Stephen Schwartz wrote this article for Comment is Free (run by the Guardian) on the subject of the “burial” given to Osama bin Laden’s body after his killing last week; it was reported that it was thrown into the sea after some kind of burial ritual was performed. It has been widely commented that burial at sea is not appropriate for a Muslim (presumably this only applies to one who has died on land, as it is not very healthy or practical for ships to be transporting dead bodies for long voyages, and certainly wasn’t before very recently and in hot climates). Schwartz claims that bin Laden was not entitled to an Islamic burial because his beliefs put him outside Islam.

Schwartz is right that the argument that his grave would have become a shrine is mistaken, as Muslims of his stripe are opposed to shrines and are more likely to destroy them than build them. Indeed, there have been a number of incidents in Pakistan where the local “Taliban” — vigilantes or militants of an extreme Deobandi or “salafi” tendency — have destroyed shrines of popular Sufi shaikhs. However, he then says he believes Bin Laden had apostasised from Islam:

I believe Bin Laden had apostasised from Islam by his denial of the sinful nature of terrorism. He planned and took responsibility for atrocious acts, which were those of an enemy of Islam, by the tongue, the pen, money, and the sword. These deeds were public and he boasted of them. Rejecting the judgment of the sin of killing innocent people is a repudiation of Islam.

Schwartz also suggests that “journalists should ask moderate Muslim scholars whether they consider Bin Laden to have died in a state of Islamic belief”, which raises the question of whom he considers to be moderate. Certainly, the mainstream of Islamic scholarship has always shied away from pronouncing people to be unbelievers unless they deny something necessarily known of Islam or show obvious contempt for the religion. For example, it is necessarily known (this is generally defined as “even a nine-year-old madrassah student would know that”) that drinking alcohol for its own sake is forbidden, but some scholars allow its use for such purposes as clearing one’s throat if it is the only thing to hand; they do not, though, allow it for alleviating extreme thirst, as it is a diuretic. However, if someone erred on the wrong side here, without saying that drinking alcohol in general was allowed, they would not be regarded as a disbeliever.

It is also necessarily known that killing is impermissible other than in self-defence, or in war, or in punishing a crime, or certain other limited circumstances. Deliberately killing innocent people, even in war, is forbidden as well, but the Kharijites of old made numerous excuses for killing those they regarded as enemies simply because of sometimes very minor disagreements that were not over matters of doctrine. The only Kharijites that were declared not to be Muslims, however, was one group that regarded Sura Yusuf, a chapter in the Qur’an, not to be part of the Qur’an. As this passage was universally regarded as being part of the Qur’an, they were excluded from being Muslims. Terrorists justify their actions by making excuses for why certain people are not “innocent” (such as that they pay taxes to the enemy state, voted for its leaders or are in their army, even if not on active service — a common justification for terrorist acts in Israel) which are rejected by many or all scholars, but without declaring them to be out of the fold of Islam because they do not make the killing of innocents in general lawful.

The upshot is that we do not pronounce takfeer, that is, that someone is not Muslim, unless they declare themselves not to be Muslims, or show obvious contempt for the religion (such as by desecrating a copy of the Qur’an) or adopt a belief which is against a well-known unanimous consensus. This means that, as in most religions, the majority of criminals are entitled to a proper burial in Islam (although it is not always up to to the local imam or the whole community) as long as they did not regard the crimes they committed as being in line with Islam. Schwartz does not list any “moderate scholar” who has actually declared Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qa’ida to be outside of Islam; the majority, I believe, regard him as being a criminal who justifies his acts with spurious arguments, much as was the case with the Kharijites of old, but still a Muslim. This, of course, means that Muslims should know that they do not have to be loyal to anyone who purports to act in the name of Islam or in defence of Islam, and that we may still condemn a person’s or group’s actions and disassociate from them even if we cannot say they are outside Islam altogether.

On the night of the mi’raj the Prophet(saw) was offered wine or milk and he chose milk
This is the knowledge bequeathed to our ummah through his heirs.

I have met sufis,salafis,ikhwanis,tableeghis and they mainly all adore shaykh Hamza. Many non muslims find him fascinating and adorable.

Schwartz and Irfan have lactose intolerance
And the diarrhoea is aplenty

On finding that comment, I posted a question to the DeenPort forum, knowing that that site has also been an object of Schwartz’s slander in the past, asking for who might like to testify in case he did sue me, knowing that there would be plenty of people willing to testify to the good character of some of those he had slandered. Schwartz, after unleashing another barrage of slander against me and against two prominent (non-scholar) defenders of traditional Islam, told me:

I said you deserve to be called to account, and you cried like a little girl. That’s satisfaction enough for me.

And it would have to be, because in the face of so much evidence that some of those he had attacked as extremists in fact were not, and the multitude of people who could testify to their good character, he would have been humiliated in court, much like David Irving.

When I first came across Schwartz’s writings, it was still the 1990s and he was associated with Hisham al-Kabbani’s wing of Shaikh Nazim’s tariqa. After 9/11, I found an article by him on the front page of the Spectator, then and perhaps now the leading conservative political magazine in the UK (then, it had no real competition), blaming the 9/11 attacks on Wahhabism, and a similar article from him ([1], [2], [3]) appeared in the Telegraphh around the same time, i.e. September 2001. Even then, his writings included ridiculous hyperbole, such as in this piece on FrontPage Magazine in which he claims that “Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabi death cult represent naked Islamofascism”. The term “death cult” is meaningless, sounding like it was extracted from a tabloid headline about the Heaven’s Gate incident, and does not describe Wahhabism, particularly Wahhabism as a whole. Wahhabism as it exists now diverges from mainstream Islam on certain matters of aqida, such as rejecting figurative interpretations of certain Qur’anic passages, rejecting the idea of following one of the four schools of thought in Islamic law, rejecting seeking intercession through the righteous or even Prophets, and rejecting Sufism. None of that makes it a “death cult”, particularly as their “mainstream” scholars reject suicide bombing and everything else connected with al-Qa’ida; none of it is a threat to non-Muslims; rather it is a doctrinal disagreement among Muslims and (given the behaviour of some of them) a matter of vexation to other Muslims.

Nor do they represent “naked Islamofascism”. Fascism is a European ideology, and common features of fascist states include personality cults (the Fuhrer, the Duce, and so on), and a totalitarian police state with a pervasive display of propaganda and a heavy government hand in the economy. In the Muslim world, this is best represented in some Arab nationalist socialist regimes; the only regime that could really be called Islamofascism is that of post-revolutionary Iran. Most of it offends against the Wahhabi sensibility; I am sure you would not see building-sized portraits of Osama bin Laden in places in Pakistan or Afghanistan sympathetic to him. Even if he allowed his picture to be taken, the government might not allow the pictures to be displayed.

Some of us were willing to excuse his association with FrontPage Magazine, a notoriously Islamophobic site with a heavy Jewish extremist neo-conservative presence, while he was attacking the Wahhabis. His attacks on Shaikh Hamza Yusuf are of another order entirely. We all thought he was a traditionalist Muslim who hated what is widely considered to be a force for the destruction of traditional Islam, and that Hisham al-Kabbani’s group were among its defenders, even if we disapproved of his speech to the US State Department. Their website, sunnah.org, still contains extracts from Shaikh Hamza’s speeches and writings, including an entire interview with him. The gist of his accusations is that, before 9/11, Shaikh Hamza had been a fiery anti-American orator, and afterwards, he transformed himself into a Sufi and claimed to have been an advisor to George W Bush.

A common accusation against Shaikh Hamza is that, at an ICNA conference at the University of Southern California, he gave “a classic oration” on the subject of “Why Jihad is the Only Way”. The accusation appeared in the Weekly Standard in Sept 2004: [1], [2]), but it has been repeated on a number of other websites (a search on Google reveals over 100 hits, but most of them are quotes of one or two of Schwartz’s articles). The trouble is that Schwartz has never furnished us with an actual quote from the speech, and no trace of it is available anywhere. The speech was given in 1991, at the same time that the Bosnian war was ongoing. Any time before about 1998, a speech to that effect could have been given in the west without eyebrows being raised. In fact, Schwartz had a poem published in The Muslim Magazine entitled The Ballad of Imam Shamil, intended to be sung to the tune of Pretty Boy Floyd by Woody Guthrie, praising the Muslim jihadist who fought the Russians, at a time when Chechens were doing the same, with some success (and before the foreign extremists had ruined it).

Schwartz also accuses Hamza of making this claim:

I am a citizen of this country not by choice but by birth. I reside in this country not by choice but by conviction in attempting to spread the message of Islam in this country. I became Muslim in part because I did not believe in the false gods of this society whether we call them Jesus or democracy or the Bill of Rights or any other element of this society that is held sacrosanct by the ill-informed peoples that make up this charade of a society. . . . [T]here should be no voting or debate . . . [W]e have no room for ayes or nays.

The reader will notice the short quotes from the middle of sentences interspersed with dots, a classic sign of words being taken out of context. Schwartz repeats the quote in this article (originally on Family Security Matters, a political website of much the same stripe as FrontPage), opining after it that “the final lines in this quotation reflect the standard radical Islamist contempt for all forms of democratic governance”. However, material I read in 2000, in a book containing both his and Shaikh Abdullah bin Bayyah’s writing, emphasises the importance of obeying the law and keeping agreements, particularly for immigrant Muslims. He stressed that they had an obligation to leave, and not stay indefinitely on tourist visas, which was common practice at that time.

In his article for the Spectator, he makes this accusation:

Hanson varies his message according to his audience: when he speaks before crowds where jihadists dominate, he proudly repudiates any questioning of radical Islam and shouts his hope that others will also ‘fail the test’ of moderate belief.

This refers unmistakeably to Shaikh Hamza’s announcement that Daniel Pipes had set a test of moderation and that he had failed it and hoped others would as well. Parts of it include uncontroversial demands to condemn named extremist groups, to which most American Muslims have no connection whatsoever (like the Algerian GIA), but others demand rejection of aspects of Islamic law which disagree with western norms. So, Schwartz’s claim is dishonest: Shaikh Hamza did not talk of failing any generic test of Muslim moderation, but one specific loaded test, posited in the Jerusalem Post in 2003, by a man with a record of hostility to Muslims.

Before and after 9/11, Shaikh Hamza has been foremost in promoting Islamic learning among Muslims in an attempt to keep traditional scholarship alive, against the pressures of modernism and Wahhabism. This is why he opened the Zaytuna Institute and why he ran the Deen Intensive courses, and it has been an inspiration for other such efforts, such as the SunniPath website and distance learning institution. Without people like Shaikh Hamza, Islamic learning on the four madhhabs would be restricted to Urdu-based teaching by Indian and Pakistani scholars, and the Deobandi-Bareilawi barrier might have been stronger among the youth than it is. That Shaikh Hamza promoted Sufi practices before 2001 is not in dispute; for example, he wrote the foreword to this collection of litanies (awraad) by Imams al-Haddad and al-Nawawi, published by Starlatch, and his association with scholars like Shaikh Nuh Keller, an active Sufi shaikh of the Shadhili-Darqawi tariqa whose defences of Sufism against both perennialism and Wahhabism are well known (and they were originally published in writing on the website run by Mas’ud Ahmed Khan, to whom we will come later), and the shaikhs of Hadramaut. One would have thought that someone campaigning against Wahhabis imposing on traditional Muslims in Europe (such as here) and someone campaigning to keep classical Islamic scholarship, spirituality and religious culture alive in America and in western Europe would be on the same side.

While most Muslims would disagree with some of the statements made by Shaikh Hamza in his interviews in the post-9/11 period, much of what he said was in keeping with his stances in the years previously. He also identified, very early on, the conspiracy theories about 9/11 that some Muslims were inclined to believe. While there had always been those who rejected him simply because of the type of scholarship and religious practice he advocated, some condemned him outright for what he said in his post-9/11 interviews, in one case resorting to racism.

Not content with attacking Shaikh Hamza, Schwartz has also made those who have defended him targets of his vitriol. In this article, originally published at Family Security Matters, he attacks the DeenPort website:

The UK features an Islamic website, www.deenport.com, promoting the alleged benevolence of Hamza Yusuf Hanson and other “born-again moderates.” But deenport.com also exists to slander and intimidate. Monday had not ended when Fareena Alam, a semiliterate Muslim scribbler and deenport commissar living in Britain, went on the attack. Alam preens her success in inducing Newsweek International to publish a feeble defense of the Islamist veil. Now she asked, “Can someone who has hosted Irfan Alawi… please tell us what he is like in person?” She continued, “Why is he aligning himself to Stephen Schwartz?… This is not a good sign.”

The next commentator on the site reproached Alam for her lack of “good adab,” writing, “I think your post is extremely provocative and is likely to invite people to say negative things about Irfan Alawi on a public forum which would be slanderous. Especially from people in the Tablighi movement.”

This appeared in an article called A Dab of Adab, which alleged that the Islamic concept of adab (good manners) was commonly used among Muslims in the UK to “suppress dissent” and “can get in the way of good-hearted Muslims speaking out”. DeenPort is an excellent website, and is one of the few mainstream Sunni forums where men have to give full names (women can use a kunya, but must give a recognisable name), ensuring that no troublemaker can come on with a name like “Jihadi786” and start telling everyone they have to “kill the kuffar”; Deobandi-Bareilawi bickering is banned (even mentioning the names is discouraged) and, most importantly, adherence to the four schools and approval of traditional practices, including Sufism, is a given. It is, in short, a safe space for traditional Muslims, and it is rare for debates to get out of hand on that site (a contrast to some other forums, notably the old ASFA forum which had to be shut down because there was too much acrimonious arguing).

Also up for attack is Aftab Malik, founder of Amal Press, which has also published a number of titles on classical scholarship, including The Broken Chain, by Malik himself, and one volume of al-Hidayah, a popular textbook of Hanafi fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). After he wrote this article defending Shaikh Hamza against a defamatory sideswipe in the Spectator, Schwartz alleged that he is part of Shaikh Hamza’s entourage, a strange idea given that they live in two different countries, and also that he published a book by Harun Yahya (Islam Denounces Terrorism), which brings the author’s usual anti-Darwinist line into the subject, but the title pretty much says it all. Amal Press jumped at the chance to publish a colourful book denouncing terrorism (and mentioning the Najdi, i.e. Wahhabi, backdrop) which Muslims would read and non-Muslims would notice, amid a lot of other books promoting moderate mainstream Islam (and Harun Yahya’s other books were published in English by other publishers), and all Schwartz can do is complain and insult. In his recent comment here, Schwartz calls Aftab “another munafiq” (hypocrite, which can be a generally dishonest person but also someone who falsely pretends to be a Muslim), apparently without minding the enormous consequences of such accusations, particularly when they are without any basis whatsoever.

Schwartz also insulted Mas’ud Khan, who has been publishing the writings of Shaikh Nuh Keller and Abdul-Hakim Murad since the mid-1990s, as well as a host of other materials defending mainstream aqida against attacks from Wahhabis and others, as a “loudmouth slob”. The articles on his website include material written by the shaikh whose picture appears on each page of his “Islamic Pluralism” site - Shaikh Muhamamad bin ‘Alawi al-Maliki - and about the situation of Muslims in the Balkans which should be of interest to Schwartz. Surely this is someone else Schwartz should consider an ally. Does he care about Wahhabism in the west anymore? Did he ever?

Schwartz is perhaps the most egregious of a trend we have seen much of in the last few years: of Muslims, or at least self-proclaimed Muslims (as their target audience often does not care for the difference between a Muslim and, say, an Isma’ili), standing up and announcing that they are “telling things how they are”, and ripping into the community, often in front of a non-Muslim audience, and accusing its leaders of being terrorist sympathisers, extremists etc., and accusing anyone who disagrees with them of lying, being deluded, “drinking the Kool-Aid” or something similarly disparaging. Ed Husain and his friends are one example in the UK, we have seen Abdur-Rahman Muhammad (recent example) in the USA, but Schwartz’s hatred for a whole spectrum of Muslims, from Wahhabis to the CAIR leadership to Shaikh Hamza and Mas’ud Khan, is unfathomable from a Muslim. Is it all a vehicle for generating controversy to raise his own profile? Does he have a personal vendetta? (In the years I’ve been Muslim, I’ve met very few people with bad things to say about Shaikh Hamza.) Schwartz alleges that adab functions as a gagging device; in the past, I have personally faced censure for suggesting that certain “shaikhs” are not all that they are made out to be (such as that they are not in fact authorised, or are not as strict in their adherence to Islamic law as a shaikh should be), although none of this happened on DeenPort. I do not disagree with Schwartz on Shaikh Hamza because I am a fan-boy or afraid of censure; I disagree because Shaikh Hamza is a great teacher of Islam and a credit to the Muslims, and Schwartz’s claims are outrageous and ridiculous.

When we see someone who first claims to be a Sufi, who writes a poem praising a Sufi jihad leader, who attacks Wahhabis in the media, who then turns on one of the sect’s most vocal and effective intellectual and scholarly opponents, and does much of this in papers and magazines notorious for their hostility to Muslims, including one which allows someone to call for the nuclear bombing of Makkah, one which allows a serial slanderer of Muslims to allege, falsely, that Muslims sacralise public spaces in England by holding processions, and one which allows someone to come out of nowhere to liken Muslims to dogs, Janjaweed and Nazis, one must ask questions. If anyone is behaving like a hypocrite, it is certainly not Aftab Malik or Mas’ud Khan.

Schwartz’s Words of Mass Distortion by Aftab Malik

There were no letters printed from Muslims objecting to Schwartz’s hatchet job on Shaikh Hamza Yusuf or any other Muslim shaikh. However, apparently in response to my letter, they sent a postcard to my house stating the following:

The Poetry Editor thanks you for your poem but regrets he is unable to publish it.

I don’t recall deliberately trying to make my letter rhyme or scan. It’s in paragraphs, and the words wrap when they reach the end of a line, rather than the lines ending after the requisite number of syllables. How did the Poetry Editor get his hands on it?

Schwartz seems highly ill-informed about the make-up of the Muslim community here. He alleges, for example, that “Islam in the UK is overwhelmingly influenced by imams and other religious officials born in Pakistan and trained in that country or in Saudi Arabia”. Many, many mosques have imams who were born in this country and trained at institutions in this country, notably Dewsbury and Bury. The origins of the community include parts of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, and the majority of imams were trained in Subcontinental institutions, either in that region or here in the UK. Of course, imams in the “Salafi” community took their training from Saudi, but relatively few of the Deobandi, let alone the Bareilawi, imams did so.

As one might expect, Schwartz was unimpressed with the recent Radical Middle Way roadshow, in which the government sponsored a tour by a group of moderately-inclined Muslim leaders including Tariq Ramadan, Habib Ali Jifri, Hamza Yusuf, Abdul-Hakim Murad, Abdullah bin Bayyah and others. Schwartz doesn’t miss the opportunity to get another dig in at Shaikh Hamza:

Apart from Ramadan, the risible roadshow has included a Kuwaiti jihadist, Tariq al-Suweidan, a Californian charlatan, Joe Hanson, alias Hamza Yusuf. Hanson varies his message according to his audience: when he speaks before crowds where jihadists dominate, he proudly repudiates any questioning of radical Islam and shouts his hope that others will also ‘fail the test’ of moderate belief.

(Update 22nd August: I’ve been informed that Tariq Suweidan was in fact never on the roadshow. The reader might take Schwartz’s assessment of Suweidan’s positions in the light of how he writes about other Muslims.)

The test in question, referred to in Shaikh Hamza’s speech to the ISNA conference shortly before the 2004 US Presidential election, was one dictated by Daniel Pipes, in which he posed a number of questions some of which prompted Muslims to renounce what is part of normal Islamic doctrine and practice. Shaikh Hamza loudly condemned what happened on Sept 11 in ways that saw him condemned by a number of Muslims who were sympathetic to “jihadist” strains of Wahhabism. However, other of Pipes’ demands invited us to flatly contradict aspects of Islamic law which merely differ with liberal western understandings. Of course, any normal Muslim would fail such a test!

Shaikh Hamza, far from merely claiming “to be the number one enemy of Wahhabism in the West”, has been at the forefront of refuting some of their most notorious innovations: the rejection of madhhabs, the denunciation of Sufi tariqa practices, the slandering of scholars past and present, the condemning as shirk (idolatry) perfectly valid practices, and so on.

On the subject of the Deobandi school, who I consider to be in the same vanguard, Schwartz says:

Pakistan has a level of uncontrolled Islamist bloodshed exceeded only by Iraq. Along with adherents of Wahabism (sic), the country is swarming with fantics of the fundamentalist Deobandi sect, which originated in India and part of which metastatised into the Taliban. The Masjid-e-Umer mosque in Walthamstow, a converted synagogue attended by at least eight of the alleged terror plot suspects, is a Deobandi institution. These homicidally inclined ideologues summon the madrassa boys to riot for the benefit of global television news. They do so at the command of political parties standing for exclusive sharia law, fundamentalist theology and aid to the Taliban and al-Qa’eda. Among these movements, some merely drench the mosques and streets of Pakistan with blood, like the infamous murder machine known as Sipah-e-Sahaba or Knights of the Prophet’s Companions. Others, bearing such names as Jamaat-i-Islami (Community of Islam) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous), maintain extensive international paramilitary networks.

The claim that the Deobandis are “homicidally inclined ideologues” is a huge, libellous over-generalisation. The Deobandis are a denomination whose membership includes a huge proportion - a minority, but a substantial minority - of Pakistan’s and northern India’s Muslim population. Their differences with, say, Bareilawis, are about history and relatively minor issues of doctrine rather than about practical matters. They are also not “Wahhabis” in any modern sense, having been in opposition to all the developments associated with the sect for decades. And in India, where Deobandis also have major influence (much of the Gujarati diaspora are Deobandi), the sectarian violence found in Pakistan (and in particuar Karachi) is not much in evidence; instead, what violence there is is mostly the work of Hindu extremists.

It’s no secret that the Taliban were Deobandi and that the Deobandis supported them, something I discovered when I converted to Islam in 1998 and discovered much support for them in the local community. A number of brothers could be found who would either approve of or deny the many excesses and tyrannies reported of them in the press. Still, it does not follow from this that, just because Masjid-e-Umer in Walthamstow is a Deobandi mosque, they would encourage anyone who worships there to commit acts of terrorism in the UK or indeed anywhere. I have attended many Deobandi mosques myself, listened to lectures by their scholars and sat with men my own age who are of Deobandi background, and none of them that I’ve met have supported terrorism or praised people who carried it out. However many of the suspects in the present terrorism case worshipped there, it is highly likely that they also worshipped at many other mosques, depending on where they were at the time. It is, of course, likely that they preferred that mosque to the Bareilawi mosque on the Lea Bridge Road, for numerous mostly theological reasons.

Schwartz alleges also that the “constellation of crime” consisting of the armed groups he mentioned, “backed by senior officers in the Pakistani army, the country’s ISI intelligence establishment and other armed bodies of the state … is exported to every country where Pakistani Sunnis reside”. This is not a phenomenon I’ve encountered in several years of being Muslim; it’s not something Pakistani friends have ever mentioned, nor is it something I’ve ever seen mentioned in the Muslim press or on Muslim discussion fora, even though the influence of foreign Muslim groups over “community” bodies like the MCB has been mentioned in publications like Q-News, not always approvingly. So where does Schwartz get the impression that our community is controlled, and intimidated, by a network of “religious gangsters” linked to the Pakistani intelligence service? He gives not a single example of how “these zealots silence moderates through slander and intimidation”; sectarian violence between Pakistanis is rare if not unknown in the UK.

Schwartz concludes by recommending that Britain “require that Muslim clerics be at least trained and certified in Europe, if not in Britain, according to a classical, anti-radical Muslim curriculum that reinforces loyalty to the legitimate authorities”. Given that he denounces those who took part in the RMW roadshow as two-faced jihadists, it’s difficult to work out who is left after those he disapproves of are eliminated. Even if, for example, the Bareilawi group are given control over every mosque in the country, regardless of whom the local community might wish to vote into the management, they may not have the ability to prevent the youth drifting away into clandestine meetings in people’s houses or to persuade people that British foreign policy is not bringing about the deaths of Muslims in Muslim countries if that is what the Muslims are learning from the news.

And there is a reason lots of Muslims are not rushing to become Bareilawis despite the recent rash of articles raising suspicions about the Tablighi Jama’at and Muslim Brotherhood: Bareilavism is inherently sectarian, and denunciations of Deobandis, for reasons unconnected with Schwartz’s concerns, feature heavily in their literature. Deobandis have proved more efficient at founding religious schools, which contrary to certain columnists’ assertions are not jihadist production lines, than the Bareilawis despite the glowing praises the Bareilawis heap on some of their own imams on some of their websites. If anything, religious instruction in immigrant mosques in the UK has failed by being too centred on the needs of the mosques’ respective ethnic communities, to the exclusion of converts, less well-established immigrant Muslim communities (such as Somalis) and the youth who often do not speak the “mother tongue” as well as the older generation for whose benefit said “mother tongue” is still used in the mosque. This may have resulted in some youth falling into the hands of extremists who do speak English.

This does not mean that mosques themselves are breeding grounds for terrorists, and no serious evidence has been produced that they are; rather, we have seen a stream of claims associating certain terrorists or suspected terrorists with certain mosques - the most likely explanation for such associations being that the individuals lived near the mosque and had to worship somewhere. The modus operandi of extremists in the past has almost never been to use mosques, but to use private houses and hired-out halls. Since Schwartz knows so much about the Muslim community in this country, he might give us specific examples of what he alleges in his article, and I do not mean the out-of-context phrases his Front Page colleagues give, but solid examples. I suspect that he cannot, a fact which would not be lost on the editor of any Muslim magazine to which he might submit that article.

Schwartz gets into even stranger territory when he starts associating Sufism with “Islamic pluralism”:

If, at one end of the continuum, we find the fanatical creed of Wahhabism, cruel and arbitrary, more an Arab-supremacist state ideology than a religious sect, at the other end we find the enlightened traditions of Sufism. These stress not only intra-Islamic dialogue, separation of spiritual from clerical authority, and teaching in the vernacular, but also respect for all believers, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or other. Sufis emphasize, above all, their commitment to mutual civility, interaction, and cooperation among believers, regardless of sect.

This is, in fact, falsehood from beginning to end, and hints toward linking Sufism with the false ideology of perennialism which Shaikh Nuh Ha Mim Keller has made much efforts to distance his field from. Sufism is an Islamic discipline and encourages “separation of spiritual from clerical authority” only in as much as one has to be qualified in Sufism to be a Sufi shaikh, and in other Islamic disciplines to be a shaikh of those. Wahhabis in the west teach in the vernacular, while a lot of traditional Sufi-oriented teachers continue to teach in Urdu (“vernacular” for India, but not for here). He should be aware that “believers”, in Islamic parlance, means Muslims, not followers of other religions. Furthermore, the tariqa groups among Ahlus-Sunnah do not accept followers who are not Sunnis, since one cannot progress along the Path if one clings to offensive beliefs (such as that some of the Companions of the Prophet, upon whom be blessings and peace, were corrupt or are in Hell). So Sufism teaches the primacy, and exclusive claim to validity, of Ahlus-Sunnah, that is, the mainstream orthodox Muslim community, and its beliefs.

So a Sufi cannot be Sunni or Shi’a, as he falsely claims in his next paragraph. There are some Shi’ites claiming to be Sufis, and even some Hindus, but Sufism originated among Sunni Muslims. The “hundreds of different orders and communities around the globe, none pretending to an exclusive hold on truth” are, in fact, one community, with a large number of different methods. In fact, one shaikh’s methodology may differ from his own shaikh’s, because of the different circumstances of his students. For example, most tariqa groups have a wird, or litany, which is recited at given intervals (such as twice daily). Some recite silently, some recite out loud. Some shaikhs insist that their students wear a certain type of clothing, such as the turban. Others don’t. Others accept followers who seek only “the blessing” of the wird, rather than to become travellers (saalikeen) on the Path. Others don’t. I know of one group whose shaikh follows the Hanafi school, as do all his followers. Another is Shafi’i, and his followers follow different schools.

Sufis follow teachers … but they resist the notion that religious authority should be based on titles and offices. Rather, Sufi teachers gain acceptance and support by their insights and capacity for transmission of enlightenment to their students.

This is simply wrong. A shaikh is known as a shaikh not because of the insight he imparts, but by authorisation from an existing shaikh. Someone cannot follow someone claiming to be a shaikh, however pious he appears, if he claims “authorisation” in a dream or through some preternatural source. Only a verifiable authorisation from a shaikh is acceptable.

The history of Sufism is filled with examples of interfaith fusion, in contrast with the rigid separatism of the Islamic fundamentalists. Balkan and Turkish Sufis share holy sites with Christians. Central Asian Sufis preserve traditions inherited from shamans and Buddhists. Sufis in French-speaking West Africa adapt local customs, and those in Eastern Turkestan borrow from Chinese traditions such as Confucianism and Taoism, as well as martial arts. In the Balkans, Turkey, and Central Asia, Sufis have accepted secularism as a bulwark against religious intolerance and the monopolization of religious opinion by clerics.

Holy sites are shared with followers of other religions in many places, but these places are usually associated with Muslim saints and with such people as Old Testament Prophets (peace be upon them), who are revered by members of both religions. One must also guard against confusing the practices of common people (like the supposed borrowings from shamans and Buddhists he talks of) with Sufism. Some Sufis in Turkey have been very critical of Turkish secular policies, and the repressive policies of some of the régimes of central Asia are extremely well-known. Even if we strongly disagree with someone’s political affiliation, we do not advocate boiling someone to death, or extracting confessions by threatening to rape his mother in front of him, both methods associated with Islam Karimov.

Further on, he alleges that among western students of Islam, Sufism is often dismissed as “folk Islam”; but again, a lot of the popular practices around the tombs of Sufi saints are just that. The Path is about perfecting one’s Islam; some of the common people’s practices around tombs are, in fact, not appropriate. (It is, however, true that there are Islamic Studies departments at certain western universities which take funding from Wahhabis in the Gulf region (not just Saudi Arabia), which do not teach Sufism or hire teachers known to be interested in Sufism.) Later on in the piece, he appears to promote an alcohol-drinking pseudo-Sufi group in the Balkans. The Bektashis are the butt of numerous jokes in Turkey for their notoriously lax attitude to religion, and anyone who says that the drinking of alcohol is permitted ceases to be Muslim. The prohibition on intoxicants is a “necessarily known” part of Islam; even a child knows this.

I can’t disagree with his statement that ‘attempts at direct cooptation or subsidy of a “Sufi alternative” to radical Islam should be avoided’, but I fail to see how this can be consistent with frequent visits to local Sufis by American diplomats and businessmen. Apart from the fact that many Sufis shun the contact of “worldly” people, becoming associated with politicians or with western political or business interests can lead to such figures being seen by local Muslims as tainted. Having a “defender” such as Schwartz writing for a magazine like FPM does not do the reputation of Sufism any favours either. While Sufis (like all followers of mainstream Islam) would condemn the terrorist tactics associated with al-Qa’ida, it doesn’t follow that they care about the US’s geo-political interests. Local Muslims with Sufi affiliations would as readily fight an American invasion of Syria as they did the French occupation of Algeria, or indeed, as they fought in the Turkish invasion of the Balkans.