G2 carried the above article, and it featured a number of Muslim women who claim they are challenging stereotypes and extremism; they include Tehmina Kazi (who has commented here in the past) from the so-called British Muslims for Secular Democracy, Sara Khan of Inspire, Houriya Ahmed who was with the Centre for Social Cohesion until recently, and one Rabia Mirza who is involved with an outfit called Cheerleaders Against Everything which has “informal links” with both the BMSD and the English Defence League. (Having looked at CAE’s Facebook page, it’s not a Muslim group; she just happens to be involved in it.)

If you saw the print edition, you might have noticed that neither of the two women were wearing hijab, and that’s where their claim to be “challenging stereotypes” starts to come down, because stereotypes about Muslim women usually involve those who do wear hijab. There actually are nowhere near as many barriers to Muslim women who refuse the hijaab, or who come from families where it’s not worn anyway, achieving in mainstream society as there are for those who do wear it. Significantly, of the “record number” of Muslim MPs that were elected at the last general election, none of the females wore hijaab and all of the males were clean-shaven.

Then there’s the problem with the groups they represent. British Muslims for Secular Democracy uses the non-Muslim definition of a Muslim — namely, someone who looks like a Muslim, has a Muslim name and claims (however dishonestly) to be one. Two of their trustees are Taj Hargey and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, whose status I have discussed here in the past. Alibhai-Brown is a particularly poisonous character, notorious for her broad-brush character assassinations of Muslim women in the popular press. Sara Khan’s group “Inspire” (note: the site has sound which plays automatically) is barely less problematic; it is currently organising an event at City Hall in London, entitled “Speaking in God’s name: Re-examining Gender in Islam”, whose publicity reads:

Unfortunately some of those who deny women their rights claim to do so in God’s Name. For too long these ultra-conservative views in the UK have remained unchanged and unchallenged - until now.

The line-up of speakers includes only one person who could be called a scholar in the traditional Islamic sense; the rest are activists of one sort of another, and are expected to present standard secularist, anti-orthodox views laced with generalised attacks on traditional scholarship and a few stereotypes of their own (such as that classical scholars were all or nearly all men, which was not true, particularly in the very early days which is when most of the work of deciding what was or wasn’t the Shari’ah was done). Although there are no speakers known for extreme hostility for genuine Islam or Muslims (like Hargey or Alibhai-Brown), they do have Amina Wadud, who gave one of her “woman-led Friday prayers” at Hargey’s institution in Oxford. It is significant that no scholar and nobody from any major Muslim organisation in the UK has been invited, so it is not a dialogue with conservative Islam, or even Islam as normally practised in the UK, but merely about it, in the court of a mayor with a long history of hostility towards Islam. It’s a case of “about us, without us”.

They also make some specious claims about female “extremism”, such as that there is a “lack of Islamic literature for female followers and provision for women at mosques” which is why people like Roshonara Choudhary, who stabbed the MP Stephen Timms last year, had to learn their faith from the Internet. There is actually no shortage of such literature — you only have to pay a visit to any Islamic bookshop — and it is not just women who learn about Islam from the Internet; there are many cases of male extremists “self-radicalising” by reading material online, but there are also a lot of quite worthy Islamic forums online, as well as Islamic resources such as question-and-answer websites. As for good-quality Islamic teaching, particularly in English, there is a shortage of that for everyone, particularly adults and converts.

However, my biggest criticism of them is that they are not breaking any ground for Muslim women who wish to follow the deen in its fullness, and that includes wearing the hijaab. It has always been possible for someone with brown skin to tell a right-wing, white-dominated think-tank what its leaders want to hear, and get a job, and there have always been men and women of various ethnicities working in the race relations and equality sector. Neither is there any dispute about the right of a Muslim woman to wear hijab and be a housewife or full-time mother or run a sewing business at home. What’s at stake is the right to wear hijaab and do a normal job, and when these women take off their hijabs and talk about stereotypes about extremism and hijab in the same article, it does the women who practise the deen properly no favours.

The fact is that I have nothing to do with the Islamic Awakening board, am not a member of it and never have been. I followed the story of Usama Hasan’s pronouncement at Kashif Aziz’s blog, Peace, Bruv, and made my first comment on it on DeenPort last Friday and then posted my reaction to his clarification on my blog last Saturday. I’ve never been to Leyton mosque, even when I used to make regular trips to east London (which is a long time ago), and wasn’t at the meeting where he made his inflammatory statements. However, I’ve read some of his interviews in the media, and it is clear that he has been drifting away from what anyone would recognise as mainstream Islamic opinion for a long time, long before this. Those who have opposed him in the recent evolution controversy have also noted some of the things he has said about the status of the hijab, for example.

The claim that any pronouncement of kufr (unbelief) or apostasy is tantamount to a death threat is simply wrong. Anyone who listened to Abdullah Faisal’s taped lectures from the 1990s will hear several individuals named and called kafirs, mostly black American "salafi" preachers such as Abu Usaamah (who presently works as an imam in Birmingham) and Dawud Adib, for defending the legitimacy of the Saudi regime and opposing terrorist attacks on such institutions as the Egyptian army. In one tape, Faisal asks his listeners, "what shall we do with this man", and he makes them repeat "kill him!" three times before saying "I think that makes sense". Yet the person named has not been murdered. He also explicitly called Bareilawis (the majority of Pakistani Muslims) kafirs, but we have not seen Faisal’s followers going around killing Bareilawis.

I do not know who, if anyone, is threatening Usama Hasan’s life. I certainly am not, and I haven’t told anyone to harm him, and I am not in contact with the sort of people who would (and I seriously doubt they read this blog regularly — they know I have a long-standing antagonism towards "salafis"). The issue is that Usama Hasan should not be an imam, regardless of his current status, and if it were not for being Suhaib Hasan’s son, would have been removed from any position of influence the same day he made the statements that caused all the fuss. Nobody needs to get hurt over this; what needs to happen is for Usama Hasan to resign, or be sacked. Of course, as a British citizen he does have the right to freedom of conscience, but that means nobody has the right to harm him for exercising it; it does not mean he has the right to stay an imam if his community no longer wants him.

It just so happens that Usama Hasan was associated with a “salafi” mosque in Leyton, but this would have been just as controversial if it had been said in any mosque. Muslims simply don’t believe in the evolution of the human species, end of story. A sample of what was said at the event where these statements were made in January is posted here; some of his other statements were made in an interview on the BBC Hardtalk programme in 2007 and in an email sent to a mailing list called Abjadiyya, in which he describes women wearing niqaab and men who grow their beards as looking, respectively, like “ninjas and clowns”. These statements are reproduced in this PDF which has the important conclusion:

Usama Hasan’s contemptuous attitude towards Masjid al-Tawheed congregation, by considering them descendants of apes, ninjas and clowns, calls for the congregation to be more vocal and proactive in taking the authority of the mosque back from Usama and those who back him, for a mosque is a house of Allah, and a community centre, and not a family business.

Yesterday, he posted a notice on his blog retracting a number of the statements he made about the matter of the “parentage” of Adam, peace be upon him, but did not resist the temptation to get a dig in at his opponents:

Neither does it excuse those who have continued their mediaevalist, hair-splitting theological and jurisprudential discussions whilst remaining silent about the clear incitement to murder uttered by some in their midst. “Slaughter the people, but worry about killing mosquitos.”

This last comment refers to the behaviour of certain sectarians in the early days of Islam who were so pious as to have asked as to whether killing a mosquito would nullify their pilgrimage, but were associated with various killings and massacres of other Muslims over usually very minor disagreements. He accuses people of threatening his life; that is the hallmark of the Quilliam group, who are fond of portraying themselves to the mass media as boldly speaking out against extremism when nobody else will (it is a standard tactic of anyone who wants to portray themselves as lone defenders of truth; the death threats do not have to be real). One recalls Hassan Butt, who admitted inflicting stab wounds on himself and attributing it to a “Muslim extremist” who was angry at him for turning against them, when in fact he had made up much of his story about his “adventures” with al-Qa’ida in Pakistan.

Usama Hasan’s actions require a mea culpa, an unconditional retraction and repentance, without any parting shot at anyone, and without it, Muslims should not accept him. While anyone threatening him was in the wrong, it is he who was in the wrong by making statements which are incompatible with Islam and then expecting to remain in a position of authority at a mosque of any stripe. In fact, this action allows him to cast himself to his non-Muslim admirers (like Johann Hari) as a kind of Muslim Galileo, forced to retract beliefs he “knew” to be true by obscurantist religious authorities. He is nothing of the sort; he was facing nothing more than the loss of a job which he and his few supporters seem to have regarded himself as entitled to by birth, but which his beliefs made untenable. He was not facing the chopping block.

If Usama Hasan is sincere, he should accept that he has burned too many bridges with the Muslim community at large, that people are not comfortable praying in a group led by him, that many people no longer trust him, and he should step down immediately. After all, when I converted to Islam myself, I did not become an imam; I became an ordinary Muslim, and this is what he should have to accept, and his supporters should as well. To reiterate, a mosque is not a family business, and nobody is entitled to leadership because of who their father is.

Historically, a cult was a religious movement, whether inside or outside a wider religion, that was focussed on one thing or person — a shrine, relics or a saint or real or supposed prophet. The devotion to the Virgin Mary (‘alaiha as-salaam) in Catholicism is often referred to as a cult (and Catholicism’s enemies often call the entire religion the “cult of Mary”) and sometimes Christians themselves call their religion the “cult of Christ”. One well-known example of a cult in Christianity originated in England, where a young boy was found in the Jewish quarter of Lincoln and a myth originated that he had been killed for ritual purposes and that his blood had been consumed by the local Jewish population. It’s most likely that he was murdered by a sex maniac of some kind, but a cult grew up around him (eventually suppressed by the Catholic church) based on the myth, which perpetuated in Europe for centuries after.

The groups we call cults nowadays are closed religious movements, which again may or may not claim to be associated with a major religion. Their characteristics include an excessive devotion to the leadership, with members expected to entirely suspend their judgement in favour of that of the leader or leaders, regardless of whether they would previously have regarded the leader’s demands as immoral or abusive. Another common feature is the separation of the members from their families, sometimes to the point that they are forbidden from even speaking to them, or to anyone in the outside world. It’s worth pointing out that no major religion does this. Some, but by no means all, modern cults engage in sexually abusive practices, such as claiming all the women in the group for the pleasure of the leaders. Again, no major religion does this.

The reason it came up probably has to do with discussion about certain Muslim groups, particularly Sufi-oriented ones, at least one of which has been called a cult on certain blogs in recent years. Having been a member of one of them for a number of years, I firmly reject the suggestion that it’s a cult, as they do not separate themselves from the community — the vast majority live in major cities, have spouses and other family members who aren’t members, freely mingle with those not in the group, and take religious knowledge from people outside the group with the encouragement of the leadership. No cult in the modern-day sense would allow its members to do the last of these in particular. Regardless of the atmosphere which has been said to prevail at the group’s centre, people have left, and removed their children as well, without coming to physical harm.

It was suggested in the discussion at DeenPort that Islam in its early phase could be called a cult by modern standards: “Extreme devotion to the leader (sal Allahu alaihi wasallam), family strife, radical lifestyle changes, certainty of the nearness of end times… I could go on, but you get the picture”. However, even then, Muslims were not encouraged to forsake their families, with the exception of wives whose husbands refused to become Muslim (and even then, not right from the beginning). Under the treaty of Hudaibiyya, the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) even sent back men who emigrated from Makkah to Madinah without the permission of their guardian, although women were eventually exempted. The lifestyle changes for the early, Arabic-speaking believers were nothing like as radical as those required of converts from a western background today, and the earlier someone became Muslim, the less radical and more gradual the changes were. The “certainty of the nearness of end times” is shared with a number of Christian denominations, not just cults, and there was no question of sitting out in the desert or up on a mountain waiting for it. And while some men of the Ansaar in Madinah who had two or more wives gave up one of them so that men coming from Makkah could have one, there were none of the depredations associated with cults of today, or even the more controversial Muslim groups — no prevailing on men to divorce wives for the sake of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) or those close to him, no dumping of large groups of young men outside the city gates, and certainly no claiming of any rights over all women in the community.

So, Islam never was a cult, not least because although there was a heavy focus on the character and person of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), he made it clear that he was an intermediary and that he called to the worship of One God and not of himself. As for other groups, inside and outside of Islam, people do have a tendency to call any group a cult if they find something distasteful going on in the leadership or they dislike some aspect of its beliefs or its behaviour. But I would not call any group a cult unless it had the distinctive characteristics I mentioned earlier in this entry, and not even every group with plainly false beliefs, a plainly corrupt leadership or both has these features.

The New York Times printed some pictures which have been shown at community meetings in NYC and which were released to the public last week. The frontage of the building is to entirely consist of some sort of lattice-like construction, except that it’s not a classical Islamic geometric pattern, rather it’s a collection of jagged shapes which, frankly, could scare small children. The building doesn’t really look like anything, least of all a mosque. Inside, people are shown walking in these eerie white rooms next to the windows in the fake-lattice frontage. There is really nothing Islamic about what has been shown so far, either the inside or the outside. Much the same could be said for the Abbey Mills proposal, which also deliberately avoided common Islamic architectural features apparently for its own sake.

Perhaps this is par for the course in New York, I don’t know. However, it fits the pattern coming up with an over-ambitious project at a sensitive time that stirs up a lot of bigotry and hostility when they do not even have the resources to build it. Apparently the Cordoba Project raised $18,000 from donations for their community centre (surely you couldn’t buy a poky one-bedroom flat in NYC with that money), but it needs $100 million or more to actually get the thing built, which means a whole lot of hostility has been raised and other mosque projects have been put in jeopardy across the USA and all because of a project that is not even concrete in terms of what will, if anything, actually be built (no architect has been hired for Park51 yet). It is, of course, possible that they might raise the money from Saudi Arabia, but this may well come with “strings attached” in terms of the donor’s name being on the building or his being in control of what goes on inside, although given the extremely liberal reputation of Faisal Abdur-Rauf, that might not be forthcoming anyway.

It becomes difficult for someone like me, who seeks to defend the Muslim community’s interests in writing, to defend those who propose these ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky, overblown projects. I’m not going to say the Muslims are their own worst enemies, but a lot of the time, our leaders, or those who seek to be our leaders, don’t really do us any favours. Muslims really want mosques and educational facilities like schools and libraries (both secular and religious); let’s leave swimming pools to the municipality, and interfaith prayer rooms where they belong — the airport.

My concerns were that Dr Qadri was being presented by a newspaper with a history of Islamophobia, complete with an appreciation from Douglas Murray, as some sort of great hope, a Muslim scholar who will at last condemn suicide bombing unequivocally, when in fact Islamic scholars had been doing this for years, largely unacknowledged by the media who have continued to demand such condemnations since 2001. He did so with a broad-brush slur against other parts of the Muslim community, accusing them all of being terrorist sympathisers — thus further endearing him to people like Douglas Murray and his supporters.

Besides which, why is a fatwa against suicide bombing significant in a British context now? We have not had a successful attack since 2005, and the people who carried them out never belonged to movements which never recognised Qadri’s authority anyway. It was condemned at the time, much as the 9/11 attacks were. Whatever its significance in Pakistan, its importance in this country was overstated.

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.

Among those they first interview are Hamza Tzortzis, who is a former HT member (or at least, former activist) who has since left, and Qasim Rafiq of FOSIS, who had been Abdulmuttalib’s predecessor as president of UCL ISoc, who said that most people who get radicalsied do so through watching BBC News and al-Jazeera. After him came Ed Husain, whose view that the separation of men from women, the latter submitting their questions in writing, “are examples of the hardline form of Islam that has become endemic in many ISocs”. He himself said that the practice belongs in Saudi Arabia, not in Britain. He also alleged that the views given out in “event after event after event”, the literature present in prayer rooms and the content of Friday sermons “clearly does provide the extremist mood music to which suicide bombers dance”.

OK … besides the suggestion of dancing to “mood music” (mood music is background music; you don’t dance to it), this amounts to blaming ISocs for people becoming suicide bombers when there is no definite link. The programme points out that six former ISoc members have become involved in terrorism, but that is a small fraction of how many there have been. If ISocs convey any view on politics, it ought to be one based on the tenets of Islam and influenced by concern for the Ummah, not for what the government might want Muslims to think. As for the matter of separating men from women, people may disagree with it, but the issue has no place in any discussion on terrorism.

Next, there is a female (supposed) former ISoc member, who alleges that there is a culture of intolerance in the prayer room in which sisters who do not wear hijab, do not pray “correctly”, or do not share the common view on certain political issues like Palestine or the Iraq war, are looked down on. While the issues of people “correcting” each others’ prayers based on instructions from unreliable, sectarian sources is a well-known problem, not just in ISocs, what “moderate” views on Palestine and Iraq were objected to is not explained. She also alleged that the “hijabi sisters” would refuse to associate with her if they knew she had non-Muslim friends, male or female; this could only have been a certain section of them rather than all or even most. I’ve seen women in hijab socialising quite happily with obviously non-Muslim women on many occasions, including around the university quarter around Gower Street where UCL is.

They then interviewed the provost of UCL whose opinion was that university authorities cannot be the police, and that restricting outside speakers will not make a great deal of difference to terrorism as “the influences on young minds are many and varied”. The reporter then said that his team had discovered that an al-Muhajiroun presentation had taken place last December, with Anjem Choudhary chairing and a video-linked message from Omar Bakri Mohammed. The university had given a statement that they had been deceived by the person who booked the room who said he was from a London youth centre, that complaints had been made about the conduct of some attendees, and that the person who booked that meeting would not be allowed back.

There then followed an interrogation of Daud Abdullah over his signing of the Istanbul Declaration, which called for Muslims to fight foreign warships sent to police the “ceasefire” and prevent the smuggling of guns into Gaza “by all means and ways”. This leads to them arguing over what that phrase meant and whether it includes or excludes military means, but the real question should have been what it has to do with British students being radicalised and how much his course contributes to that. Daud Abdullah is then heard explaining that Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006 and thus represents the will of the Palestinian people, and on that basis he supports them; he did, however, express disapproval to the killing of civilians, whoever they are.

After Daud Abdullah, they moved onto Shahidul Mursaleen, a member of the “moderate group” Minhaj-ul-Quran, who told how he had found himself unable to promote or arrange events on certain campuses because of interference from HT students. If such things are going on, surely they should be seeking help from the university authorities so that one group cannot prevent another from operating. Normally, however, universities reserve much of their poster space for internal use, which includes registered student societies and does not include outside organisations. Did the MQ group have permission to put the posters up? Surely they should try and settle these matters through the proper channels rather than running to the media.

Next came Anthony Glees, professor of security studies at Buckingham university, who alleged that universities had become “safe spaces for radicalisation that can lead to a state where a student is ready to be recruited by al-Qa’ida”. He blamed political correctness for allowing such radicalisation to be presented as free speech, such that those responsible could not be touched:

There is only free speech within the law; you should not be at liberty to incite people, you should not be at liberty to radicalise people so that they turn to terror. Joining al-Qa’ida is not like joining the Young Socialists or the Young Conservatives. It is a step change and it marks a move towards total abhorrence and hatred for everything the liberal democracy of this country stands for.

But the fact that al-Qa’ida depise western liberal democracy is not why anyone is fighting them; it is their behaviour as fighters and their behaviour when they get a chance to rule, or influence rulers, that motivates people to fight them. The west itself has produced a number of ideologies over the years whose followers despise liberal democracy, as well as academics who have acted as apologists for every dictatorial regime from Pinochet to the Khmer Rouge. This is not the same as inciting people to commit terrorist acts, as they would have gone to prison if they had done that, and quite rightly so. And as for “radicalising people” etc., if this is done by clearly teaching them that al-Qa’ida are fighting for Islam and that it is the duty of Muslims to support them, this should clearly not be allowed, but talks by former Guantanamo Bay prisoners and slideshows about atrocities in Iraq or Afghanistan, even though they may have this effect on some people, are free speech. As Qasim Rafiq said, people could be radicalised by simply watching the news, but in any case, the real radicalisation likely comes through websites anyway.

In short, this is yet another attempt to blame the Muslm community in the UK and its institutions for a terrorist act it had nothing to do with. They cannot find any real evidence that Umar Abdulmuttalib acted under the influence of “radicals” in the UK, so they make completely irrelevant attacks on elements of conservative Islam that they find objectionable, but which does not attract significant protest from those affected, and draw attention to some problems which are real, but which again have nothing to do with the Christmas bombing attempt. Sectarian bias and political control of ISocs is a real issue in some places, and if the Muslim student community tolerate it, it may be because they get their central job (organising Friday prayers and Ramadan fast-breaking facilities, for example) done efficiently enough that they can be ignored the rest of the time. None of these problems necessarily contributed to the terrorist act in Detroit or any other; the fact that they attack ISocs generally indicates that they cannot find any concrete evidence of a link.

I wanted to fillet Johann Hari’s article in which he interviews three leading members of the Quilliam clique plus Anjem “Andy” Choudhary, but never having known them and always being far from the centre of all things HT — Newham and then SOAS (I was at Coulsdon College and then went on to Aberystwyth, and HT/Muhajiroun had no presence in either place) — I don’t really know enough to rebut it except to say that their version of, say, the murder of that Nigerian student differs with the version that many other Muslim students who were there at the time offer, and that I can’t really believe that they called the Nigerian Christians niggers when they were pushing the universality and non-racism of Islam rather than an Asian-centred village Islam. But Timothy Bowes did know Maajid Nawaz, and certainly didn’t know him as a jihadi but as a bore who was convinced of the power of argument.

Johann Hari’s interview with Andy reveals more about himself than about his subject. He does not even entertain the idea (or doesn’t seem to) that Andy is an agent provocateur or suggest that he is trying to whip up non-Muslims against Muslims for their own nefarious ends, whatever they may be. His last gambit reminds me of Keith Allen with the Kansas “anti-smoking brigade”: he goes too far in trying to provoke his subject, but the subject, rather than producing the desired explosion, simply terminates the interview:

He begins to ask – jabbing his finger – what my alternative is. “In the United States, bestiality is legal in the privacy of your own home,” he says. Paedophiles are rampant, with the Man-Boy Love Association on the brink of success. Compare that with the 1,300-year long caliphate. In all those years, he says, “there were only 60 rapes”.

Do you really believe that if people are not suppressed by a tyrant-God, they will become paedophiles and start fucking animals? Are you so rotten inside? Does Anjum fear Andy that much?

He stares at me, flat and emotionless now. “That is your last question,” he says. And as I leave and look back at him through the glass, jabbering on his phone and daydreaming of annihilation, I realise how far all my interviewees – and new friends – have travelled.

Actually, I wasn’t too happy about the whole idea of Muslim counter-demonstrations against al-Muhajiroun anyway. The problem is that any demonstration would have been seen as too small, and even if the tiny number of fanatics who turn up with Anjem were outnumbered by 400 Muslims, that would still have been 400 out of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in London alone. However, besides that, there was the issue of BMSD being influenced by Shaaz Mahboob, who is well known to Muslims on Facebook as someone who likes to slander Muslims and particularly scholars, commonly using the word ‘mullah’ as if it were a term of abuse. Their board of trustees includes Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Taj Hargey, both of whose anti-Islamic viewpoints have been discussed amply here in the past.

The Facebook discussion also led to some woman referring to the Muhajiroun as “fake Muslims”, a manner of speaking much more typical of extremists like al-Muhajiroun than of moderate Muslims. However, in response to some of us saying we wouldn’t march or demonstrate under the BMSD banner, someone linked a YouTube video containing a clip of the “Judean People’s Front” scene from Life of Brian. That was a send-up of left-wing groups in the 1970s and 1980s, in which small groups with nearly identical politics, at least as far as outsiders were concerned, fell out over minute differences. Perhaps outsiders would think my differences with the BMSD were insignificant, but the level of contempt they show for practising Muslims and scholars doesn’t seem that way to me.

In any case, it later appeared that the so-called English Defence League were jumping on the bandwagon, and I can understand that nobody wanted a three-way confrontation between the Muhajigoons, the thugs from the EDL and various disparate groups of “moderate Muslims”. Despite being an “administrator” for the event’s Facebook group, I wasn’t certain I was going, but neither was I consulted about pulling it off Facebook; it just disappeared some time this afternoon. Perhaps cancelling was the wisest thing to do, but I thought “democracy” meant that there was a bit of discussion before an event is deemed to be on — or off.