Baroness (Syeeda) Warsi recently said in an interview with the Guardian that Muslim extremists such as Anjem Choudhary, who led the group which was threatening to outrage the public with a counter-demonstration on Remembrance Sunday until it was banned late last week, forfeited the right to call themselves Muslims. Her reasoning is pretty extraordinary: in a video interview with John Harris, she says:

From the Islam that I have been taught, and grown up with … and most people have been bought up with, it has to be rationed, reasoned, contextualised. Now if you detach reason from religion, then you are no longer a follower of that faith. If you are a follower of a religion that is so clear in its support of humanity [and you behave the way they do] then you are no longer part of that faith.

Asked specifically about Choudhary, she alleged that “nothing about the way they conduct themselves is in accordance with the teachings” and that “the minute they detach reason from religion, they’re not part of that faith any more”.

It is actually pretty dangerous for a Muslim to be issuing statements that clearly imply that someone who identifies as a Muslim in fact is not (known as takfir). There are pretty strict criteria for exclusion from Islam, such as expressing a belief which is contrary to what is well-known about Islam (whether in relation to law or doctrine) or showing clear contempt for Islam (such as by defiling a copy of the Qur’an or insulting any Prophet). There are certain sects which are held not to be Muslim despite their identifying as such and having a superficially Islamic culture or using Islamic language, because their beliefs are incompatible. The American-based group which calls itself the Nation of Islam is the best-known of these in the West.

Crucially, sins do not nullify one’s Islam, unless you deny that something well-known to be a sin is a sin. This does not include things on which there is any dispute about them being forbidden, even if only a small minority regards it as permitted. Making unusual or invalid excuses for a sin also does not constitute disbelief: one common example is justifying killing Israeli civilians on the grounds that all Israelis are soldiers, or justifying killing anyone associated with the army of any contemporary Muslim country on the grounds that they support a non-Islamic government. The early Muslims had to deal with a sect called the Kharijites, some of whom proclaimed anyone who disagreed with them on very minute matters to be an unbeliever and slaughtered them in their thousands. Yet, they did not call the Kharijites unbelievers.

When murder does not put someone outside of Islam, one can easily deduce that hurting people’s feelings by making a noise on Remembrance Sunday does not either. It is not even a sin as such, it is simply bad manners and politically naive, assuming that they were not actually intending to attract negative attention to the community as they did with their demonstration against the Royal Anglian regiment parade in Luton in 2009, which did immense damage by prompting the founding of the English Defence League. Some Muslims certainly suspect that they do their publicity stunts for ulterior motives and may in fact intend harm, but it is also possible that they intend to provoke a conflict in which Muslims will be forced to take sides and which they presume will lead to their victory and domination, or that of a group very much like them. A dishonourable intention, as most Muslims do not want to live under their rule, but not something which, on the face of it, stops them being Muslims.

Takfir is something that is by turn condemned and encouraged: a few years ago it was being presented as the root of the entire extremism problem in the Muslim world, and Muslims everywhere were encouraged to sign the “Amman message”, which declared that members of several named sects were, at least, Muslims and could not be called otherwise (some scholars refused to sign it, among them Mufti Taqi Uthmani). However, when the takfir is against the extremists themselves (and against those who cause embarrassment to the Muslim community), some people are only too keen to call them unbelievers. The fact remains that the criteria are extremely strict, and usually it is up to scholars, not ordinary Muslims, however famous or politically influential they are.

Image source: Wikipedia.

I’ve heard some criticisms of this documentary to the effect that, although it shifts the focus away from female converts, it concentrates too heavily on one very extreme group which has a tiny number of followers. There were also a number of inaccurate statements, such as the reference to the stoning of women for adultery, which appears twice in the first ten minutes. In fact, the punishment applies to both sexes (according to most scholars, a pregnant woman can easily escape the charge by claiming she was raped, which would the dominant opinion in this day and age given its prevalence). Leech films during Ramadan, and witnesses Richard sleeping for large parts of the day, opining, “solution to fasting: sleep as much as you can”, as if this is what Muslims in general do. In fact, Muslims in general work, and cannot sleep most of the day.

We did not find out exactly how Richard had been attracted to the Muhajiroun, but we do find him doing his “da’wah” on the streets of east London, accosting a new convert from Latvia and trying to encourage him to get involved with them, but also getting into a fight with a man they believe to be drunk, after he flings one of their leaflets back at them (I could not smell his breath on TV, obviously, so I could not tell whether his slurred speech was due to that or to a disability). It gave a fairly good picture of what the group are like among themselves, which is to say, somewhat jocular and matter-of-fact with what many would consider harsh views. They talk with exaggerated disgust at all the munkar (evil) going on around them as they drive around London looking for somewhere to pray (as has been pointed out elsewhere, that is an easy task in east London). Several of these men, of course, were once part of that scene, in Salahuddeen’s case only a couple of years earlier.

Salahuddeen and Ben/Ahsan both come from Weymouth, which Leech describes as an “ordinary seaside town”. There is no such thing as an ordinary seaside town; there are big and small seaside towns, some are prosperous and youthful, like Brighton; some are faded and run-down, like Hastings, while others are popular with retirees and commuters. I haven’t been to Weymouth since I was a child, but I do know someone who lives there now. One of the group’s stunts was to bring some men down from London, including Salahuddeen and Ahsan, on a “da’wah” trip, which leads to some locals having to be dragged away by the police while others call their message “bollocks” or something similar. All quite likely to make the situation for the few Muslims in Weymouth more difficult.

Towards the end, Robb confronts his brother on his way to Mecca, and asks him some questions about the derogatory way in which the latter spoke to him, such as by claiming that Muslims were supposed to shake hands with non-Muslims with their left hands, as it’s their “dirty” hand (something no Muslim I asked had ever heard of, and nobody else in the group seemed to have done either). Salahuddeen also seemed rather more reasonable and conciliatory when on “enemy territory” in Weymouth, telling people they were entitled to their opinion etc., but was full of bluster when surrounded by his friends in London. Leech is also heartened that Ben/Ahsan seems not to have swallowed everything he was being told in London to quite the extent that Salahuddeen had.

This isn’t a particularly comprehensive documentary on al-Muhajiroun (I’ve heard the book Radical Islam Rising by Quintan Wiktorowicz recommended for that), nor is it representative of the convert experience generally. It does, however, give a fair indication of what sort of people the Muhajiroun are and what they make of people who convert and join them. They did not have to use hidden cameras as were used in other recent documentaries, because this group will clearly do anything for publicity, much as we saw with the Tottenham Ayatollah documentary in the 1990s. Most converts live pretty ordinary lives, and will not want to live with cameras pointing at them (and these were all men, none of them apparently married). None of this is new, of course, for people who have known the Muslim scene in London for the last 20 years or so; the only concern is that converts in general, particularly in provincial areas like Weymouth, will be judged on these men’s example.

I’ve written about the Doncaster tweet before. In both cases, it’s arguable that the content did not justify the authors being arrested, since terrorist attacks on airports (let alone aeroplanes) do not generally come from dissatisfied customers but from politically-motivated terrorists, and a single person cannot stone someone to death: it takes a crowd to do that. Still, if a dissatisfied customer threatened to burn a restaurant down, that would be taken every bit as seriously as this, if not more so. It is only to be expected that threats to bomb airports are taken extremely seriously, because there have been attacks, and attempted attacks, on planes in the very recent past, and unlike in a train or car accident, if one blows up in mid-air, you have no chance. People are just that much more nervous about threats to air safety.

This is only the latest in a long line of incidents in which there is outrage at a law which, supposedly, should be getting used to keep “others”, be they Muslims, young Black men or “chavs”, in line being applied to middle-class white people. A few years ago, a commenter noted on the blog Samizdata that there was a tendency for well-to-do white women to run to the media with tales of outrage because they were arrested and put in a cell overnight for knowingly breaking the law, as if the law only applied to lesser mortals. The same was true of the outrage about the white British man who could not bring his 19-year-old white Canadian wife into this country, a law clamoured for by the anti-immigration lobby as a way of eliminating the Asian practice of bringing in young wives from “the village back home”; if the bride had come from a poorer country and had not been white, there would have been no such outrage even if she and the husband were well-educated.

A similar attitude can be found in some of the protests against intrusive airport security, such as the “naked body scanners”. I recently saw an article on the right-wing news website WorldNet Daily complaining about the scans in the USA, and two of those who complained mentioned that they were white or “as American looking as apple-pie”, as if that should excuse them from the same level of security as everyone else. What isn’t said is that it’s quite OK for this kind of harassment to take place when those travelling are Muslims, or have names that look like Muslim names (because of terrorism), or Hispanic or Black (because of drugs etc.), but perish the thought that someone who looks like an American goes through the same thing. Of course, Timothy McVeigh did not look or sound like a Muslim, nor did the Unabomber.

The article does mention that staff operating scanners in Nigeria had been reported as using them for what is essentially sexual harassment of passengers (who are mostly black, obviously), but the article clearly is not objecting to the sexual harassment of passengers in general, only when it’s white people, because white people are obviously not criminals or terrorists, an assumption that history does not bear out. They should accept that the law applies to everyone and exists to protect everyone and assumes nothing about what the threat looks like or where it comes from (that’s the theory, anyway), and if they do not like it, they should campaign to make it fair for everyone, not just exempt themselves by saying that it should apply only to everyone but them.

This isn’t the only insult to the poppy appeal to be made publically this week — a bunch of idiotic Muslims held a demo in London on Armistice Day (last Thursday) in which a giant poppy was burned and banners reading “British soldiers, burn in Hell” and “Afghanistan, graveyard of empires” were held up, and the two-minute silence was deliberately broken. Of course, this was the one that got media coverage even though it was the usual handful of idiots (no doubt known to those who shouted slogans as Roshonara Choudhary was sentenced last week, if they’re not the same people).

The finger is, once again, being pointed at “Shaikh” Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American preacher currently living in Yemen, whose videos were found on Choudhary’s home computer. They didn’t say what the “hate videos” consisted of, but it’s widely known that he has begun to openly advocate violence since his imprisonment in Yemen a few years ago. Before that, he was best known for his Sirah tapes, which many young Muslims listened to keenly. His recent turn means that anyone who ever shared a platform with him or sells his old CD’s is presumed in some places to be a fellow traveller with him now.

However, we can’t blame him for anything anyone who has watched his videos, even the recent ones, has done. This woman acted on her own judgement and was not told to do anything by him. Her actions should be blamed on her alone, and can’t be used to point the finger at anyone else in any way associated with him.

There’s a letter in today’s Guardian advocating that Google should use its multilingual technology to censor content based on the use of certain words, and subject material with certain triggers to human moderation. This would require them to hire a huge number of staff, when in reality, anyone can “flag” a video containing inappropriate or illegal material, but in any case, American law distinguishes between advocating and inciting, which is to direct someone to commit a crime, and only the latter is illegal. We should not expect the state, or some company, to protect us from ideas, as we are adults, after all (and as for those who aren’t, there are people called “parents” whose duty that is).

Furthermore, it’s noticeable that sentences are getting harsher, with Choudhary receiving a sentence for attempted murder that exceeds what many people convicted of actual murder receive, or what people receive for deliberate cruelty, including against disabled people. The judge informed her that, had she succeeded in killing Timms, she would have received a whole-life sentence, so one should ask whether the murder of a politician for supporting an illegal war is really a more heinous offence than some of the senseless murders in London which commonly receive life sentences with set tariffs. Anyone familiar with the Northern Ireland peace process will be aware that some terrorists known to have participated in bombings and massacres — of ordinary people, not soldiers or politicians — ended up serving less time than Choudhary will. It begs the question of why an MP’s life is somehow worth more than that of a disabled child, or an equally innocent ordinary person in south London or Northern Ireland.

They call this an independent inquiry; they need to contact the independent organisations that have expertise in Islamic radicalisation and in the history of Islamism, people such as the Quilliam Foundation and I would have hoped to have Student Rights consulted as well; the Centre for Social Cohesion; they’re all people with great background and great knowledge of radicalisation on campus.

Student Rights seems a bizarre name for a group which has as its main aim “tackling extremism” (as they see it) rather than, say, campaigning for better funding for student welfare and lower (or no) tuition fees, which is what student rights meant when I was a student in the mid-1990s. A look at who’s on their advisory panel reveals that they are anything but independent:

• Robert Halfon, MP for Harlow, who has held consultancy roles for the Conservative Friends of Israel
• Daniel Johnson, editor of Standpoint magazine which is published by the Social Affairs Unit, a right-wing think tank, and is noted for hostile reporting on matters related to Muslims
• Dr Alan Mendoza, executive director of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society
• Shiraz Maher, best-known for boasting of having joined Hizb-ut-Tahrir after 9/11 and left them, to become a media-friendly HT-basher, after the London bombings in 2005.

Their recommended books include Infidel and Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Celsius 7/7 by Michael Gove and Londonistan by Melanie Phillips. The groups they recommend, similarly, are not independent: the Centre for Social Cohesion is based out of the same offices as Policy Exchange, a known Tory-aligned think tank, and is known for its spying antics around various mosques in London and producing inaccurate reports as a result. The Quilliam Foundation may not be linked to one political party or other, but it is also a group which attempts, like all the others mentioned, to police the ideologies espoused by Muslims, to denounce anyone who does not fit their agenda as an extremist or a radical. In the recent past, such ideological policing on left-wing ideologies would be called McCarthyism.

It’s dishonest to play on non-Muslims’ fears of extremism and terrorism to suppress ideologies you dislike for your own reasons, particularly when you do not have the evidence to prove a real connection. Islamic societies have guest speakers once in a while, and even if they promote a particular view of Islamic history or politics or convey anti-gay or anti-feminist or anti-Zionist views, half an hour of that is hardly likely to lead to someone going and bombing an aeroplane. To talk about someone “being radicalised”, in any case, takes the blame away from the person who committed a terrorist act and assigns it to someone else who may not even have the same views as he does and may have never spoken a word to him in person; the terrorist may have made his own mind up by reading various websites or by speaking to people he knew, at college or outside, or even well before he got there. He can have access to these people and website all the time, rather than for half an hour every few weeks at an ISoc event; he could easily have been biding his time and keeping his views and intentions a secret for at least some of the time he was at UCL.

Besides, Umar Farouk spent nearly 18 months in the Middle East after leaving UCL, much of it in Yemen, and there are plenty of people there who could have persuaded him towards more radical attitudes than any he could have encountered in London. Also, as I believe I have said here before, university Islamic societies may change their positions substantially from one year to the next as a new committee is elected with a totally different stance to the old one, in some cases emptying out the prayer room book collection and completely replacing it with books of the new committee’s liking. Ordinary Muslim students may pay little attention to what goes on, just as long as they get the Friday prayers and the Ramadan and Eid refreshments organised properly. There may be a case for reforming the ISoc scene, but a tenuous and unproven connection between UCL and its Islamic society and a terrorist is not part of it.

The fact that UCL commissioned this report at all demonstrates that they bent to media pressure, given that in our time when any disaster happens, we ask “who is to blame?” (even if the answer is obvious, as in this case) and “how can we stop it happening again?” rather than “is there any reasonable way of stopping this happening again?”, “reasonable” meaning without sacrificing everybody’s freedom in the process, much as we do when one child in a class of 30 acts up on a school trip. He passed through UCL and ran its Islamic society for a while … so it had to be the fault of one or both that he ended up as a bomber. Uh, no it doesn’t. And the observation that “the risk of radicalisation cannot be ‘eliminated’ without altering UCL’s educational mission and character”, which seems to have been taken on in some quarters as meaning that UCL (and presumably every other educational facility) should do precisely that, seems actually to mean that they cannot reasonably be expected to totally remove the risk, and given that it’s not at all established that radicalisation at UCL is what happened here, they should not be expected to.

Maajid Nawaz supported the government’s decision to ban Islam4UK and al-Muhajiroun (they are already banned as “The Saved Sect” and “Al-Ghurabaa”) on the grounds that several members of the group are in prison for terrorist offences and many of those known to have carried out terrorist attacks had “links” to them. He questioned Choudhary over how much he got in benefits from the state, after Choudhary mentioned the Quilliam Foundation’s government funding, then demanded to know whether he would be put to death in Choudhary’s idea of an Islamic state. He didn’t give a straight answer, but alleged that Maajid had left Islam by joining an organisation which had taken sides against the Muslims, and thus he already knew the answer to the question. Choudhary claimed never to have met Maajid who countered that he had in fact been his solicitor in a murder trial in the 1990s.

Maajid said that he had opposed the government’s intention to ban Hizbut-Tahrir, but supported the ban on Choudhary’s group because of its close links to “terror”. However, it just so happens that the decision to ban it comes less than a week after the controversy over their intention to march through Wootton Bassett, and not after any new revelations about terrorist connections. The decision to ban them has just brought them more publicity, and publicity is what this group has always thrived on; there cannot be many leaders of political movements this tiny — unless they do really significant things, like kill people for their cause — who get invited onto major news programmes like Newsnight. Just today, the Evening Standard opined (HT: Islamophobia Watch) that this ban will be to Choudhary’s delight, calling his group “a benefit claimants’ exercise in macho fantasy and a prop for his own ego”. Islamophobia Watch noted, however, that the Standard had published its own fair share of dramatic al-Muhajiroun stories (they list some of them), so it remains to be seen whether the paper will take its own advice regarding giving the group publicity.

Besides, whatever the apparent “connections” between members of al-Muhajiroun and various terrorist actions, it seems to have become unnecessary to actually prove that they encouraged them to do it, or personally told the perpetrators that it was acceptable (though, given their public pronouncements, that may have happened), let alone that they organised any of it. It seems to have become sufficient that “people don’t like them” for them to be banned. All they are known to be guilty of is a few vexatious public demonstrations, one of which laughably landed a few of those involved public order convictions yesterday, under one of Britain’s notorious catch-all “breach of the peace” laws. If these people’s antics were ignored, they would go away pretty quickly, which is what a lot of the Muslims of my acquaintance want them to do.

Orde’s history is in policing the notorious sectarian marches of the Orange brigades, and a few dozen Muhajiroun marching through a small Wiltshire town will cause not a fraction of the tension that was associated with the Orange marches through Catholic neighbourhoods in particular. However, the ramifications for the Muslim community in the UK will be serious, as has already been demonstrated since their appearance at the Royal Anglian Regiment procession through Luton last March. I put “Muslim extremist” in quotes above because many Muslims are not entirely convinced that their leadership are precisely that; Choudhary in particular is suspected of being an agent provocateur or at least an asset, and the amount of airtime they get, given their tiny membership, is grossly out of proportion. Here is an extract from a post I found on DeenPort the other day:

While you (Choudhary) and your friends are being protected by the kuffaar police, it is other Muslims that will feel the backlash over this, and probably more masajid firebombed.

The EDS (sic) formed because of the Luton protest by Al Muhajiroun, now that they have run out of steam and been criticized in the media, AM are going to give them more impetus and public support with this provocation.

I hope choidhary gets his head kicked in, but he won’t, because he is a state asset,that will happen to some uncle on his way to pray at his masjid or some sister doing the shopping.

I agree with Hugh Orde here; I don’t believe a march should be banned just because people find the views expressed distasteful. However, I do think that people should show their displeasure by holding a counter-demonstration, and that Muslims should join unless the counter-demo is not obviously dominated by people out to bash the Muhajiroun as Muslims rather than oppose them as the extremist lunatics they are, or profess to be. Do we want to be seen alongside football hooligans? Far from it. (One way to avoid this possibility is for a small group — possibly of unobtrusive white Muslims — to go ahead and call back to the rest of the party to tell them if the demonstration is safe to join.)

However, there is also the possibility of a repeat of the incident last October, in which two separate groups planned counter-demonstrations to al-Muhajiroun, one from a group of religious Muslims in which Inayat Bunglawala was involved, and another from “British Muslims for Secular Democracy”, and when the Muhajiroun cancelled, the religious group decided to cancel theirs as well, while the BMSD went ahead anyway and, having already criticised Bunglawala’s group for organising their own counter-demo, later criticised them for calling it off. Let’s be clear about this, regardless of whether you can call the UK a “secular democracy” given the position of the Church of England, the Muslim objection to al-Muhajiroun is about the threat they pose to us, the danger they place us in given the roaming gangs of football hooligans which have emerged since their demo last March, and their overblown and disproportionate media profile. It’s not about “secular democracy”; it’s about whether Muslims can live in peace in this country while these goons are going round shouting their heads off and making headlines at our expense.

For my part, I’ve never listened to Awlaki’s lectures, since I’ve maintained a strict policy of taking knowledge only from reputable Sunni scholars whose own teachers are well-known, i.e. not those with dubious scholarly credentials. I don’t want a repeat of my experience of repeating things I heard from a certain London-based preacher and finding out that they were nonsense. Still, he was known as a moderate even after 9/11, but since his imprisonment in Yemen from 2006 to 2007, his pronouncements have taken on a rather extreme quality, as typified in his “Nidal Hasan is a hero” blog post last month.

I don’t think we should be celebrating even if Awlaki has died. This is not, after all, a mass murderer. We should not be falling over ourselves to excuse his positions on grounds of al-wala w’al-bara or anything else when he embarrasses us with a stupid diatribe at a sensitive time, i.e. after a Muslim has sprayed bullets around an army base. His change in position may well be the result of his experiences in prison, in which case we might have a little understanding, but his words should in no way be taken as guidance and we should not be struggling to defend them in public.

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.