Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’oon.

Formalities over …

I am somewhat taken aback by the tone of the comments on some of the Muslim message boards and blogs. People have seemingly forgotten that this was a man who was a symbol of the degeneration of al-Azhar, many of whose positions in fiqh would not have been taken seriously towards the end of his life, and was associated with two disgraceful public involving involving Muslim women, and are treating him like he was a great shaikh. One person on DeenPort even said this:

Mashallah look at his qismat, forget all the negative issues about him and his fatwas, subhanullah his janaza will be in Habib’s (saw) masjid and he will be buried in janaat al baqi shareef

How often do people die in Riyadh and get buried in al-Baqi, particularly when they did not live anywhere near Madinah? If an elderly Pakistani gentleman, who had done his prayers on time all his life, fulfilled the other obligations, treated his wife gently and respectfully, brought up his kids well and was a doting grandad, treated his neighbours kindly and gave as much as he reasonably could in charity, had a heart attack at the same place, where would he be buried? Whether or not he was a sayyid, I very much doubt they would transport his body to Madinah to be buried in al-Baqi; he would most likely be prayed over locally and buried locally.

Tantawi is being made to look like a saint and a big shaikh for no other reason than that he was powerful and famous. The Egyptian government has recently been cracking down on Muslim women in niqaab, barring them from access to colleges and even children’s playgrounds, and Tantawi imposed this in the girls’ schools run by al-Azhar. A few years ago, he attempted to publically shame Yvonne Ridley who refused (rightly) to shake his hand, and more recently intimidated a young girl who wore niqab in front of him at school in Egypt. He told the girl he knew more about Islam than she or her family did, which may be true, but it means he would have known that she was right and he was wrong.

Most of us take a dim view of men who harass and abuse women, and we wouldn’t make excuses for some lout in a park in East Ham, so why do we make excuses for a man who uses his scholar’s robes and prestigious position of authority to do the same to a young girl in Cairo? This man gave ammunition to those both within and outside the Muslim world who have an anti-niqaab and even anti-hijaab agenda, and within days Italian legislators were using it as a justification for a proposed law banning it there.

People have said we should not insult the dead, and I agree. I am not insulting him or cursing him, but just saying that he should not be made to look like something he wasn’t. Thirty hours ago, many of us despised him as he was someone who displayed public contempt for the Shari’ah, so why are we getting so sanctimonious now? He died in Riyadh, the main city of Najd, a place known for trouble (fitna) as mentioned in the hadeeth. Those who attach significance to his proposed burial in Madinah should consider that fact as well. That is where he died and, unless they want to take him back to Cairo, that is where he should remain.

I had heard of the Angola Three before today, but this article puts the whole case into very clear detail for anyone else not familiar (and I wasn’t). Two African American men, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, have been held in solitary confinement at the Closed Cell Restricted (CCR) block at Angola prison in Louisiana since 1973. The author, Erwin James, is a convicted murderer and spent his first year in prison in a high-security part of a prison where the cell doors were opened only for “slopping out” (of the toilet buckets that were in common use in British prisons at that time) and meals and, sometimes, half an hour’s exercise:

The cells were 10ft x 5ft, with a chair, a table and a bed. You could walk up and down, run on the spot, stand still, or do push-ups and sit-ups – but sooner or later you had to just stop, and think.

As the days, weeks and months blur into one, without realising it you start to live completely inside your head. You dream about the past, in vivid detail – and fantasise about the future, for fantasies are all you have. You panic but it’s no good “getting on the bell” – unless you’re dying – and, even then, don’t hope for a speedy response. I had a lot to think about. When the man in the cell above mine hanged himself I thought about that, a lot. I still do. You look at the bars on the high window and think how easy it would be to be free of all the thinking.

Such thoughts must have crossed the minds of Wallace and Woodfox more than once during their isolation. They are fed through the barred gates of their 9ft x 6ft cells and allowed only one hour of exercise every other day alone in a small caged yard. Their capacity for psychological endurance alone is noteworthy.

Back in 2007, I blogged an article about juveniles facing life without parole in American prisons (Life Without Hope). The most disturbing case involved Nicole Dupure, who was jailed for supposedly helping her boyfriend murder her aunt. She claimed that she was in a nearby diner when the deed was done, but was convicted mainly on the word of her boyfriend, who testified against her (after first saying she was involved, then saying he did it alone) in return for a second-degree murder conviction and a fixed maximum sentence (albeit of twenty to fifth years). While some of those featured were unquestionably guilty, some were involved only peripherally in group enterprises but were convicted of “felony murder”, which carries a mandatory sentence of life without parole and applies even to participants who were not there at the time of the killing or who did not know that there was a lethal weapon involved. So, there are old men in American prisons serving whole-life sentences for acting as lookouts at the age of 14 or 15.

More recently, I came across the case of Efren Paredes, a Latino schoolboy who was convicted in March 1989 for the murder of a shopkeeper in a robbery in Benton Harbor, Michigan. A number of others who definitely were involved, and who gave information or testimony against him, were not prosecuted or have since been released; he is serving life without parole. Again, a dubious conviction based on information from people with something to gain. There is a well-known problem of such “snitch” evidence in US courts, and it is a mystery that the law allows evidence from people of obvious ill character with something to gain from their testimony to be presented in court. Clearly it’s a case of prosecutors wanting to notch up convictions as it makes them look more efficient, even if the convictions are subsequently overturned. Paredes has now spent more than half his life in jail.

These facts always strike a huge chord with me: that a person who is, or might be, innocent has spent most of their life, or more than my whole life, in prison. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been unable to get Lynn Gilderdale out of my head for the past six weeks and why she’s been turning up time and again on this site. Fifteen or twenty years may not seem like a long time to someone who is middle-aged, but to a teenager it’s more than their whole lifetime so far, or longer than as much of their lives as they can remember; it’s a hardly conceivable time frame. I think back to the time just after I left boarding school, riding up into the hills to college, discovering new music I liked and eyeing up girls (though in the event, I never actually had a girlfriend) and then remember that both Lynn and Efren were spending much or all of their time confined to small rooms, Efren was trapped in a building pretty much devoid of female company except for the occasional visit, and Lynn, who had not been to school since the second day of her illness in late 1991, could not tolerate the music (even if Tori Amos, Richard Thompson and the Indigo Girls had been to her taste), and that much the same state of affairs persisted for 14 years afterwards for Lynn and to this day for Efren.

Nowadays, prison sentences that long are presented as if they were mere slaps on the wrist and we hear demands for mandatory jail sentences of several years for merely carrying a weapon. There are organisations fighting to get people off Death Row and to get rid of the death penalty in the USA generally, but the issue of innocent people serving life sentences when they are innocent does not have quite the same urgency, for obvious reasons. While I do accept that people sometimes have to be confined for long periods, sometimes their whole life, it is clear that hysteria, prejudice and a vested interest in getting heads on plates leads to a lot of innocent people, particularly but not just men, ending up spending their entire youth in prison. It’s not just tragic; it’s heinous.

I posted my views on the issues he raised in a comment on that entry, but I do wish to make the point that the traditionalist blogs, including at least one of those he names which have shut down, always challenged the extreme modernists, notably the Muslim WakeUp site, covered the schisms in the “Progressive Muslims” movement which eventually burned itself out, and drew attention to the RAND report and its clear attempt to drive divisions in the community by supporting one section against another. The blogs he talks about may well exist, but I’ve managed to avoid them all the time I’ve been part of the Muslim blog scene.

As for why several of the older blogs closed down, I do believe that the Jordan issue contributed substantially. Once Umm Zaid was gone, those close to her felt less need to continue. Certain people knew of problems there which they chose to keep silent about; the way it came out in early 2009, with foully-worded comments on Umar’s blog and on Salafi Burnout (which the Wordpress admins rightly closed down as it was full of unbridled libel against many individuals; my comment here), caused a lot of hurt and acrimony. Another issue may have been that the ending of the Bush era made the sense of solidarity it brought about seem less necessary, and thus some Muslims became less tolerant of each other. One formerly well-respected blogger became antagonistic to me and more recently to several others over what still seem like very petty issues.

Am I going to shut my blog down? Certainly not. Blogging is still relevant in a British context, given that we have Europe on our doorstep, large sections of which are becoming increasingly hostile to their own Muslim populations and where an anti-Muslim rabble-rouser stands a chance of becoming the prime minister of one of our closest neighbours, and there is pressure within this country to take a similar road. We have newspapers who run front-page attacks on Muslim women, usually for their dress; we have TV channels which send spies into mosques and then broadcast what they find; we have even had physical attacks on Muslims, including an attack which left an imam in London completely blind, and on Muslim properties and mosques; and we still have Muslims willing to be played off against others and to attack whole other groups of Muslims in the press by calling them terrorist sympathisers and the suchlike. American Muslim readers should remember that the first successful terrorist attack happened here nearly four years after 9/11, and we are still dealing with the consequences of it.

All this needs to be fought and the internet — individual and group blogs, forums, mailing lists and so on — is a good way of co-ordinating resistance as well as refuting the nonsense which appears regularly about us in the media. There are other issues this blog covers, such as the ongoing issue of mentally impaired people being harassed in the street and sometimes tortured to death by groups of their so-called friends, and the fact that some people think a serious disease which can paralyse and mute a 14-year-old girl and take someone out of circulation for twenty years or more is some kind of joke, not to mention the personal interests that this blog helps support. This is why I have no intention of stopping blogging any time soon.

The group’s chief executive, one Donal Blaney, has said, “we have been described as a Conservative madrasa, so we bring the next generation out to the States and bring them back radicalised”. Whether this is said by the group’s enemies or its leaders, I find the comparison to Muslim madrasas offensive. Madrasa is simply Arabic for school, and as used outside the Arabic-speaking world, it means any place of Islamic religious education, regardless of the political or sectarian stripe of the people running it. It does not usually mean an extremist training camp of the sort found in some parts of Pakistan; it usually just means a Sunday school where children (or adults, for that matter) are taught to recite the Qur’an and how to pray.

They are using this term in a similar way to how gangsters use al-Qa’ida imagery to make themselves look hard, but they are appropriate a term which scares others but is neutral or positive to us. If they want to call themselves a Tory radicals’ training camp, much as one offshoot of the Countryside Alliance, formed to defend fox-hunting, called itself the “Real CA” (as in Real IRA), that’s their business, but let them use a term which means what they are trying to say.

The Bulger murder happened in 1993; Venables and another 10-year-old boy, then named Robert Thompson, let a toddler away from his parents in a shopping centre, dragged him (past crowds of shoppers) to a railway track, tortured him and then left him to get run over. They were both detained indefinitely and served eight years each. It was believed that putting either of them in an adult prison would undo all the rehabilitative work that had been done in the secure unit, even though politicians had caved in to tabloid-orchestrated petitions and increased their tariff (which is a minimum time they have to serve); ultimately it was down to the Labour human rights legislation that the original eight-year tariff was reinstated. The boys, who had been detained separately, were released under new identities and under various licence conditions, among them that they never contact the Bulger family or return to the Liverpool area without permission.

Yesterday I read this article in the Guardian, and it reminded me of the unpleasant political climate that prevailed under the John Major government. The author’s father ran a residential home in Wales which took in children from disturbed backgrounds, most of whom had not been in trouble with the law but several of whom had harmed themselves or been harmed by others. Some of the children were taken on trips abroad, which the author claims were remarkably successful, but the press found out and reported it in terms of “hooligans” being taken on holidays at state expense:

Despite the sensationalist, fear-mongering coverage of the Bulger case, my father was still taken by surprise when he first went on television to talk about his work. “When the producers of Eamonn Holmes’s chat show invited me along to ‘put across my side of the story’, I naively believed them,” he says. “I walked into the studios just before the programme went live. As it did, a huge ‘Hooligans on Holiday’ banner unrolled behind me. Then three women in the audience stood up with pictures of their dead children, who’d been killed by joyriders. Our kids had never killed anyone, and many hadn’t even offended, but the producers were quite happy to confuse joyriders, murderers, young offenders and children in care.

“Throughout the negative press attention, social services knew the trips worked, and continued to place children with us. But the kids themselves were very upset and angry. They felt they were being verbally abused by the whole country.”

In response to a Sun campaign, Michael Howard, who had become home secretary, (illegally) extended the sentences imposed on Venables and Thompson from 10 years to 15 years. And in response to the media furore surrounding Bryn Melyn, Howard also banned therapeutic trips abroad for children in care.

This was typical of the nastiness of that government, which combined sleaze with sanctimony, lecturing the public about family values and carping at single mothers while several of their ministers were playing away, using tax as an electoral weapon then imposing VAT (sales tax) on domestic fuel, and so on. I remember very well the sense of relief when they were finally removed in 1997 and I found the decision to run Michael Howard as a prime ministerial candidate eight years later disturbing and baffling. Although not implicated in any of the scandals, he was heavily associated with the mean-minded attitude of the government he served in.

As for the situation now, the fact is that Venables (or whatever he is called) is 27 now and committed the murder when he was just ten years old. In many countries, he would not even have been criminally responsible. There should be no giving in to public or press clamour for vengeance, whether or not it carries the “seal of approval” of James Bulger’s mother. If anything, the two boys should have been allowed to emigrate after serving their sentence, as they would have been able to live relatively normal lives in some other part of Europe where the crime would not have raised such emotion as it did here, which may well have meant that they did not need to give people a significantly altered life story as they are believed to have done; people on life licences are not normally allowed to do so, but most murderers are adults when they offend, not children. The case should not be allowed to turn into another Hindley-type saga with recurrent tabloid frenzies and a true crime cottage industry. If he has committed a serious offence, obviously he needs to be punished accordingly; otherwise, they need to get him out of the way as quickly and cleanly as possible.

Admittedly, I saw this video after I read in January all about Lynn Gilderdale’s dreadful struggle with the condition he is talking about (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis or ME, otherwise mistakenly called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or CFS), but even before that, I did know that ME wasn’t a trivial illness that made you “tired all the time”, but something that at worst caused people to become paralysed, mute and bedbound in the space of a few months (in its more moderate forms, it causes people to have extremely low physical energy, impaired concentration and pain). You can read an account of a typical day by another severely affected sufferer, Jodi Bassett, here; she also has a website.

Organica told me that Ricky Gervais was an atheist; I replied that this was his business, and that what I objected to was him making cheap jokes at the expense of seriously ill people (this was her reply). He called Multiple Sclerosis a “crippling wasting disease” while trivialising ME as “the one where … ‘don’t feel like going to work today’”. If he could have been bothered to use the same computer he wrote his spiel on to find out some basic facts about what he was talking about, he would have found out that not only did ME have much in common with MS, but that, particularly for severe sufferers, it is far more debilitating on a day-to-day level than MS except at the final stages of degenerative MS, or the final stages of a number of other fatal illnesses. On top of this, MS is recognised as a real, neurological illness (or at least it is now) and sufferers are likely to receive sympathy and good care; ME is officially recognised but is the subject of medical turf wars and patients are highly likely to experience professional disbelief, counter-therapeutic medical treatment, downright abuse and prejudice.

Years ago, I told someone that I didn’t find Woody Allen all that funny and she asked me if that was because he was Jewish (this was after I became Muslim), something I didn’t know about him at the time. I just found that Woody Allen’s jokes went over my head. Honestly, I’ve found Jackie Mason funny and he is much more extreme. As long as he sticks to jokes about Jewish mamas in New York and doesn’t make racist jokes about Palestinians. I wouldn’t pay money to see him, but the fact that he’s an extremist Zionist doesn’t mean that some of his jokes are not funny. The same cannot be said for jokes which trivialise a seriously debilitating and distressing illness. Someone posted in the comments to that video above that Gervais has since apologised, but he should have checked his facts beforehand and he wouldn’t have looked like an ignorant, offensive jerk.

I don’t know if this is on the material that Organica bought recently (and I don’t intend any of this as an attack on her, by the way). The show went out in 2007 and some bloggers objected at the time, and Gervais responded to some of them personally. Gervais’s response was to compare “complaints” about ME to third-world situations where people are starving and, supposedly, where nobody complains about ME. It’s a common stereotype that you don’t get ME on council estates or in third-world countries, but it is simply not true. In any case, if you’re in a third-world country and you can’t swallow and need tube-feeding and can’t get access to it, you probably won’t be around for long enough to “complain” about it. Around the same time, he also managed to get a joke about killing prostitutes into his routine; this was shortly after the time of the Steve Wright murders in Ipswich.

Do people really think about whether the comedy they watch is really funny? I’m sure Ricky Gervais wouldn’t make the same ME jokes now that someone in the audience could call out “hey, what about that Gilderdale woman?”, but over the last few years there has been an increase in “comedy” about highly offensive subjects, which include racist and variously misogynistic material; I commented on this with some of my own experience here. Last October there was a huge stink about a comedian called Jimmy Carr making a joke, probably sourced from soldiers at a military rehabilitation centre, about limbless soldiers making for a great Paralympic team in 2012, but the same man fills his routine with jokes about rape (they give two examples and they are both pretty unpleasant), without any of the same uproar; note that the Daily Mail article didn’t mention this fact, referring only to his “deadpan style and crude material”. The observation that many men are somehow indifferent to rape and see women as sexual objects is increasingly common nowadays (see Natasha Walter’s recent book, Living Dolls, for the porn-obsessed culture which feeds into this); Kira Cochrane noted that the serial murderer and rapist, Levi Bellfield, was fairly open about his misogyny, and his history and those of two other murderers convicted the same week “paint a picture of a society in which misogyny is taken as a given, in which someone can crow to his friends, without fear of redress or chastisement, as Bellfield did, that he had shaved himself from top to toe to ensure he didn’t leave any DNA behind at a crime scene”. (Bellfield is suspected of being the murderer of Amanda “Milly” Dowler, who was abducted in Walton on Thames and murdered in March 2002.) While these cases may be extreme, and certainly not all men would fail to bat an eyelid when one of their friends bragged about such deeds to them, the fact that careers can be made on the back of such extremely hurtful material is disturbing to say the least. What’s so funny about a man harming a woman for its own sake? Why would anyone want to do that anyway?

As for Ricky Gervais, his stand-up routine included the line that “one false move and I’m Jim Davidson”, one of the “old-school” offensive comedians. The fact that Gervais’s crass ME jokes are out there and people will, no doubt, still be laughing at them reflects on how much ignorance there is about the condition. I was recently in contact with two women who had been friends online with Lynn Gilderdale, or Jessie as they called her, and one of them told me that “Lynn always wanted to raise as much awareness of M.E. as she possibly could; it was very important to her”. This lady was perturbed by the fact that, in the time since the end of Lynn’s mother’s trial, the debate had been all about assisted dying and not about the condition itself and what needs to be done for people who suffer from it. Although the media was largely sympathetic to Kay Gilderdale, there was a fair amount of nonsense in there as well, including Esther Rantzen promoting the so-called Lightning Process, supposedly a cure for pretty much every illness under the sun (it has been called the “Lightening Process”, after its effect on the client’s wallet), and there was also the grave-dancing of “Dr Crippen”, an anonymous GP fond of slagging off his patients, in the Guardian. One would like to think that, following the publicity of the appalling stories of Lynn and of Sophia Mirza back in 2006, someone who fell ill today would not suffer the same abysmal fate, but given the sneering scepticism and the ongoing problem of lack of funding for care of ME patients, along with the perception in some places that it’s all a big joke, one can’t really have such confidence.

There are two adverts they hold up; one is the recent one featuring a woman screaming inside a car, with the text (in all caps) “stop, no, stop please, no, please. Please stop taking unbooked minicabs”. The other features a woman with a partially greyed-out face, with the text, “to find out what an illegal cab could cost you, ask a rape victim”. Both advertise the Transport for London CabWise scheme, in which anyone can get the numbers of taxi and licensed minicab firms by text message. The reason for the adverts is that there are known to be illegal minicab drivers who “ply for hire” by the roadside around bars and theatres in various parts of London. These are cowboy operators who do not keep any records of their journeys. Riding with them is no different from just getting into a stranger’s car.

As in New York, there are two types of cabs in London: black cabs (equivalent to NY’s yellow taxis) and minicabs (equivalent to livery cabs). Black cabs are official cabs; although they are not always black, they are always one of three models of large cars, are meant to be wheelchair-accessible, and there is a fixed (and quite expensive) fare. Their drivers take a lengthy course known as “the knowledge” to make sure they know London, and particularly its major landmarks and routes, inside out. Minicabs are usually family-sized cars and are available on a pre-booked basis only, and their fare is generally much cheaper than black cabs. Most people would take a minicab unless it was really necessary, and black cabs only when they were desperate (such as needing to get to the station from the theatre at 11pm in the pouring rain). Black cabs can use most bus lanes, pick up passengers (“fares”) pretty much anywhere and everywhere, including in the middle of the road when the light has just gone green, and stop on red routes (main roads with stopping restrictions). Minicabs can do none of this. As far as road rules are concerned, they are just like any other car.

I defended the adverts, because rapes and other attacks on women who’ve used unlicensed cabs are a known problem. I am not sure what the other statistics, in terms of robberies (or even sexual assaults) on male passengers, let alone robberies of drivers by passengers, are like, but rape is still enough of a problem as to make it necessary to warn women about it (a man was found guilty last December of two sexual assaults on men while running a minicab illegally). There is perhaps a valid point that focussing on rape may lead men to think it’s OK to ride fake cabs as well (hence the scandal over Darren Johnson using one, and telling the world about it through his Blackberry tweeter, and then complaining that he got ripped off).

One commenter found fault with the apparent moral equivalence of running an illegal minicab service, or being part of the “underground economy”, with robbery and rape. However, nobody ever said that the two were equivalent; there are, however, definite advantages in using a licensed cab, such as that the driver and the car are traceable, the journey is logged and the fare is either pre-agreed or based on what the meter reads. It’s true that one black cab driver was found guilty of a series of rapes last year, but that was one individual; the vast majority of rapes involving cab drivers do not involve black cabbies but illegal minicab drivers. After all, you would not just get into any stranger’s car, but that is in effect what you are doing if you entrust yourself to a fake cab driver.

Nor is it “blaming the victim” to warn women of the dangers. Nobody, except a rapist, wants a woman to get raped. It is not a slur on the character of someone who has already been through it to warn women against using cowboy cabs, any more than warning people not to dive without making sure the water is deep enough is a slur on the character of this woman or this man, who both became paralysed after breaking their necks diving into water that turned out to be only about three feet deep. They were just having fun and the women who took the cabs were just desperate to get home, perhaps cold, perhaps a bit drunk. (I’m not saying some people don’t assign blame to the victim in such circumstances to the benefit of the rapist, just that these adverts do not do that.)

Perhaps the adverts are “hard-hitting” and may be “triggering” to victims of rape or abuse (i.e. it gives them a sharp reminder of their trauma), but such things as graphic imagery of the aftermaths of car accidents and other potentially upsetting material are the norm in British public safety adverts. The Advertising Standards Agency exists to regulate these kinds and if anyone finds this advert upsetting, they may complain online to them or to TFL themselves. However, it is too late to complain about this campaign as it does not seem to still be current; although referred to in archived press releases on the TfL site, the advert was introduced last November for the Christmas period, and their cab information pages contain no references to it today. This does not mean criticism of the advert is not valid, as it is likely that TfL will run more campaigns of this kind in the future, particularly in the approach to next Christmas.

To begin with, Qadri’s fatwa is not by any means the first to condemn the use of suicide bombings, and he is not even the first supposedly genuine Islamic scholar to issue one. The tactic has always been controversial; there have been some scholars who approve of it, but since suicide itself is against Islam and the tactic originated among non-Muslims (the Japanese in World War II followed by the Tamil Tigers), its adoption was never likely to be universally accepted. Specifically, the mainstream Saudi Wahhabi scholars publically condemned it years ago, including a denial that suicide bombers were martyrs, as did a mainstream Sunni scholar called Muhammad Afifi al-Akiti, who is Malaysian but who lives in Oxford. Contrary to Douglas Murray’s accusations that Muslim condemnations of violence always contain caveats and double-talk, none of them make exceptions for, say, Israeli civilians. Dr Akiti’s fatwa specifically states that soldiers on the way back to the army base, for example, are not to be treated as combatants. Shaikh Nuh Keller, in 2003, disapproved of Palestinian suicide bombings on the grounds that suicide was against Islam and that they involve the killing of women and children, and unlike in cases such as those in Lebanon where fighters had killed enemy soldiers along with themselves, the “victories” spoken of in Palestine were only “propaganda victories”.

A further problem is that Tahir ul-Qadri is not by any means a universally accepted figure in the Muslim community, either here or in Pakistan. His authority is not accepted by all Barelvis, which is what is meant by “Sunni” and “Sufi” throughout this article. His fatwa will be accepted by his followers, who are likely never to have supported suicide bombings anyway, and ignored by a whole lot of other people. Having spent time among the Barelvis in east London (Walthamstow to be precise), I can state for sure that he is bitterly opposed by some of the Barelvi imams in that part of London. A Deobandi imam I spoke to in south London several years ago called him “a complete jahil”, meaning an ignorant person, and “an outcast, even for the Barelvis”. Mostyn-Owen claims that he has “the status of a Sheikh-ul-Islam”, but this is not accepted by much of the community and never has been. In the past, only the highest class of scholars had this title, many of them household names centuries later, as well as the official chief scholars of the Ottoman empire. Among the Indo-Pakistani community, there are plenty of imams whose followers give them high-flown titles and extol their phenomenal scholarship, but there is no sign of that scholarship or spirituality flourishing in the parts of London they influence.

Some of Qadri’s comments in this interview reveal his divisive, sectarian nature. Regarding Deobandis, he says:

As Dr ul-Qadri sees it, no terrorists have emerged from a Sunni or Sufi background: instead, they have come from the Salafis (Wahhabis) or Deobandis. The Deobandis are a South Asian variant which is close to the Gulf-orientated Wahhabis.

“Every Salafi and Deobandi is not a terrorist but I have no hesitation in saying that everyone is a well-wisher of terrorists and this has not been appreciated by the Western governments,” he said.

This simply isn’t true. Deobandis are recognised by Sunnis elsewhere in the Muslim world as Sunnis, and scholars from the Gulf who are not Wahhabis have travelled to the Indian subcontinent to study in Deobandi institutions. The similarities between Deobandis and Brelvis, regardless of their very different appearance and style, are much greater than between the Deobandis and the Wahhabis of today, who reject the Deobandis because of their adherence to the Hanafi school of law and various Sufi traditions. The main divide between the Deobandis and Barelvis is a bitter dispute over what some of the early Deobandi imams may or may not have written in their books a century ago which led to the Barelvis’ leader issuing a fatwa saying that the Deobandi scholars concerned were apostates. This is what it is all based on, along with disputes over such matters as whether celebrating the mawlid (birthday) of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) is acceptable — something the Deobandis, particularly in the UK, have moved towards accepting as more moderate forms of it have become apparent, such as in the Hadrami tradition.

So, that the MQ group in London opposed the Abbey Mills mosque project is nothing surprising; Abbey Mills was a Deobandi project and Barelvis would have wanted it stopped for their own reasons even if they do not normally openly oppose them. The concern about “extremism” is just an excuse. It is not a sign of their commitment to peace, only of their hostility to Deobandis. The claim about Wahhabis being “well-wishers of terrorists” is also a lie. As already stated, the official Saudi scholars have always opposed terrorism, whether in Palestine or anywhere else. They are especially suspicious of groups seeking to wage jihad and ultimately to replace the Saudi regime. From talking to individual Deobandis personally I can state that his claim that they are all well-wishers is false as well. It’s true that many Deobandis supported the Taliban in the 1990s, but I would imagine that some Barelvis did as well. Certainly, they were active in the religious parties which governed Baluchistan and the NWFP under Musharraf. They are not nearly as pacifist as they make out when talking about “peace” to western newspapers.

Douglas Murray is also deluded about the importance and reach of Qadri’s fatwa. He claims that it “has the possibility of being respected by a far wider range of people than any of those individual non-scholarly Muslim voices who have also condemned terrorism without caveat”. Again, they are not all non-scholarly, but Qadri’s reach is to his own followers, and not many others. Many Indian and Pakistani Muslims will simply not take someone seriously as an upright Muslim, let alone a scholar, if their beard is trimmed to less than what they can grab with their fist, and this is the case with Qadri. He also claims that “the most violent interpretations of Islam have indeed trickled down to terrorists via learned scholars”, which is also mostly untrue. The justifications generally come from people with dubious scholarly credentials, are heavily based on skewed interpretations and extrapolations and are rejected by most actual scholars. Even if an individual who gives an extreme ruling, whether permissive or otherwise, is a scholar, Muslims are not allowed to accept it if it is known that most other scholars oppose him, and there are likely to be warnings not to take his word on that issue.

In short, this is a rather insignificant development which shows how ignorant the western press are about the make-up of the Muslim community and about Muslim scholarship. The fatwa will be taken up by people within the Minhaj-ul-Quran organisation and a few fellow-travellers, but most of those outside will have received similar rulings in the past anyway. As for those who do approve of this kind of thing, many of them either despise Dr Qadri and this will come as no surprise to them; others are likely never to have heard of him. It could be that it turns out to be an unusually comprehensive piece of work and may become a standard text on those grounds, but given how extensive Dr Akiti’s existing work on this matter is, I find that unlikely. It is a predictable stance by a sectarian figure, and its impact is likely to be very limited.

It’s not as if Tiger Woods is a priest or someone else who makes his living preaching about such matters. He plays golf for a living, and while golf may be known as a “gentleman’s sport” without tolerance for the boorish antics other sports are notorious for, golf is notorious as the sport of the rich and privileged, of those very so-called gentlemen. In some places, golf courses are known for environmental damage, for being built on stolen land and for using scarce water. A few years ago George Monbiot wrote these two articles ([1], [2]) about the involvement of Gary Player, a renowned South African golfer, in a golf development in Myanmar (Burma) and in other countries in the Far East where golf is the sport of corrupt and oppressive elites.

I’m not sure what reputation sportsmen have in America; in this country, footballers in particular are rapidly acquiring a reputation for being overpaid, unsportsmanlike prima donnas. But when one has a domestic crisis, whether it’s his or her fault or not, I don’t see why they should have to retire from public view and then make a grovelling apology to the public. Unless (as with the recent John Terry scandal) it may affect his relationship with his team-mates, it’s got nothing to do with sport.

I submitted a comment to this effect to this post at Shakesville, and for some reason (and no, the “prima donnas” bit wasn’t in it) it got deleted although my comment list at Disqus still lists it.

Today a guy who was on trial for an armed robbery at Heathrow airport in 2004 jumped bail after having left the Royal Courts of Justice in London, ostensibly to consult his lawyers. This is his third trial; the previous two collapsed because of suspected jury tampering; the trial is the first non-jury criminal trial in England or Wales for 350 years. (Courts in Northern Ireland don’t have juries.)

He has been described as dangerous and the public are advised not to approach him. Has it taken them this long to realise this, given that he or his associates managed to nobble two juries in the past? Apparently the prosecution opposed granting him bail, but given his apparent record, it should have been a good reason to refuse him bail.