Nowadays, I don’t bother refuting nonsense on Islamophobic blogs. They are not as important as they were at the moment anyway, now that the explosion of interest in them prompted by 9/11 has died down a bit. The movement has fragmented considerably, with Spencer and Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (I had to struggle to remember his name) having fallen out because the latter wasn’t willing to go buddy-buddy with European fascists (he fell out with others because he was unwilling to entertain “birther” conspiracy theories). There had been other fallings-out, notably over the Schiavo case which split the “Bush liberals” like Johnson from the hardcore conservatives. LGF itself is a shadow of its former self, covered in intrusive adverts which it certainly wasn’t in 2004.

Spencer wrote this review of Sookhdeo’s most recent book earlier this week. In it, he drew attention to an exchange of comments we had back in 2004 on his blog, when I was more zealous about defending Islam from people like him than I am now. Today, I am more interested in defending Muslims in this country from defamation in the British press and from the likes of the EDL; I also have other interests. The review was cross-posted to Front Page Magazine, but so far I’ve had no referrals from there (I’ve had a total of 25 from Jihad Watch).

His article read:

The venomous antisemite and historical revisionist Ben White attacked the book in an odd review that noted correctly that Sookhdeo contended that “the primary motivation of terrorists and suicide bombers is theological” and then purported to refute that contention not by showing that Sookhdeo had misrepresented Islamic theology, but that jihadists cited political issues in their communiques — thus demonstrating only that Ben White has no clue whatsoever about the inherently political character of Islamic theology.

This was enough, however, for the Islamic supremacist blogger Yusuf Smith (Indigo Jo), who showed up here a few years back in a most illuminating exchange (read the comments), to dub Sookhdeo “the Sookhdevil” — resulting in Sookhdeo being threatened with death by some of Indigo Jo’s coreligionists. Yusuf did not, of course, call them devils.

Actually, the reason I called him that is because his articles, such as Will London Burn Too? ([1], [2], [3], [4]) contained outright falsehoods, such as this particularly ludicrous one:

Migrant Muslim communities in the West are constantly engaged in sacralising new areas — first the inner private spaces of their homes and mosques, and latterly whole neighbourhoods (e.g., Birmingham) by means of marches and processions. So the ultimate end of sacred space theology is autonomy for Muslims of the UK under Islamic law.

Apart from the fact that most Muslims in the UK nowadays are not “migrants” but citizens, and the obvious geographical absurdity of calling Birmingham a neighbourhood when it is in fact a large city (I still marvel that this got past the editorial staff), the fact is that marches are not used to sacralise space in Islam at all. In fact, they have no ritual significance. They are used for political demonstrations and by one section of the community (Brelvis) to celebrate the Prophet’s (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) birth. The claim Sookhdeo makes is plainly false, baseless and malicious and was obviously made to stoke hostility. How do his supporters explain this?

As for why I never called those who made the alleged threats “devils”, I have nothing to do with them. I do not know if they exist or if any threats were made, or if they were made on the basis of things they had read here. Given the above, we cannot really rely on claims that Sookhdeo or his supporters make. It was given undue prominence by being repeated as fact by Melanie Phillips in the Spectator in March 2009, but that does not make it true.

Edmund Standing at Harry’s Place on the Islamophobic reaction to the decision by KFC to offer halaal meat at eight of their outlets. The usual suspects have been whingeing, among them Robert Spencer who detects “Islamic supremacist assertions that non-Muslims must abide by Islamic norms”, when in fact this is plainly a move by a commercial organisation to please its customers, or attract more customers:

Now firstly, KFC is an American company and its restaurants are famous for serving Southern fried chicken. I’m not wanting to come over all Naomi Klein on the issue, but if there is any kind of ‘colonisation’ going on here it’s colonisation by American culture, given the fact there are now 720 KFC stores nationwide, all of which are no doubt contributing to the ‘crushing’ of our ‘indigenous’ fish and chip shops and greasy spoon cafes by ‘invading’ the British market with their foreign chicken dishes. How ironic that an insular minded political party that professes a hatred of globalisation should be so upset about what happens to American fast food chains in this country.

Secondly, what a load of nonsense anyway. Businesses, last time I checked, work on the basis of making a profit from serving their customers with a desired product. It is quite obvious why KFC is trialling halal meat and it has nothing to do with ‘colonisation’ by a Muslim conspiracy and everything to do with making more money. If you go into any urban area in Britain with a significant Muslim presence you will find that almost all independent outlets selling fried chicken are halal certified. There is a good financial reason for doing this - it means more customers. And, despite ethical issues surrounding ritual slaughter, I never saw any shortage of non-Muslim customers frequenting such fast food businesses in my time living in Cardiff, London, and Birmingham. After all, let’s face it, if you don’t care about the birds having to live their entire lives shut away in factory farms, it’s hard to see why you should suddenly be so filled with compassion for them at their moment of death.

Given the fact that numerous independent restaurants and smaller chains already sell halal chicken wings and chicken burgers, it is clearly counterproductive for KFC not to.

Now, I don’t know which side is telling the truth. The dentist, Dr (?) Omer Butt, claims that he did not refuse to treat her, but used his religious ethos as a marketing tool, offering discounted or free treatment to Muslim women who wore the hijab. She claims she was taken to an X-ray room on arrival and told the rules, and agreed to them, but left after being told she must return to the surgery wearing the headscarf provided.

If the truth is as the woman alleged, the fact is that the dentist has no business using his practice to act as religious policeman over the Muslim women in his town. He is a healthcare provider; for good or ill, we don’t live in an Islamic state here and it’s not up to Muslims to force other Muslims, at least those not under their care such as their children, to abide by the Shari’ah. His job is to provide dental care, end of story. No doubt male Muslim dentists treat non-Muslim women all the time, some of them in far worse states of undress. Surely a Muslim lady, even if not practising and without her hair covered, would have been a pleasant change!

People should realise that we are lucky to live in this country where wearing hijab is no bar to receiving medical treatment or education. That isn’t the case in some countries, both in Europe and in the Muslim world. If Muslims do stupid things like this, they play into the hands of those who wish to see the end of hijab altogether, and would use healthcare and education as a weapon in that campaign.

“Hugh Fitzgerald”, the person Robert Spencer calls on (or pretends to be, as some suspect) when he wants to publish an intellectual-sounding article, calls on countries in Europe to follow the example of Benes and Masaryk in Czechoslovakia and expel the Muslims. This is in response to a claim by “Appa”, a Dutch Moroccan rapper, that if he got his hands on the bigoted politician Geert Wilders then Wilders would “be his”, i.e. he’d harm him (although he didn’t actually say he would kill him, as Fitz alleges):

Appa, who says he represents a large group of Muslims youth in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, says in De Pers: “If I ever meet Wilders, he’s mine. I swear to you, I’ll take him on. And there are more people who feel the same way. People shouldn’t be surprised if a Mohammed C. [i.e. a successor to Mohammad B, or Bouyeri, who killed Theo Van Gogh] springs up soon. If someone were to put a bullet in his head, I wouldn’t mind.”

Fitzgerald accuses the Muslim minority in the Netherlands of causing “a situation for the indigenous Dutch (and of course for other, but non-Muslim immigrants, such as Vietnamese Buddhists, Hindus from India and even Indonesia, and Chinese of Confucian or Christian or other persuasion) that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than it would be without that quite unwelcome, quite unnecessary, and deeply dangerous Muslim presence” and of regarding themselves as being behind enemy lines, without giving any references for how many really are followers of people who preach such ideas. He claims that the Dutch have allowed this situation to develop through “their easygoing tolerance”, and calls on them to “realise” that Western tolerance “does not include tolerating those who cling tenaciously to a doubly totalitarian Belief System, that offers a Complete Regulation of Life, and a geopolitical plan that justifies, by any instruments available and effective (and not merely qitaal, or combat, or its variant “terrorism”), the removal of all obstacles to the spread and dominance of Islam everywhere, and everywhere a situation where Muslims rule”. (I wonder how pleasant and safe their famous tolerance of drugs and prostitution really makes life for local people.)

People interviewed by Ziauddin Sardar in the New Statesman in late 2005, after the riots in several cities in Europe that autumn, saw things differently. He met Muslims who found that the majority population did not treat them with respect and dignity, including a female cabbie with a Moroccan boyfriend who nonetheless claimed that most Moroccans were criminals. Fitz, of course, does not bother to distinguish between religious Muslims and people of minimal attachment to Islam who are delinquents of the sort found in ghettoes the world over. Religious Muslim men, for one thing, have wives, not girlfriends.

His comparison of the Muslim minority with the Germans in Czechoslovakia is a false one. The Germans in Czechoslovakia, who lived in regions adjacent to Germany and Austria (and Germany, at that time, also included what is now south-western Poland, meaning that northern, western and southern Bohemia were predominantly German), were the remnant of past German and Austrian rule, which had been allowed to stay even in the inter-war period, had been instrumental in surrendering first their part, then the whole, of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany, and had participated heavily in Nazi rule of the former Czechoslovakia after that. They had thus proven themselves to be a threat, by much more than just one murder of a notorious hatemonger and a few rucksack bombs. Fitzgerald says that nobody then or since has asserted that the transfer was immoral, which may partly be because the situation was totally and utterly different to that of the Muslims in Europe, but also because Czechoslovakia shortly afterwards surrendered itself to Russian domination, which would have made return to the country unattractive to any deported German.

He ends by comparing the “prostrate” Germany of 1946 with the supposedly strong Muslim world of today, strong “thanks to that ten trillion dollars in OPEC money received since 1973, along with all the aid, a disguised Jizyah, that is received, almost as tribute, by Muslim states and nascent statelets that have no oil or gas, but are able to count on the foreign aid that the Infidels provide”. I can think of no recently established “nascent statelet” which is predominantly Muslim - what is he talking about? Western states buy oil from the Arabs because they need it; the western consumer lifestyle could not exist at the moment without it, and most of it is under Muslims’ soil. If Fitz thinks aid is “disguised jizyah”, perhaps he could provide a breakdown of how much of it actually goes to the Muslim world?

I don’t normally comment on the drivel Spencer and “Hugh Fitzgerald” publish; I mention this one because CAIR noticed it and mentioned it in their email circular. In some ways it’s a pretty standard anti-Muslim hate screed, with such distinguishing features as not distinguishing between delinquents and Islamic fundamentalists there as usual, but the leap of subject matter - from a possible death threat by a rapper to a politician to kicking an entire population out - seems extraordinary even for them. Or perhaps it’s not.

I’ve got a copy of the Reliance myself, and the quotes around “Holy War” are not Spencer’s, Myers’ or my own, but Shaikh Nuh Keller’s. They are in the index and clearly signify that “Holy War” is not Islamic terminology. Myers alleges that the re-definition of jihad as personal striving is “a later adaptation brought by Shia and Sufi scholars, the influence of ascetics, around the turn of the last millennium as Islam struggled with schism and the Moghul invasion”. Islamic texts, including the Reliance, all discuss jihad as meaning war.

Except, of course, that war means just that. It means fighting the enemy on the battlefield, not by carrying out spectacular destructions of property unrelated to whatever war is at hand. I should point out that many Muslims have misconceptions as to what went on in the World Trade Centre, which was no more than a multi-occupancy office block and was not a place where people sit and “plan world trade”, as one brother suggested to me, nor a “usurious institution” although some of the companies who owned parts of it were banks and insurers. It was not US Federal Government property, but it would not have made the attack lawful even if it was.

The terrorists are “classicists” only in that they belong to a tradition of fringe extremism going back to the dawn of Islam. Someone who speaks only English, and not Arabic or even another Muslim language like Urdu or Persian, can’t be blamed for having only Reliance of the Traveller to go on as an authority on the Shari’a; but Shaikh Nuh has a number of speeches recorded in English, among them the series of MP3s recorded at Friends’ House, London, last year entitled This is Jihad? (currently available here at DeenPort) or this article he wrote shortly after 9/11, or for that matter other articles by other real classicists after the 9/11 attacks, or this fatwa on attacking innocent civilians by another genuine classicist, Shaikh Muhammad Afifi al-Akiti.

While the notion that “jihad is only defensive” is indeed a myth, anyone who reads these articles and fatawa should come to the conclusion that terrorism is indeed a species of banditry even if those responsible call it war (and incidentally, our governments can be rather convenient when classifying terrorists as combatants or criminals; the British government made a big thing of classifying convicted IRA terrorists as criminals and refusing them political status, while 9/11 was pronounced an act of war immediately). Indeed, this activity has been the downfall of two Muslim countries (Chechnya and Afghanistan) recently, as marine piracy and slave raiding was the downfall of Islamic states in Africa in the past.

Technorati Tags: ayaan+hirsi+ali, melanie+phillips, netherlands, islam, terrorism

With Ayaan Hirsi Magan’s resignation after the exposure of her asylum grounds as largely false and her Dutch citizenship now in serious doubt, the hypocritical crocodile tears are beginning to flow in large numbers. Robert Spencer calls it “persecution”, the immigration minister Rita Verdonk “lamentable” and the politicians involved “despicable, black-hearted Dutch dhimmis” who “evidently want to take the greatest stateman they have produced in this age and send her back to Somalia and certain death”. Melanie Phillips talks of the Dutch being “in the throes of a pathological moral convulsion” and her downfall “a development that shames the Dutch people and should strike a chill throughout the rest of dhimmi Europe”. (More: Pickled Politics, MPACUK, CLOSER, Muslim Contrarian, Umar Lee, Izzy Mo, Crooked Timber.)

These people continually overlook salient facts about why Ayaan Hirsi Magan’s position has become untenable. The fact is that, having given a false name and age, her citizenship is invalid, and the lies she told when she applied for refugee status in the Netherlands meant she always was working on borrowed time. Had she declared that she came from Kenya, it is unlikely that she would have been admitted unless it was on grounds of political trouble there (as that was the time of the Moi dictatorship). Given that she lived for twelve years in Kenya, and had not merely used it as a staging post, and that her family disputed the various claims she made about being married off and fleeing an abusive marriage, it appeared that they had overlooked her dubious status for too long. She was no longer an asset, but a liability, and had to go.

Phillips acknowledged that AH Magan’s lying about her journey to the Netherlands “was wrong, and she shouldn’t have done it”, but insisted that “the fact that she was a refugee from Islamist oppression was true”. In what way? In that she had been married off against her will and had fled from that? Not according to her family. Furthermore, she could easily have followed her husband to Canada, and if she still found it oppressive, she could have made the same scene there that she ended up making in the Netherlands. Note her use of the term “Islamist oppression”: in what way was it Islamist? She further alleges that Ayaan Hirsi is “being broken and bullied out of the country by an unholy alliance of venomous leftists, spineless public servants — including those of a highly conservative disposition — and radical Islamists, all giving a victory to the forces of evil”. Again, those forcing her out are her former allies, whose anti-immigrant policies her anti-Islam campaigning benefited as long as people forgot that she was an illegal immigrant.

Furthermore, “it is oppressive to haul up someone in this way years after she has settled as a citizen”. Rubbish! The expulsion of illegal immigrants who have lived in the country since childhood, or who have borne children here, or were born here to illegal immigrants, are all known of in various European countries including the UK regardless of what an asset they have become in their local community - I mean real assets to the local community who mind their own business and pay their taxes (such as the Onibiyo and Kachepa families in the UK), not political troublemakers. It is all par for the unpleasant course of immigration control. There are many, many deserving exceptions, but when someone becomes an immigrant and then a citizen on demonstrably false grounds, and then makes a name for herself attacking an immigrant community, sooner or later it is to be expected that her past would come back to haunt her.

The excuse Ayaan Hirsi presented when giving her resignation speech yesterday therefore comes down to fleeing an unwanted marriage, and this is generally not considered a good reason for giving someone asylum unless the story is embellished somewhat - particularly when they already have residency for another western country. Does anyone think Europe should open its doors to every woman in the world with marital problems? As for the issue of FGM, it has no relevance to her asylum claim whatsoever: if she has already had it done, as she claims she did (arranged by her grandmother against her father’s wishes), then whether she lives in the Netherlands or Canada or Kenya will not change that.

Ayaan Hirsi’s campaign has been grist to the mill for everyone looking to demonise Islam and Muslims, and a great source of distress for not only “radical Islamists” but for anyone looking to defend the Muslim community itself. Put simply, she has dragged the community’s name through the mud by presenting all of the usual stereotypes, in some cases about matters which are particular to some parts of the world and not others (such as FGM, an overwhelmingly African practice which is also found among non-Muslim Africans and is unknown in most of the Muslim world). Some of the problems she talked of are real, but there are people working to address them from within the community, rather than use them as a political football by portraying all Muslims in a bad light. This article in The Nation (hat tip: Raz at Pickled Politics) demonstrates that many of those working to do the same in the Netherlands reject Ayaan Hirsi’s campaign:

Karima Belhaj is the director of the largest women’s shelter in Amsterdam. She’s also one of the organizers of the “Stop the Witchhunt!” campaign against what she sees as anti-Muslim hysteria. On the day we talked, she was despondent. Arsonists had set fire for the second time to an Islamic school in the town of Uden. A few days later a regional police unit warned that the rise of right-wing Dutch youth gangs potentially presents a more dangerous threat to the country than Islamist terrorism. “The rise of Islamism is not the problem,” Belhaj said. “The problem is that hatred against Arabs and Muslims is shown in this country without any shame.” With her message that Muslim women must give up their faith and their families if they want to be liberated, Hirsi Ali is actually driving women into the arms of the fundamentalists, said Belhaj: “She attacks their values, so they are wearing more and more veils. It frightens me. I’m losing my country. I’m losing my people.” If Belhaj was sad, another “Stop the Witchhunt!” organizer was angry. Like Belhaj, Miriyam Aouragh is a second-generation immigrant of Moroccan background. A self-described peace and women’s activist, Aouragh was the first in her family to attend university. She’s now studying for a PhD in anthropology. She scoffs at the idea that Hirsi Ali is a champion of oppressed Muslim women. “She’s nothing but an Uncle Tom,” Aouragh said. “She has never fought for the oppressed. In fact, she’s done the opposite. She uses these problems as a cover to attack Islam. She insults me and she makes my life as a feminist ten times harder because she forces me to be associated with anti-Muslim attacks.”

With regard to violence, it should be pointed out that attacks by Muslims on individual westerners in the west for insulting or attacking Islam are very rare indeed - while murders and violent incidents arising from petty personal slights, or even less than that, are very common. The bark of the Muslim community in the west is somewhat worse than its bite. FGM is on the decline, a point often missed in any debate in which it is cited, and while women do tend to have less freedom than white middle-class western women, their existence is rather more dignified than a lot of other western women. Religious Muslims do not tend to refer to women as bitches and ho’s (ghetto Arab youths influenced by American gangsta culture may do, however). Perhaps some Muslim women realise that “westernising” their ghettoes in Paris or Amsterdam is more likely to bring them drugs, gangsterism and yob culture than a comfortable, “liberated” middle-class life.

A number of Ayaan’s fans accuse the Dutch of cowardice and of rejecting her because they are somehow afraid of “Islamofascism” or “the jihad”, hoping they will go away if the messenger is removed, as if either are capable in Holland, or anywhere else in Europe, of much more than displays of blind anger or the occasional bomb (with a bit of help from their buddies abroad). The suggestion that her departure is a loss for the Netherlands, let alone for Europe, is laughable. Her new audience of religious reactionaries, neo-cons and inveterate, dishonest anti-Muslim bigots are welcome to this shrill Uncle Tom type. Let us hope that we in Europe can raise the tone of the debate on immigration and containing extremism, both within the Muslim community and elsewhere.

The first disadvantage of converting, apparently, is the lack of music:

Islam does not permit music, though here and there folk music has been allowed. But music having to do with religious worship is absolutely forbidden. When black Americans convert, they are throwing out all of Gospel music, doubly wicked in Muslim eyes: the music itself is forbidden, and this particular church music takes its texts from Old Testament stories (stories involving Jews, and the Promised Land).

Actually, Gospel music is not forbidden due to its Old Testament references; in fact, Islamic literature makes much of the works of the Israelite Prophets and their antecedents (‘alaihim as-salaam). Of course, this is a transparent attempt at an insinuation of anti-Semitism; the reason Gospel music is prohibited is because the use of musical instruments and public female singing is prohibited. “Shaikh” Abdullah Faisal once told his followers that some of his teachers in Saudi Arabia were amazed when he told them that in his former church, the Salvation Army, worship involved performances by these singing girls. Of course, Muslim women do sing, but not to men. Islam offers a very rich repertoire of singing material known as nasheeds and qasidas, but they are sung a capella, in gatherings rather than performances, and by men and women separately.

A reference to a “Promised Land” is problematic for Afro-Americans anyway, for whom there really is no promised land, since they have been separated from Africa to the extent of not knowing for the most part where exactly their individual ancestors came from (quite apart from the fact that a fair percentage of their ancestors came from Europe, not Africa). They arguably have a better right to America than whites, because they did not choose to usurp it from its original inhabitants, but were taken there by force.

It is curious that real Muslims regarded (and may still regard) Elijah Muhammad’s Black Muslims as not the real thing, partly because of the claims made on behalf of Elijah Muhammad himself, and partly because of the music that occasionally was allowed (and may still be) at certain gatherings of followers.

In reality, real Muslims regard the so-called Nation of Islam as “not the real thing” because their beliefs are radically different. Their religion is an invented one which uses some Arabic terminology, but their theology and their practices are at great variance with Islam. They are polytheistic, and their beliefs regarding the origin of white men are kufr. Some NOI members do from time to time become Muslims, and there are rumours every so often of Louis Farrakhan or his organisation accepting real Islam, but the NOI historically is an un-Islamic racist sect which uses a bit of Arabic terminology.

When black Americans discard Christianity for the sake of Islam, because they are fooled into believing that Islam is somehow the correct vehicle of protest, they manifest ignorance of the whole horrible Arab slave trade. That trade began earlier and ended (where it did end) later than the European slave trade. Also, it was, because it involved the castration on site of so many black African children, much greater in scope. The mortality rate was something like 90%, so that only 1 out of 10 black male children seized and castrated by the Arab slavers actually made it to the slave markets of Riyadh, Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, Algiers, Istanbul, and similar centers of Islam.

The castration of slaves, or indeed anyone, is forbidden in Islam. One can find this written in any number of Islamic legal textbooks. The difference between Islam as it should be practised and what is practised by the rulers, in particular, is great; there are many sayings by both the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) and by scholars about the dangers of getting too close to the rulers. There were many incidents of scholars being tortured or murdered by the agents of the rulers for not accepting heresies they were trying to advance.

I am not in a position to dispute his figures and do not defend what he is describing. But Afro-Americans, and others of the Black diaspora, who convert to Islam do not seek to emulate the Arab slave-merchants of old in any case. They tend to focus on traditional scholars, both Arab and African (and in some cases even Indian), and on the “Salafi” movement.

Those Afro-Americans who are made the obvious target of a campaign of Da’wa (as are immigrants from Latin America), and who choose to embrace Islam, are unwittingly, with that “reversion” to Islam (one in which they are seldom presented with the full meaning, or texts, of Islam), also turning their back on, discarding, jettisoning, the place of Biblical imagery and of the Bible in the history of black America. Decades ago, when the Black Muslims first got started (and because of Elijah Muhammad’s own claims, and other doctrinal irregularities, Arab Muslims never considered them to be “real Muslims” and even today are contemptuous of “Black Muslims” as opposed to “black Muslims”), much was made of their ability to supposedly “straighten people” out — have them wear coats and ties, give up drugs and alcohol, and so on. Well, perhaps. But what it also did is cause them to abandon their entire pre-Islamic history, and to thus sever ties with their own past, their own relatives who remained Christians or part of a Christian or Judeo-Christian tradition.

So, he admits (contrary to his earlier assertion) that the “Black Muslims” are rejected because of their doctrine and not because of the music they play in their worship. In fact, there are some mainstream Muslims who use music in their religious activities, particularly some so-called Sufis. This is not Islamically correct, but they are Muslims and not a home-grown sect. The NOI is only the best-known of a number of invented Afro-American religions which use Islamic terminology; to be a Muslim, one has to believe what Muslims believe, and witness to it. The NOI do not.

The “loss of history” argument is a commonly-heard one, but in fact it applies to anyone who leaves one community for another: he becomes part of it and begins to consider their history more important than his own. This happens, for example, when someone exchanges one citizenship for another, often necessitating learning about his or her new country’s history or culture. Of course, Islam does not demand that anyone cuts ties with their family; it demands the exact opposite, as is well-known.

Finally, let’s talk about racism. Anyone who has spent even a week in the Arab states of the Gulf, or taken a summer course in Arabic in Cairo or Damascus, knows that the most racist, most skin-color aware societies on earth, are those of the Arabs — despite all the talk of a “universalist” religion. One student of my acquaintance, who had taken courses with, and been brainwashed by, Bruce Lawrence of Duke University, to regard Islam as a great thing, then spent a summer in an Arab country. He came back completely disabused — no greater racists, he insisted, had he ever met in his life. He was from rural South Carolina.

Funny, I know people of African origin who spent time in the Arab world, including Syria, and did not come back with tales of all the racism they encountered. They went to study Arabic or to seek out religious people such as elderly pious shaikhs. They came back very much impressed by what, and those whom, they saw. Their faith in Islam was strengthened, not weakened. In some Arab regions there are very strong connections with parts of Africa, Hadramaut and its diaspora being a major example. Every Muslim knows that the practices of common people are not to be confused with authentic Islamic practice. If one looks in the right places, one finds many Muslims dissatisfied with the contempt some Arab immigrants show Afro- and Latin Americans. The tensions surrounding Arab corner shops in black and Latino districts of many US cities has seen much discussion on Muslim blogs (start here).

Why this information is not more widely written about in the press, including the black press, by black ministers who should try to hold onto their flocks and not let wanderers be seduced by the siren-song of Islam, which for more than a thousand years has meant nothing but kidnapping followed by enslavement or death at the hands of Arab slavers, is beyond me.

Of course, for many Africans Islam meant no such thing. It was better associated with the likes of Omar Tall al-Futi, ‘Uthmaan dan Fodio and other major scholars, such as those of Timbuktu and later Sokoto, than with the slave trade and its associated banditry. There were not only African scholars, some with chains of transmission traceable to India in three or four generations, but also African sultans. The fact is that Africa was used and abused by both its northern and its eastern neighbours for centuries; it still continues to pay vast sums to service usurious loans to its former colonial slave-masters. Added to this is the undeniable fact that Africans, Muslims and others, collaborated in the slave trade, and that Africans and mixed-race people owned African slaves in the Americas and elsewhere. The notorious slave-raider Muhammad “Tippu Tip” al-Murjebi, who raided out of Zanzibar, was half African.

And even today Arabs continue to show their contempt and hatred for blacks, not only in the enslavement of black Africans by Arabs in Mali and Mauritania, but by the Libyan mobs that attacked black African students and lynched a black diplomat a few years ago; by the Moroccans who have been known to deal with black African migrant workers by taking them and dropping them in the middle of the desert with no possible way of survival; and of course by the behavior of that member in good standing of the Arab League, the government of the Sudan, which over 20 years, killed or starved to death nearly 2 million black Africans in the southern Sudan, with survivors often enslaved.

Well, Europeans and Americans treat refugees barely any better, whether they come from Africa or anywhere else. The Blair government tried to impress the anti-immigrant press by denying benefits to some refugees, among the results of this were reports of women begging in the streets of London for sanitary towels. The Americans turned back ships full of Jewish refugees from Europe, with some of them finishing in countries later over-run by the Nazis. The violence in Libya in 2000, occasioned by rumours of an African expatriate raping a local girl, is indefensible, but hardly unique to the Muslim world.

There’s much more to add. But the Islamic Da’wa campaign in America involves the clever targeting of blacks. The Boston Mosque was placed right across from Roxbury Community College, and part of the “deal” was for the mosque members to offer “free lectures” to students at Roxbury Community College and 2,500 “books on Islam” (you can guess which kind) for the college’s library. In other words, the Mosque’s backers were planning on using it as a center for conducting Da’wa among the black population of Boston. One wonders if the Rev. Eugene Rivers, or other ministers, have taken note of the history of Islam, of the tenets of Islam, of the menace of Islam to the wellbeing of those whom they instruct and guide and elevate and offer solace to.

The actual “deal” involved a bit more than that, as is explained in the Boston Globe:

Under the 2000 deal, the Islamic Society of Boston bought the Roxbury land, valued at $401,187, for $175,000. The remainder was to be paid in kind: the Islamic Society was to maintain a playground and park by the Roxbury parcel for 10 years, offer lectures on Islam at Roxbury Community College next door, help develop an Islamic library there, and assist the college foundation in fund-raising.

So, the mosque was to assist the college in fund-raising and maintain their playground and park for ten years - perhaps this would account for just over $200,000? How much is a gardener’s yearly pay in Massachusetts? Fitzgerald makes presumptions about the nature of the books being supplied, when he could perhaps ask someone at the college - assuming they were supplied; you cannot build an “Islamic library” from da’wah pamphlets.

Slavery was implicitly recognized by the American Constitution. But it is so no longer. Fortunately, the Constitution has always been subject both to formal modification (amendments)through the express will of the people, and to judicial interpretation (“It is a constitution we are expounding” wrote Chief Jusice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison). There is no way to modify the passages in Qur’an, the sayings and acts of Muhammad in the Hadith and Sira, that allow, permit, even offer rules for, the institution of slavery. Muhammad himself, and his Companions, owned slaves — the slaves taken in battle. It is not possible, therefore, for any Believer to denounce slavery as a moral evil, for that would be to condemn Muhammad. And he is uswa hasana, the Model for All Mankind. So it just can’t be done.

True. But slavery was part of the human condition from ancient times until the last hundred years. The notion of abolishing it altogether gained popularity in Victorian times as a direct result of the abuses in the slave trade at the time: the banditry, the deaths at sea, the murderous contempt with which those in charge often treated the slaves, the miserable conditions on some plantations, and so on. There were those who objected on other grounds, such as that it instilled laziness in white farmers who did not work, relying on slaves to actually do their work for them.

In fact, Islam encourages the freeing of slaves by such measures as making it an expiation in a number of situations, giving rise to the suggestion that the abolition of slavery may be its ultimate goal. A slave’s life in Islam (if not in every Muslim society where slavery was widespread) is vastly more comfortable than it was for most African slaves in the USA; they were supposed to be part of the owner’s household, eat the same food and wear the same cloth (none of this “slave cloth”). It is not permitted to whip or otherwise strike a slave. And a slave woman who bore her master’s child became free, along with the child, on the master’s death.

As for the US Constitution, it appears that judges have arrogated the right to read words into it rather than out of it. The First Amendment is a case in point, clearly mentioning Congress, but invariably applied to any American public authority. The same documents were used to uphold, and then strike down, racially discriminatory laws. Nowadays, liberals use the term “fundamentalist” to describe interpreting the Constitution according to what it actually says, not what people have chosen to say it means. You cannot do this with primary Islamic texts.

Black Americans, like other Americans, like Infidels everywhere, who because of the actions of Muslims themselves, and despite the efforts of the political leaders in the Western world to repeat pious nonsense about the real nature of Islam, are beginning to realize that as a vehicle for the expression of discontent, Islam is not exactly ideal. For Islam represents the greatest successful imperialism — Arab imperialism — in human history. After those it directly conquered in the Middle East and North Africa and Hindustan, the greatest victims have so far not been white Europeans, but black Africans, hideously seized, castrated, dragged to the Muslim slave markets by coffle and dhow, with 90% of them dying on the way. Islam demands that converts (“reverts”) simply regard with indifference or hostility their entire non-Islamic past. That leaves the non-Arab convert alone — with no music, no art, no history, with essentially nothing but Islam.

Again, slavery was not the sole experience black Africans had of Islam. Most black African Muslims did not live in Arab-run Islamic states, but in African-run ones (the Omanis in East Africa were a notable exception, but their domain was limited to the coastal region). Both East and West Africa have Muslim cultures of their own, including scholars who are well-recognised internationally, and using Arabic, the vernacular, and the colonial languages. It has been an important factor in da’wah among both black and white Europeans and Americans. A lot of young Muslims in both the UK and the US know more about the Fulani jihad than they do about the corruptions of the slave trade (in fact, there were incidents of African jihad leaders waging war on Arab slave traders). While Islam for the first few centuries was indeed Arab-dominated, the Arab world later fell under Turkish domination. Every part of the Islamic world has an Islamic culture based around a regional non-Arabic language: Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Malay, Swahili. This hardly represents a wholesale rejection of local culture in favour of a monolithic Arab-Islamic one.

I could go on quoting at length from this article (there is only two more paragraphs); but the reader gets the picture. Islam is not a good vehicle of protest, according to him - but the issue of people converting to Islam because they are dissatisfied with what they have found elsewhere has already been dealt with by, for example, Abdul-Hakim Murad:

Just as the namaz [salaat] prayer is invisibly invalidated if the niyya [intention] at its outset is not correct, similarly, Islam will not work for us unless we have entered it in faith, out of a sincere questing for God’s good pleasure. If things are not going right for us, if we find no delight in our prayers, if Ramadan simply makes us hungry, if we cannot seem to find the right mosque or the right company to take us forward, then we would do well to start by examining our intentions. Did we become Muslims only, and purely, to bring our souls to God? Other reasons: solidarity with the oppressed, admiration for Muslims we know, desire to join a group, the love of a woman - none of these are adequate foundations for our lives as Muslims deserving of Allah’s grace and guidance.

I would dispute the notion that any great number of converts enter Islam as a protest. Rather, their protests would lead them to investigate Islam, perhaps as a result of meeting Muslims through their activities, or because they see the other side of western civilisation (I count myself among these people). The actual appeal to black Americans is often made in terms of Islam being their real ancestral religion, before they were enslaved, which is often (though not always) true. This, in itself, is not a good reason to change one’s religion, but it is a powerful appeal for an alienated minority, practising the religion of their former persecutors and slave-masters without being respected by them, to investigate Islam. One might add that man-made ideologies into which protests often directed themselves have become discredited, and even at the ballot box, a vote for a major party seldom translates into serious reform, while a vote for a minor party, particularly in a non-proportional system like the one we have here in England, is likely to be a wasted vote.

The issue of prison da’wah, which Fitzgerald raises in this article, is a problematic one. People often find religion in jail, and not just Islam, but the community’s recent history of da’wah seems to revolve around prisons and ghettoes. The former may well be a legacy of the Nation of Islam, while the latter has much to do with the fact that most Muslim immigrants, in the UK at least, end up in ghettoes themselves. Back home, of course, many of them were farmers, and there has been no serious attempt to give da’wah in rural areas or anywhere outside urban ghettoes. This means we draw our fresh blood from the roughest parts of the population, which has a lot of ill effects on our people, which may well be the reason why a brother observed that in Saudi Arabia, people said they could recognise the English Salafis by their anger.

The fact remains that, as with all his sneering treatises on converts to Islam, Fitzgerald contemplates any number of reasons why black Americans might accept Islam, but does not consider belief; one might bear in mind that people’s belief tends to strengthen after they convert, even if their journey into Islam began out of dissatisfaction or alienation or protest. The arguments he gives as counter-appeals are just as weak, based on ignorance of (or wilful blindness to) real black African history. The bottom line is that people become Muslims to become Muslims, not to become Arabs or Pakistanis; if the behaviour of common Arabs towards black Africans today is some black mark against Islam, how can anyone expect Christianity to have much appeal to black Americans given that when it was at its height, before the secularisation of the 1960s, white Christians treated their fellow believers like sub-humans, even in church? While the history of the Arab slave trade may not be well-known among Afro-Americans, the history of white, Christian America is studiously ignored in Fitzgerald’s proposals for counter-appeals.

I’ve more than once heard the complaint from non-Muslims that some Muslims they have met cannot possibly fathom why anyone would not be a Muslim. Hugh Fitzgerald is the precise opposite: he cannot fathom that anyone would convert to Islam because he or she believes in it, and not for some other motive. He cites “the clearly marginal characters, at the bottom of society, such as Richard Reid” and “the ex-gang members wishing to find another kind of community for solace, and choose the community of the umma al-islamiyya — such as Jose Padilla”. Let’s imagine for the sake of argument that Jose Padilla is guilty of whatever the US government supposes he did; this would make him, like Reid, one out of hundreds of this type of convert and hardly representative. Most converts do not become terrorists - fact - and they do not get involved in fighting either.

He also, of course, notices those who fall in love and “revert” to please their spouse, “and may come to realize that there is a bit more to this belief-system than had at first been apparent, and then are forced to cope as best they can”. Then there are those who convert out of a hunger “for the picturesque or unusual” and a desire to display “unusual tastes”. Then, of course, there are the “Serial Seekers After the Truth”, who jump on one religious bandwagon after another. Western society, he says, regards converts “as objects of great interest, especially if they appear outwardly to be respectable and not the dregs-of-society sort”, as was the case with Muhammad Asad, Muhammad M Pickthall and so on - and they have to be “western”, and the more famous the better. And apart from those who “tepidly” convert for marriage purposes, his only suggestion for what motivates the others is a “need for the solace of certainty, and of complete regulation of what is haram and what halal, a need to be special, when one is otherwise so un-special”. As for those who converted under Muslim rule, this must have been “to avoid either death, or the severe disabilities, the humiliation and degradation and insecurity of dhimmi status”, as if substantial populations of Christians does not survive in several Muslim countries to this day. (When, in an earlier debate with Spencer, I mentioned that Christians apparently preferred dhimmi status to removing themselves to the nearest Christian country, he called this ridiculous and asked me to bring my proof if I was truthful. Indeed, the fact that they did not remove themselves is proof enough.)

The notion of Islam being more convincing to the intellect than Christianity does not occur to Fitzgerald: the fact that it still has a main body, rather than several sects which were mutually hostile until they drastically lost influence in the 20th century; the fact that it is truly monotheistic and does not compromise on La ilaha ill’ Allah with man-made constructs which are not mentioned in the Bible in the way they are by Christians today; the fact that it has a law at all, rather than a vague set of principles with a handful of actual rules traceable to the original texts, most of which are ignored, increasingly so by people who demand to know why Leviticus can be used to condemn homosexuality but not the consumption of pork by Christians; all of this passes Fitzgerald by. (Read the comments to the piece, and you’ll discover how hundreds of years of Muslim dominance of Spain turned the Spanish into the mass murderers they were in their Latin American colonies. Someone might suggest a similar root-cause argument with regards to US-supported dictators and terrorism by some Muslims …)

In a more recent article, Fitzgerald attempts to incite fear and suspicion in response to the Dawanet website, and after seeing his recommedation to “take a tour” of it, I did so. The website merely gives advice on how Muslims might better give da’wah to non-Muslims; Fitzgerald has darker fears:

More than one John Walker Lindh — I can think of an East Coast example — has been set on the course of Islam and is off seeking a suitable bride in Yemen because of a smiling Pakistani roommate (or some such) he had at prep school and then at Harvard, or schools like it. The problem is everywhere, at every level. Eternal vigilance has to be exercised. This jihadist cult threatens everyone who does not belong to it, in a way that the Hare Krishnas and the other well-known cults never did. And it will permanently stunt the growth of all those who enter it. You do not want to stunt your child’s mental growth, do you?

The comparison of the so-called “jihadist cult” with the likes of the “Hare Krishnas and the other well-known cults” is ludicrous. The “International Society for Krsna [Krishna] Consciousness” has, in fact, been affected by a child abuse scandal in its Gurukula boarding schools; the flirty-fishing antics of the so-called Children of God are well-known, along with the notoriously repressive atmosphere in the cult houses, as reported by former members; and while no cult has recruited young people off the streets and prompted them to crash a plane into a skyscraper, one did persuade people to relocate to a remote forest encampment in Guyana and force them to drink poisoned fruit juice. Cults are generally regarded as malevolent and controlling, and renowned for such things as separating people from their families - something Islam, if people follow it correctly, does not do. (I’m not talking about moving out of the family home here; I’m talking about cutting off contact.)

There are, of course, some shaky facts on the site, including for example the replication of a “history of Islam in the Americas” which has appeared on a number of other sites; the site owners might do well to check some of the facts therein rather than simply reproduce material unquestioningly. But the tone of the site is entirely unthreatening and, in fact, does not encourage Muslims to take any aggressive position with non-Muslims with whom they come into contact (see this article by Abdul Malik Mujahid, for example).

A commenter calling herself “Jen” noted that in the section on women, “only two areas are addressed – the male speaking about women, and the hijab. This confirms for me that the Muslimah’s role is defined by the Muslim male, and that her dress plays a pivotal part in this defined role (to which she, for the most part, acquiesces), and you can be sure it’s not a liberating element”. Anyone who actually looks at the page will realise that the first thing the article advises is to “let the sisters speak”. The last is to ask women for their perspective on issues. So this is the furthest thing from the Muslimah’s role being defined by the Muslim male.

Fitzgerald encourages readers to peruse the DawaNet site, in order to circumvent Muslims’ da’wah efforts:

So you need to study with care those parts of www.dawanet.com that are most relevant and most revealing. It is not hard to do. You can print out some of the stuff and share it with other parents. You can protest — or better yet, preempt the efforts of the smiling lady who wants to come to St. Grottlesex or your child’s homeroom to tell everyone about the wonders of Ramadan. You may think, at first, that little harm can come of it. You would be wrong. An initial false impression about Islam, implanted in someone at an impressionable age, may be stuck and hard to eradicate later on. The first task of all Infidels is to sufficiently study the matter so that no matter what is presented to them, they cannot be fooled. The second task is to help inform as many other people as possible, no matter how long it takes, no matter how tiresomely pedagogic one’s tone may become, no matter how repetitious — repetition even of phrases, until your audience has thoroughly assimilated those turns of phrase and made them their own, even possibly not recognizing where they came from.

I fail to see what alarm the other parents at St. Grottlesex will feel at a potted history of Muslims in the USA and at people being encouraged to engage with those of other religions, the better to spread their own. I think some people might find it alarming that people wishing to distribute information about their religion and perhaps dispel a few stereotypes and suspicions are accused of some sort of plot to lure people into a “jihadist cult”. And misinformation, implanted at whatever age, often proves difficult to shake off, which is no doubt why Muslims feel the need to remedy the situation by informing the public of the Islam most Muslims practise every day, rather than what some Muslims do some of the time.

The problem with shutting down such mosques is twofold. First, there are no extremist mosques in the UK. The only mosque which ever came close to being one was in fact built by the community, and the extremists were never elected by anyone; they just took over. And the state did indeed use its powers to expel the extremists and, after a time when it was closed (and the community used the mosque across the road), restore it to its original management. This has not been necessary anywhere else. As is fairly well-known, the rabble-rousers of which we all know preached in community centres, not mosques (Abu Hamza being the only exception).

The second is that, if the extremists are centred on a particular mosque, it’s much easier to keep an eye on them than if they are scattered among the community. It also means that they cause less trouble and are less likely to lead the youth astray at the mosques which are still in the hands of the traditional communities. People who want to find the nutcases know where they should go; people who want to mind their own business usually need not worry about them, or worry about their relatives being led astray, or attacked, by them.

On Dhimmi Watch, Robert hails the “courageous Muslim” Tashbih Sayyed for “speaking truth to power” regarding anti-Semitism in the Muslim community. A brief examination reveals that Sayyed is part of the neo-con Benador gang along with Amir Taheri, Kanan Makiya and Charles Krauthammer (full list here). So he may well be talking to “power”, but not as Spencer would have us believe in this entry; he is on the side of “power” and telling them what they want to hear!