Taj Hargey is no stranger to long-time readers of this site: he is notorious for his anti-Shari’ah publicity stunts and for being able and willing to come out and attack Muslims in the press, first of all on the BBC’s Panorama in 2005 and since then mostly in the Times. Now, his so-called Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford has got some publicity (in the Oxford Times, albeit appearing on their website for anyone to read) for holding marriages between Muslim women and non-Muslim men, which is unlawful by consensus in Islamic law.
The article claims:
Dr Taj Hargey, chairman of the Muslim Education Centre of Oxford, said he had performed about 36 marriages in the past two years between Muslim women and non-Muslim men.
More imams are happy to marry Muslim men to non-Muslim women.
Couples from Spain, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, France and Norway have all come to Dr Hargey after failing to find someone locally prepared to carry out the service.
Most had spent months looking for an imam, and many found Dr Hargey after contacting American Muslim leaders via the Internet.
Dr Hargey, who believes he is the only imam in the UK who openly performs the mixed marriages, said: “We do it because there is no prohibition in the Koran.
“Islam allows Muslim men to marry non-Muslim women and such marriages are common, but I am one of the only people who will do it the other way round.”
Such marriages are actually not all that common, and certainly most Muslim men marry Muslim women. In fact, their usual choice is much narrower in many families; they want their children to marry spouses from the village back home, or the same caste, and inter-racial marriages among Muslims are probably not that common in large sections of the Asian Muslim community in the UK (among converts, it’s absolutely normal). Where Muslim men have married non-Muslim women, it has often proved to be a recipe for conflict as the man might well expect things of her that a husband from the same culture might not. There have also been numerous abductions of children of such marriages, often to countries which won’t return the children. Such marriages are, in my view, ill-advised for both parties. They were permitted because traditional Christian and Muslim values in the Middle East are, or were, similar. That isn’t the case in a Europe where Christianity is increasingly, where it’s held to at all, a matter of identity. Shared beliefs and values are, in my view, essential to maintain a happy marriage.
Hargey is a well-known proponent of “Qur’anic Islam”, but much as “it’s not in the Qur’an” doesn’t mean it’s not perfectly valid in Islam, the prohibition on Muslim women marrying outside the faith is definitely in the Qur’an, as the section which permits Muslim men to marry Christian or Jewish women specifically instructs women to marry Muslim men. So, Hargey’s “Qur’anic” emphasis is proved to be just an excuse; his real agenda is to erase any aspect of Islam which Europeans might not like, meaning that Islam is reduced to a mere “culture” consisting of names, stories and food. However, Islam is not conferred on the basis of a Muslim name and a taste for couscous or biryani, but on belief, affirmation and practice. What Hargey preaches is not Islam and Muslims have never taken it seriously.
Possibly Related Posts:
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- Smug charlatan Hargey screws thousands out of Muslim Weekly
- Amina Wadud joins Hargey publicity stunt
- Manal Omar, the ‘burkini’, the rude busybody and the local media
- An attack on the idea of communities
I can’t believe he is coming out with such baqwas (nonsense). People of his kind are best ignored, because all they want is publicity. Cosmic Cook´s last blog ..Cheap Books
That article is from June last year. I wonder how many more people he has ‘married’ since then!? They are simply not valid, and you will be hard pressed to find many Muslims in the world who would agree that they are.
Surely you can’t help who you fall in love with?
What is the other option, they renounce their faith to marry? At the end of the day more people are staying Muslims this way.
If religion were to cast out every person that didn’t follow 100% of the rules/guidelines, then faith would soon become a thing of the past.
I agree with with Cosmic Cook above, this is but another publicity stunt by Hargey. We live in times were his ilk are flavour of the month and getting cash thrown at them from all quarters. Since 9/11 a cottage industry of reformists, repenting radicals and “experts” on Islam have come out of the woodwork to feed the medias appetite for all things anti-islam. He is simply milking it for what he can. What he says is for the western audience. We all know that his views will never influence orthdox Islam and so does he.
He’s probably hoping for a Rushdie style fatwa so that his stock increases. Best thing to do is not give extremists like Hargey the oxygen that they crave (where have I heard that before?!).
P.S. I heard Hargey was from a Qadiani background - which would explain an awful lot.
As-Salaamu ‘alaikum,
Ali: Taj Hargey isn’t himself a Qadiani, but I’ve been informed that the Hargeys are a well-known Qadiani family in South Africa.
Of course, the Pope isn’t a Qadiani either; it doesn’t make him a Muslim any more than it makes Taj Hargey a Muslim.
There is a Muslim/Christian Marriage group in Britain. They have a small website which includes contact details: http://www.mcmarriage.org.uk/index.html - there is also a list of links: Taj’s isn’t on there, but the MCB is.
Why is this being labelled as a “fresh anti-Islam stunt” when the article was written in June? And who can blame these Muslim women for hooking up with non-Muslim men when most of the decent, functional, attractive Muslim guys with steady jobs are already taken?
Why are muslims wasting theie time on this man??? His views and opinions are just that ‘views and opinions, not from islam. Allahu mustah’an, he’s getting enough publicity from the media and non-muslims, now the muslims are giving in to his nuisance too. All he talks about is the quran says this and the quran says that…but yet I’m not getting anything but his interpretations. He is not a scholar, maybe in oxford, but he is not one of the scholars who are the inheritors of true knowledge. May Allah protect us from these people who are only here to cause fitnah and confusion. The religion of islam is complete and has been perfected by Allah, Muhammed ibn Abdullah (sal’lallahu alyahi wa salam)is the final prohpet and our guidance is in his way.