movements more extreme), will also sign up to the charter, working alongside the religious for a more compassionate world.

The standard assumption is that women’s lives have dramatically improved over the last 50 years. They have considerably more personal freedom; and opportunities for education and employment have been transformed. As a result they have much greater financial independence, which has given them more power to shape their lives. So far, so easy.

But something odd is going on that no one can explain. These huge social changes are not making women happier, and, according to several significant studies, women’s happiness relative to men’s has declined in the last 25 years. This includes women of all age groups, and it is evident in many countries, particularly in the US and the UK.

Let’s start with the most alarming evidence. It comes from the West and Sweeting study of 15-year-olds conducted in exactly the same place in Scotland in 1987, 1999 and 2006. When the 1999 results were published, there was concern that the incidence of common mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks and anhedonia(loss of capacity to experience pleasure) had significantly increased for girls from 19% to 32%. The increase for boys was much smaller, at only 2%. But the latest set of results are even more dramatic. There has been an increase for both sexes: boys are now on 21%, and girls are at a staggering rate of 44%.

The rate of increase is appalling. Over a third of girls agreed “they felt constantly under strain”; those who “felt they could not overcome their difficulties” had more than doubled to 26%. The number who agreed with “thinking of yourself as a worthless person” had trebled between 1987 and 2006. These findings could partly explain the recent reports of sharp rises in girls’ binge drinking and aggressive behaviour.

The first thought is that perhaps this gender gap is a teenage thing. Other studies showing a marked increase in mental ill-health of teenagers have prompted speculation that the transition to adulthood now is much more difficult and demanding. But the gap in mental ill-health between men and women is just as striking in other age groups; an NHS study published this year showed that between 1993 and 2007 common mental disorders had risen by a fifth for women aged between 45 and 64 (there had been no change in men), and among the over-75s, they were twice as likely in women as men.

Various explanations are put forward. Women’s levels of serotonin are more vulnerable, it has been suggested, but that doesn’t explain the change over time. Women are struggling with work and family, looking after their elderly parents, or coping with empty nest after children have left. Two American academics checked all the data from the US and the European Union to try to hunt down the explanation.

Stevenson and Wolfers found that American women – of all social classes, ages and whether they worked, stayed home, had kids or did not – had seen a decline in happiness since the early 70s. Thirty years ago, women reported higher rates of subjective wellbeing than men in the US. This advantage has been entirely eroded, and in many instances it is now men who are happier than women. So how did women manage to end up, after a generation of advances in gender equality, less happy typically than their mothers at their age?

There are no easy answers, conclude Stevenson and Wolfers. They pose the extraordinary question: “Did men garner a disproportionate share of the benefits of the women’s movement?” They suggest “perhaps the wellbeing data point to differential impacts of social changes on men and women, with women being particularly hurt by declines in family life, rises in inequality or reductions in social cohesion”. One finding they highlight is that women’s satisfaction with their financial situation has declined while men’s has remained stable – one possibility is that there has been a change “in the reference group” or expectations for women so that their lives are more likely to come up short.

This latter is key to the work of another American psychologist, Jean Twenge, whose most recent work has been to analyse what she describes as a “narcissism epidemic” in the US that is disproportionately affecting women. Her meta-analysis covered 37,000 college students. It found that in 1982, 15% got high scores on a narcissism personality index; by 2006 it was 25% – and the largest share of this increase was women.

The narcissist has huge expectations of themselves and their lives. Typically, they make predictions about what they can achieve that are unrealistic, for example in terms of academic grades and employment. They seek fame and status, and the achievement of the latter leads to materialism – money enables the brand labels and lavish lifestyle that are status symbols. It is the Paris Hilton syndrome across millions of lives.

Twenge points to the fact that in the 1950s only 12% of college students agreed that “I am an important person”, but by the late 80s it was 80%. In 1967, only 45% agreed that “being well-off is an important life goal”, but by 2004 the figure was 74%.

The problem, Twenge believes, derives in part from a generation of indulgent parents who have told their children how special they are. An individualistic culture has, in turn, reinforced a preoccupation with the self and its promotion. The narcissist is often rewarded – they tend to be outgoing, good at selling themselves, and very competitive: they are the types who will end up as Sir Alan’s apprentice. But their success is shortlived; the downside is that they have a tendency to risky behaviour, addictive disorders, have difficulties sustaining intimate relationships, and are more prone to aggressive behaviour when rejected.

The narcissism of young women could just be a phase they will grow out of, admits Twenge, but she is concerned that the evidence of narcissism is present throughout highly consumerist, individualistic societies – and women suffer disproportionately from the depression and anxiety linked to it.

This is what alarms psychologist Oliver James. He is working on an updated version of his pioneering Britain on the Couch, which first argued that mental ill-health had increased despite more wealth. He worries that the Scottish teenage girls are the “canaries” down the mines, giving powerful indications of a set of social influences that are deeply damaging their wellbeing. He points to the pressures of a “consumerised, commercially driven version of femininity” that puts huge emphasis on girls’ appearance.

Girls are more compliant and eager to please – that is how they have always been socialised – but now the dominant social expectations of them are deeply destructive of their happiness. Breast augmentation quintupled in 2006 in the US, Twenge points out. The expectations of girls and women have multiplied and intensified – on every front, from passing exams to looking good and having more friends and better photos on Facebook. Technology proliferates the places in which one is required to self-promote.

One possibility is that women’s identity has always been framed around relationships – as mothers, daughters, wives, friends and sisters. “Relationality” is still central to how women see their lives, and yet it is entirely at odds with an individualistic, intensely competitive, narcissistic culture. Women, brought up to seek social approval, battle between competing frames of reference, and many end up feeling failure and inadequacy on multiple fronts.

guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 July 2009 23.55 BST

Article history

Denny Pattyn is an American priest of a special kind. In 1996 in Arizona, he set up a programme by the name of the Silver Ring Thing with the aim of urging young Americans to refrain from sex before marriage, convincing them that it is fornication, and sinful. Pattyn regularly holds events attended by hundreds of young Americans who read the Bible with him and then pledge before the Lord to preserve their virginity for their future spouses. At the end of the celebration, each puts on their left hand a silver ring inscribed with Biblical verses, which they wear until they marry.

The surprising thing is that Pattyn’s campaign has won a large following in the US, and received funding from the government. On French television I saw a long programme about Pattyn in which his followers defended virginity as a measure of virtue. A French psychologist appeared to discuss their ideas respectfully.

I began to wonder: Pattyn’s ideas about chastity as a measure of virtue are completely in line with Arab Muslim culture, but yet on French TV they deal with him politely because he is American, Christian and white. If an Arab or Muslim had said the same thing, he would have faced a barrage of accusations that he was backward, barbaric and contemptuous of women.

This western double standard is widespread, and there are countless examples. Elections recently took place in Iran and the winner was President Ahmadinejad. But there were allegations of vote-rigging. Western governments were up in arms, issuing strongly worded statements in support of democracy in Iran.

Yet Egyptian elections have been rigged regularly for many years and President Mubarak has taken office through rigged referendums, so why hasn’t that provoked such anger? The outcry is not to promote democracy but rather to embarrass the Iranian regime, which is hostile towards Israel and trying to develop its nuclear capabilities, which are a threat to western imperialism. The Egyptian government, on the other hand, in spite of being despotic and corrupt, is obedient and tame, so the western media overlook its faults, however horrendous they might be.

When the young Iranian woman called Neda Soltan was shot by an unknown assailant, her death quickly became global headline news. Western politicians were so moved that even President Obama, close to tears, said that it was heartbreaking. A few weeks later in the German city of Dresden, an Egyptian woman called Marwa el-Sherbini was attending the trial of a man who racially abused her because she was wearing a hijab. Fined €2,800 for insulting her, the extremist then went on a rampage, attacking Marwa and her husband with a knife. Marwa died on the spot.

The murder of Marwa and the murder of Neda should be seen as crimes of equal barbarity and of equal impact. But the murder of the Egyptian woman in the hijab did not break Obama’s heart and did not receive front-page coverage in the west. The murder of Neda incriminates the Iranian regime, whereas the murder of Marwa shows that terrorism is not confined to Arabs and Muslims – a white German terrorist kills an innocent women and tries to kill her husband simply because she is Muslim and wears a hijab. The western media do not care to convey this message.

In short the west, politically and in the media, generally adopts points of view and policies that are hostile towards Arabs and Muslims. But are Arabs and Muslims merely the innocent victims of this prejudice? Definitely not. We cannot use “the west” as an exclusive term meaning only one thing. There are millions of ordinary westerners who neither love nor hate Islam, simply because they know nothing about it.

Now, what of the image that Muslims themselves convey of Islam? If an ordinary westerner decided to find out the truth about Islam through what Muslims do and say, what would he find? Osama bin Laden would look out at him, as though emerging from a medieval cave to announce that Islam ordered him to kill as many western crusaders as possible, even if they are innocent civilians who have done nothing to merit punishment. Then the westerner would read how the Taliban has decided to close girls’ schools, arguing that Islam bans the education of women on the grounds that they are as intellectually and religiously deficient.

After that, the westerner would read statements from those who call themselves Islamic jurists, saying that a Muslim who converts to another faith must repent or have his throat cut. Some jurists will assert that Islam does not recognise democracy and that it is a duty to obey a Muslim ruler even if he oppresses and robs his subjects. They will welcome women covering their faces with the niqab so that those who see them are not driven by sexual desire.

The westerner will not find out that Islam gave men and women completely equal rights and obligations. He will not find out that in the eyes of Islam if someone kills an innocent it is as if he has killed everyone. He will never find out that the niqab has nothing to do with Islam but is a custom that came to us with the money of the Gulf from a backward desert society. The westerner will never find out that the real message of Islam is freedom, justice and equality, and that it guarantees freedom of belief, in that those who wish may believe and those who do not, need not, and that democracy is essential to Islam, in that a Muslim ruler cannot take office without the consent and choice of Muslims. After all that, can we blame the westerner if he considers Islam the religion of backwardness and terrorism?

Last year, I had to make a speech in Austria about the reality of Islam. I told how the Prophet Muhammad was so mild-mannered that when he knelt down to pray his grandsons Hassan and Hussein would often jump on his back in play. He would stay kneeling so as not to disturb the boys and then he would resume his prayers. I asked the audience: “Can you imagine that a man who stopped praying for the sake of children would advocate killing and terrorising innocent people?”

Many listened to this story with interestand later asked me how they could obtain real information about Islam. It is true that the west’s policy treats us as colonial peoples who do not deserve to enjoy the rights of their citizens, and it is true that its media is mostly biased against Arabs and Muslims – but it is also true that the retrograde Wahhabi reading of Islam that is now widespread helps to entrench an unfair and mistaken image.

It is our duty to start with ourselves. We must save Islam from all the nonsense, falsehoods and retrograde ideas that have attached themselves to it. Democracy is the solution.

By Uthman Lateef

Seldom do people in our contemporary world rise to heights or slump to lows and annex the public imagination, arousing sentiments of grief, loss and world-weariness, quite like Michael Jackson. His death, amid extensive preparation for his comeback tour, ‘This is It’, came as a cataclysmic shock to his fans, an abrupt jolt to cynics who had so many unanswered questions, and a pensive reminder to us all about the fragility of human affairs. ‘This is it’ and it really was ‘it’.

Michael Jackson’s life was one clouded by so many abnormalities; his early rise to fame and warped transition to adulthood, radical colour alteration, obsessive reliance on cosmetic surgery and Peter Pan-like persona allowed the unapologetic media machine to exploit his bizarre antics for worldwide public consumption. Michael Jackson became the world’s best loved phantom, a character that thrived on media publicity and shaped his existence around the ‘off the wall’, ironically the title of his fifth studio album released in 1979.

Michael was a tragic victim of his own success. This, because the success he found was in the realm of an ever-changing entertainment industry; Michael was neither always relevant nor always admired. His success was set on a shaky pedestal from where it and he was then knocked down. Where the literary critic William D. Howells (1837-1920) once remarked that ‘What the American public wants in the theatre is a tragedy with a happy ending’, this time the happy beginning ended with a tragedy as it did for Elvis Presley and countless others who became entangled into a world of false promises; once the initial glitter had worn off, the ever tedious task of maintaining appearances was no ‘Thriller’. Despite the money and fame, Michael Jackson was said to have died an extremely lonely man.

“But as for him who shall turn away from remembering Me – his shall be a life of narrow scope and on the Day of Resurrection We shall raise him up blind.” Al-Qur’an 39:23

Descriptions of Michael Jackson in life and now in death overflow with superlatives from ‘the King of Pop’ to the ‘Greatest’. The public grief following his sudden demise was evidenced, in part, by the so-far 12 suicides in his memory, the first of whom was a Tunisian teenage girl. That someone could take their life because Michael Jackson had died is a patent example of the extent to which the lives of some people are entirely shaped around and dependent on the artificially media produced image of a celebrity. Clearly then, the vacuum of our experiences are made emptier by our anxious straining with the artificial to fill them synthetically. Where Michael was plagued by his desire to be someone so unnaturally different, then we too, in our adulation of him may be filling our vacuums with the artificial. Celebrities like Michael are of course creations of the media and there is a danger that our fascination with such celebrities makes them receptacles into which we pour own purposelessness. Where the celebrity is the creature of the tabloid press, music videos and worldwide gossip, this very agency which gives the celebrity his name and fame is the very same agency that in turn destroys him. As Michael, and others who took his path, was ‘made’ by publicity, so too will he be ‘unmade’ by publicity. And then where does that leave his die-hard fans?

In our obsession with celebrities and entertainment we fail to give recognition to the oftentimes unsung heroes – doctors, teachers, aid workers. Their biographies become dry and unglamorous and are unable to satiate our thirst for gossip and scandal. Their accounts nevertheless are usually purposeful and genuine. Where one eulogy of Michael was that ‘he made the whole world dance’, then in the realm of serious pursuits where one labours to fulfil the purpose of his existence, Michael has no relevance. This is not to deny the good that Michael was known to have done; his care for children and world poverty drove him to donate large sums of money to alleviate world afflictions. But it is not the purpose of this article to exonerate or condemn Michael; it is instead an attempt to place things into perspective.

“Know that the life of this world is but play and amusement, pomp and mutual boasting and multiplying, (in rivalry) among yourselves, riches and children. Here is a similitude: How rain and the growth which it brings forth, delight (the hearts of) the tillers; soon it withers; thou wilt see it grow yellow; then it becomes dry and crumbles away.” Al-Qur’an 57:20

The verse is a powerful reminder of the illusory and ephemeral nature of our world. If we allow our enjoyments to define us, so that play, amusement, pomp, boasting and taking indulgent delight in wealth, become the raison d’être of our existence, then soon enough whatever we have amassed for our or others’ gluttonous consumption will wither away; it will cease to be the means for our contentment and will inversely become our grief and remorse because it does not remain nor is it ever enough. Likewise, a celebrity’s fame soon withers as time expires; Michael’s plan to reverse the negativity he had received during his high-profile trials in the US by performing a staggering 50 shows scheduled only weeks after his death should bring to mind the permanently relevant advice of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), who once drew some lines in the sand, and said:

“This [line] is Man, and this is his hope, and [the third line, between them] is his appointed time for death. So while he is in this state [in hope] the closer line [death] takes him.”

Perhaps it was too late for Michael to look attentively at the ‘Man in the Mirror’ and ask him ‘to change his ways’. Where Michael was killed by time – suffocated and then starved by his own fame, the man we see in the mirror is still a reminder to us that a lot needs to change. Islam promotes an awareness far removed from vain pursuits that provide only an intermittent thrill at the expense of what is more profound, life-changing, and what leads to the permanent –

“All that is on earth will perish: But the Face of your Lord will abide (for ever),- full of Majesty, Bounty and Honour.” 55: 26-27.

The Islamic Shari’ah aims at the protection of an individual from all forms of exploitation and society from the harms of an individual. Its focus on the needs of the society before the desires of the individual ensures that one person’s pursuits, of whatever type, are not at the detriment of the healthy functioning of society.

In essence, there is no real tragedy in Michael Jackson’s fall, for he has returned to his proper anonymous and original station. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) reminded his last audience in his last sermon,

‘Oh people, all of you are from Adam, and Adam was from dust.’

Michael will, as we all will, become passé, pass out of the picture; the bright lights, music, entertainment, will soon be replaced by a real world not glossed over by synthetic, a real ‘Neverland’ where people really never die.

And it is the seeking of the good of that abode that we must make our priority in life.

The takeaway line from the Gallup poll (pdf) on Muslims and integration in western Europe is very simple: there is no correlation between religious observance and feeling alienated from the society around you; but this is what the society around Muslims believes.

Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Centre for Muslim Studies, said at the report’s launch that:

If the integration debate defines people as people looking the same or thinking the same in terms of morality, then it’s natural for general public to assume Muslims are not loyal, but if the focus is widened and takes into account how people actually identify with their country and how much they identify with institutions, then it would draw a different picture. The data would suggest that the public is getting a narrow picture of integration and thereby drawing a false conclusion.

The figures that Gallup has produced are quite startling, and apply both to beliefs and symbols. In England, Germany and France, the three countries surveyed, Muslims are twice as likely as the general public to suppose that Muslims are loyal citizens. In Germany and the UK, they have higher confidence in the police and the judiciary than the general public (in France, where they are also over-represented in the prison system, they also mistrust the authorities more).

They are also, in all the countries surveyed, much less likely to want to live in communities made up predominantly of their own ethnic and religious population than the general public, though British Muslims are those most favourable towards the idea in Europe.

The second, startling fact, is that while almost everyone agrees that having a job is very important if you are to integrate into wider society, British Muslims place less value on both jobs and education as necessary for integration than any other group. Even so, 70% of them agree that finding a job is necessary to integrate, and 76% that education is (compared to the 95% of German Muslims, for instance, who hold these views.) In this light, it is frightening that the actual employment for British Muslims is only 38% – again, a huge outlier from all the other populations surveyed.

These polls are not ideal. The sample size, though large in absolute terms (with 500 Muslims and 1000 non-Muslims surveyed in each country) is not large enough to eliminate a large margin of error (5% for the Muslim figures, 3% for the general public) so only the broadest pictures are trustworthy and some results, such as the 0% of British Muslims apparently tolerant of homosexual acts are not to be taken literally. The full report is available here as a pdf for anyone who wants to poke at the figures.

Within this broad and blurry picture, it is possible to see the outlines of a clear argument between the British, or multicultural, model of integration and the French, secularising one. On some measures, the British come out worse, or at least more boorish: only half of British Muslims strongly agree that they always treat of other faiths with respect, compared to two-thirds of French Muslims; in both cases, the figure for the general population is about 10% higher. Similarly, and this is surely part of the legacy of the Rushdie affair, five times as many non-Muslim as Muslim Britons feel that integration demands that people accept public comments they perceive as offensive about their faith or ethnicity. In both France and Germany, Muslims are less sensitive and non-Muslims less keen on their right to offend.

In practice, however, 90% of all the groups surveyed agree that they had been treated with respect all day the day before.

The French, however, are much more divided about issues of religious symbolism, and much less likely to tolerate headscarves as legitimate symbols of loyal diversity. More than half the British public thinks that removing the veil is necessary to integrate minorities, compared to only an eights of Muslims. But that was the only item of religiously identifying clothing which a majority of the British rejected, whereas clear majorities of the French rejected headscarves, yarmulkes, turbans and “visible large crosses” as well. About a quarter of French Muslims also thought these were obstacles to immigration.

Andrew Brown is the editor of Cif belief. His most recent book is Fishing in Utopia, which won the 2009 Orwell prize

Only days after they were groaning with fury at the Israeli lobby’s success in hounding the outspoken Charles Freeman away from his proposed intelligence job for President Obama, the Arabs now have to contend with an Israeli Foreign Minister whose – let us speak frankly – racist comments about Palestinian loyalty tests have brought into the new Netanyahu cabinet one of the most unpleasant politicians in the Middle East.

The Iraqis produced the hateful Saddam, the Iranians created the crackpot Ahmadinejad – for reasons of sanity, I leave out the weird ruler of Libya – and now the Israelis have exalted a man, Avigdor Lieberman, who out-Sharons even Ariel Sharon.

A few Palestinians expressed their cruel delight that at last the West will see the “true face” of Israel. I’ve heard that one before – when Sharon became prime minister – and the usual nonsense will be trotted out that only a “hard-line extremist” can make the compromises necessary for a deal with the Palestinians.

This kind of self-delusion is a Middle East disease. The fact is that the Israeli Prime Minister-to-be has made it perfectly clear there will be no two-state solution; and he has planted a tree on Golan to show the Syrians they will not get it back. And now he’s brought into the cabinet a man who sees even the Arabs of Israel as second-class citizens.

Lieberman’s first visit to Washington will be a gem. AIPAC – posing as an Israeli lobby when in fact it works for the Likudists – will fight for him and Lady Hillary will have to greet him warmly at the State Department. Who knows, he might even suggest to her that she imposes a loyalty test for American minorities as well – which would mean demanding an oath of faithfulness from Barack himself. The horizon goes on forever.

In Egypt, Avigdor Lieberman will have a tough time. Hosni Mubarak can be a soft touch for the Americans but it was Lieberman who, complaining that the Egyptian President should visit Israel or “go to hell”, deeply offended a man who has taken great risks in maintaining his country’s peace with the Israeli state.

Egyptians have been outraged to read in their newspapers that Lieberman has talked of drowning Palestinians in the Dead Sea or executing Israeli Palestinians who talked to Hamas. Last night, a supporter of Lieberman appeared on Al Jazeera television to describe Hamas as “an anti-Semitic, barbarous organisation” – even though Israeli army officers spoke openly with this supposedly “barbarous” group both before and after the Oslo agreement.

But the growth of such an extremist administration in Israel and the hopeless response of the Obama administration to the so-called supporters of Israel who destroyed Freeman’s career, can only be dangerous news for the Middle East. The Jeddah-based Arab News called the Freeman disaster “a grave defeat for US foreign policy”. But while uttering all the usual platitudes, the Arab press has been playing up the pusillanimous remarks of US press secretary Robert Gibbs when asked why Obama was “standing mute” in the Freeman affair. “I’ve watched with great interest how people perceive different things about our policy and during the campaign about whether we were too close to one group or too close to the other. So I don’t give a lot of thought to those.” Asked for “straight answers”, Gibbs said: “I gave you as straight a one as I can get.”

This was almost as funny as The New York Times when it attempted last week to explain why Lady Hillary was frightened of offending the Israelis during the formation of the Netanyahu government when she described the destruction of 1,000 Palestinian homes as “unhelpful”.

Her caution in the Middle East, it explained, was “a reflection of the treacherous landscape in the Middle East, where a misplaced phrase can ruffle feathers among constituencies back home”. You bet it can – and when Mr Lieberman comes to town, we’ll see who those feathers belong to.

Their owners would do well, however, to dwell on the incendiary language of Avigdor Lieberman. He speaks like a Russian nationalist rather than the secular Israeli he claims to be.

I covered the bloodbath of Bosnia in the early Nineties and I can identify Lieberman’s language – of executions, of drownings, of hell and loyalty oaths – with the language of Messrs Mladic and Karadzic and Milosevic.

Lady Hillary and her boss should pull out a few books on the war in ex-Yugoslavia if they want to understand who they are now dealing with. “Unhelpful” will not be the appropriate response.

Is the Ministry of Fear about to be reopened? I thought – when Lord Blair finally departed from us and George Bush left the White House – that the institution had been closed down, that we might have been allowed a few hours in the broad sunlit uplands. Change? Hope? Renewal? Inspiration? But no, the semantics of our masters are reverting to type. There are no uplands, just another new dark age of fear and terror.

A few months ago, the following Bush-speak would be wearily familiar. “Let me be clear: al-Qa’ida and its allies – the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks – are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al-Qa’ida is actively planning attacks on the US homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan … if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban – or allows al-Qa’ida to go unchallenged – that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.” Only, of course, this wasn’t Bush-speak. It was a Bush-clone, called Obama-speak.

And now a reversion to Blair-speak: “Contemporary terrorist organisations aspire to use chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear weapons. Changing technology and the theft and smuggling of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive materials make this aspiration more realistic than it may have been in the recent past…” Yup, that’s the Home Office for you. Dirty bombs. Biological weapons, according to the Home Office intelligence girls and boys – the same crew, presumably, who helped to give us weapons of mass destruction and five-minute warnings six years ago but who now work for Lady Jacqui. I thought it was Churchill who warned us in 1940 of a new dark age “made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science”.

That these two crimson-lit warnings should have come within three days of each other last month was surely not by chance. Note how the Taliban has now become conflated with al-Qa’ida, how the land mass of the Middle East has been pushed further east. Once it was Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Now it’s Afghanistan and Pakistan. And note how Tube train bombings in London have suddenly turned into dirty bombs, poison and radioactivity. The border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan is now “the most dangerous place in the world”, according to Obama.

Well, tell that to the Raj. Didn’t Sir Mortimer Durand define the frontier – henceforth the Durand line – to separate India from Afghanistan? And hasn’t it always been “the most dangerous place in the world” (save, I suppose, for “Palestine” which – for all the usual reasons – got left out of the Obama speech of 27 March). Wasn’t it just a few miles up the road, in the Kabul Gorge, that an entire British army was wiped out in 1842? And was it not in 1893 that Lord Roberts spoke of “the policy of endeavouring to extend our influence over, and establish law and order on, that part of the border where anarchy, murder and robbery up to the present time have reigned supreme … Some 40 years ago the policy of non-interference with the tribes, so long as they did not trouble us, may have been wise and prudent, though selfish and not altogether worthy of a great civilising power”.

Yup, it was that same “porous” border – and count how many times you read the word “porous” in the weeks to come – that Obama is now talking about. The problem is that the dratted Pathans think this place is called Pushtunistan and no more recognise the Durand line today than they did in the 19th century. And when millions of people just don’t recognise a border, then all the king’s horses and all the king’s men (or President Obama’s) aren’t going to be able to do anything about it. “We will insist that action be taken – one way or another – when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets,” Obama promises. If the Pakistani government doesn’t take action, the US will.

Ho hum. In the days of empire, we crossed the Durand line from the Raj into Afghanistan. Now Obama’s going to change the plot by invading in the opposite direction, from Afghanistan into the former Raj. And with just 20,000 extra troops. My colleague John Griffiths has been researching Soviet files on Moscow’s attempts to stamp out “terrorism” in Afghanistan with surges and cross-border raids. Here’s an analysis from the Soviet Frunze Military Academy on the “terrorists” the Russians fought in Afghanistan for eight bloody years:

“Several combat principles lay at the heart of mujahedin tactics. First, they avoided direct contact with the superior might of regular forces which could have wiped them out. Second, the mujahedin practically never conducted positional warfare and, when threatened with encirclement, would abandon their positions. Third, in all forms of combat the mujahedin always strove to achieve surprise. Fourth, the mujahedin employed terror and ideological conditioning on a peaceful populace as well as on local government representatives.”

The Frunze lads concluded that their “terrorist” enemies enjoyed night action, could move rapidly through the border mountains (in Obama’s “most dangerous place in the world”), had a broad intelligence network and could pick up details of secret Soviet unit movements. Now who does that remind you of? In his soon-to-be-published book, Griffiths recommends that the Frunze report should lie on every US president’s desk, permanently open at this page.

Do we never learn? Muslim Pakistan is detonating in front of our eyes while Israel, when it’s not grabbing more land from Muslim Palestinians in the West Bank, is claiming that Iran – not Pakistan – is the greatest threat to world peace. Its foreign minister doesn’t even want a Palestinian state any more. And what should we be doing? Trying to resolve the wound of Kashmir, of “Palestine”, of Kurdistan, of Lebanon. But no, we’re off on another adventure. Poison, dirty bombs, the lot. The most dangerous place in the world. Carry on up the Khyber.

This is Holy Week. It started yesterday with Palm Sunday and continues through Holy Thursday, Good Friday and culminates this Sunday with Easter Day. One can no longer assume most people will be aware of this, let alone the events these days mark; in a recent UK poll, only 22% could identify what Easter was celebrating. What other system of belief has collapsed at such spectacular speed as British Christianity? One can only presume that the New Atheists are organising a fabulous party to celebrate. Richard Dawkins could stump up for the crates of champagne out of his sumptuous royalties from The God Delusion.

But I’m curious as to how many of the country’s finest minds would join the celebrations. Increasingly, one hears a distaste for the polemics of the New Atheist debate and its foghorn volume, and how it has drowned out any other kind of conversation about religion: what it is, the loss of it, whether it matters, and what happens in a post-religious society? From sometimes surprising quarters there is an anxiety about the evangelical fervour and certainty of the New Atheists: they are so sure they are right, but there are plenty of people – and many of them would not count themselves as believers – who can’t share their contempt for religion.

Just this week, AN Wilson announces in a thoughtful cover article for the New Statesman that he has apostated, abandoning his fellow atheists. Or take another example: in the Third Way, a Christian magazine, the poet Andrew Motion reflects wistfully, “I don’t believe in God – though I wish I did, and I can’t stop thinking about it so who knows what might happen one day?” Wilson and Motion talk of uncertainty, doubt and faith in terms that are probably far more familiar to the vast majority of the British – many of whom still describe themselves as believing in God, whatever they mean by that – than the certitudes used by Dawkins. New Atheism may come to be regarded as winning a battle but losing the war.

What many argue is that the New Atheist debate has ended up down an intellectual dead end; there are only so many times you can argue that religion is a load of baloney. Ask a philosopher like John Gray or a historian of religion like Karen Armstrong and they are simply not interested in the debate; they bin the invitations to speak on platforms alongside New Atheists. Gray dismisses them as offering “intoxicating simplicity”; Armstrong is appalled by their “display of egotism and arrogance”. Both are deeply frustrated by a debate inflated by the media that generates heat but no light. They see the New Atheists mirroring a particular strain of fundamentalist Christianity with no knowledge of the vast variety of other forms of religious faith. In common with their Christian opponents, they share “the inner glow of complete certainty” – as Wilson describes his atheist conversion.

Armstrong and Gray converge again on where they pinpoint the key mistake. Belief came to be understood in western Christianity as a proposition at which you arrive intellectually, but Armstrong argues that this has been a profound misunderstanding that, in recent decades, has also infected other faiths. What “belief” used to mean, and still does in some traditions, is the idea of “love”, “commitment”, “loyalty”: saying you believe in Jesus or God or Allah is a statement of commitment. Faith is not supposed to be about signing up to a set of propositions but practising a set of principles. Faith is something you do, and you learn by practice not by studying a manual, argues Armstrong.

“We need to get away from the endless discussion about wretched beliefs; religion is about doing – and what every faith makes clear is that the doing is about compassion,” she argues. To try and shift the debate about faith into more fruitful territory, Armstrong came up with the idea of a global Charter on Compassion for all faiths (and none), which she is drafting and planning to launch later in the year.

From a different perspective, Alain de Botton, the philosopher and writer, has also been trying to broaden the conversation. He has founded a School of Life in London, which runs courses and events reflecting on how to live. He describes himself as “definitely an atheist”, but readily admits he borrows plenty from religions. His team have instituted the idea of Sunday sermons, and organise contemporary “pilgrimages”. “Even if you’re an atheist, there are a huge number of insights in religion,” he says. “We’re in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

De Botton argues that the decline of religious faith has left behind a real and widespread need for wisdom and insight; the media offers only a “cruel sentimentality” and gives little space to the most difficult of our life experiences, such as failure, death or envy, nor does it offer ways to deal with them. The author Mark Vernon teaches on some School of Life courses. A former priest and atheist, he now advocates a principled agnosticism rooted in an understanding of the limits of human knowledge. He argues that the most interesting conversations about faith are among those just outside religious traditions and those just inside – along the borders of belief, if you like.

It’s a perspective that Gray shares. Describing himself as a sceptic, he looks to another border of belief for deeper insight into the nature of faith: the dialogue between the theistic and non-theistic. Intriguingly, where Gray, Armstrong and Vernon all end up is with the apophatic tradition of theology. Apophatic is a word no longer even in my dictionary, but it’s a major tradition of Christian thought, and central to the thinking of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas: it is the idea that God is ineffable and beyond powers of description. S/he can be experienced by religious practice, but as Armstrong puts it: “In the past, people knew we could say nothing about God. Certain forms of knowledge only come with practice.” It makes the boundary between belief in God and agnosticism much more porous than commonly assumed.

But the modern distortion was to make God into a proposition in which you either did or did not believe. He was turned into an old man in the sky with a long white beard or promoted as a cuddly friend named Jesus. Arguing about the existence of such human creations is akin to the medieval pastime of calculating how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.

So the media has been promoting the wrong argument, while the bigger question of how, in a post-religious society, people find the myths they need to sustain meaning, purpose and goodness in their lives go unexplored. What worries Gray is that we forget at our peril that all systems of thought rely on myth. By junking the Christian myths, the danger is that the replacements are “cruder, less tested, less instructive”. At times of crisis – such as the economic recession – the brittleness of a value system built on wealth and a particular conception of autonomy becomes all too apparent, leaving people without the sustaining reserves of a faith to fall back on. The consequences of that will certainly not be cause for celebration, he warns.

He raises his daughters to be assertive: they can wear whatever they want so long as it’s not a headscarf. He believes in free speech and the right to cause offence but understands that he has neither the right to be offended nor to speak out. Whatever an extremist is, on any given day, he is not it.

He regards himself as British – first, foremost and for ever. But whenever a bomb goes off he will happily answer for Islam. Even as he defends Britain’s right to bomb and invade he will explain that Islam is a peaceful religion. Always prepared to condemn other Muslims and supportive of the government, he has credibility in his community not because he represents its interests to the government, but because he represents the government’s interests to Muslims. He uses that credibility to preach restraint and good behaviour. Whatever a moderate is, on any given day, he is it.

On his slender shoulders lies Britain’s domestic anti-terror campaign. And as soon as the government finds him things are going to start turning around. Until then we are resigned to the fact that we will be about as successful at fighting terrorism at home as we are abroad and for the same reason. Unburdened by any desire to forge consensus or engage in negotiation, the government seeks to craft new realities out of whole cloth and then wonders why no one wants to wear them. And so it is that the mythical Muslim will prove as elusive as weapons of mass destruction or the beacons of democracy that Iraq and Afghanistan were supposed to become.

Last week’s launch of the government’s new counter-terror strategy, Contest 2, was preceded by Hazel Blears’ threat to deny funding to the Muslim Council of Britain because of comments its deputy secretary, Daud Abdullah, made about supporting Palestinians. It shows how these domestic tensions are intertwined with foreign policy.

If this changes anytime soon it won’t be because of anyone we’ve elected at home. Britain has no independent foreign policy. Apparently when America wants to start wars, so do we; and when America wants to end them, we do too. We vacillate, at the pleasure of the White House, with great moral conviction. So long as its foreign policy is uncritically tied to Israel’s then we should expect discontent from the Muslim community. That is not a reason to change our foreign policy – we should do that because it’s wrong – but it is a reason to stop pathologising Islam as though the source of Muslim discontent is completely unfathomable.

“There is a grievance,” explains Salma Yaqoob, a Respect councillor in Birmingham. “There’s no reason to deny that. All you need to know that there is a grievance is a TV. These young men who want a short cut to heaven see innocent people being killed and then retaliate by going out and killing innocent people. There’s a chilling logic to it. It’s wrong. But it is logical.”

But while the problem may start with foreign policy it does not end there. Lest we forget, there were riots involving Muslims in Britain’s northern towns during the summer of 2001. Back then the issues were poverty (of Muslims and non-Muslims), organised racism and segregated housing.

Those problems have not gone away. Two-thirds of Bangladeshis in Britain and over half of Pakistanis live in poverty. The unemployment rate for Pakistanis is four times higher than for whites; for Bangladeshis it is more than five times. Among the youth it is worse – and in the areas where Muslims are concentrated, white people aren’t doing that well either.

People generally don’t make a living out of being Muslim and those who do should not be on the government payroll. The most obvious response to news that Blears was threatening to cut funding to the MCB was to say: “We shouldn’t be funding the MCB anyway.” Governments should not be in the God business. The fact that it funds the Church of England creates inequality. But the proper response is to stop giving the C of E money, not fund other religions.

Instead the government continues to approach Muslims as though their religion defines them. It rarely speaks to them as tenants, parents, students or workers; it does not dwell on problems that they share with everyone else; it does not convene high profile task forces to look at how to improve their daily lives. It summons them as Muslims, talks to them as Muslims and refers to them as Muslims – as though they could not possibly be understood as anything else.

“The confusion between the plural identities of Muslims and their Islamic identity is not only a descriptive mistake, it has serious implications for policies for peace in the precarious world in which we live,” writes Amartya Sen in Identity and Violence. “The effect of this religion-centred political approach, and of the institutional policies it has generated … has been to bolster and strengthen the voice of religious authorities while downgrading the importance of non-religious institutions and movements.”

And when it does talk to them as Muslims, it demands they join a society that doesn’t exist, on terms that would not be set for any other religious group. The Home Office pledge to challenge those who “reject parliamentary democracy, dismiss the rule of law and promote intolerance and discrimination on the basis of race, faith, ethnicity, gender or sexuality,” is laudable. But, in a period that has seen the Catholic church stained with endemic child sex abuse and the Church of England rent asunder over homosexuality, the idea that Muslims should be singled out is laughable. Given the rise of the British National party in areas where Labour once dominated, you would think the ministers might launch such a challenge closer to home. And if these are “shared British values” then opposition to war and torture are no less so.

The trouble with those who rail against multiculturalism is that they invariably struggle to articulate the kind of monoculture they would like to replace it with, let alone how they would enforce it. And when they do, things rapidly start to fall apart.

I have yet to see a culture where truly shared values were proclaimed by fiat from above rather than forged by struggle and through consensus from below, let alone one where the primary responsibilty for tolerance rests with the most impoverished minority group that faces the most intolerance. But I dare say that it is in that place that we will find the mythological Muslim – patriotic, pious, peaceful and patient – waiting for reality to come to him and tell him it is ready.

* This article was first published in The Guardian, Monday 30 March 2009. Gary Younge may be contacted at g.younge@guardian.co.uk

Blears had been gunning for the MCB, the country’s main Muslim umbrella body, which has shown increasing independence in recent years, particularly in relation to British foreign policy. The pretext was a statement about Israel’s onslaught on Gaza signed by the MCB’s number two, Daud Abdullah, which Blears interpreted as a call for attacks on British ships if they were sent to intercept arms supplies to Hamas. Ten days ago, in a tone more associated with Raj-era colonial governors than democratic politicians addressing independent community bodies, Blears delivered an ultimatum to the MCB: either it sacked its elected deputy general secretary or all contacts would be severed.

Never mind that Gordon Brown’s idea about policing Palestinian waters has been kicked into the long grass of international talks; or that Abdullah, a Caribbean-born veteran of Grenada’s leftwing New Jewel Movement (later overthrown by Ronald Reagan) made clear he was not calling for such attacks – let alone attacks on Jewish communities, as Blears claims in a letter in today’s Guardian. All links have now been suspended. And if there were any doubt that the attempt to isolate Britain’s most significant Muslim body was linked to the new anti-terror policy, the timing of the ultimatum for the eve of the launch made clear that for Blears they were all of a piece.

Not surprisingly, the MCB has rejected the government’s diktat. As it acknowledges, to do anything else would destroy its credibility in the community, which can in fact only be boosted by the confrontation. The point seems to have belatedly dawned on Blears, whose department yesterday appeared to be looking for a way out as it pressed for “further clarity” from the MCB about its attitude to violence in the Middle East.

But the dispute goes to the heart of the fatal flaw in government policy towards the terror threat. Instead of simply aiming to stop indiscriminate attacks, something that unites almost all Muslims as well as non-Muslims, the idea underlying the new strategy is to confront “nonviolent extremism” as well. The definitions of such a catch-all target specified in earlier drafts, including support for armed resistance anywhere in the world, sharia law and a belief that gay sex is sinful, have mercifully been dropped. It became clear to other ministers – reported to include Jack Straw, John Denham and Harriet Harman – that not only would such zealotry brand most of Britain’s 2.4 million Muslims extremist, it could also apply to many Christians, orthodox Jews and atheists as well.

But strong echoes of this folly remain: for example, in the categorisation of those who reject Israel’s legitimacy as extremist. It is a policy that has been driven by neoconservative-leaning thinktanks – such as Policy Exchange, the Centre for Social Cohesion and the government-funded Quilliam Foundation – who believe Islamism, a political trend as broad as socialism or liberalism, is the enemy, rather than the tiny takfiri groups who think it’s a good idea to blow people up on buses and tubes.

That’s a dangerous blind alley, which makes such attacks more, rather than less, likely. Instead of listening to representative groups which can honestly reflect what drives Muslim anger – notably western support for wars of occupation in the Muslim world – the government ends up talking to its own creations and attempting to use cash to buy political docility. It is the same approach which preferred listening to republican defectors than Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, as the former chief of the defence staff Lord Guthrie enthusiastically emphasised this week.

The Contest 2 strategy has one merit, at least. It does for the first time officially acknowledge what the rest of the world has known for most of the past decade: that Muslim “perception” of the west’s support for Israel, the Iraq and Afghan wars and the wider war on terror plays a “key role” in fuelling “radicalisation”. But instead of then getting to grips with the cause of the problem, the response is still to treat the symptoms. Since Israel’s western-backed devastation of Gaza unleashed a new wave of Muslim political activism, for example, the reaction has been heavyhanded policing, attempts to link protest with terrorism and renewed Islamophobic campaigns in the media.

Perhaps Blears thought attacking the MCB would play to the gallery in such a climate. But as the Jewish Chronicle columnist Geoffrey Alderman warned yesterday, not only was her interference a democratic outrage, but a dangerous precedent for other community organisations. Would Blears refuse to engage with a Jewish Board of Deputies leader, he asked, who backed West Bank settlements the government regards as illegal? Muslims are already angered by the double standards that allow Britons to serve with Israeli forces in Gaza and the Zionist Federation to raise charitable funds for occupation troops accused of war crimes, while any parallel moves to support Hamas are treated as involvement in terrorism.

The government preaches globalisation but has failed to face up to the implications of the multiple identities and loyalties that flow from it. The presence of a large population with recent roots in a part of the world where British forces are fighting unpopular wars is one reason why domestic and foreign policy can never again be separated in the way that was possible in colonial times. The government’s counter-terrorism plan talks about Muslims needing to accept Britain’s shared values. Fortunately, they do already. Both Muslims and non-Muslims oppose wars of aggression and want British troops brought home from Iraq and Afghanistan; they both accept people’s right to defend themselves against invasion and occupation; and both mostly sympathise with the Palestinian cause. Now responding to that consensus would be a real counter-terror strategy.

* This article was first published in The Guardian, Thursday 26 March 2009.

The unbridled aggression and brutality are justified as “exercising caution”: the frightening balance of blood – about 100 Palestinian dead for every Israeli killed, isn’t raising any questions, as if we’ve decided that their blood is worth one hundred times less than ours, in acknowledgement of our inherent racism.

Rightists, nationalists, chauvinists and militarists are the only legitimate bon ton in town. Don’t bother us about humaneness and compassion. Only at the edges of the camp can a voice of protest be heard – illegitimate, ostracized and ignored by media coverage – from a small but brave group of Jews and Arabs.

Alongside all this, rings another voice, perhaps the worst of all. This is the voice of the righteous and the hypocritical. My colleague, Ari Shavit, seems to be their eloquent spokesman. This week, Shavit wrote here (“Israel must double, triple, quadruple its medical aid to Gaza,” Haaretz, January 7): “The Israeli offensive in Gaza is justified … Only an immediate and generous humanitarian initiative will prove that even during the brutal warfare that has been forced on us, we remember that there are human beings on the other side.”

To Shavit, who defended the justness of this war and insisted that it mustn’t be lost, the price is immaterial, as is the fact that there are no victories in such unjust wars. And he dares, in the same breath, to preach “humaneness.”

Does Shavit wish for us to kill and kill, and afterward to set up field hospitals and send medicine to care for the wounded? He knows that a war against a helpless population, perhaps the most helpless one in the world, that has nowhere to escape to, can only be cruel and despicable. But these people always want to come out of it looking good. We’ll drop bombs on residential buildings, and then we’ll treat the wounded at Ichilov; we’ll shell meager places of refuge in United Nations schools, and then we’ll rehabilitate the disabled at Beit Lewinstein. We’ll shoot and then we’ll cry, we’ll kill and then we’ll lament, we’ll cut down women and children like automatic killing machines, and we’ll also preserve our dignity.

The problem is – it just doesn’t work that way. This is outrageous hypocrisy and self-righteousness. Those who make inflammatory calls for more and more violence without regard for the consequences are at least being more honest about it.

You can’t have it both ways. The only “purity” in this war is the “purification from terrorists,” which really means the sowing of horrendous tragedies. What’s happening in Gaza is not a natural disaster, an earthquake or flood, for which it would be our duty and right to extend a helping hand to those affected, to send rescue squads, as we so love to do. Of all the rotten luck, all the disasters now occurring in Gaza are manmade – by us. Aid cannot be offered with bloodstained hands. Compassion cannot sprout from brutality.

Yet there are some who still want it both ways. To kill and destroy indiscriminately and also to come out looking good, with a clean conscience. To go ahead with war crimes without any sense of the heavy guilt that should accompany them. It takes some nerve. Anyone who justifies this war also justifies all its crimes. Anyone who preaches for this war and believes in the justness of the mass killing it is inflicting has no right whatsoever to speak about morality and humaneness. There is no such thing as simultaneously killing and nurturing. This attitude is a faithful representation of the basic, twofold Israeli sentiment that has been with us forever: To commit any wrong, but to feel pure in our own eyes. To kill, demolish, starve, imprison and humiliate – and be right, not to mention righteous. The righteous warmongers will not be able to allow themselves these luxuries.

Anyone who justifies this war also justifies all its crimes. Anyone who sees it as a defensive war must bear the moral responsibility for its consequences. Anyone who now encourages the politicians and the army to continue will also have to bear the mark of Cain that will be branded on his forehead after the war. All those who support the war also support the horror.

* This article was first published in Haaretz.com, on 9 January 2009. Read more articles from Gideon Levy.

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, “the silence is a lie.” It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia’s incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, “Israel’s right to exist”. They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine’s right to exist was cancelled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous “Plan D” resulted in the murderous de-population of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as “ethnic cleansing”. Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, “What shall we do with the Arabs?” Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, “made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, ‘Expel them’. The order to expel an entire population “without attention to age” was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world’s most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya’ari noted “how easily” Israel’s leaders spoke of how it was “possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy … who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war… we are appalled.”

Every subsequent “war” Israel has waged has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first. Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Schlaim, Noam Chomsky, the late Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Uri Avnery, Ilan Pappe and Norman Finklestein have dispatched this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called zionism. “It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe on 2 January, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as desperate events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system… Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government , this ideology – in its most consensual and simplistic variety – has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanise the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide].”

In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines and treatment, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and the killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, meet the international standard of the Genocide Convention. “Is it an irresponsible overstatement,” asked Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and international law authority at Princeton University, “to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”

In describing a “holocaust-in-the making”, Falk was alluding to the Nazis’ establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland. For one month in 1943, the captive Polish Jews led by Mordechaj Anielewiz fought off the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed and the Nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew. Today’s holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben-Gurion’s Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-Israeli project. The F-16 jet fighters, the 250-pound “smart” GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza, having been approved by a Congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4 billion in war-making “aid”, give Washington de facto control. It beggars belief that President-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken on Russia’s war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obama’s silence on Palestine marks his approval, which is to be expected, given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of Zionists as his secretary of state, chief of staff and principal Middle East advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings “Think”, her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obama’s inauguration on 21 January, I trust someone with the brave heart of Muntadar al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower, will shout: “Gaza!”

The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now “Operation Cast Lead”, which is the unfinished “Operation Justified Vengeance”. The latter was launched by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with Bush’s approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time. In the same year, the authoritative Jane’s Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the “green light” to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel’s secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of New Labour Party’s enduring, cringing complicity in Palestine’s agony. However, the 2001 Israeli plan, reported Jane’s, needed the “trigger” of a suicide bombing which would cause “numerous deaths and injuries [because] the ‘revenge’ factor is crucial”. This would “motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians”. What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli Chief of Staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks. On 23 November, 2001, Israeli agents assassinated the Hamas leader, Mahmud Abu Hunud, and got their “trigger”; the suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.

Something uncannily similar happened on 5 November last, when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got their propaganda “trigger”. A ceasefire initiated and sustained by the Hamas government – which had imprisoned its violators – was shattered by the Israeli attack and home-made rockets were fired into what used to be Palestine before its Arab occupants were “cleansed”. The On 23 December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel’s charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz.

Behind this sordid game is the “Dagan Plan”, named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon in his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Now head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organisation, Dagan is the author of a “solution” that has seen the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, effectively a concentration camp. The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah under Mohammed Abbas is Dagan’s achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed through a mostly supine, if intimidated western media, notably in America, that says Hamas is a terrorist organisation devoted to Israel’s destruction and to “blame” for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, long before its creation. “We have never had it so good,” said the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. “The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine.” In fact, Hamas’s real threat is its example as the Arab world’s only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians’ oppressor and tormentor. This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the western media as “Hamas’s seizure of power”. Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic. Neither is its proposal of a ten-year truce as a historic recognition of the “reality” of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in the UN General Assembly demonstrates, 99 per cent of humanity concurs. On 4 January, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a “monstrosity”.

When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a “1948-style solution” – the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller “cantonments” and perhaps finally into Jordan. This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed… Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Sharon] had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it.”

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi is an American writer on Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. “Holocaust denial is anti-Semitic,” she wrote on 31 December. “But I’m not talking about World War Two, Mahmoud Ahmedinijad (the president of Iran) or Ashkenazi Jews. What I’m referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years… Since Arabs are Semites, US-Israeli policy doesn’t get more anti-Semitic than this.” She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young American who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer. “I am in the midst of a genocide,” wrote Corrie, “which I am also indirectly supporting and for which my government is largely responsible.”

Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of “responsibility”. Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform. With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-Semitism. The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.

Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plea for help? Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than “intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries”?

Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third Writers’ Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 3,500 jammed the auditorium and a thousand were turned away. Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete; the literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance; false symbolism is all. As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs Nabokov: “The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are.”

If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilised society. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants the impunity of war criminals the immunity of our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or gives us the power to speak out. For the moment I prefer my own memory of Gaza: of the people’s courage and resistance and their “luminous humanity”, as Karma Nabulsi put it. On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No one told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and a few of them climbed on to a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, believing the world will not forget them.