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.

You see, I authored a page on my old school, or rather the building in which it was situated, and despite having posted a number of articles about my experiences there (many of them negative), kept the Wikipedia entry factual and posted whatever I could find from Google about the history of the building. Some guy (or perhaps woman, since they never gave us more than a nickname) thought it was relevant to tell the world that the main author of the page was an “Islamist blogger”. I thought it was irrelevant, particularly as I did not use Wikipedia to attack the school or anyone associated with it.

Anyway, it starts here and you can see my (currently rather empty) YouTube channel here, insha Allah.

The Christians who objected to White tipping me off were concerned about threats to Christian missionaries and to Sookhdeo himself. Phillips is more concerned about the fact that Ben White and some of his associates have a less indulgent attitude towards Israel than she would like:

A recurring thread of White’s writing is his hatred of Israel. He justifies Palestinian terrorism against Israel as legitimate self-defence to bring about the ‘decolonisation and liberation from occupation and Zionist apartheid’.

He says he can ‘understand’ why some people are unpleasant towards Jews because of Israel’s ‘ideology of racial supremacy and its subsequent crimes committed against the Palestinians’ and also ‘the widespread bias and subservience to the Israeli cause in the Western media’.

Enter at this point the non-evangelical, secular Left in the shape of Andrew Brown, who joined White’s onslaught against Sookhdeo on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free website. Brown claimed of Sookhdeo’s supporters that they constructed ‘a closed mirror-world of hatred to stand against the Islamist one’.

Brown’s article, too, seemed to be driven by hostility to anyone who supported Israel. His objection to Sookhdeo was principally that ‘in practice the Sookhdeo view of Islam is always coupled with a stance in favour of the greater Israel’ — which enabled Brown to make a witty crack insinuating that the Jews were ‘people who are instructed by their religion to be violent, treacherous and imperialist’.

Andrew Brown has another explanation for why Anglican clergy are often not Israel-lovers:

But most of the Anglican ambivalence towards Israel is much simpler and less completely worked out than a conspiracy: it arises from the simple fact that Palestinian Christians are Arabs, and if you go to visit them, as Anglican clergy often do, you will see how Arabs are treated under Israeli occupation. That makes the travellers dislike the Israeli army. No doubt this will be interpreted by Melanie as “blaming the Jews”, but occupying armies get blamed for their behaviour whether they are Jewish, Chinese, or even British. It goes with the territory.

I had two qualms with Phillips’s references to me. The first is that she called me an “Islamist”, a term used so broadly by those who use it that it really does not mean anything anymore. The same goes for “radical Muslim”, a term used for me on the Barnabas Fund’s prayer request:

Indigo Jo does say on his website that he is a British convert to Islam, original name Matthew Smith, now using the name Yusuf, and that he is pro-madhhab http://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/about/about-me-and-my-blog.html (Madhhab is the word for a school of sharia, Islamic law, so this means that he is pro-sharia, i.e. a radical Muslim.)

Whether this is ignorance or dishonesty, I’m not sure. What I do know is that most radicals, except for some in Pakistan, are actually anti-madhhab; at least, against them in the way Muslims traditionally follow them. The Shari’ah is the entirety of Islamic law, including the food laws and rituals, not just the political aspects.

The second is the description of Sookhdeo as an “Islam scholar”. Sookhdeo’s articles on Islam frequently contain brazen distortions of the truth and outright falsehoods, and what makes them more egregious is that they appear in mainstream magazines and newspapers, such as the Spectator and Evening Standard in London, not just obscure Evangelical publications. The Spectator published one entitled Will London Burn Too?, in November 2005 (available here on a sympathetic Evangelical site, or here at the Spectator’s site in four tiny parts), which demonstrated his tendency to seize every opportunity to present Islam as a threat, magnifying small incidents out of their propoer proportion (e.g. a bit of trouble between Kurdish and Pakistani youths in Peterborough), and also contained this false accusation:

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.

Quite apart from the ridiculous description of Birmingham as a “neighbourhood” (it’s a city - where were the editors when this was being published?), the claim that marches and processions are used to sacralised the areas marched in is just baseless. Besides political demonstrations, some sections of the Muslim community partake in marches for certain celebrations, most commonly the birthday of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), which is actually condemned by most of the radicals.

Is this man a total idiot, or a liar? One thing he is not is a scholar. He is nothing more than a hatemonger who uses a few long words. As I said before, his work for Christians abroad does not offend me, and his pro-Israel stance does not offend me a tenth as much as his repeated, malicious slurs against Islam and Muslims. The spectacle of Boris Johnson getting promoted in the Tory party after publishing the utter nonsense this scoundrel writes convinced me that the party had nothing to offer Muslims.

It appears that people are concerned that my use of the epithet “Sookhdevil” has been taken up by various other, so-called radical Muslim, websites. Their definition of “radical” is pretty loose: they judge me a radical because I follow a madhhab: “he is pro-madhhab … Madhhab is the word for a school of sharia, Islamic law, so this means that he is pro-sharia, i.e. a radical Muslim”. This is typical of Sookhdeo’s rather liberal way with words; for most of us, a “radical Muslim” is one who advocates certain types of political action. It also appears that they are more irritated by Ben White tipping me off than with what I’ve written (originally here):

Why should an evangelical Christian go out of his way to point out to a radical Muslim a negative review of another evangelical Christian’s book? Was he put up to it by the evangelical group Fulcrum? If so, what was their purpose? To destroy the Sookhdevil and his ministry?

As a matter of fact this kind of betrayal of one Christian by another to a Muslim is not as uncommon as you might think, especially if - as in this case - the betrayer is white and the betrayed is not. Let me give you another example.

In December 2005, Pastor Daniel Scot was speaking in Australia to Christians about Islam. Scot, originally from Pakistan, had moved to Australia because of persecution in his home country, where his bold defence of the Christian faith had led to him being accused under Pakistan’s “blasphemy law”. In Victoria, Australia, he had fallen foul of the new state law on religious “vilification”, in a case brought by the Islamic Council of Victoria. (Incidentally, Gary Bouma, a white Anglican priest, gave evidence for ICV against Scot because he did not like charismatic Christians.) White Christians who attended the 2005 meeting - which was not in Victoria - took Scot’s material to the Islamic Council of Victoria to get him into still more trouble. Imagine the distress this betrayal caused him.

For my part, I have no intention of disrupting any campaign to protect Christians in the Muslim world, or anywhere else. That is not my objection to Sookhdeo’s writings and never has been. My objection is that he defames Muslims in his writings, which have appeared not in obscure Evangelical publications but in mainstream political magazines such as the Spectator, and even major newspapers such as the Evening Standard in London. He makes alarmist and false claims about the designs Muslims supposedly have on the west, such as that we “sacralise” public spaces by means of marches and processions, when in fact there is no Islamic ritual which involves such activity. Any opportunity he finds to raise fear about Muslims or make Islam out to be a threat, he does so. I fail to see how this helps protect Christians anywhere else. If anything, for someone involved in such work to be stirring up Christians against Muslims in the west puts that work in jeopardy.

Why did I condemn his book without reading it? Normally, doing such a thing makes you look very ignorant (as was the case most recently with those who condemned the title of the film Slumdog Millionaire, when if they had seen the film, they would have known that the term “slumdog” was only used by baddies, namely a gangster and a corrupt cop), but I had actually read an awful lot of Sookhdeo’s other writings on Islam, which were given great prominence in the Standard, Telegraph and Spectator. My own observations bear out the claim in Ben White’s review that Sookhdeo’s book contains very basic, stupid historical inaccuracies.

While we are on the subject of Sookhdeo, can anyone tell me where he got his name from? It is not his real surname; I did a Google search for some common Muslim and Christian names followed by Sookhdeo and Sukhdev, from which it seems to be derived, and found no examples of people with such names. The name Sookhdeo looks like a corruption of Sukhdev, a common Hindu name (the words deo and dev both mean god, in the former case with or without a capital G); why would a man who converts from Islam to Christianity adopt a Hindu surname? Something does not seem quite right here.

More scary is Boris Johnson, who was being discussed on Vanessa Feltz’s show this morning. Feltz told us that apparently women love him for some reason which I can’t quite remember. One male caller said that if women were really going to vote for him on that basis, then they should have locked Miss Pankhurst (the suffragette) up and thrown the key away, and that underneath his blond hair and his charisma was an old Etonian, right-wing Tory. This is the closest anybody said to why this man is a dangerous prospect for mayor of London.

While I know some Muslims will disagree with me about this, I don’t mind whether the mayor of London is pro-Israel or supported the Iraq war. The mayoralty isn’t about that, it’s about things like transport (with Ken Livingstone having been mayor for as long as the position has existed, it’s hard to think of what else it’s about). It’s important, however, that the mayor is not a bigot, which on the strength of his coverage of Muslim affairs while editor of the Spectator, Boris Johnson is. In that position, Johnson reacted to the July 2005 London bombings and the Paris slum riots of that year with horrendously unbalanced coverage, commissioning articles from the likes of Patrick Sookhdeo, full of sweeping generalisations, plain falsehoods and outright absurdities. The tone was that Islam itself, not an extremist movement, or the western policies off which it thrives, was to blame.

I took a look in the Spectator today, and my first impression was that Boris’s ghost lives on at the Spectator even though the editorship was in the hands of Matthew D’Ancona. However, this time round, the Sookhdeos, Steins and even Johnsons are gone, replaced with Alex Lewis of Oxford Student, Saira Khan (of The Apprentice fame) and Stephen Schwartz and Irfan al-Alawi. On this occasion, Schwartz manages to get through an article without attacking Shaikh Hamza Yusuf. Their article is mostly about the links between medicine and Islam, the fact that several prominent radical Islamists have been physicians and that their organisations have built clinics and other community facilities, and that moderate, Sufi groups like the Indonesian Nahdatul-Ulama have also built hospitals and clinics. Their assertion that “the West has got radical Islam wrong: it is less a product of misery and the sense of extreme oppression than of the thwarted aspirations of the Muslim middle classes” seems contentious, since these particular physicians are not the thwarted ones but had every opportunity. If they were less literate and wealthy, like the residents of Imbaba in Cairo, they might have concerned themselves with local acts of rebellion aimed at getting rid of the likes of Mubarak.

The Alex Lewis article describes how he sought for proof of Anthony Glees’s claims that “prior to the 7 July bombings up to 48 universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE, had been infiltrated by the now-banned extremist group al-Muhajiroun”. He was not convinced, and had never seen any evidence of extremist activity and nobody he spoke to, including Muslim students, had either. So, he decided to speak to Omar Bakri, over the phone at his house in Tripoli, Lebanon, and guess what? Omar Bakri said that everything Glees said was true, and that he had used innocuous names like “peaceful society” and “shisha society”:

Bakri claimed to have been visiting Oxford since the 1980s, and to have spoken there during the Bosnian crisis and the first Gulf War. It fitted — in 1996 he’d told the Guardian that al-Muhajiroun planned to recruit from Oxbridge using friendly-sounding front organisations. ‘They will not be able to ban peace and human societies,’ he said, ‘because if they do, it will only backfire!’

Not entirely convinced, we contacted Anjem Choudary, Bakri’s second in command in al-Muhajiroun, and Abu Izzadeen, who has called for the Pope’s assassination and described the 7 July attacks as ‘completely praiseworthy’. (Izzadeen was arrested just days later under the Terrorism Act after an extensive surveillance operation.) Both men confirmed that they had visited Oxford with Omar Bakri as part of a nationwide recruitment campaign — which Bakri claimed secured up to seven converts a day. ‘Sheikh Omar Bakri had many platforms around the country, and I definitely remember watching him speak in a debate in Oxford,’ said Choudary.

Bakri had claimed al-Muhajiroun had the support of up to 30 Oxford students and that they regularly distributed leaflets from a street stall under the name of the ‘Dawah Society’. At our request, Choudary sent the leaflets to us from an email account belonging to Ahlus Sunnah wal-Jamaa’ah, a successor organisation to al-Muhajiroun. One, entitled ‘The Rotten Fruits of Democracy’, described paedophilia and adultery as the products of liberalism: ‘Democracy and all that emanates from it is retarded and perverse. Truly the Kuffaar are upon a falsehood and what they believe in and live according to is what will make them residents of the hellfire. Do you really want to live in a society where people live like animals?’

There are a few problems with this story. First of all, Omar Bakri and his gang are notorious braggarts and loudmouths, and appear to relish being media sensations. It is not certain that their boasts can be trusted.

Second, if these people were active on your campus, you certainly could not say you’d “not had a whiff of al-Muhajiroun”, as the author of that article was told by Muslim students. Any function they could arrange would have the stamp of al-Muhajiroun over it. Unless they had maintained enormous secrecy, people would definitely have noticed. Besides which, since he had already told the press that his group would arrange under innocuous names, some of which don’t look like real student society names (Human Society, Intellectual Society), it should be pretty easy to check records to see if functions had been arranged under those names.

Third, there is the obvious difference between members of al-Muhajiroun and terrorists. Even if there are people on campus shouting about the kuffar and paedophilia and the idea of a global Caliphate, it does not prove Glees’s claim that terrorists are recruiting on campus.

However, the article I found most obnoxious was that by Saira Khan. This is not the first time I’ve seen this woman presented as a media example of a moderate Muslim: Jeremy Vine put her up against Anjum Choudhary last September on his lightweight lunchtime current affairs programme on Radio 2, and the inevitable result was a personal slanging match. In this article she tells us about her two cousins who ditched their Pakistani culture and started wearing hijab and “Middle Eastern outfits” after coming across some Islamic organisation at university (which sounds like al-Muhajiroun, or its predecessor, branded as Hizb-ut-Tahreer). The women proclaimed that they were Muslim and not British, and told their mother that she was not a proper Muslim because she was still into Pakistani culture and did not dress as they did.

She alleges:

My point here is not to say that women who wear the hijab are extremists — far less that they will at some stage be involved in some terrorist activity — but to suggest that this is how, in many cases, extremism starts.

Al-Muhajiroun was not by any means the only way women got into wearing hijab. While it was certainly a noisy presence and did advocate hijab, the position that hijab is compulsory is the standard one, and Muslims and Muslim groups which had nothing to do with al-Muhajiroun or any other extremism advocated and defended wearing the hijab. Extremism starts when you hook up with extremists, not when you start wearing hijab. Richard Reid and the individuals allegedly behind last week’s incident did not get into extremism by wearing hijab, after all. They are all male.

Two paragraphs down, we get this staggering generalisation:

Of course, most British Muslims won’t become violent extremists, but most will endanger society — albeit unwittingly — by supporting and condoning the actions of extremists. Very few will admit this in public, but many will say behind closed doors that they are sympathetic to the bombers’ cause and that they can understand why they are doing it. These things are said in front of young children and justified by various conspiracy theories which nearly always involve Jews, America and the CIA.

This is an appalling piece of slander, or what we call in Islam nameema, which refers to gossip, betraying secrets and telling people what someone else says behind their back in order to foster enmity for that person. She is telling an audience of hostile non-Muslims that, behind their backs, most Muslims actually “support and condone the actions of extremists”, or their cause, which is simply not true, in my experience. I know there are those who support suicide bombings, but those who support international terrorism are considerably fewer than those who support such actions in the particular circumstances of the Palestinian situation, which is certainly not everyone. I haven’t done a census, so I can’t say what percentage it is, but then I presume Saira Khan has not done one either.

She goes on to promote Hassan Butt, even suggesting that the government engage with him and those like him, rather than people who have practised Islam without falling into extremism or terrorism, and even worked to keep mainstream Islam alive despite sectarian attack, for the last two decades while Butt and those like him were making trouble. The fact that Butt has simply started telling politicians what they want to hear, and that he echoes the arguments of anti-Muslim bigots regarding “those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers” without mentioning the context, which is not circumstances in which those non-Muslims are not harming Muslims, means nothing to Saira Khan.

At the end, she dictates to us that “British Muslims have to realise that there is no ‘but’ after a sentence like, ‘I wholeheartedly disagree with the terrorist actions and the killings of innocent civilians’”. In terms of public pronouncements by mainstream Muslim representatives, I can’t remember hearing one in which a “but” appeared at the end, this being mainly the preserve of the likes of Omar Bakri. As for opinions we express in private conversations amongst ourselves, that is our right and our business (unless it is for planning a crime, of course). If the “but” is usually that it’s western government actions that draw terrorists in, it is not without basis.

It is rather galling to be dictated to by this woman, who has come out of pretty much nowhere, at least nowhere which has significance for Muslims, like a mosque, a centre of Islamic learning or a Muslim charity or organisation, or any position of secular authority for that matter. She is just a runner-up in a BBC competition - nothing more than that - and she is no advertisement for an Islamic lifestyle, yet she feels free to tell non-Muslims who the authentic Muslims are, and it’s (guess what) people like her. It is no skin off my nose, or our noses as Muslims, if Saira Khan or some other petty TV personality chooses not to wear hijab; that’s her business; however, her fame and background do not make her an authority on Islam or on the Muslims, and she should recognise this. Her article in the Spectator is a disgrace; it is nothing more than a tissue of smears and generalisations.

Technorati Tags: evening+standard, guide+dogs, niqab, patrick+sookhdeo, pc+bashar

It seems to have been open season on Muslims in the media the last few days, with three inflammatory anti-Muslim stories becoming front page news in either the morning or the evening papers in as many days. First it was the Pc Bashar story, which turns out to have been exaggerated anyway, but nonetheless made the front pages of the tabloids and was the lead story on Vanessa Feltz’s phone-in, with the host branding it “pick-and-mix policing”. Then there was the “Jack Straw on veiling” controversy, and then the petty incident of the Muslim cab driver who refused to carry a blind woman with a guide dog. I’m not suggesting that these stories were co-ordinated to appear in quick succession, but the fact that any petty story involving Muslims makes the front pages, and do so three days running, is starting to distress me somewhat.

The Pc Bashar has already been exposed as an exaggeration, but it still did not stop Vanessa Feltz discussing it on her three-hour phone-in, inviting a former Flying Squad officer to give his opinion, without knowing the full facts of the case. The Telegraph today made a big thing of Bashar’s marriage being conducted by Omar Bakri Muhammad; one has to actually read the article to find out that OBM did not know that Pc Bashar was a policeman; we all know that he was violently opposed to Muslims voting, much less joining the police and enforcing the “kafir law”. It has been made clear that, were there an incident at the Israeli embassy, Bashar would attend if necessary, but as others have pointed out, it would certainly have been controversial to have a Muslim with Lebanese and Syrian connections standing with a gun outside the Israeli embassy.

Jack Straw’s statement that he found it uncomfortable talking to a Muslim woman with her face covered was made in a local newspaper, and would quite possibly have stayed local, but as ever the London tabloids love an excuse to bash so-called radical Muslims, or at least those who look a bit radical or strident. When it became a national “debate”, he upped the ante by saying he’d prefer that women stop wearing the niqab altogether. As regards women who insist on wearing the niqab when actually dealing with men, such as when doing business or, perhaps, when consulting their MP, Islamic scholars - I mean real ones, such as Imam Ahmad Quduri (source: Reliance of the Traveller, section m2.8) - have given the opinion that it is permitted for men to look at women “because of the necessity of her need to deal with men in giving and taking and the like”. He said he only requested that women remove their veils, rather than demanding, although as Rajnaara Akhtar pointed out, these women were in need of his assistance and therefore were unlikely to feel themselves in a position to refuse.

Mike Marqusee, also at Comment is Free, noted that there are many people who make others feel uncomfortable with their appearance: women with bare midriffs and a ring in their navel (personally, I find women who show their cleavage make me more uncomfortable, particularly if they insist on calling me “darling” when I hardly know them), Chassidic Jews with shaved skulls and side-locks, large white men with Union Jack tattoos, none of whom are being asked to change the way they dress. Personally, I find no discomfort in talking to Muslim ladies in niqab whatsoever. The only time I’ve ever found it frustrating was when I was talking to a sister about marriage and she refused to unveil for the whole session (presumably because she had already decided against marrying me).

The Evening Standard showed breathtaking ignorance in its choice of commentators: Jemima Khan (what an authority!), Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and the usual suspect, Patrick Sookhdeo. Sookhdevil, a media darling with a long record of hostility to Islam and of peddling distortions and outright untruths about Islam and Muslims, said that “in addressing the issue of the full veil, the nikkhon (sic), he has shown that pseudo-religious practice must not conflict with the rest of society”. Where on earth is a veil called a “nikkhon”? Certainly not in any Muslim country that I know of - it sounds like a make of camera. The veil is called a niqab, something Sookhdeo, or whoever quoted him, could easily have found out. He continues, “and there is a further discussion of how much men can get away with abusing women and then covering it up”, as if that is in any way relevant to this issue. If a woman wears the niqab of her own accord and has a happy marriage, who is abusing her?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a regular writer for the Standard and the Independent who is of Ismaili background, gave the opinion that “Muslim women constantly talk about how Western women dress so why shouldn’t society discuss how they dress?”. The answer is that Muslim women generally do not have access to the mass-circulation media; their opinions are expressed in conversation, on internet fora and blogs and, sometimes, in low-circulation magazines. Cricitism of western women’s dressing habits in the mainstream media is very often done by westerners, in fact. She alleges that the veil came out of the desert and was intended to protect people’s faces from sandstorms, an assertion which does not stand up to any scrutiny. In countries where women veil, men don’t, except perhaps by wrapping their turbans across their faces in the event of an actual sandstorm. In one desert region of west Africa, men cover their mouths all the time, and women don’t veil, sandstorm or no sandstorm. The fact is, the niqab is a religiously-motivated modesty garment. End of story.

There are a number of popular misconceptions about niqab. One is that it is connected with radical Islamic politics, which is partly true in that people adhering to such politics often have wives who cover their faces (or do so themselves, if they are female). However, women who veil can be found in just about every mainstream grouping of Muslims - I encountered at least three among Shaikh Nazim’s followers in London. A lot of those who wear it follow what one might call “Saudi export Salafism”, the strand of Wahhabism found in places like Brixton which is very much opposed to political agitation of all kinds; there are others who are entirely mainstream Muslims and wear the veil, sometimes against the wishes of their family, because they think it is the best thing for a Muslim woman, particularly a young woman, to do. The second is that there is a link with abuse of women, alluded to here by Sookhdeo. In fact, abuse of women such as honour killings and domestic tyranny goes on everywhere, not just in places where there are a lot of women who veil their faces and, indeed, not only where Muslims live. There is ample evidence that a lot of women do wear the veil on their own initiative and not under spousal or other family pressure. In fact, some women stop wearing it because of spousal objection.

And it has to be remembered that niqab has never been associated with terrorism in this country; in fact, I can’t think of anywhere where it has been. There are places where it has been used as a disguise by violent criminals, but this country is not one of those places. While a few women have been charged with such offences as concealing information about terrorist attacks they are accused of knowing of in advance, not all of these women have covered their faces anyway. While a lot of people dislike the custom, the fact remains that veiled women are not associated with trouble, which is why they were not included in the anti-hoodie rules introduced at Bluewater a few months ago. Hoodies cause trouble; veiled women don’t. They mind their own business, and in this country we are awfully good at bellyaching and busybodying about things other people do which don’t affect us.

(By the way, a woman wearing a veil was attacked in Liverpool today according to this report; her veil was forcibly removed by a man who shouted racist abuse.)

The last of these stories - so far - was that about the Muslim cab driver fined £1,400 for refusing to carry a blind woman’s guide dog in his minicab. I happen not to be of the school of thought which would make an issue of the dog’s presence (the Shafi’i school, which is mostly found in south-east Asia, east Africa and parts of the Levant and Yemen), but if the cabbie accused in this case is of that school, I can perfectly understand his reasons. There are other reasons why someone might object to being in a confined space with a dog, such as an allergy to them; if such a person had turned up to pick up this lady and had refused, she still would have been just as wet and cold as she was in this case. I would suggest that, in such cases, it is made clear to the cab company which sends out the vehicle (and, by the way, you cannot hail a minicab; by law, they must be arranged, and the drivers cannot solicit hirings, which is intended to cut out cowboy cab drivers who, among other things, pick up women and rape them) that a guide dog - or any dog - is to be carried so that, if possible, a driver is sent out who does not mind. I appreciate that guide dogs are invariably better behaved than pet dogs, but no Muslim who is of a Shafi’i background would, for example, want a wet dog in the back of a normal car.

In this particular case, leaving a woman, especially a blind woman, stranded at night would have exposed her to great danger, and I believe the man should have carried her (perhaps he should take a plastic shield of some sort with him so that the dog does not come into contact with his car’s interior if he is concerned about the impurity issue). However, I don’t think Muslims have such a control over the minicab industry that an arrangement whereby a cab driver can opt out in advance, for whatever reason, of carrying dogs would make it much more difficult for the blind to get a cab.

He starts off on the subject of Muslim schools, in the context of a police raid on an Islamic school in east Sussex over the weekend:

Once there were tens. Then there were hundreds. Now Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch, speaks of thousands of militant British Muslims, indoctrinated and radicalised in British mosques and madrassas like the Jameah Islameah school in Sussex raided at the weekend. This is not, primarily, because of the influence of a handful of a few “preachers of hate”. Islamic extremism has spread in Britain thanks to a particular brand of multiculturalism encouraged by this Government. And until ministers tackle it - especially the influence of Muslim faith schools - all their new efforts to build cohesion will come to very little.

It surely did not escape Sookhdeo’s attention that the activities that are under suspicion are those of guests, not of anyone actually involved in the school. It’s known that, though they did receive a visit from Abu Hamza some years ago, they sent him packing because they disliked his behaviour. To suggest that Islamic schools are more guilty of radicalising youth than the likes of Abu Hamza or Abdullah Faisal is simply preposterous. The school itself is run by the former imam of Balham mosque in south London, a mosque which has never been linked to “radicals”, much less terrorists. I have personally been inside one of the well-known Islamic schools, and the imam and the headmaster were both known for their Sufi tendencies (this was in early 2000; the headmaster has since moved on). This is also true of friends of mine whose children went to Islamic schools, including the one at Balham mosque.

The context goes far beyond Britain. Contemporary Islam has burst out of its colonial restraints. Once colonialism removed power, jihad and territorial control from Islam, it was left a benign force focusing on prayer and good deeds. But contemporary Islam has reverted back to early Islam, with all its theological rage against the non-Muslim world. Issues like Iraq and Afghanistan have become valves for expressing this anger and hatred against Britain and the West.

The activities of terrorists today bears no resemblance whatsoever to the early Muslims, except perhaps to the Khawarij who killed Muslims (though, at that time, not non-Muslims) for disagreeing with them. They killed innocents, including pregnant women and children, for not accepting their outlandish claims, and were rejected and fought by the mainstream Muslim community. At no time did the early Muslims simply enter places where there were non-Muslim civilians, and no fighters, and kill civilians for its own sake. While there is much anger against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, this has mostly manifested itself in peaceful political actions and in the written word. I don’t believe there will be thousands of British Muslims going to carry out acts of terrorism in either country, though there are, perhaps, a pool of people that size who might turn up in such a situation.

Increasingly, it is the values and culture of Islam which define the identity of British Muslims. A senior British Muslim leader has defined Muslim identity as creed, sharia and umma.

He gives no reference for this. He does not tell us who the “senior British Muslim leader”. A Google search for the phrase he uses returned not a single result (see these images for proof: [1], [2]). I’ve never heard of anyone defining Muslim identity this way, although it’s only a certain minority who loudly reject any notion of identifying with the country they live in. Even so, it hardly makes us the only religious minority who take an active interest in the situation of others of the same religion in other parts of the world, does it? I can think of at least two others (Jews, and the Hindus with links to the Hindu chauvinist factions back home; Narendra Modi certainly had an audience when he visited north London in 2003).

The Islamic creed is non-negotiable. Those who do not share this creed are despised as kafir (infidels). Hatred of non-Muslims is preached in many British mosques.

Again, he gives no evidence that Islam encourages us to despise non-Muslims or that most Muslims have this attitude. A lot of Muslims refer to “the kuffar”, usually meaning powerful enemies of Muslims or to non-Muslims they dislike, but to find out the extent to which Muslims despise non-Muslims or habitually use the word kafir or kuffar, I’d have to do a pretty big survey (not a few thousand people by phone either). I presume Sookhdeo hasn’t done the survey himself.

Meanwhile Islamic law, sharia, is deemed by the majority of Muslims to be unalterable. Its medieval formulations cannot be updated. Yet it is this discriminatory law which many British Muslims wish to see enforced.

No references or evidence here, either.

Finally the umma, the worldwide community of Muslims, is the primary focus of loyalty. It represents the political as well as the religious. Muslims have a duty to defend each other. This defensive jihad is what leads Muslims to go and fight in places such as Iraq.

Except that they are not fighting a “defensive jihad”, but to impose a particular order on Iraqis which is not one they would have chosen themselves. Most Iraqis, including most Sunnis, contrary to popular belief, are not Wahhabis or extremists and have not taken up arms to put one of their number in power any more than the Egyptians or Syrians have, which is why groups like the Muslim Brotherhood have turned into social welfare organisations rather than political movements. They may give the rhetoric of jihad, but what they are seeking is rulership, in order to impose a particular, unfamiliar and oppressive, “Islamic” order in a country where they see a power vacuum. We don’t see Muslims everywhere being urged to go and fight, or even to support those who do.

It might seem paradoxical that the UK, which has granted Muslims greater freedoms than any other Western country, should be the greatest Western incubator of Islamist violence. The explanation lies not only in the radicalisation of Islam but also in the Government’s policy on multiculturalism. There is a positive aspect to a multiculturalism where people share and enjoy each other’s cultures. But the UK’s well-meaning policy of validating every faith and ethnic community culturally, in a depoliticised way, is naïve when it comes to Islam. For Islam does not separate the sacred from the secular: it seeks earthly power over earthly territory. The result is that already the UK has reached the stage of parallel societies, where purely Muslim areas function in isolation.

There are hardly any “purely Muslim areas”, and those that exist are there mainly for economic and social reasons rather than religious ones: they are the areas around the mosque and where halaal food can be obtained. In some places, white racism played a large part in establishing Muslim “ghettoes” in places where the racists weren’t. Sookhdeo has previously elaborated on Muslims’ territorial tendencies in the Spectator, alleging that by means such as marches, we “mark out” territory as our own. (Marching, in fact, is generally the preserve of Bareilawis who do it on the occasion of the birthday of the Prophet, sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam, which most other groupings do not commemorate in that fashion, if at all.) A fact Sookhdeo seems not to have noticed is that nowhere have Muslims actually attempted to rename our “enclaves” to Islamic-sounding or Asian-sounding ones.

A rather more recent reason why Muslims in many places have no interest in integrating is because of the behaviour and attitudes of many of their white neighbours, as Faisal Bodi noted in the Guardian in July this year (see the original article, and my comments). A lot of middle-class whites would not want to live on these estates either, nor, I suspect, would Sookhdeo. He’d probably get called a terrorist and beaten up.

Worse, this is about to be made semi-official. In West Ham a gigantic mosque is planned by the radical Tablighi Jamaat group. The London Thames Gateway Development Corporation says that the new mosque will make West Ham a “cultural and religious destination”. This will be nothing less than an Islamic quarter of our capital city. But has anyone asked the people of West Ham? The non-Muslims? The moderate Muslims such as Barelwis and Sufis? The Muslim women? And shouldn’t the Government be looking into why a movement claimed as inspiration by terrorist suspects should be allowed to control a whole community?

In one sense I agree that the mosque in question shouldn’t be built. The Olympics are highly likely to cause the gentrification of the area, a steep rise in house prices and rents, and the departure of a huge percentage of the less well-off including much of the area’s ethnic population. It is more likely to become a costly white elephant than the centrepiece of any “Islamic quarter”. If such a quarter emerges at all, it will be inhabited by those displaced as the money floods in.

There is, of course, no suggestion that those in charge of this mosque, if it gets built, will be in control over the whole Muslim community in east London. The Tablighi Jama’at, of course, are Sufis, and their differences with the Bareilawis are mostly in matters of history and doctrine, not in visible practical issues. If there is animosity, it is mostly on the side of the Bareilawis who accuse many of the originators of the Deobandi/Tablighi school of insulting the Prophet, sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam. It is his presumption that Muslim women will object to the area becoming a Muslim quarter, but I should not think they will unless the government designates the area a Muslim enclave under dictatorial TJ control, which as I understand it they have no intention of doing.

One must feel grateful for the police’s interception of terrorist plots. Yet we must tackle the root causes, rather than dealing with this threat simply by vigilance and appeasement. Giving in to the demands of Muslim extremists will not turn them into liberals loyal to the UK. They will simply want further concessions. This is now the Government’s dilemma. With the launch of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion last month, it recognised that it must address the development of separate societies. Privately, ministers are deeply worried. Yet at the same time the Government seems fixated on empowering an ultra-conservative Muslim leadership embodied by the Muslim Council of Britain and Muslim Association of Britain. It says sharia will never be permitted in Britain, yet it has allowed sharia-compliant mortgages, and admits that many British cities have sharia councils.

There is no inconsistency. What is refused is the establishment of Shari’a marital law, as exists in many countries in the Muslim world where an established native Muslim community exists (India, Israel/Palestine). This is what was proposed in Ontario, utilising an existing religious arbitration provision which allowed for marital affairs to be resolved under Jewish or Christian religious law. Much of the controversy over it came from prominent “liberal Muslims”, from non-Muslim religious bigots and from the exiled Iranian Worker-Communist mafia. What exist in this country are provisions for Islamically-valid commercial dealings and private councils for settling disputes between Muslims on an Islamic basis. As I’m sure Sookhdeo is aware, Muslims are required to obey their religious rules (the “path”, which is what Shari’ah means) even when it is impossible to establish the Shari’ah as the law of the land. The rulings these councils give are not legally binding in British law, and everyone involved knows that.

He then moves back to the subject of Islamic schools:

Has the time come to say no to Islamic schools, while allowing the others to exist, even though this may seem unjust? Or should we consider a new kind of school where all children can study core subjects together in the same environment, with religious teachers - be they mullahs, rabbis or priests -instructing the children in their own faiths? I believe Islam needs different treatment from other faiths because Islam is different from other faiths. It is the only one which teaches its followers to gain political power and then impose a law which governs every aspect of life, discriminating against women and non-believers alike. And this is ultimately why a naïve multiculturalism leads not to a mosaic of cultures living in harmony, but to one threatened by Islamic extremism.

Every known religious law discriminates against women, most to a far greater extent than Islam itself does. Islam, for example, does not make someone who touches a woman or the bed she sleeps on during her period impure and subject to a purificatory ritual, as the Old Testament does. It looks more severe than them because of its prescription of veiling, but it’s known that veiling does not stop a woman making a success of herself in the world where people do not deliberately obstruct this, as they do in France and Turkey. Furthermore, he (again!) gives no evidence that Islamic schools are actually teaching children to do what he claims; they teach Islamic doctrine, practice, personal laws and values, and sometimes a classical text of Islamic law such as the Hidaya, the Risala of Ibn Abi Zaid or the Reliance of the Traveller. None of these books were actually aimed at Muslim minorities with claims to act as a treacherous fifth column.

… But unless all of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, join forces against the kind of multiculturalism which has nurtured extremism, we may eventually find that whole swathes of London and other cities have become “cultural and religious destinations” dominated by Islamic extremists - men who would remove the very freedoms so many moderate British Muslims now appreciate.

In my experience, what has “nurtured extremism” is the malign neglect during the 1990s which involved turning a blind eye to rabble-rousers who were operating on university campuses and shouting on street corners and in community centres, libraries and other public property. These people were well-known and could have been stopped well before 9/11 if there was the political will. They were actually in complete opposition to the traditional ways of the Muslim community (sometimes rightly, usually very wrongly) and were turning young Muslims against their own families and causing disruption, some of it violent, in mosques. The government, of course, gave these people much ammunition with the sanctions regime in Iraq, the failure to arrest the massacres and rapes in Bosnia until the Serbs had got what they wanted, and finally the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and their respective aftermaths. But it was not ordinary Muslims and their institutions that were stoking extremism during this period: it was the generally tolerated fringe.

Yet, now that the lunatic fringe are out of the way and their leaders in jail or out of the country, it is the ordinary Muslims people like Sookhdeo want to punish, despite the fact that these schools are not known to be linked to extremism and never have been. The problem for Muslim educators is that for decades, Muslims, unlike Christians, have had to rely on private funding for Islamic education, which given that we are mostly a working-class community, has meant that the fringe found it easier to reach Muslim youth than the traditional scholars did. Most Muslims do not want their children to be terrorists any more than they want them to be common thugs and layabouts mixing American gangsta culture with a bit of Punjabi terminology and bhangra beats. If our children are to be saved from these prospects, the community needs proper Muslim schools.

The problem is that Sookhdeo clearly referred to the subtitle of the translation, which has very little commentary (unlike Khan & Hilali), which does give the impression that it was the content of the Qur’an which Sookhdeo was suggesting was the issue, not commentary alongside the text. So people were justified in fearing that the Qur’an itself was under attack and not one person’s writings.

Begin: An article by Alasdair Palmer in last week’s Sunday Telegraph (19 Feb 2006) entitled “The day is coming when British Muslims form a state within a state” contains the following paragraph:

“… For example, there is a book, The Noble Koran: a New Rendering of its Meaning in English, which is openly available in Muslim bookshops. It calls for the killing of Jews and Christians, and it sets out a strategy for killing the infidels and for warfare against them. The Government has done nothing whatever to interfere with the sale of that book. Why not? Government ministers have promised to punish religious hatred, to criminalise the glorification of terrorism, yet they do nothing about this book, which blatantly does both.”

You will probably know that the publication referred to is the Bewley translation of the Qur’an which is rapidly being recognised as one of the most accurate and readable translations. Not only does Palmer’s interviewee advocate banning the sale of the Qur’an but describes its contents in such a way as to suggest it is nothing more than a handbook on terrorism. He falsely claims that it “calls for the killing of Jews and Christians”.

The Qur’an does not call for Jews and Christians to be killed. This claim is a malicious lie. Furthermore the interviewee urges that the Qur’an itself be made illegal. It is outrageous that the Sunday Telegraph should promote such a viewpoint, particularly in the context of recent events. We cannot permit Allah’s Book to be traduced in this way in the National Press and allow the Sunday Telegraph to promote such an abhorrent view of the Qur’an.

It is important to note that this article represents a new and more sinister development. Previously, we have had attacks on the person of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, the bearer of the revelation. This attack is on the revelation itself, and thus indicates a new and more dangerous front opened in the war on Islam.

Certainly the minimum we can do is send an e-mail to the editor of the Sunday Telegraph expressing our outrage at this unprecedented open attack on the Qur’anic text.

The editor’s e-mail address is:

Sarah Sands: sarah.sands@telegraph.co.uk