I partly agree with this; a state-appointed consultative council only has so much legitimacy as a representative of popular opinion. When king Fahd of Saudi Arabia set up an appointed consultative council, it was generally dismissed and one local liberal said it had as much power as a flock of sheep. A council of “theologians” consisting mostly of Asian imams with one or two representatives from Central Mosque would be seen as just another talking shop, particularly by Muslims outside the communities represented.

On the other hand, fatwas, whether on loyalty to the UK or anything else, can only be issued by people qualified to give them, and this usually does mean “beards”, i.e. religious scholars who studied in traditional religious schools or somewhere like al-Azhar. It is simply not permitted in Islam to take fatwa from someone who is unqualified, or even from a council of various experts where the religious scholars were outvoted. Of course, they do not have to be old, or Asian, but they are usually male. Even then, when a religious scholar starts saying things the government wants him to say, people switch off, and any such council will have no effect on the youth who are already radicalised. It will, if anything, damage the image of the imams in this country among young people who are at risk of such a transition.

The embrace of former extremists is a slap in the face for Muslims who have worked tirelessly to build a British Muslim identity and foster inclusion by constructive community activity. It’s another attempt at the marginalisation of the overwhelming majority who never had a moment’s doubt that Islam gives no sanction for such murderous and misguided perversion of belief.

I am troubled by the fact that former extremists are seen as the only people who know how to deal with extremism. Just because you have been an inmate of a mental hospital does not mean you are an expert in clinical psychology. But former extremists are being lionised because they confirm the basic tabloid prejudice that violence is a natural part of being a Muslim. So whose ignorance is being vindicated? Certainly the potential of an open, unapologetic belief in Islam as a valuable part of British society is not on the agenda.

Technorati Tags: muslim power 100

A careful reading of the Muslim power list shows a parade of the usual suspects. Some of them may be millionaires, but they are totally without influence. Some of them may be community leaders, but they have never bothered to gather a real following, or build substantial institutions that engage with and minister to the needs of the mass of British Muslims. Many are self-selected and surrounded by their contacts, their friends and others with whom they organise meetings and conferences in desperate attempts to show that not all Muslims want to turn Britain into an Islamic state.

He also notes that the list “follows a time-honoured Muslim tradition” in that several of those at the top of the list just happened to be on the judging panel. He suggests that “real power” exists in organisations like City Circle and websites like MuslimYouth.net. I notice that virtually an entire class of people with actual influence within the Muslim community - religious scholars - are absent. The nearest we get is Dr Farhan Nizami, founder of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (founding chairman: Shaikh Abul-Hasan Ali Nadwi); Tariq Ramadan is also on the list. However, I would have thought that Shaikh Yusuf Motala, who founded the Bury madrassa from which a fairly large number of the imams trained in Britain come, would deserve a place; there is hardly any other representative of an actual British Muslim religious institution on the list, and given how well-represented we are in the medical profession, it is surprising that there is not a single person on the list involved in medicine.

The list is mostly full of “industrialists”, many of them financiers, and few of them actual entrepreneurs (that is, people who have risked their own wealth in starting a business). There’s the chairman of Bournemouth (!) football club, the actor Art Malik, Amjad Hussain (“Director General Logistics (Fleet)”), Anila Baig of the Sun, the “author and garden designer” Emma Clark, Ghayasuddin Siddiqui (head of the so-called Muslim Parliament, an unelected body which started out as the Khomeini fan club and now busies itself attacking “Wahhabis”), Dr Hassena Lockhat (“author”), Mohamed al-Fayed, the photographer Peter Sanders (they don’t mention his Islamic name, Abdul-Adheem), Shami Ahmed of the Joe Bloggs fashion chain and the non-Muslim (Isma’ili) columnist, who writes articles attacking the hijab in the Evening Standard, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

No doubt there are a few worthies on the list who have made genuine contributions to the lives of Muslims and given good service to society in general (such as Hany el-Banna, founder of Islamic Relief), and I’m sure that there have been many Muslims (and others) who have cause to thank Muhammad Khalid for founding Chicken Cottage. There are one or two lawyers who have given the community good service also. However, I doubt very much whether many of the industrialists and financiers are even known within the Muslim community, however much renown they have in their particular sector. It speaks volumes about how much political power we have that every single Muslim MP, and various other minor politicians, are on the list; it does, however, completely ignore people who are held in huge respect and who have considerable influence over the Muslims.

Sardar notes that, in a meeting he witnessed in Alton, Hampshire, “men and women sat separately and listened to religious scholars giving sermons on the Koran”, making them indistinguishable from normal Muslims to “most observers”. Members of the sect are “on the whole, pretty conformist, believing that the Koran is divine and that Muhammad was a prophet, and who fast, pray, give generously in charity and do all the other things that Muslims are supposed to do”. The problem with this is that it is beliefs, not actions, which make someone a Muslim. By this token, the Hindus who act as Muslims in films like East is East, performing Islamic acts of worship, are also Muslims, but this is not our definition of a Muslim. Our definition of a Muslim is one who affirms, and believes, the testimony of faith and what comes from it, and it is the last four words on which the Qadianis are judged to be outside Islam. This includes believing that the Prophet Muhammad, sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam, was the last prophet as he told us he was, and that if someone claims to be a prophet, or something amounting to a prophet, that if he is not insane then he is an impostor, and anyone who believes him (or her) is outside Islam.

Zia alleges that the less important of two departures of Qadianism from Islam is its rejection of violence in all its forms, including defensive jihad:

Generally, this would not have been a cause for concern for the orthodox, except that the Ahmadiyya movement first emerged in 1889, barely 20 years after the “Indian Mutiny”. At that time, jihad against the Raj was the norm, so many Indian Muslims saw the sudden arrival of the Ahmadiyya sect, loudly denouncing jihad, as a British imperialist conspiracy. The conspiracy theories have stuck.

Actually, if such an idea had appeared at any time in the history of Islam, it would have been denounced as kufr or unbelief. To renounce jihad is simply to renounce the practice of the Prophet, sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam, and every generation of Muslims since. To renounce the idea of using force to “save a beleaguered community” is absurdity of the highest order: if the first generation had not taken up arms to fight the pagans at Badr, the community may have been wiped out altogether. It makes sense if you are the leader of a tiny sect which expects to prosper under the protection of non-Muslims, as in the UK or Israel. It doesn’t make sense to bite the hand that feeds you, but if you intend to survive as an independent unit, you need to have people ready and willing to fight.

The most important difference concerns what Ghulam Ahmad claimed to be. The following is an extract from an essay on their website, A Life Sketch of the Promised Messiah:

Prophets achieve a closeness to God and a high spiritual station, but it is through their relationship with humanity that they are recognised. Indeed it is their example that leads others to God. This month while we celebrate the knowledge and wisdom of his lecture delivered at the Great Conference of Religions we should not forget the smaller, simpler details of Hadhrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s everyday living—incidents that may appear small things at first glance but nevertheless reflect the depths to which his character was immersed in the love of the Holy Qur’an and of his master, the Holy Prophet (saw) of Islam.

So, the implication that Ghulam Ahmad was a prophet is clearly made. Here is another, from the same article:

From an early age he received revelation from God, as well as visions and true dreams. It was in a state of relative seclusion and anonymity that in 1868/69 he received the revelation,

Thy God is well pleased with what thou hast done. He will bless thee greatly, so much so that Kings shall seek blessing from your garments.

Note: Muslims believe in visions and true dreams. This is not the same as revelation, which is peculiar to prophets. So they believe in, at the very least, Ghulam Ahmad as something amounting to a prophet.

Let us imagine for a moment that the sect do not actually regard him as a prophet. They call him the “Promised Messiah and Mahdi”, despite the fact that the only Messiah is Jesus, alaihi as-salaam. The Mahdi is promised, by the (real) Prophet, sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam, to be recognised in the Hijaz (which Ghulam Ahmad never visited) and fight the Dajjal (antichrist), an individual of Jewish ethnicity (not western civilisation, as some of them claim). Given that Ghulam Ahmad rejected even defensive jihad, one wonders how they will do this and maintain their religion. When the Messiah, alaihi as-salaam, returns, it is foretold that he will do so in the Middle East and not India. Furthermore, decades after their “Messiah-Mahdi” died, we have yet to see the appearance of the Sufiani tyrant, the antichrist, the return of the Gog and Magog tribes, the Europeans appearing to us (in battle) with their scores of flags, or anything else we are told of the era of Mahdi and Messiah (alaihi as-salaam). So they are a false cult based on a religious fraud, following a bogus Messiah who does not fit the criteria of the real one.

Zia’s other claims for them are simply irrelevances. One of them is that they have “the largest mosque in western Europe”, the Baitul Futuh in Morden, Surrey, which is a building they did not build but rather bought. Neither did they build “Britain’s first purpose-built mosque, which opened in 1889”; rather, they controlled it for a period. It was built with money donated by an aristocratic woman from Bhopal and is presently run by Sunnis. And furthermore:

Theirs is, without doubt, the most educated, organised and disciplined of all Muslim communities in Britain. They work, worship and act as a unit - which is why almost all of them attended their annual convention last month.

Which is because they are a small group, and as I wrote when addressing this topic in an earlier essay, it is easier to keep a small group united than a big one, and if you have a small group then it is relatively easy to hire a large venue to fit the whole crowd in. You can’t do this with the Muslims in London, simply because there are so many of us. We have dozens of small mosques, each one built according to the needs or (perhaps more commonly) the resources of the local community, and contrary to popular opinion, we do not have access to a bottomless pit of oil money. We also do not have a supreme leader; minor differences of opinion are held as a mercy and not as a problem.

Reading the literature on their website, any Muslim is struck by the alien doctrines on display and anyone would notice their false pretensions. For example, in this PDF pamphlet, they start off by saying that “Islam believes in all the prophets and religious teachers appointed by God, including Muhammad, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Confucius and Zarathushtra (peace be upon them all)”. In fact, Islam only explicitly accepts the prophets of the Israelites and their antecedents as well as Isma’il and Muhammad (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihim wa sallam) as prophets; we are told that every nation was sent messengers, but not told who they were. So the baseless innovations start from the first column of the first full page of their pamphlet! In the section on page 3 headed “Ahmadiyyat - The True Islam”, we read:

Over a hundred years ago, an amazing event took place in an obscure and tiny hamlet (Qadian), in the province of the Punjab, India. It was an event that was destined to change the course of history.

In the sense that any event “changes the course of history” in its tiny way, this could be said to be true, but the fact remains that to date Ghulam Ahmad’s influence has been negligible; his legacy is a small sect and a few foundations around the world. Apart from this fact, Muslims’ energy has been expended in refuting their false claims and deceptions rather than getting on with other good works, much as the Sahaba were occupied in fighting the likes of Musaylima when they could have been fighting the Romans or Persians, who were a threat to the Muslim state.

The fact remains that Muslims do not judge the Qadianis as unbelievers by their desires but by the criteria which have always existed in our religion, which were made crystal clear by the reaction of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) to Musaylima and other impostors of that period, many of them motivated by tribal rather than religious concerns. The reaction to Ahmadiyyat in any other generation would have been to denounce them and fight them; they were not fought only because they emerged under a friendly non-Muslim colonial régime and were too well-established, with a whole generation born into the sect, by the time the first attempt was made to set Pakistan on an Islamic course. As it happens, the sect has been a thorn in the side of Muslims since its inception, being among other things an excuse for outsiders to call us bigoted and uncivilised, although as these articles ([1], [2], [3]) suggest, their persecution is exaggerated and their position has become stronger under General Musharraf’s leadership. Zia is already well-known for presenting the position of a tiny minority of academics in issues of fiqh as universally-accepted facts; here, he is denouncing the Muslim community in a non-Muslim white liberal publication at a time of weakness for the Muslims for rejecting a fraud in the name of Islam, thus adding the onus of treachery to the already serious matter of the falsehood he advances.

This week’s New Statesman (the first I’ve had through the door on a now ended subscription offer of £4.80 for three months) has on its front page a feature marking the anniversary of the 7th July bombings last year. There are two long articles, one by Shiv Malik (yep, him again) on the background of the bomber Shazad Tanweer and one by Ziauddin Sardar (yep, him again) on young British Muslims. Laughably Shiv’s feature is entitled The Suicide Bomber in his own words, which refers to the personal statement on his UCAS (university application) form that he’s managed to get hold of. Depressingly, as I noted last year when writing about political magazine coverage of the bombings, these two were the only voices within the community the NS could find, with Shiv concentrating on Hizbut-Tahreer, which had nothing to do with the bombings.

The feature is basically the story of Tanweer’s life from December 2000, when he entered college (from which he later dropped out, purportedly to help out in the family chip shop but, according to his younger brother “Nikki”, actually because he was bored), through his activities with the local “Mullah crew” and the Hamara Healthy Living Centre, to the bombings. Regarding the goings-on at the HHLC, he alleges:

I was barred from the Hamara Centre after asking the manager, Hanif Malik, about a meeting held in August 2004 in conjunction with the Iqra bookstore. That meeting, attended by several hundred young people, may offer a clue about the sort of activities the young men were involved with. Among the “special guests” was Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Quick, a South African living in the US, whose topic was “The Dilemma of the Muslim Youth”. What he said in Leeds is not clear, but in a similarly entitled speech to an Australian audience, which is reported on the internet, Quick spoke of the destruction of Islamic civilisation by the west and of the sickness of homosexuality.

I have listened to part of that lecture (you can download it here). In the first half-hour of the lecture (in which both these themes are discussed) there is no inflammatory content whatsoever, although I hesitate to agree with the idea of a general plan to undermine Muslims by selling them culture. He told the story, for example, of a village in Mauritania which was at one point a place where one could hear people recite the Qur’an in the street to the extent that it was never silent, and ten years later the travellers who had observed this came back to find the place silent, the Qur’an recitation having ceased after free televisions were given out along with free scholarships to western universities. Television, at the end of the day, sells things. People want to make money and they don’t care whether they do or don’t break down society somewhere to do this. Third-world countries offer unrestricted markets where rules which exist in the west, such as the law in the UK which forbade tobacco companies to encourage people to start smoking in their advertisements (this was before their advertising was banned altogether), are not in force. The point made about Muslim youth in Muslim countries forsaking their own cultures in favour of foreign non-Muslim cultures, even in Mecca and Madinah, is a valid one, preferring Levi’s baseball caps to kufis and McDonald’s to their own food. The fact that Dr Quick disapproves of homosexuality should come as no surprise to anyone, because he is a Muslim. If you find a “shaikh” willing to say homosexuality is OK, know that he is unrepresentative and a liar. I have heard many other lectures by this scholar and he is not a demagogue or a lunatic by any means, nor is he linked to any of the “political Islam” groups: he is simply a traditional, mainstream Sunni.

Zia Sardar’s piece concerns the response of Muslim youth to the recent events, notably their greater interest in politics (as if Muslims were not interested in politics before last July, or even before 9/11):

According to M A Qavi, a London-based social activist who spends most of his time attending meetings and listening to the young all over Britain, the new expression of dual identity “is a product of a certain self-consciousness of belonging to this country and growing awareness of the need to make their voices heard as Muslims”. Young politicised Muslims deeply distrust professional Muslim leaders, or those identified with the government, and are drawn towards those who articulate what they consider to be injustices suffered by Muslims everywhere, says Qavi. The Respect leader George Galloway, “even after his shameful antics in Big Brother”, remains their favourite politician.

He gives a voice to one Andleen Razzaq of the City Circle, who alleges (in Zia’s paraphrase) that “there are still a few imams and self-appointed sheikhs in Britain who project Islam as an ideology that is absolutely right, holy and totally good, and see everything else as an imminent danger to the community”. She alleges that most of them “are uneducated or semi-literate”, which strikes me as a broad-brush slur although people who’ve been in more mosques than me are welcome to disagree. It is normal for them to have received their training at a Dar al-Uloom or a religious university rather than have a wodge of (watered-down) A-levels or a bachelor’s degree. This doesn’t make them semi-literate.

Sardar interviewed Yahya Birt, “a research fellow at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester), whom he allows to say that “the Muslims are the new Irish”, but other than that allows few of his own words to get through. He is also rather scathing about the recent “roadshow” of traditional scholars:

As with previous official attempts to engage with the Muslim community, this one had the unintended effect of promoting traditionalists and conservatives, even to the extent of importing closed-minded traditionalists from the United States. In turn, this has increased theological engagement with extremism, and with it, sectarian division among British Muslims. As a result, differences between conservatives and liberals are much more pronounced. Conservatives such as the intellectual Tariq Ramadan and the American preacher Hamza Yusuf Hanson insist the only people with the right to interpret Islam are the ulema (religious scholars), who must seek solutions to contemporary problems within a largely ossified tradition. While Ramadan has called for the hudood laws, the problematic crime-and-punishment aspects of Islamic law, to be suspended, he is a strong supporter of the sharia. Hanson rejects the whole idea of religious reform and presents a romanticised notion of tradition where the sheikh or the teacher knows all.

This is a huge oversimplification; the religious tradition is in any case not “ossified” but rather certain questions, mostly about everyday religious practice, are deemed to have been settled and it is not up to the religious scholars of today to overturn the rulings of those who were just a few steps removed from those who were there at the beginning. Sardar’s position on the “gates of ijtihad” can be found in his printed books such as Introducing Islam, which in an earlier version under another title was instrumental in bringing me to Islam, but advances this modernist position as if it were commonly agreed, which is far from being the case. In fact, the youth often turn to these scholars precisely because they are seen as above sectarian divisions such as those affecting many of religious scholars of the Indian subcontinent (besides the fact that they speak English and Arabic and not Urdu, which a lot of the youth don’t speak and in many cases their elders never did speak). They bring proofs, going back to the revealed sources and the understandings of the earliest generations, in refutation of the claims of sectarians.

Sardar brackets Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui along with Abdul-Wahhab al-Affendi and the infamous Taj Hargey as “liberals”. Dr Siddiqui’s history is with the Muslim Parliament, which was originally basically a front for Iranian influence over the Muslim community in England, but has become rather more moderate (and obscure) since. Despite the ignorance he displayed in his speech at SOAS last Thursday (such as claiming that political Islamists regard 7th-century Mecca, as opposed to Medina, as “pure Islam”), I really doubt he has the same views on the Shari’a as Taj Hargey, an absolute nobody who has become famous since he was wheeled out by John Ware to issue broad-brush attacks on the community on Panorama last August:

Hargey sums up the liberal position. Liberals want to talk about “gender equality, sexual orientation, pluralistic notions of Islam, the nature of loyalty to the umma [global Muslim community], the accumulation of religious authority in the hands of a particular class, and the problematic nature of the sharia”, he says - the very issues on which the conservatives on the whole are silent. The “litmus test” of a liberal Muslim, Hargey suggests, is that he or she is ready to discuss everything and does not accuse others of heresy or of being lesser Muslims. He is particularly scathing about the religious scholars and the sharia. “Blind following of the religious scholars is responsible for our current impasse,” he declares. “And the sharia has no relevance to the 21st-century lives of the British Muslims.”

So, Hargey’s “liberal” Islam is a collection of attitudes which don’t come from within the Muslim population; they are simply the reasons non-Muslims (particularly those on the left) are dissatisfied with us. Any Muslim reading this knows that some things really are not up for discussion and that some Muslims are better than others and some are heretics. Most of the people invovled in terrorism are heretics of one sort or another, an idea I’m sure Hargey really has no problem with unless he regards their “orthodoxy” (as rigidity is sometimes mistakenly called) as the problem. In fact, one of the central planks of the attempt to fight extremism from within the community is the effort to expose it as being based on false legal and theological reasoning. The concept of truth still has meaning in Islam - we are not relativists such as those one finds elsewhere, which is why extremism can be refuted and why we cannot follow every societal trend such as allowing women to lead men in prayer (just because the Episcopalians do it) or getting involved in usury just because it’s convenient. His accusation regarding “blind following” is really just lazy and dishonest. What is commonly called “blind following” applies to long-settled matters and does not, for example, bind the community to accept orders from “religious leaders”.

Really, I don’t need to go into much detail as to why Hargey shouldn’t be trusted and why he should not be taken as a “leader” of the Muslim community here; see the earlier entry on Panorama. Quite simply, he is not representative.

What the NS has done with these two articles is to attack and smear the moderate proponents of normative, traditional Islam and to promote unrepresentative fringe elements. I find it puzzling that this magazine has not made the effort to find representatives of the Muslim community more representative than Shiv Malik, who trotted out Zeyno Baran’s “conveyor belt to terrorism” comment about Hizbut-Tahrir over and over again (and given that HT have nothing to do with al-Qa’ida, it is about as relevant as saying that PETA is a conveyor belt to the anti-Huntingdon intimidation brigade or that LIFE is a conveyor belt to arson attacks on abortion clinics). In my opinion the worst that can be said about the government sponsoring a roadshow by people like Shaikh Hamza is that they may have been preaching to the converted - the type of Muslims who would have come to a presentation by these scholars would have come anyway, while on the fence might have been less willing to come knowing that it had government backing. Whatever good the roadshow did, it likely did no harm, while promoting the sort of liberalism associated with the “progressive Muslims” in north America, whose main supporting organisation fell apart acrimoniously in a few months, would have had hardly more effect here than it has over there, other than foster ill opinion towards the wider Muslim community for failing to support it.

Zia Sardar in the current edition of the New Statesman on the folly of “intelligence-led” police operations:

Don’t be fooled by the mantra that intelligence is an extremely difficult business, prone to absurdly wide margins of error. If that were so, Britain would have lost the Second World War. The remarkable success of British intelligence, including counter-intelligence, during that war proves that we can produce reasonable - say, 25 or even 50 per cent - rates of success. Intelligence may be difficult to gather but it is not impossible to get right. It must follow certain simple rules and principles. One has to ask some fundamental questions. Is the source reliable? Clearly a source that has been tortured is going to tell you whatever you want to hear. If you are going to recruit your source from a mosque, you have to make sure he doesn’t harbour grudges against certain members of the group that you are targeting - which is probably what happened in the Forest Gate case. Can the source’s evidence be corroborated? The official excuse that the police have to act on every single tip-off, however dodgy the source, without bothering to corroborate it, is not only ridiculous, but dangerously so. Intelligence, to be intelligence, has to be based on more than one source. And then, to increase the margin of success, one has to check out the intelligence, using proper surveillance.

His conclusions are that these “intelligence-led” jobs are often the fruit of political expediency, often involving people who entered into conspiracies at the instigation of the informers themselves. The whole article can be read once per day only, other than by subscribers.

In Germany, he interviews the insurance broker and his Polish girlfriend who come out with a list of complaints against the Turkish community. The European immigrant communities are “well integrated”; the Turks aren’t: they “don’t integrate”, “they are conservative, their women cover their heads” and the Qur’an supposedly “tells them to murder Christians”. He has, however, never met a Turk, but he of course has an excuse: they stick to themselves and don’t go to the non-Muslims’ pubs. The local Turkish women, some of whom (as with Pakistanis in this country) cover their heads and some of whom don’t, bear no apparent resemblance to those described, and say they have no idea why the Germans hate them so much. He does not find the sentiment reciprocated, but the teenagers he interviews say they experience racism everywhere, including from school teachers.

Sardar gives a history of German nationhood, a relatively recent phenomenon given that the country was cobbled together from the petty principalities which emerged after the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. The country “came late to nationalism and colonialism, and caught a bad case of both”, scrambling “briefly and brutally” in the 1880s for colonies (which it lost after World War I); the country was also heavily involved in the Crusades, a factor which weighs heavily on the country to this day:

The Germans embraced the Crusades with great vigour: the first, infamously, commenced at home with pogroms against the Jews. The crusading motif is as important to the German self-image as it ever was; the hatred of Turks I heard was often expressed in crusading language - even if couched in liberal terms.

In Eindhoven, Sardar met a female taxi driver who, despite having a Moroccan boyfriend, called the local Moroccans “mostly criminals” and accused them of ruining her country. Those he met at the local shisha bar (next to the official red light district) were old men playing the usual games, who claimed that the Dutch treated them as if they were separate, and without respect or dignity, so they ended up being separate. He meets an IT consultant of Moroccan origin who complains of blatant job discrimination; interviewers ask him what kind of Muslim he is and whether he prays or goes to the mosque; he accused the Dutch of treating the Muslims as “colonial subjects” and assuming that they are all terrorists. It’s notable that the “liberalism” for which the country is so famous does not extend to Muslims, but then it shouldn’t be surprising as this liberalism is all about euthanasia, drugs and prostitution. The country is notorious as a place people go for these things, and among the most bigoted against Muslims are the most morally corrupt people in the country. Of course, they don’t want Muslims spoiling their party.

The colonial theme is continued in the discussion of the situation in Belgium, where Muslims are not considered Belgian even in the third generation and where they report endemic racism, being treated like “colonial subjects”, and being afraid to speak freely. Belgium, of course, had a notoriously brutal colonial record in the Congo, treating the place as a big labour camp. While the term “heart of darkness” has been used to describe Congo/Zaire since it came under native rule, it was used by Joseph Conrad to describe the Belgian-ruled Congo. A police officer in Antwerp calls integration “a one-way street” and rejects accommodation. “We are not a problem. Islam is the problem. Anything is possible where Islam is concerned.” He expects a riot.

Belgium has a constitution which allots self-rule to the different white communities who could not live together, but of course makes no such allowance for immigrant communities. Holland has its much-vaunted liberalism for its own and all the world’s scoundrels, but not for religious immigrants and their descendents. Similarly, France parrots its “liberté, egalité, fraternité” slogan, but in its colonial history never treated its own colonial subjects as equals. The state ideology today dictates that all citizens are “French” and refuses to acknowledge difference, but in reality racism flourishes. Even the physical layout of the cities resembles the colonial pattern: in north Africa, the natives lived in the old cities while the colonisers built their own cities outside them; today in France, the natives live in the old towns and cities while the immigrants are shoved into “suburbs” on the fringes of the towns.

The conclusion I draw from this article is that Europe cannot accommodate any group with a remarkably different lifestyle from the majority. It proved this with its treatment of Jews over the centuries, only really resolved (in western Europe at least) when most of them were massacred, a large number of the remainder fled (perhaps in response to massacres in Poland, perhaps in response to the encroaching Red army), a substantial number had assimilated and had shed those aspects of their religion which necessitated separateness, and the recognition of what anti-Semitism had brought about protected the rest. But for most of history, Europe found one excuse after another to subjugate Jews. They were different, they were disloyal, they regard Palestine as their home and not Europe; there were also the religious reasons. Europe also has a history of inter-communal religious tension, particularly between Catholics and Protestants. And Gypsies are treated as second-class citizens in central Europe, Slovakia and Hungary being well-known examples.

Today, mainland Europe finds similar excuses to deny Muslims the same rights other citizens have. It’s more subtle now, of course; they may not have an officially separate status and be required to be in their ghetto by sundown, but laws exist explicitly banning religious dress in public buildings, with the effect of barring religious Muslim women. It’s particularly cruel that this is often done in the name of feminism, sometimes with the excuse that it “protects” girls from being forced to wear something they don’t want to by their families, but sometimes explicitly because people don’t like what it represents. (Most schools on the continent don’t have uniforms; the issue of parental pressure to wear a headscarf really cuts no ice in a country where thousands of children are expected to wear a uniform they don’t particularly want to wear every day.) The effect, and in some cases the intention, is to make the life of an observant Muslim as difficult as possible. The fact is that the general population can wear pretty much what they like; the normal dress of one community is barred.

It is not just Muslims who are affected, of course. France has indeed assimilated immigrants from all European Christian backgrounds; this route is not open to black Christians from the French Carribean. There have been no pogroms so far, but police harrassment, particularly of young men, is well-known; it is also known of in this country (I heard two calls to the BBC London phone-in this morning by black women who said they had been pulled over by police who came over all apologetic when they realised that they were women!). Sardar notes that the bigotry is just as pronounced among so-called liberals, including those who are relaxed about mixed-race relationships. From my reading of blogs in English, I would suggest that most of this bigotry is these days advanced in the name of liberalism; self-styled “muscular liberals” with both blogs and regular newspaper columns seek to push this country in the same direction. They demand a total separation of religion and state, which in practice means an end to all allowances for Muslims. The reason, of course, is that Muslims are not liberals themselves. Tolerance is not to be extended to intolerance, which is routinely conflated with disapproval.

As for the idea of this leading to another holocaust, I find this both alarmist but also somewhat naive. The Holocaust of the 1940s was a unique event in history; genocides took place before and have done since, but mass murder on that scale was unprecedented. It was not an explosion of mass hatred, but the action of a determined central group in a dictatorial state which they set up in particular political and economic circumstances, and not all those involved knew exactly what was going on. The Hindu extremists in India may have more manpower than the Nazis did, and have been responsible for anti-Muslim riots and pogroms which have led to much loss of life, but they do not have control over a totalitarian state. The point that Europe seems to be blindly repeating its old mistakes is a valid one; it’s too easy to assume that it might lead to a re-run of the Holocaust. If a comparable event takes place, it is more likely to be an altogether new atrocity, perpetrated by people who would be horrified at the thought of taking people to be gassed at Auschwitz.

In Morocco the attack on Muslim marriage law has struck at both the beginning and the end of marriage. The new Mudawwana increases the age of marriage for women to 18, bans polygamy except where a judge gives his permission, and removes the right of a man to unilaterally divorce his wife. This ignores the reality of marriage and divorce in Islam, which is a marriage becomes a fact when the parties agree to make it so, as long as their agreement is itself Islamically correct. There are rules concerning suitability, which differ from school of thought to school of thought, but a minimum age for the bride is not one of them in any school of thought, nor is the permission of a judge. The Salaf married girls who were much younger than the age of consent in any western country, and by agreeing to the attack by Moroccan crypto-secularists on Islamic marriage law, he falls into the trap set by the kuffar - setting laws which would class the Salaf as criminals. In the case of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), this is outright kufr.

In the case of Morocco, the age of marriage for girls is actually higher than that in some countries in Europe! In the UK the age of both consent and marriage is 16, and recently I had to abandon plans to conduct a marriage in Morocco to a 16-year-old lady, which would have been quite legal in the UK if the father had agreed. The new law helps nobody, certainly not the urban intelligentsia who don’t marry young anyway, nor the peasantry, for whom early marriage may be a necessity, and has been part of their culture for centuries, even millennia.

Of course, some of the pseudo-Sharia laws which are in place in some countries are unjust and should be reviewed. Nobody could not be horrified by a young girl being punished for being raped, but the answer is a return to genuine Sharia under the control of people who know its ins and outs and are willing to “ward off the hudood by means of ambiguities” as one of the Sahaba (I believe A’isha, radhi Allahu anha) told us, and don’t regard large numbers of hand-cuttings and floggings as the mark of an Islamic state. The fact is that our decline began after un-Islamic ideas penetrated our thinking, and we can gain nothing by succumbing to pressure from the enemies of Islam.

• “In some Islamic countries anybody proclaiming the truth of evolution could be in serious danger of being killed”: the fact is that this is not “truth” but mere theory. Western “science” has a history of making things “facts” when they are not, right up to the recent disasters involving Roy Meadow and his theories on cot death. Nobody believed this nonsense until the late 19th century. Most people still don’t believe it.
• “In Saudi Arabia, the minister for higher (yes, higher) education stated that the earth was flat”: whoever believes this is at variance with Muslim beliefs. Muslim scholars have never believed that the Earth is anything but round. Ibn Hazm communicated consensus on this (see Nuh Ha Mim Keller, Port In A Storm, Wakeel Books, Amman (Jordan), p.85) and told us that there is a verse in the Qur’an which in effect states this.
• “Since [the 11th century] it has been accepted in Islam that the pursuit of knowledge means the pursuit of religious knowledge”: which is for most people more important than physical knowledge, because it teaches us how to live our lives and achieve success in the Hereafter. If your job is selling oranges or driving trucks, you don’t need to know much else, although it doesn’t hurt.
• The Qur’an “describes not science but transcendent knowledge, which is not subject to empirical observation”: which is true, but we are not required (as far as I know) to disbelieve anything we see. In fact, the words of the Qur’an have the beauty of remaining relevant even when physical facts are shown in a new light by science. Of course, the “science fetishist” believes in nothing but what can be verified by empirical observation, but the belief that the Unseen does not exist is, itself, mere dogma. We don’t believe your dogma.

He complains that this resulted in an intellectual degeneration, and was a major reason for the ease with which the Muslims were later colonised. Sardar advocates the re-opening of the “gates of ijtihad” and misrepresents the reason, and extent, to which they have been closed. The gates of ijtihad on new issues, such as the Islamic response to newly-available medical procedures, has never been closed, but ijtihad is restricted to qualified people. It takes years to reach the standard of knowledge necessary to make genuine ijtihad. A contemporary scholar (an American convert who studied for decades in Jordan and Syria) told a gathering I attended that he met many people who compared themselves to the early imams of ijtihad, and none of them could even properly recite the Fatiha, the short opening chapter of the Qur’an, properly, which Muslims are expected to recite at least seventeen times every day!

The issues on which the gates are closed are old issues, such as the particulars of worship and purification, which were settled in the first few hundred years of Islam by far better qualified people than are available today. Those that wish to open them today are in many cases reactionary Wahhabis, and their propaganda has caused much discord in the modern Muslim community. On top of this, the classical education in the four schools of thought is what stands to put the Muslim community back on its famous “Middle Path” and steer it away from extremism. To quote Abdul-Hakim Murad, “with every Muslim now a proud mujtahid, and with taqlid dismissed as a sin rather than a humble and necessary virtue, the divergent views which caused such pain in our early history will surely break surface again. Instead of four madhhabs in harmony, we will have a billion madhhabs in bitter and self-righteous conflict. No more brilliant scheme for the destruction of Islam could ever have been devised” (Understanding the Four Madhhabs: the Problem of Anti-Madhhabism).