'Imams are not the solution to terrorism' - Education Guardian
An article which appeared in today's Guardian Education supplement, featuring an interview with Shaikh Ibrahim Mogra, on why government funding for imam training may have no real effect on fighting terrorism:
"The problem is not imams and their countries of origin," says Mogra. "The tiny proportion of extremists usually have nothing to do with imams. Anyway, there is no guarantee that just because an imam is trained in the UK, he won't suddenly flip. Likewise, foreign imams are not necessarily extremists. The majority of imams are trained in the UK and in the next 20 years 90% will be British graduates. But there will always be a need for an expert from abroad." Mona Siddiqui, professor of Islamic studies at the University of Glasgow, says it is wrong to assume imams are the buffer between extreme Islam and secular education. "People who are involved in extremism will not usually involve their imam," she says. "Imams are not the solution to the problem of terrorism."
This is bizarre too. Every time you get a group of Muslims together and ask them wha they want (this was most forcefully highlighted two years ago when the Guardian held its Muslim discussion which included Inayat and Abdur Rahman Jafar from MCB), almost everyone said they needed more British born imams who could talk to people in English and relate to them.
http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/161
Isn't this one of the main issues cited by many when they say that the reason why HuT etc have been quite popular is because their people are able to relate better to youngsters?
I like Mogra. What the hell is he playing at?
The need for British born imams is more down to a need to tackle social issues - arranged marriages, how to deal with the un-Islamic environment they live and work in etc. However, if these British trained imams are going to act as mouthpeices for the state - as they are in Muslim countries then they'll do nothing to hinder terror, as similar pronouncements from senior scholars in places like Saudi Arabia have done little to stem the support young Saudis have for al-Qaida. These imams may have a positive role in regards to reducing other crimes, such as "honour killings" but their effect on terrorist activity will be negligible. The bottom line: terrorism is ultimately down to people wanting to fight injustice, whether real or imagined.
Sunny, the issues(terrorism and having more amazing imams) are distinct blurring them together is a silly waste of money and a foolish government intervention that wont help either matter.
I don't think funding imams alone is the silver bullet. But then I never said there was one answer to terrorism or one answer to sorting out social problems. The scale of the problem is wide so the measures taken also have to be wide.