What is behind Stephen “Suleyman” Schwartz’s hateful rants?

The other day I wrote an article in response to one in the Sunday Telegraph of 19th October, quoting at length an official in the Church of England from Bradford who claimed that the Tablighi Jama'at, the missionary arm of the group he had signed some sort of agreement with in Bradford, citing "many examples of Christian and Muslim leaders working in partnership", in fact did not engage and promoted an "us and them" mentality, among other things. As so often when a right-wing British paper wants to slander the Tablighi Jama'at, they called on the so-called Centre for Islamic Pluralism, whose British spokesman, Irfan al-Alawi, obliged. I pointed out that the CIP's leader, Stephen Schwartz, "is notorious for cosying up to American Jewish and fundamentalist Christian bigots (i.e. those who run Front Page Magazine, where most of his writings seem to appear) and telling the Muslims' enemies what they want to hear by denouncing prominent Muslims as extremists". Schwartz responded by calling me "obviously illiterate and dishonest", alleged that the only prominent Muslims he had denounced were extremists — "name an exception" — and threatening to sue me.

On finding that comment, I posted a question to the DeenPort forum, knowing that that site has also been an object of Schwartz's slander in the past, asking for who might like to testify in case he did sue me, knowing that there would be plenty of people willing to testify to the good character of some of those he had slandered. Schwartz, after unleashing another barrage of slander against me and against two prominent (non-scholar) defenders of traditional Islam, told me:

I said you deserve to be called to account, and you cried like a little girl. That's satisfaction enough for me.

And it would have to be, because in the face of so much evidence that some of those he had attacked as extremists in fact were not, and the multitude of people who could testify to their good character, he would have been humiliated in court, much like David Irving.

When I first came across Schwartz's writings, it was still the 1990s and he was associated with Hisham al-Kabbani's wing of Shaikh Nazim's tariqa. After 9/11, I found an article by him on the front page of the Spectator, then and perhaps now the leading conservative political magazine in the UK (then, it had no real competition), blaming the 9/11 attacks on Wahhabism, and a similar article from him ([1], [2], [3]) appeared in the Telegraphh around the same time, i.e. September 2001. Even then, his writings included ridiculous hyperbole, such as in this piece on FrontPage Magazine in which he claims that "Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabi death cult represent naked Islamofascism". The term "death cult" is meaningless, sounding like it was extracted from a tabloid headline about the Heaven's Gate incident, and does not describe Wahhabism, particularly Wahhabism as a whole. Wahhabism as it exists now diverges from mainstream Islam on certain matters of aqida, such as rejecting figurative interpretations of certain Qur'anic passages, rejecting the idea of following one of the four schools of thought in Islamic law, rejecting seeking intercession through the righteous or even Prophets, and rejecting Sufism. None of that makes it a "death cult", particularly as their "mainstream" scholars reject suicide bombing and everything else connected with al-Qa'ida; none of it is a threat to non-Muslims; rather it is a doctrinal disagreement among Muslims and (given the behaviour of some of them) a matter of vexation to other Muslims.

Nor do they represent "naked Islamofascism". Fascism is a European ideology, and common features of fascist states include personality cults (the Fuhrer, the Duce, and so on), and a totalitarian police state with a pervasive display of propaganda and a heavy government hand in the economy. In the Muslim world, this is best represented in some Arab nationalist socialist regimes; the only regime that could really be called Islamofascism is that of post-revolutionary Iran. Most of it offends against the Wahhabi sensibility; I am sure you would not see building-sized portraits of Osama bin Laden in places in Pakistan or Afghanistan sympathetic to him. Even if he allowed his picture to be taken, the government might not allow the pictures to be displayed.

Some of us were willing to excuse his association with FrontPage Magazine, a notoriously Islamophobic site with a heavy Jewish extremist neo-conservative presence, while he was attacking the Wahhabis. His attacks on Shaikh Hamza Yusuf are of another order entirely. We all thought he was a traditionalist Muslim who hated what is widely considered to be a force for the destruction of traditional Islam, and that Hisham al-Kabbani's group were among its defenders, even if we disapproved of his speech to the US State Department. Their website, sunnah.org, still contains extracts from Shaikh Hamza's speeches and writings, including an entire interview with him. The gist of his accusations is that, before 9/11, Shaikh Hamza had been a fiery anti-American orator, and afterwards, he transformed himself into a Sufi and claimed to have been an advisor to George W Bush.

A common accusation against Shaikh Hamza is that, at an ICNA conference at the University of Southern California, he gave "a classic oration" on the subject of "Why Jihad is the Only Way". The accusation appeared in the Weekly Standard in Sept 2004: [1], [2]), but it has been repeated on a number of other websites (a search on Google reveals over 100 hits, but most of them are quotes of one or two of Schwartz's articles). The trouble is that Schwartz has never furnished us with an actual quote from the speech, and no trace of it is available anywhere. The speech was given in 1991, at the same time that the Bosnian war was ongoing. Any time before about 1998, a speech to that effect could have been given in the west without eyebrows being raised. In fact, Schwartz had a poem published in The Muslim Magazine entitled The Ballad of Imam Shamil, intended to be sung to the tune of Pretty Boy Floyd by Woody Guthrie, praising the Muslim jihadist who fought the Russians, at a time when Chechens were doing the same, with some success (and before the foreign extremists had ruined it).

Schwartz also accuses Hamza of making this claim:

I am a citizen of this country not by choice but by birth. I reside in this country not by choice but by conviction in attempting to spread the message of Islam in this country. I became Muslim in part because I did not believe in the false gods of this society whether we call them Jesus or democracy or the Bill of Rights or any other element of this society that is held sacrosanct by the ill-informed peoples that make up this charade of a society. . . . [T]here should be no voting or debate . . . [W]e have no room for ayes or nays.

The reader will notice the short quotes from the middle of sentences interspersed with dots, a classic sign of words being taken out of context. Schwartz repeats the quote in this article (originally on Family Security Matters, a political website of much the same stripe as FrontPage), opining after it that "the final lines in this quotation reflect the standard radical Islamist contempt for all forms of democratic governance". However, material I read in 2000, in a book containing both his and Shaikh Abdullah bin Bayyah's writing, emphasises the importance of obeying the law and keeping agreements, particularly for immigrant Muslims. He stressed that they had an obligation to leave, and not stay indefinitely on tourist visas, which was common practice at that time.

In his article for the Spectator, he makes this accusation:

Hanson varies his message according to his audience: when he speaks before crowds where jihadists dominate, he proudly repudiates any questioning of radical Islam and shouts his hope that others will also 'fail the test' of moderate belief.

This refers unmistakeably to Shaikh Hamza's announcement that Daniel Pipes had set a test of moderation and that he had failed it and hoped others would as well. Parts of it include uncontroversial demands to condemn named extremist groups, to which most American Muslims have no connection whatsoever (like the Algerian GIA), but others demand rejection of aspects of Islamic law which disagree with western norms. So, Schwartz's claim is dishonest: Shaikh Hamza did not talk of failing any generic test of Muslim moderation, but one specific loaded test, posited in the Jerusalem Post in 2003, by a man with a record of hostility to Muslims.

Before and after 9/11, Shaikh Hamza has been foremost in promoting Islamic learning among Muslims in an attempt to keep traditional scholarship alive, against the pressures of modernism and Wahhabism. This is why he opened the Zaytuna Institute and why he ran the Deen Intensive courses, and it has been an inspiration for other such efforts, such as the SunniPath website and distance learning institution. Without people like Shaikh Hamza, Islamic learning on the four madhhabs would be restricted to Urdu-based teaching by Indian and Pakistani scholars, and the Deobandi-Bareilawi barrier might have been stronger among the youth than it is. That Shaikh Hamza promoted Sufi practices before 2001 is not in dispute; for example, he wrote the foreword to this collection of litanies (awraad) by Imams al-Haddad and al-Nawawi, published by Starlatch, and his association with scholars like Shaikh Nuh Keller, an active Sufi shaikh of the Shadhili-Darqawi tariqa whose defences of Sufism against both perennialism and Wahhabism are well known (and they were originally published in writing on the website run by Mas'ud Ahmed Khan, to whom we will come later), and the shaikhs of Hadramaut. One would have thought that someone campaigning against Wahhabis imposing on traditional Muslims in Europe (such as here) and someone campaigning to keep classical Islamic scholarship, spirituality and religious culture alive in America and in western Europe would be on the same side.

While most Muslims would disagree with some of the statements made by Shaikh Hamza in his interviews in the post-9/11 period, much of what he said was in keeping with his stances in the years previously. He also identified, very early on, the conspiracy theories about 9/11 that some Muslims were inclined to believe. While there had always been those who rejected him simply because of the type of scholarship and religious practice he advocated, some condemned him outright for what he said in his post-9/11 interviews, in one case resorting to racism.

Not content with attacking Shaikh Hamza, Schwartz has also made those who have defended him targets of his vitriol. In this article, originally published at Family Security Matters, he attacks the DeenPort website:

The UK features an Islamic website, www.deenport.com, promoting the alleged benevolence of Hamza Yusuf Hanson and other "born-again moderates." But deenport.com also exists to slander and intimidate. Monday had not ended when Fareena Alam, a semiliterate Muslim scribbler and deenport commissar living in Britain, went on the attack. Alam preens her success in inducing Newsweek International to publish a feeble defense of the Islamist veil. Now she asked, "Can someone who has hosted Irfan Alawi… please tell us what he is like in person?" She continued, "Why is he aligning himself to Stephen Schwartz?… This is not a good sign."
The next commentator on the site reproached Alam for her lack of "good adab," writing, "I think your post is extremely provocative and is likely to invite people to say negative things about Irfan Alawi on a public forum which would be slanderous. Especially from people in the Tablighi movement."

This appeared in an article called A Dab of Adab, which alleged that the Islamic concept of adab (good manners) was commonly used among Muslims in the UK to "suppress dissent" and "can get in the way of good-hearted Muslims speaking out". DeenPort is an excellent website, and is one of the few mainstream Sunni forums where men have to give full names (women can use a kunya, but must give a recognisable name), ensuring that no troublemaker can come on with a name like "Jihadi786" and start telling everyone they have to "kill the kuffar"; Deobandi-Bareilawi bickering is banned (even mentioning the names is discouraged) and, most importantly, adherence to the four schools and approval of traditional practices, including Sufism, is a given. It is, in short, a safe space for traditional Muslims, and it is rare for debates to get out of hand on that site (a contrast to some other forums, notably the old ASFA forum which had to be shut down because there was too much acrimonious arguing).

Also up for attack is Aftab Malik, founder of Amal Press, which has also published a number of titles on classical scholarship, including The Broken Chain, by Malik himself, and one volume of al-Hidayah, a popular textbook of Hanafi fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). After he wrote this article defending Shaikh Hamza against a defamatory sideswipe in the Spectator, Schwartz alleged that he is part of Shaikh Hamza's entourage, a strange idea given that they live in two different countries, and also that he published a book by Harun Yahya (Islam Denounces Terrorism), which brings the author's usual anti-Darwinist line into the subject, but the title pretty much says it all. Amal Press jumped at the chance to publish a colourful book denouncing terrorism (and mentioning the Najdi, i.e. Wahhabi, backdrop) which Muslims would read and non-Muslims would notice, amid a lot of other books promoting moderate mainstream Islam (and Harun Yahya's other books were published in English by other publishers), and all Schwartz can do is complain and insult. In his recent comment here, Schwartz calls Aftab "another munafiq" (hypocrite, which can be a generally dishonest person but also someone who falsely pretends to be a Muslim), apparently without minding the enormous consequences of such accusations, particularly when they are without any basis whatsoever.

Schwartz also insulted Mas'ud Khan, who has been publishing the writings of Shaikh Nuh Keller and Abdul-Hakim Murad since the mid-1990s, as well as a host of other materials defending mainstream aqida against attacks from Wahhabis and others, as a "loudmouth slob". The articles on his website include material written by the shaikh whose picture appears on each page of his "Islamic Pluralism" site – Shaikh Muhamamad bin 'Alawi al-Maliki – and about the situation of Muslims in the Balkans which should be of interest to Schwartz. Surely this is someone else Schwartz should consider an ally. Does he care about Wahhabism in the west anymore? Did he ever?

Schwartz is perhaps the most egregious of a trend we have seen much of in the last few years: of Muslims, or at least self-proclaimed Muslims (as their target audience often does not care for the difference between a Muslim and, say, an Isma'ili), standing up and announcing that they are "telling things how they are", and ripping into the community, often in front of a non-Muslim audience, and accusing its leaders of being terrorist sympathisers, extremists etc., and accusing anyone who disagrees with them of lying, being deluded, "drinking the Kool-Aid" or something similarly disparaging. Ed Husain and his friends are one example in the UK, we have seen Abdur-Rahman Muhammad (recent example) in the USA, but Schwartz's hatred for a whole spectrum of Muslims, from Wahhabis to the CAIR leadership to Shaikh Hamza and Mas'ud Khan, is unfathomable from a Muslim. Is it all a vehicle for generating controversy to raise his own profile? Does he have a personal vendetta? (In the years I've been Muslim, I've met very few people with bad things to say about Shaikh Hamza.) Schwartz alleges that adab functions as a gagging device; in the past, I have personally faced censure for suggesting that certain "shaikhs" are not all that they are made out to be (such as that they are not in fact authorised, or are not as strict in their adherence to Islamic law as a shaikh should be), although none of this happened on DeenPort. I do not disagree with Schwartz on Shaikh Hamza because I am a fan-boy or afraid of censure; I disagree because Shaikh Hamza is a great teacher of Islam and a credit to the Muslims, and Schwartz's claims are outrageous and ridiculous.

When we see someone who first claims to be a Sufi, who writes a poem praising a Sufi jihad leader, who attacks Wahhabis in the media, who then turns on one of the sect's most vocal and effective intellectual and scholarly opponents, and does much of this in papers and magazines notorious for their hostility to Muslims, including one which allows someone to call for the nuclear bombing of Makkah, one which allows a serial slanderer of Muslims to allege, falsely, that Muslims sacralise public spaces in England by holding processions, and one which allows someone to come out of nowhere to liken Muslims to dogs, Janjaweed and Nazis, one must ask questions. If anyone is behaving like a hypocrite, it is certainly not Aftab Malik or Mas'ud Khan.