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.

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.

Researching the programme myself over the last six months, I discovered that a range of agencies – such as schools, colleges, youth and community services – in areas with significant Muslim populations are expected to gather intelligence about the young people they work with. Youth workers, for instance, are under pressure to provide to counter-terrorism units detailed information about those whose religious and political opinions are considered extremist – a vague term that can include things like religious literalism or anger at British foreign policy. Muslim youth workers who have been unwilling to involve themselves in this kind of information sharing, because of legitimate concerns about professional confidentiality, have themselves come under suspicion and, in at least one case, become the target of a smear campaign.

The government describes Prevent as a community-led approach and believes that by selectively directing resources at moderate Muslim organisations to carry out community development and anti-radicalisation work it can empower them to unite around shared British values to isolate the extremists. While the government denies the programme has a surveillance element, this is contradicted by its adviser Ed Husain of the Quilliam Foundation, who says intelligence gathering is a part of Prevent. He also believes it morally right that professionals such as teachers should alert the authorities to those who hold views considered extremist. Indeed, through its Radicalisation Awareness Programme, the foundation is receiving significant public funds to advise local authorities on how extremist views among Muslims can be identified by public service workers.

Also see this report from last Friday’s paper, including a video interview with ‘Ed’ Husain of the Quilliam Foundation and Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty. It should be noted that ‘Ed’ and his gang were never trusted by the community and that Quilliam were a media invention; he is known to just repeat his tales of woe to the media rather than responding to the community’s questions. I notice we’ve heard less of him the last year or so — perhaps that’s because Hassan Butt exposing himself as a liar made all the other celebrity ‘former extremists’ seem less credible?

(More: Islamophobia Watch - [1], [2], Inayat Bunglawala.)

The alert claims that among the regular presenters are Azad Ali, Yasir Qadhi, Inayat Bunglawala and various Hizb-ut-Tahrir activists. As for Azad Ali, they allege that he has written blog articles which “have been interpreted as condoning terrorist attacks on British troops in Iraq - as well as other blogs supporting Hamas and advocating the re-creation of the Caliphate”. They link to a “This is London” article (TIL is run by the Evening Standard) written by Andrew Gilligan. Among Gilligan’s accusations is that Azad Ali praised “Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden’s key mentor”; however, Abdullah Azzam was murdered in 1989, years before anyone in the West had heard of Osama bin Laden; it is alleged that he was at odds with Ayman al-Zawahiri, who regarded the Egyptian rulers as infidels and sought jihad against them, while he was opposed to calling Muslims infidels. Calling Muslims infidels is very common among Muslim extremists (Abdullah Faisal was notorious for it).

Even if Azad Ali’s views are offensive to some non-Muslims, Islam Channel is a channel for Muslims. Views highly offensive to Muslims, and articles clearly aimed at stirring up hostility to us, are found in media aimed at other religious groups, and sometimes find their way into mainstream journals (Melanie Phillips’s conspiracy theories in the Spectator, for example), so as long as Azad Ali is not directly inciting terrorist violence, there is no reason why his views should not be heard — particularly if they are not being expressed on the Islam Channel. Advocating the re-establishing of the Caliphate is not an extremist position by anyone’s standards.

Next, Yasir Qadhi is described at once as “a Wahhabi graduate of the University of Medina”, in a clear attempt to poison non-Muslims’ minds against him. While it’s true that a lot of Arab Muslim extremists have Wahhabi beliefs, what separates Wahhabis from other Muslims consists of matters of theology which most non-Muslims would not understand or even care about, such as whether innovations in religion can ever be justified and whether certain verses in the Qur’an are literal or figurative. The alert says that Yasir Qadhi also denounced Shi’ism as “the most lying sect of Islam”; quite apart from the fact that articles denouncing Wahhabis in far more vituperative terms can be found on various mainstream Muslim websites, and their deviation from normal Islam is much less severe, the use of dishonesty in attempting to spread Shi’ism, which is all that he is referring to, is something many Sunnis can attest to ([1], [2]). As for the claim that he “has denied the Holocaust”, he is well-known to have revised these views.

The complaint about Inayat Bunglawala is really quite irrelevant, since it relates to Daud Abdullah and his Istanbul Declaration, not something he himself did or said. The alert alleges that Bunglawala complained to the BBC after they called Abu Qatada an extremist; if you read the complaint, it cites Victoria Brittain from the Guardian accusing the media and the security services of demonising him without any proof.

On top of all this, they have not expended one word in complaining about anything that these three, or the various HT figures they allege appear on the channel, has actually said on the channel! The complaint is solely that they shouldn’t be there because they are “tainted”.

The alert continues:

Islam Channel claims to be committed to giving a platform to a range of views from across Britain’s Muslim and non-Muslim communities. However, one unfortunate side-effect of this laudable and broad-minded policy has been to give an undue prominence to Islamist voices that represent only a small minority of British Muslims. This over-representation has also led to other voices - for instance from the UK’s Shia community or from non-Islamist Muslim groups - being under-represented on the channel.

The particular claim about Shi’a representation may be accounted for by the fact that the Shi’a and Sunni Muslim communities in the UK do not have much to do with each other; they do not even pray at the same mosques, for example. There are also Shi’ite TV channels which are available on satellite as IC is. Not all the presenters are “Islamists” and the QF’s own Usama Hasan is listed as one of them. They also allege that the IC-sponsored Global Peace and Unity conference has “featured anti-Semitic speakers, Holocaust deniers and supporters of terrorist violence and gender apartheid - as a well as a range of hardline Wahhabi speakers - while moderate, tolerant Muslim voices have been sidelined”, without naming anybody or suggesting that offensive speeches were made at the event itself. Whether anyone else likes it or not, a lot of Muslims like these people and respect them, and will pay money to listen to them, and they are not best known for these views but rather, for other things (a crucial difference from the well-known Holocaust deniers such as David Irving and Ernst Zundel). As for “gender apartheid”, this is a derogatory comparison between what is normal in most Muslim countries, namely the separation of non-related men and women, with a system of racial segregation, based on hatred and contempt and used for the purpose of exploitation.

A further insight into the politics of the Quilliam Foundation can be found in their alert on Osama Saeed, accusing him of not really believing in democratic values or in equal rights for non-Muslims, and suggesting that he might follow “the same sectarian and divisive agenda that he has followed in the past”. That agenda has consisted of defending Shaikh al-Qaradawi, supporting the Caliphate and the establishment of Muslim schools, and defending Shari’ah punishments. The attack is peppered with subtle untruths and smears, such as:

• The claim that Shaikh al-Qaradawi justifies “the murder of homosexuals”, citing this article at IslamOnline. While I accept that some readers might find even that opinion offensive, the death penalty for sodomy, not for merely being gay, is what was being discussed. Given that the penalty requires witnesses or a confession, and not merely suspicion (as was the case with the old indecency laws which were abolished in the UK in the 1960s, which opened the door to blackmail), the chance of anyone actually being executed is actually pretty slim, as is the case with adultery. Claiming that someone justifies the murder of homosexuals is a very serious accusation, as it suggests that he is telling people to just kill gays, which he is not. The claim is a lie.

• The paragraph which attacks Osama Saeed for criticising the late Zaki Badawi for claiming that hijaab was not mandatory. This is an errant or “shaadh” fatwa which is contrary to normal Muslim practice and scholarly opinion and which has been generally ignored, and was only given in response to anti-Muslim hate crimes and was not intended to be general; its only value is as a weapon to those who want to force Muslim women and girls not to wear hijab. Being willing to tell outsiders what they want to hear about Islam does not make anyone a moderate. I am sure some of the QF’s “pet scholars”, or at least those who have yet to disassociate themselves from them, would take the opposite view.

• The claim that the Scottish Islamic Foundation has “given platforms to … foreign Islamists, including two senior members of the Brotherhood-linked Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR)”, when the CAIR is not a front group but a well-respected organisation which campaigns against Islamophobia and discrimination against Muslims, both of which have been rampant in the USA recently, particularly under the last administration. The fact that they have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood does not make their main work any less valid or valuable.

• The paragraph about his “ambiguous stance on Shari’ah punishments”, an irrelevance to his campaign as Scotland, let alone the UK, is not a predominantly Muslim country and so the question of implementing them here is not under discussion. They demand that “Saeed should be publicly challenged over his view of the Sharia’s traditional punishments and asked whether he believes they are applicable anywhere in the modern world”, but the orthodox view is that they are still part of the Shari’ah, subject to the normal rules of evidence and other constraints imposed by the Shar’iah. Ed Husain’s own view on them was expressed very clearly on the Today programme in December 2007, but that is certainly not the orthodox Muslim view.

It is ironic that the alert accuses Osama Saeed of promoting censorship while they take a position that Muslims should be screened to check for what are perfectly orthodox Muslim opinions before they are allowed to run for public office, even though those opinions may have no real significance in this country right now. It is dishonest for them to pose with Islamic scholars such as Musharraf Hussain al-Azhari while condemning a Muslim for holding such views, as the scholar is likely to have much the same views about the Shari’ah in, say, Pakistan; one of Dr Musharraf’s shaikhs was Pir Karam Shah, who served as a judge in the Pakistani Shari’ah appelate court. The same views are likely to be held by any other practising Muslim, so who is going to be challenged over them and who is not? Why is Osama Saeed challenged, and their “pet” shaikhs not?

The QF do not claim to be a representative organisation; they call themselves a think tank. One does not need to represent anyone to have an opinion, but to be the Muslim voice that dictates which Muslims are entitled to run for public office and which aren’t, you need to get your authority from somewhere, and Ed Husain and his Quilliam Foundation certainly don’t get it from the Muslims in this country. They can boast all they like about the anonymous Muslims who have told them they’re doing good, but their name is mud among most of the Muslims that I know, and most of them are not Islamists.

The above post at Harry’s Place is by the infamous Shiraz Maher (this is the guy who says he got involved in Islamism after 9/11 and changed his mind after the London bombings in 2005, which should raise a few eyebrows in my opinion), claiming that there is “encouraging news” coming from India in the wake of the Bombay massacres, namely that Indian Muslim leaders are refusing to allow Muslims killed while perpetrating the attacks to be given funerals, or buried in Muslim cemeteries in India (see BBC report). The report quotes Ibrahim Tai, president of the Indian Muslim Council, as saying:

“They are not Muslims as they have not followed our religion which teaches us to live in peace.

“If the government does not respect our demands we will take up extreme steps. We do not want the bodies of people who have committed an act of terrorism to be buried in our cemeteries.

“These terrorists are a black spot on our religion, we will very sternly protest the burial of these terrorists in our cemetery,” he said.

There is an al-Jazeera report on the same subject posted on YouTube:

The report mentions a letter from the Muslim Council Trust, quoted as saying:

Islam does not approve of wanton killings and targeting non-combatants. As such, it can be safely surmised that such criminals are not Muslims.

This is worrying, because we see a supposed religious authority claiming that a Muslim is not a Muslim on account of having committed a sin, even a major sin. The fact that someone remains technically a Muslim despite committing a sin (the legal state of belief being separate from the inner state) is something most ordinary Muslims know; it was settled very early on in the history of Islamic scholarship, and the reverse position was associated with the Kharijites, a group best known for calling people unbelievers because of disagreement, and killing them as a result. The category of Kharijite includes Muslims who rebel, sanctioning the killing and enslavement of Muslims, on account of their own mistaken interpretation of Islam. While the behaviour of today’s terrorists differs - the historical Kharijites usually left non-Muslims alone, while the terrorists of today kill anyone and everyone, claiming that the non-Muslims are the enemy while making various excuses for killing whatever Muslims are among them - the principle is still that they make war, and kill people who may not be killed according to most Islamic scholars, on the basis of their own, or their leaders’, spurious reasoning and mistaken judgement, which makes them criminals but does not remove them from Islam.

Controversy about funerals for criminals and terrorists in Islam is not new; it is often reported that people who have died in an act of terrorism get a big funeral, as with one of the 2005 London bombers or the Bali bombers. More recently, a Muslim criminal, who was killed robbing a shop in Philadelphia dressed in a niqab, was denied a public funeral by a major local mosque. This did not mean that the robber did not get a funeral at all; prayer over the dead falls into the category of fard kifaya, i.e. a communal obligation, meaning it is an obligation for someone to do it, not necessarily anyone in particular, and not necessarily everyone, so it is sufficient for a few people to pray over them. In both cases, the criminals had offended and endangered the Muslim community, in Philadelphia by using the clothing Muslim women wear for modesty as a disguise, and in Bombay by killing indiscriminately, then exposing the community to a backlash which might make post-9/11 America look like a walk in the park. This is not to say that the community needs to have any big ceremony about it, or even that a large number of people should be present, and no doubt they could be buried away from the other Muslims, but an obligation is an obligation. Not fulfilling it lowers their status more than that of the deceased.

After all, scoundrels get burials. Politicians who launched murderous wars get buried with far greater pomp than ordinary people who led blameless or even virtuous lives. Doubtless, when the leaders of the various Hindu nationalist parties and mobs die, they will get a big public burial, particularly if they had also been politicians. I wonder if the Indian Muslim Council refuse burials to members of Dawood Ibrahim’s mafia gangs, or to Muslims who have carried out, or helped carry out, honour killings, which account for up to a third of homicides in parts of India. However, their Hindu neighbours are unlikely to blame them for that, as I am sure Hindus do their share of such murders.

It was Ed Husain, in this article on the Guardian’s website, which drew my attention to this lecture. He dismisses it as “a rant” from “an Arab male cleric with extreme Wahhabi leanings, denouncing the contract as kufr, or non-belief”. Well, most “clerics”, or scholars as Muslims actually call them, are male. This has always been the case, although the fact that there are not enough female scholars (as there used to be plenty) is acknowledged in some quarters at least. Ed is also male; why should anyone take any notice of him if this trait is a black mark against Haitham al-Haddad? The lecture’s biggest offending seems to be that it rubbishes a point of view Husain agrees with, and does so pretty comprehensively, and I cannot call its delivery a “rant” although I think he over-eggs the pudding a bit regarding the decline of the West.

“Ed” starts off with a sob story about a female former colleague of his, who caved into parental pressure to marry a cousin who then treated her badly. Given how much of what Ed has told us over the past couple of years has been debunked, I wonder how much of what Ed says about this woman is true, or if she even exists. Ed reckons that, if this contract had been used, his friend might have been able to divorce this abusive husband, or indeed, to have married her “first love” whom she had sacrificed to marry this man. The fact is that it would have had no such effect.

You can download the Muslim Marriage Contract (PDF) here. You will notice that the first page contains a substantial array of logos, including that of the Islamic Shari’ah Council and Muslim Council of Britain, both of which have withdrawn their support for the contract. The MCB have explained their position thus:

In furtherance of its policy to work with others for the unity of Muslims and for the common good, the MCB had collaborated on a worthwhile initiative on enabling parties to a Muslim marriage to understand and respect their rights and obligations and to enable Courts to enforce the rights of parties in accordance with what is agreed at the time of the Nikah. That initiative has regrettably led to misinterpretation of Shari’ah by those who the MCB had trusted to take the lead on this matter. Those representing the Muslim Institute were reported as saying that the documentation produced was a “re-invention of Shari’ah” or that it was a “modern” or ” reformist” view of the Shari’ah. These types of glib generalisations on sharia councils are unhelpful and not in keeping with MCB’s evidence-based approach to community issues. Moreover the MCB looks to the traditional Islamic institutions of ijma (the consensus of scholars) as the way forward in resolving the issues of our times.

The MCB rejects the misguided and incorrect assertions made by and ascribed to the Muslim Institute.

Given that the Muslim Institute is run by Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, one would have expected that the MCB would have checked up on his record, which includes rubbing shoulders (if not literally) with Cassandra Balchin of the secularist pressure group, Women Living Under Muslim Laws. I saw him present a lecture at SOAS on a bill which included Balchin and Chetan Butt, a Harry’s Place type based at Goldsmith’s College. Ed accuses the Council of having a position “as retrogressive and insular as its previous decision to boycott attending Holocaust Memorial Day”, a decision they had every right to take, particularly given that the memorial was all about an event which had nothing to do with Muslims, particulary those from the Indian subcontinent. Ed thinks that the City Circle were ahead of the MCB on that issue as they are on this one. The City Circle is run by Asim Siddiqui, who is the son of Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, who has run the so-called Muslim Parliament and Muslim Institute for years, whose name is on this contract, a fact that Ed does not bother to mention in his article. Whatever the inadequacies of the MCB, it is not a family affair.

The tolerance the Muslim Institute gets from the secular establishment is amazing; the Muslim Institute and Parliament have been part of the same establishment since the 1980s, and were then noisily pro-Iranian, and both have degenerated into vehicles for Ghayasuddin Siddiqui; both are run out of the same address (109 Fulham Palace Road, London W6). In 1989, they were among the foremost cheerleaders for the Iranian fatwa on Salman Rushdie, while UKACIA (UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs, run by the same people who later set up the MCB) stuck to demonstrations and lobbying. Perhaps the Iranian money has dried up, or perhaps Siddiqui has realised that the Muslim community no longer regard Iran as a great hope for the revival of Islam, or have decided that they do not want to be dominated by Shi’ites after all; or perhaps the secularist lecture circuit provides more money nowadays. The Muslim “Parliament” still exists, or at least its website does, but its website lists just two people as Personnel - Siddiqui himself and one Jaffer Clarke - and it seems to contain no references to past or forthcoming elections. Is a man really to be taken seriously when he runs a “parliament” to which nobody is ever elected? Running front organisations for oneself is normally the hallmark of a kook, not a respectable community leader.

The main problem with this contract is that parts of it are simply not religiously valid. The right of a man to take other wives, for example, is one which the Islamic community has agreed upon for its entire history. This contract, meanwhile, lists among the “special conditions” that the husband “is not to enter into formal or informal nikah (Muslim marriage) contract in the UK or abroad with another woman, as it is unlawful under the laws of England and Wales as well as the Scottish legal system”. If this really were illegal in this country, there would be no need for it to be included in this contract (more on that issue later, insha Allah), but as it is, informal marriages are not unlawful; what is unlawful in the UK is registering them. Even in the USA, where polygamy was outlawed as a response to the Mormon practice, informal polygamy is tolerated, whether among the Christian sects which practise it or among Muslims. However, in Islamic law, polygamy is a right men have, and no contract can take that away. A woman can stipulate a right to divorce for herself if she is particularly averse, but cannot stop it happening altogether. So, this part of the contract is null and void. Similarly, since the fact that a man’s divorce of his wife is binding is a matter of consensus among the scholars, and is well-known, no contract can make it non-binding, or bind a man to seek counselling or judicial approval.

While not part of the terms and conditions, the certificate also specifies that the marriage be witnessed by “two adult witnesses of good character”, which it alleges is “gender/faith neutral”. This has never been accepted by any Muslim authority; rather, some authorities accept one male and two female witnesses, while others insist on two men. Furthermore, they must be upstanding Muslims, and some suggest that, if there is a shortage of upstanding men, that the marriage be witnessed by a large number of people. Needless to say, classical Islamic jurisprudence does not insist that the witnesses be resident in the country where the marriage takes place, or that the marriage certificate records the postcode of their place of residence.

I suspect that this contract is, for British legal purposes, highly dubious. It mixes boilerplate rhetoric better suited to a preamble into the terms of the contract, and makes stipulations which are completely redundant. Among the terms and conditions is too much vague material. For example, it requires the couple to “undertake to stay loyal to each other and never to engage in extra-marital affairs”, the second of which is already a condition on which a marriage can be ended, and the first is too unspecific to be enforceable, since one person’s idea of what is acceptable as loyalty will differ from another’s, and in the case of marriage, may well go beyond merely not having affairs. The entirety of the “mutual rights and obligations” section is boilerplate and does not belong in the section on terms and conditions; some stipulations, such as the obligation not to spread sexually-transmitted diseases or sexually abuse the children, are already more than adequately covered by civil and criminal law; it also carries the offensive presumption that Muslims will sexually abuse their own children unless you really spell it out to them that you can’t do that sort of thing. It is rather like making people sign an agreement not to throw someone under a train every time they buy a train ticket or enter a station.

So, this contract is legally shoddy, and Islamically invalid. I doubt very much whether it would have helped Ed’s supposed friend, because the right not to marry someone you don’t want to marry is already established, at least in the Hanafi school followed in Pakistan, as is the ability to stipulate a right to divorce at the instigation of the wife. Would this woman have been offered the chance to enter a marriage based on this particular contract when caving in to family pressure to marry a clearly undesirable man? I really do not think so. It is my contention that Muslim women who want to escape from difficult family situations, or to study against the wishes of their family or whatever, do not need outside meddling in Muslim family structures or institutions; they need actual material help, which means money. If these people, and their secularist liberal supporters, wanted to help people other than themselves, they might put their hands in their pockets to help these women pay for food, accommodation and other needs, rather than drawing up a silly little document which is so badly researched and drafted that it will end up helping nobody.

Azad Ali at Islamic Forum Europe on yet another example of Ed Husain dictating to the media, and to various Islamic organisations, as to who he will and won’t appear alongside on a panel. He claims that letting them on is giving them the oxygen of publicity; he only seems to want to speak to adulatory interviewers.

The mainstream media have not acceded to his demands; it seems that Islamic organisations and media are not so courageous. The most recent involves the Islam Channel, which invited Ed and Azad Ali to their “Politics and Media” show:

As it turned out, Ed was not happy to be on a live show with me. His voice broke, his face screwed up with disdain, and the whites of his eyes were plain to see as he retorted, “I’m not going on if he is”.

Ed was apparently upset at my previous post about him, Maajid and Hasan Butt on this blog. I assured him that he had nothing to fear, and that if he truly believed what he said - why not debate them? After all, I had no hard feelings about Ed calling me an ‘extremist’ on national television!

All to no avail. After Ed threatened to walk away, the presenter decided that he would rather have Ed on the show than me, and herein lies the folly of ‘enagement’ - or to be more precise, conditional engagement! It seems that Ed will only ‘engage’ on his terms. That is, Inayat Bunglawala (the co-presenter) cannot be present, nor anyone else who can counter his arguments! So much for democratic debate.

And this is not the first time that Inayat has been ‘sacrificed’. At the recent ‘Living Islam’ camp (by ISB), Ed was also a guest panellist in the ‘Question Time’ debate. His appearance was again apparently conditional on Inayat Bunglawala’s absence from the panel.

Some people are speculating that people might be keen on getting funding, so they allow themselves to be seen with this clown while sacrificing genuine workers for the Muslim community. Surely some of these organisations do actually answer to a Muslim membership, or to commercial interests who depend on Muslims’ money, so why is nobody putting pressure to bear on them? It is ridiculous that they allow themselves to be bullied by a nobody whose claims have already been rubbished.

I suggest that, any time he appears in front of an audience on a Muslim medium, the crowd boo him, or challenge his every claim, particularly if he is obviously being allowed to put his point of view unchallenged. (This could be done with other live with-audience appearances, in fact.) I also suggest writing letters to these organisations and threatening to boycott their conferences. There is a big difference between being conciliatory and being a traitor, and we all know which side Ed is on. While I do not advocate silencing him completely, he certainly should be vigorously challenged.