I don’t watch al-Jazeera English (although I can get it, part-time, on Freeview) but saw this clip of David Frost interviewing Taj Hargey and Salma Yaqoob over the recently-introduced ban on the niqaab in France on YouTube. The debate in this clip goes for the first 11-and-a-half minutes of the YouTube clip; I can’t guarantee that it’ll be kept up. Salma Yaqoob is a RESPECT party councillor from Birmingham (David Frost introduced her as the party’s leader, but there isn’t much left of the party nowadays), while Taj Hargey is a wannabe Muslim community leader whose ideas largely seem lifted from the anti-Islamic “Qur’an alone” school of thought.

Although he did not explicitly advocate banning the niqaab, he alleged that it was “un-Islamic” because it was based on pre-Islamic (Byzantine and Persian) customs in which men kept their “possessions” under wraps, and is “un-Qur’anic” because the terms burqa and niqaab do not appear in the Qur’an itself. This is, of course, a totally spurious argument, because even if the terms do not appear in the Qur’an, it does not mean that they were not present among the Muslims in the time of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), but narrations from that time demonstrate that face-covering was in fact common among the female Companions, and that some of them in fact remained in their homes most or all of the time.

He also persistently alleged that the custom as practised in the West is only due to Saudi, Wahhabi and Taliban influence, yet face-covering is common in many other parts of the Muslim world where Saudi influence is minimal, such as parts of Kenya, Zanzibar, Morocco, Hadramaut and eastern Indonesia (particularly Sumbawa). Hadramaut is a well-known centre of traditional Sunni scholarship which has always resisted Wahhabism. The Wahhabis or “salafis” are well-known for their opinion that there is no such thing as good innovation in religion, yet their women are to be found wearing the modern three-layer niqaab, rather than a cloth tied round their head and across their face as was the custom in the time of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) and which is still to be found in some of the places I mentioned earlier; Hargey is thus applying a parody of their position by saying that the niqaab or burqa is un-Islamic because the female Companions did not wear it. As for the Taliban, they enforced a type of veiling that is not known anywhere else except Pakistan, i.e. places were Pashtuns are dominant.

He insisted that Muslim women who wear it in the West should “be honest” about the reason they wear it, and stop claiming that it is about religion when it is in fact a “tribal rag”. This disrespectful language echoes his friend Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s comparison of the rising popularity of hijab to swine flu, but it is also inaccurate. The niqaab is in no sense tribal to a woman of Jamaican heritage, is it? While the Arabian peninsula is indeed tribal, this simply means (in an Arabian context) that people know their ancestors going back generations; it’s not another word for a small national or ethnic group as it is sometimes used in Africa or the Americas. Much of the Arab world is tribal in the same sense as the Arabian peninsula is (Libya was recently described as such by the Gaddafi faction), but niqaab is not seen there. Calling it “tribal” also contradicts the claim of Byzantine or Persian origin, since those empires were not tribal.

He dismisses the religious argument by claiming that it is all made up by male scholars, based on hadeeth which were themselves, he said, written 300 years ago (also by male scholars) and contain an awful lot of hear-say and fabrication. The argument about male scholars is false, because a large proportion of the scholars and those who transmitted the hadeeth in the early generations of Islam were in fact female, including A’isha (radhi Allahu ‘anhaa), the wife of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), and one of the major teachers of Imam Shafi’i named Nafisa. The Qur’an itself is not, as Hargey would know if he bothered to read it, a modern feminist text in any case, but Muslims never have based their religion solely off it — it clearly states “obey Allah and His Messenger”, and without the hadeeth, that command becomes something of a dead letter. A further point against Hargey’s rejection of the hadeeth-based parts of Islamic law is that the major scholars of law were much closer to the time of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) than the major collectors of hadeeth, and took narrations from those they regarded as trustworthy, and they knew of the problem of people who fabricated hadeeth (they were mainly sectarians). It is not a case of modern scholars starting from scratch based on the Bukhari and Muslim collections.

The fact is that women who choose to wear the niqaab, regardless of any consideration of whether it is a socially wise choice, are do what Muslim women, particularly in cities, did for generations, from the first generation until colonial times, and are doing what is held to be compulsory by strong opinions in all four mainstream schools of Islamic thought — indeed, it is only not regarded as mandatory today because the majority of women do not wear it; that was not true in the great cities of the Islamic world until very recently. They are also not mostly “Wahhabis”, contrary to what some might imagine (and what some repeatedly claim). Anyone posing as an imam should be defending them, not slandering them to the media. Salma Yaqoob did defend the women who wear niqaab on the basis of free choice, but did not even begin to tackle his baseless claims about hadeeth, although it might have been too complicated an issue to get into.

The fact is that Hargey has no claim to be an imam, and Yaqoob should have said so — he’s the leader of a small group which conducts anti-Islamic publicity stunts for the media, some of which contradict things which are necessarily known of Islam. His status is not dissimilar to that of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — someone with no claim to Islam due to the extremity of his beliefs, but who uses a Muslim name and a similar cultural background to pretend to be one in front of non-Muslims, peddling an “Islam” which bears no resemblance to the real thing, to the detriment of people who practise the real thing. One can understand the BBC making this mistake (at least once — even John Ware did not wheel him out a second time), but there is no excuse for al-Jazeera.

To their credit, the Keighley mosque where the assaults took place co-operated with the police and a man has been arrested (though since bailed). It’s still a mystery why younger boys were left in the ‘supervision’ of older boys who hit and kicked them and threw things at them. It appears that the man arrested is the teacher filmed hitting and kicking pupils during lessons (we were told they were Qur’an lessons), but I wonder if they have any plans to change the way boys are supervised during prayers, or the people hired to do the teaching.

The mosques weren’t so keen to face up to the problems behind the lectures that were shown in the Birmingham mosque. The young man was shown lecturing the children with derogatory jokes about Hindu beliefs and practices, suggesting they “drink cow piss”; another group are lectured about avoiding the customs of non-Muslims and that people with less than a fist-length beard are worse than snakes and that travelling with such a person is more harmful than doing so with a Jew. The school’s defence is that the individual responsible was a senior pupil who had since been expelled, that some teachers had been dismissed and that outside speakers had said things that were out of keeping with the school’s ethos. Really, blaming the underling (the pupil) is the oldest trick in the book; it’s how the Daily Mail reacts when people claim about an offensive poll or headline — they just blame some junior sub-editor; it’s never really the paper’s or editor’s fault, even if the offending phrase appears again and again.

This sort of talk is fairly common among Deobandi youth, so obviously it’s coming from somewhere and that kid giving the lecture got it from somewhere. I’ve not heard the comparison of men with shorter than fist-length beards to snakes or Jews before, but hostile attitudes to Muslims who don’t live up to the particular regulations they live by have been common knowledge for years. The fact that there are four madhhabs in Islam and only one of them has that ruling, or that many Muslims who don’t follow them come from places where growing beards and maintaining traditional Islamic dress is not possible for political reasons, is not accepted, particularly by their youth (and guess where they get their ideas from). The casual insulting of others’ religions, particularly Hindus’, is something anyone who has spent time in the community will have experienced from time to time, and it’s not always Deobandis and not always madrassa boys.

On the other hand, the wheeling out of Taj Hargey is unforgiveable. Frankly, the comment about beardless men and snakes could have been made about him specifically; he is a marginal figure with a tiny following whose mission seems to be to show up the rest of the Muslim community as “backward” in front of the media by staging plainly un-Islamic ceremonies as publicity stunts. The beliefs articulated on his organisation’s website, and in his letters and articles in various newspapers, suggest that he has anti-hadeeth leanings, as demonstrated here:

We need a reformation that saves Islam from foreign-inspired zealots. That reformation is already under way, with Muslims going back to the pristine teaching of the transcendent Koran, not taking on trust the hadith (a compilation of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad recorded some 250 years after his death by non-Arabs) or the corpus of medieval man-made Sharia (religious law). …

Although the Koran repeatedly declares that God’s revelation is conclusive and sufficient guidance for Muslims and that there is no need for any supplementary legal authority in Islam, the traditional Muslim clergy defies this explicit divine assurance. They falsely convince their flock that they cannot be true believers without the hadith. They falsely assert that this source of Islam is at the heart of being a real Muslim. Most Muslims have been told that the hadith are the sacred authentic words of the Prophet, but the plethora of fictitious and forged hadith poves otherwise.

He goes on to say that a hadith must pass a “rigorous” test, namely that it should not contradict the Qur’an and not contradict “reason and logic”. The first has no Islamic basis at all, since the words of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) are regarded as a revelation in themselves, and can abrogate, and certainly qualify, a verse in the Qur’an. As for “reason and logic”, coming from someone like this it can mean anything he might say it means, paving the way for an “Islam” based on his and his friends’ desires, essentially a sort of Unitarian Universalism with the Qur’an used as a decoration. It would bear very little resemblance to Islam.

His claim that the Deobandis were running a system of “apartheid” is baseless; apartheid (like segregation, another term commonly bandied around for this purpose) is a system of legally enforced separation, not a situation whereby a religious community mostly lives and socialises together. Muslims are not as isolated as might be supposed, even if they do live in a primarily Muslim area. There are religious Muslims who work in the civil service and in every industry you can think of (except for things like alcohol).

The people “anonymously” speaking out about what is being taught in the mosques failed to convince, frankly. Clearly these were people who had already withdrawn their children from mosque classes and had made a stand, if they were for real. Perhaps they could not find anyone to speak because nobody wanted to take part in yet another television “exposé” based on dishonesty and spying? We have had nearly six years of this and people know the tricks very well, which may well be why they have to fall back on Hargey and Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, a chameleon who sheds one skin after another depending on whether he can make a name for himself as an Iranian stooge or a “progressive”.

The documentary presented a few problems that have been known about for years, and again pointed the finger at the Bridge Schools Inspectorate for possibly failing to do its job properly, but it presented a false alternative in the form of two foreign men desperate to find a community to lead here. The impression is given, with continual attacks on Deobandis generally, that this is typical, when in fact not all the institutions shown (not the one where the kids were being beaten, for example) were Deobandi anyway. At a time when tabloid media attacks on the Muslim community generally are a regular occurrence, the footage of the children being attacked could have been passed straight to the police, or to the local MP rather than being broadcast on national TV. The programme did expose some serious problems in some of our religious schools, but used it as an opportunity to promote two tired old hacks that nobody takes seriously even if they have heard of them, which means they did not have any real solutions.

This article appeared in today’s Daily Mail, and is meant to be in defence of Shirley Chaplin, a nurse in Devon who took her healthcare trust to court to secure her right to wear her cross while caring for patients, as she had done for 30 years until the rules were changed a year or so ago. Nothing wrong with that, on the surface. However, Taj manages to get his agenda of attacking Muslims while pretending to represent “moderate” Islam into the article, as might have been expected, by attacking women who wear the so-called burqa and a new mosque planned in Camberley. (More: Engage.)

His opening claim, that “Christianity is under siege in this country”, on the basis that nurses cannot wear crosses in some NHS hospitals, is palpably ludicrous. However, the historical links between healthcare and Christian institutions are a fact; it’s why nurses’ uniforms have evolved from what looked like nuns’ habits and why they used to be called “sister” (of course, that was when they were all, or nearly all, female); the St John Ambulance organisation also has its roots in a monastic organisation. The excuse given is that patients might grab her necklace; the real reason is probably not even hostility to religion but just that it was another opportunity to make workers a bit more uniform and a bit less individual. (In the mental health sector, suppressing religious symbols might have some justification, since religious symbolism features heavily in some mental illnesses, but that surely isn’t so when treating normal, physical illnesses.)

Hargey claims that there is no conflict between Islam and Christianity, that we come from the same Abrahamic tradition, and uses what he calls the “key verse” in the Qur’an, “the people closest and dearest to Muslims are those who say: ‘We are Christians’”, as proof that Muslims have a duty to defend Christianity when it is under attack. The question should be asked whether these same Christians when they come under attack; would the nurse or the airline attendant suing for the right to wear a cross to work defend the right of a Muslim woman to wear the hijab if it came to it? Some would but, as has been seen in Europe and in some of the attempts to establish a Christian right in the UK, some definitely would not.

He then goes on about “shrill demands for the imposition of the burqa in the Muslim community”, a baseless accusation. Who is demanding the “imposition” of the burqa, or even the niqaab? All that is being asked is that women who choose to wear it, for whatever reason, not be harassed or prevented from going about their business. He claims, “I would not want to see it banned, for that might only heighten the sense of martyrdom and grievance among the zealots, but I certainly believe that mainstream Muslims have a duty to speak out against it”. The Muslims who wear and support niqaab are not “zealots”, and I’ve known plenty of them. While I don’t doubt that there are a few who wear it because people in their family insist, many wear it because they regard niqaab as the completion of hijaab and because the women who were closest among the Sahaba wore it. They are not, by any means, all or even mostly hardline “salafis” or even Deobandis.

He also alleges, “the same argument could be made against minarets, which unlike Ms Chaplin’s crucifix, could also be seen as inflammatory - and for which there is no religious requirement in Islam”. It is true that minarets are a cultural rather than strictly religious tradition, and that the earliest mosques originally did not have them, but the fact remains that when Muslims came to this country, they came from countries where mosques had minarets. Their value in this country, where the call to prayer cannot be given in most places because it would cause a disturbance, is mainly symbolic, but in many places, they have adjusted in size and design to reflect this (the clock-tower minaret at the mosque here in Kingston is one example). They are not “inflammatory”. People have decided to make an issue of them in other countries. That is all the controversy is about.

I agree that there is no real reason to stop this nurse wearing her cross. However, that point could have been made by any Muslim without taking side-swipes at Muslims. It appears that these side-swipes were the real purpose of Hargey’s whole article: to show himself and his small clique in Oxford as representing “real Islam”, as if what is practised by a million and a half Muslims in this country is not. The fact is that Taj Hargey is regarded by any Muslims in this country who have heard of him as a disloyal, unrepresentative nobody who gets airtime because he tells the media what they want to hear.

The article claims:

Dr Taj Hargey, chairman of the Muslim Education Centre of Oxford, said he had performed about 36 marriages in the past two years between Muslim women and non-Muslim men.

More imams are happy to marry Muslim men to non-Muslim women.

Couples from Spain, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, France and Norway have all come to Dr Hargey after failing to find someone locally prepared to carry out the service.

Most had spent months looking for an imam, and many found Dr Hargey after contacting American Muslim leaders via the Internet.

Dr Hargey, who believes he is the only imam in the UK who openly performs the mixed marriages, said: “We do it because there is no prohibition in the Koran.

“Islam allows Muslim men to marry non-Muslim women and such marriages are common, but I am one of the only people who will do it the other way round.”

Such marriages are actually not all that common, and certainly most Muslim men marry Muslim women. In fact, their usual choice is much narrower in many families; they want their children to marry spouses from the village back home, or the same caste, and inter-racial marriages among Muslims are probably not that common in large sections of the Asian Muslim community in the UK (among converts, it’s absolutely normal). Where Muslim men have married non-Muslim women, it has often proved to be a recipe for conflict as the man might well expect things of her that a husband from the same culture might not. There have also been numerous abductions of children of such marriages, often to countries which won’t return the children. Such marriages are, in my view, ill-advised for both parties. They were permitted because traditional Christian and Muslim values in the Middle East are, or were, similar. That isn’t the case in a Europe where Christianity is increasingly, where it’s held to at all, a matter of identity. Shared beliefs and values are, in my view, essential to maintain a happy marriage.

Hargey is a well-known proponent of “Qur’anic Islam”, but much as “it’s not in the Qur’an” doesn’t mean it’s not perfectly valid in Islam, the prohibition on Muslim women marrying outside the faith is definitely in the Qur’an, as the section which permits Muslim men to marry Christian or Jewish women specifically instructs women to marry Muslim men. So, Hargey’s “Qur’anic” emphasis is proved to be just an excuse; his real agenda is to erase any aspect of Islam which Europeans might not like, meaning that Islam is reduced to a mere “culture” consisting of names, stories and food. However, Islam is not conferred on the basis of a Muslim name and a taste for couscous or biryani, but on belief, affirmation and practice. What Hargey preaches is not Islam and Muslims have never taken it seriously.

Just as Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined the lives of countless Americans during the 1950s when he and his committee smeared innocent people as communists, the Muslim hierarchy in Britain have used witchhunts to maintain their unquestioned theological power. Any Muslim freethinker is automatically branded as heretical or un-Islamic and excommunicated from the community - and debate is shut down.

A little bit of background on Hargey: he is somebody hardly anyone had heard of until 2005, when he appeared on the Panorama programme, A Question of Leadership, in which John Ware alleged that the community was led by reactionaries who fostered hostility to outsiders. Hargey was introduced as someone who had set up an institution to promote “progressive, inclusive Islam”, a term which set alarm bells ringing as it was similar to schemes which had already run their course in North America, which publicly slandered mainstream Islam and Muslim leaders before collapsing amid bitter acrimony. He was allowed to smear the community by claiming that we referred to non-Muslims as kafirs in conversation amongst ourselves (which is true of some people but not others) and that this fostered what he called a “virtual apartheid”, an obvious, sensational exaggeration. A bit of research demonstrated that Hargey had been involved in various enterprises which did not last long, among them a so-called Crescent University and a fund-raising drive for a “Black newspaper” in South Africa.

He has no real record of service to the Muslim community, unless you count MECO, which is his own vehicle and which is taken very seriously by the non-Muslim media, despite its insignificant following. His complaint about “McCarthyism” is laughable, because it is only in the Muslim community’s press that he does not get an airing, and that is because he is not trusted and in any case, that press has a very limited reach. Only the Muslim News, a freesheet available in some Muslim bookshops (which have been diminishing because of rising London rents and online competition) and Emel, a glossy “Muslim lifestyle” magazine aimed at middle-class women, have published consistently; Q-News seems to have given up the ghost and Islamica has disappeared in the last couple of weeks. Hargey, meanwhile, gets on Panorama and coverage in national broadsheets; his victory over the Muslim Weekly was covered in three of the four broadsheets (the Independent, Times and Telegraph). McCarthyism drove people out of mainstream media.

Over the past few year or so, I’ve gained the impression that Hargey is an outright hadeeth denier, which is someone who claims that the hadeeths are either so unreliable that they should all be dismissed, or that it is shirk (idolatry or polytheism) to obey or honour other than God, including a prophet whose only function, they allege, is to deliver a sacred text, or both. Last November, MECO hosted a lecture by Edip Yuksel, a noted hadith denier based in the USA who also owns the “19.org” website, and another entitled “Why Qur’an Alone Through Reason”, at its forum event. The article Hargey had printed last Friday left me less sure of this, but it clearly indicates that he has a very unorthodox and eccentric attitude to the hadeeth:

We need a reformation that saves Islam from foreign-inspired zealots. That reformation is already under way, with Muslims going back to the pristine teaching of the transcendent Koran, not taking on trust the hadith (a compilation of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad recorded some 250 years after his death by non-Arabs) or the corpus of medieval man-made Sharia (religious law). But because this reformation is still in its infancy, the reactionary clergy and its supporters is doing everything to strangle it.

Most if not all the thorny problems of faith that British Muslims face today - whether it is apostasy, blasphemy, jihad, women’s oppression, homosexuality, religious intolerance or the democratic deficit in and outside the community - can be traced either to fabricated hadith or the masculine-biased Sharia.

Although the Koran repeatedly declares that God’s revelation is conclusive and sufficient guidance for Muslims and that there is no need for any supplementary legal authority in Islam, the traditional Muslim clergy defies this explicit divine assurance. They falsely convince their flock that they cannot be true believers without the hadith. They falsely assert that this source of Islam is at the heart of being a real Muslim. Most Muslims have been told that the hadith are the sacred authentic words of the Prophet, but the plethora of fictitious and forged hadith proves otherwise.

Granted, there may be some useful guidance in the thousands upon thousands of hadith but they need to pass a rigorous double test. First, they cannot contradict the Koran and, second, they must not defy reason and logic. Unfortunately, most Muslims have been programmed to regard hadith as sacrosanct teachings that cannot be challenged. This holds all Muslims hostage to the antiquated prejudices or distortions of the narrators and recorders of the prophetic traditions.

There are many Islamic problems with all this, but let us address the obvious factual errors first: jihad, the objection in Islam to homosexuality and some of what he calls “women’s oppression” are in fact partly based on the Qur’an. It is not for the first time that I have come across someone claiming “it’s not in the Qur’an”, so as to dismiss hadith-based parts of Islamic law, when in fact what they are talking about is indeed in the Qur’an. It is also not true that the problems of “jihad”, where the term is used to mean terrorism, is to be blamed on “fabricated hadith” or the Shari’ah. A substantial body of scholarship rejects suicide bombings, a tactic borrowed from the atheist Tamil Tigers, and most scholars actually condemn terrorism against civilian populations.

The notion that Islamic teaching should be wholly or almost entirely based on the Qur’an is a completely ahistorical one, as the Companions certainly did not refuse any instruction from the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) just because it did not appear in the Qur’an. Doubtless he is expecting his audience to think the Qur’an to be like the Bible, a collection of stories mostly of declared human authorship, which it is not. The Companions learned how to practise Islam from the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) and transmitted this knowledge to the next generation, who relayed it to the next, and so on. A substantial part of the hadeeth are mutawatir, meaning that they have more than one independent chain of narrators; they were repeated among groups of people - male and female, in those days - who were only two or three degrees separated from the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam).

It is untrue, even if it is relevant, that the collections were made by non-Arabs. While many of them did originate from cities in Persia (which included large parts of other neighbouring countries at that time, including Iraq, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan), those countries had been conquered by Arab Muslims, and Arab Muslims had been settled in them. Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal belonged to the Shaybaani tribe. Imam Muslim was of the Arab Qushayri tribe. Imam Tirmidhi belonged to the Beni Sulaim, an Arab tribe originating in the Najd; Imam Abu Dawud belonged to the Arab Azd tribe. No doubt they spoke Persian as well, but even though Persian became an important language of Islam later, Arabic was the language of Islam at that time. While it is now common for Islamic scholars to mostly speak another language, particularly Urdu, the idea of any such scholar being taken seriously then was preposterous. In addition, the two biggest hadeeth collections, by Imam Bukhari and Imam Muslim, did not contain just any hadeeth, but only those they deemed absolutely the most authentic.

However, the validity of these hadeeth collections has no relevance to the validity of the Shari’ah, because it is not based on them. The four major imams lived and worked before any of those collections were made; in fact, with the exception of Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal, they were dying around the time the major hadeeth-collecting imams were being born. They lived at a time when there were many people around, known as taabi’een, who actually knew the Companions and the first of them (Abu Hanifa) actually knew some of them himself. They were certainly not working from unreliable hadeeth several generations removed from the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) but from a community of people with very close personal connections to him. I accept that it would be a matter of huge difficulty to reconstruct the Shari’ah now, even though we have the Qur’an and the hadeeth collections, but that is not what the imams did. They did not need to.

Hargey’s contention that hadeeths must not contradict the Qur’an to be deemed authentic is not accepted in Islam; authentic hadeeth are considered to be a revelation in themselves, because they are the words of a prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam). The words are treated differently, as they are not a sacred text in the same way as the Qur’an is, so a Muslim is permitted to touch volumes of Imam Bukhari’s collection without being in a state of ritual purity, but the meanings are deemed to have the weight of revelation (wahy), and as such may qualify or even abrogate a ruling contained in a verse in the Qur’an.

When Hargey attacks specific groups within Islam, he concentrates on the Wahhabis and the Tablighi Jama’at, as if these were the only groups which use hadeeth and accept the Shari’ah, when in fact every other traditional Islamic group, including the Bareilawis and the other Sufi-based groups, do as well:

Although Muslims have their own specific territorial cultural traditions, there is no such thing as an Islamic culture. Therefore the modern trend among British Muslims blindly to emulate Arab ethnic dress or grow beards or for women to wear the Wahhabi-sanctioned niqab or face masks has nothing to do with the Koran but everything to do with the primitive tribal mores and sexist practices of Arabia.

The relentless importation of Wahhabi-influenced theology and tradition into the body politic of the Muslim community is mainly the result of two factors. First, the Saudis control Mecca and Medina, the centres of Islam. This gives the Wahhabi Saudis both a spurious legitimacy and a captive market to peddle their sectarian poison.

Second, with their petrodollars the Saudis can afford to export the most horrendous brand of Islam around the globe. Here in Britain, conservative mosques and madrassas receive funding from the despotic Saudis and in turn extol their nefarious interpretation of Islam.

The fact is that niqaab, of one form or another, has existed among Muslims since the earliest days of Islam; there are clear records of female Companions covering their faces, and it is not limited to Wahhabis; the Tablighi Jamaat are not Wahhabis, and in fact the gulf between them and the Wahhabi/Salafi movement has grown enormously in the past ten years as both have admitted that there is more similarity between the Deobandis (the movement out of which the TJ emerged) and Bareilawis, and other traditional Sufi Muslims, than between Deobandis and Wahhabis. Niqaab was common for Muslim women, particularly in urban areas, until the arrival of the western colonisers. As for the Deobandis, they are different from some other Muslims only in style, and in a small number of peripheral legal and doctrinal issues. They actually have good relations with non-Wahhabi scholars outside India, and have been involved in refuting the ideas put forward by the Wahhabis.

Hargey presses one button after another to raise sympathy for his “cause” among his non-Muslim audience, labelling his opponents as foreign fanatics and calling for a “British Islam” free of their supposedly “nefarious” influence. Why on earth we should let any “British Islam” be based on the demands of a South African interloper who advocates rejecting most if not all of the hadeeth - ideas associated mostly with a Pakistani thinker (Ghulam Ahmad Perveiz) and an Egyptian one, based in the USA (Rashad Khalifa), is not explained. The reality is that he will never fool Muslims, who know their shaikhs and love them, and know nothing about this self-publicising Johnny-come-lately drifter with his strange ideas. In fact, he will not deceive a lot of non-Muslims, who know that the Qur’an itself is not a pacifist manifesto by any stretch of the imagination. Whoever he deceives outside the Muslim community, Muslims know that what he promotes would not be recognisable to any Muslim as Islam, and that it is based on ideas which have no basis whatsoever in the history of Islamic thought.

This distinction is probably lost on the judge, and on most non-Muslim observers, but Hargey’s position is clear to any Muslim, or anyone else who knows much about Islam, from the press releases on his website. For example, this article on the subject of men and women shaking hands (unlawful in Islam, according to the vast majority of scholars) contains this:

Clearly, this is tantamount to humans subverting the sublime text of the Creator, replacing it with secondary and controversial rulings (fatawah) from the entirely masculine ulama (clergy). But to maintain God’s exclusive legal sovereignty, Muslims must adhere to the infallible and immutable injunctions contained in the Holy Qur’an alone and not the fallible and undependable conclusions of culturally biased male interpreters.

An article attacking niqab, also on the MECO website, contains the following:

The extremist Muslim priesthood and their following have elevated an unthinking dependency upon the Prophet’s sayings by creating an exclusively hadith-reliant Islam, instead of an absolutely Qur’an-reliant Islam. Most, if not all of the contemporary ‘Islamic’ tendencies and innovations like female head and face coverings, the wearing of unkempt beards, strict sexual apartheid (including no opposite gender hand-shaking) female inferiority, philosophical conformity, ideological rigidity and interfaith intolerance are the inevitable products of a masculine clerical consensus. These ‘rulings’ have no legitimacy whatsoever in the immutable Qur’anic text.

(Some MECO press releases ([1], [2]) do contain references to what they — assuming there is a “they”, and that MECO is not just Hargey himself — admit, or admitted, to be authentic hadith. However, these appeared earlier, leaving open the possibility that Hargey has revised his position; it could also be that Hargey uses hadith when it suits him to do so, and rejects them otherwise. The clear advocacy of an “absolutely Qur’an-reliant Islam” in the press release on niqab from 2007 suggests the former.)

There are two well-known hadith-rejecting groups known to Muslims: the Parvezis of Pakistan and the Khalifites, who originated in the USA although they have followers in various other countries (they have a substantial online presence, and were known for flooding the AOL and Usenet discussion forums on Islam back in the mid-1990s). Whether he belongs to either of them I have no idea, but his pronouncements often have the hallmarks of hadith-rejectors, such as in this video, extracted from a BBC news report, in which he states:

Jilbab is a cultural phenomenon. It is not a religious thing. There is no religious verse, there is no Qur’anic ayah, there is nothing in the Qur’an that says you must wear the jilbab.

There in fact is an ayat which states: “oh Prophet, tell your wives and daughters, and the believing women, that they should cast their jilbabs over their persons”, something it is impossible to do without wearing one in the first place. However, that jilbab was not the abaya which is known of today, but was worn over the head and covers most of the body and usually the face; the garment known as bui-bui, worn by east African Muslim women, is probably the closest thing we have to it today. However, there are two salient points to make here.

The first is that Hargey says, “there is nothing in the Qur’an that says …” when this is not a valid objection and it is a shibboleth of hadith-rejectors, since a Muslim would say “in the Qur’an and the Sunnah”, and the Sunnah is mainly represented in the hadith. We are clearly told in the Qur’an, “obey Allah and His Messenger” (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), whose sayings and doings are known as the Sunnah. It is a fact that most of the practice of Islam is not detailed in the Qur’an, but is a handed-down tradition based on what the Companions observed the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) doing and what he told them. How to pray, for example, is not detailed in the Qur’an. Virtually all the specifics of Islam were handed down this way. Rejecting hadith in its entirety leaves you with a drastically pared-down religion.

Second, Hargey is clearly either woefully ignorant of the Qur’an itself, or is a liar. The word jilbab is actually mentioned in the Qur’an, and you can search the Qur’an on a computer and find this out. The idea that someone can be a spokesman for any kind of Islam, or an imam, when he makes such a basic error is preposterous.

The Muslim Weekly are at fault for publishing an untrue fact without doing proper research, but it is difficult to see how a five-figure settlement could possibly be justified. The Qadianis are a much bigger and better-known sect among Indian Muslims than the Khalifites and other hadith-rejectors, but the religious ruling on them — that they are disbelievers — is identical. To Muslims, who reject him and his teachings regardless of how many powerful friends he has, the untruth is the equivalent of saying that a thief stole so many hundreds of dollars when he really stole pounds; to anyone else, it is like saying someone is a Methodist when he is really a Baptist. The difference simply does not matter to most people. Hargey’s views clearly disqualify him from being what the author of the Independent’s report calls him, namely a “devout Sunni Muslim”. In fact, they disqualify him from being called a Muslim at all. It would be a shame if this was the end of the line for this particular legal action; if the facts were presented properly, the settlement could surely be reduced to a nominal sum.

As for the proof of the invalidity of the prayer of anyone who “prayed” behind Wadud, here is a collection of opinions by some modern scholars of Islam who are not ranting extremists (PDF, I’m afraid); I also wrote a few articles tackling not only the “prayer” itself but the media response to it and some of Wadud’s other antics ([1], [2], [3]). I wonder if she is aware (or if she cares) about Hargey’s well-documented deviations, such as believing that the hadeeth contain so many forgeries and fabrications that they should not be used to derive legal rulings, but rather that Muslims should use the Qur’an alone? Can’t she get any more publicity back home? Both of them know that they will only fool non-Muslims with this, that Muslims will reject them and will incur the hostility of liberals; I suspect that this is Hargey’s aim.

I don’t know why I’m surprised that a woman has run into problems wearing an all-over swimsuit; Manal Omar’s run-in with some staff in a private health club in Oxford, where she is (or at least was) a paying customer ended up in the local press and her experience became the focus of a discussion on immigration and asylum (as if it’s relevant given that she is not, and never was, an asylum seeker). However, the attitude of this busybody is pretty appalling (more: [1], [2], [3]):

As I was getting ready to head home from my Sunday swim, I heard a loud voice from a man stating that he needed to speak to the manager about dress code. I picked up on it, but didn’t really give it too much thought, until I heard him yelling about “that woman over there” who was wearing the “burkini”, the gist of what he was saying seemingly being that it was inappropriate. What the hell is that? The burkini? I could feel a rising indignation at the man’s audacity in singling me out in this way. Who had died and declared him the pool police? There were several lifeguards on duty who had seen me swimming there over the previous six months, and none had objected to the swimsuit. It’s been nearly a year since I moved to Oxford, and frankly, I had had enough of the anti-Muslim rhetoric in British political life. Now that I was in the middle of it, I refused to stand on the sidelines.

I walked up to the burly, middle-aged man who had been pointing at me a minute before and asked, “Are you guys talking about me?”

He turned towards me, and waved a dismissive hand: “This has nothing to do with you.”

“Are you talking about me? Because if you are, this has everything to do with me.”

He then confirmed he was indeed talking about me, but not talking to me. He was talking to the manager.

By this time I was irate, and the fact that he was using his dirty shoes as a pointer while he was yelling at me didn’t help the situation. “But you have just singled me out in front of everyone, and in a voice loud enough for me to hear. How can this have nothing to do with me?”

At this point he referred to me as a “silly little girl”, which I found amusing, considering that I am a 32-year-old, 5ft 10in, professional senior manager for an international NGO. This man was clearly a closed-minded bigot and a sexist to boot, and there wasn’t much I could do to change that.

Talking about her, not to her, eh? When adults spoke to me like that as a child I resented it; the health club workers should have told this man to mind his own business.

And what a surprise that the self-made “community leader” Taj Hargey crops up to defend anyone who is against a Muslim! I wonder if Manal Omar knows that this guy has made quite a name for himself as the anti-Muslim “Muslim”, since coming out of nowhere to attack Muslims on the John Ware show? (Update: having read the Oxford Mail article in question, it seems that Hargey assumed that she went into the pool “full dressed” rather than wearing the so-called burqini, which is what he suggested. However, the fact remains that he has no standing in the community, is not part of it and sells himself to the media as someone willing to attack the community “from within”.)

The IJV statement led to an outpouring of comment articles in the Guardian (and no doubt other broadsheets) as well as on the paper’s comment blog (the full list of them is here). Among the first was this, from Brian Klug, who alleged that both the Israeli leadership and the Board of Deputies of British Jews presented a “united” Jewish opinion in support of the Israelis’ actions in Lebanon, which in his view was misleading. Abe Hayeem confirmed that censorship and vilification of Jews who campaign against Israeli oppression in the occupied territories goes on and that “the [pro-Israel] lobby can operate at the highest levels of city government”, as demonstrated by an incident involving Richard Rogers, whose position as an architect for a publically-funded conference centre in New York was put in jeopardy when his partnership’s premises were used to launch Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine. (He also mentioned the well-known email harrassment campaigns and the “SHIT List”, the swear word being an acronym for “Self-Hating and/or Israel-Threatening”.)

CIF also aired a number of articles critical of IJV. This one, from Linda Grant, alleged that IJV are out of touch with Jewish life in the UK, and that many British Jews have family connections with Israel. Emmanuele Ottolenghi asserted that the IJV, unlike the Board of Deputies and the Israeli government, are not elected by anyone and thus are not representative and can be said to speak only for themselves; he also observed that many of the signatories are people with high media profiles who have no problems getting their views aired.

Naturally Sunny Hundal (of Pickled Politics) welcomed this development, noting the similarities to his own “New Generation Network”, itself launched with an attack on the “system of self-appointed leaders” in the various ethnic-minority religious communities. In that particular case, only the Asian communities, not the Jewish community, were challenged, but the parallels are obvious:

The Sun newspaper recently published a picture of children holding up placards painted with racial insults. For a follow-up they may want to consider terms such as Brown Sahib, Uncle Tom, self-hating Jew or Sell-out Muslim. In case it isn’t obvious, these are more commonly used when commentators within minority groups dare to challenge their own establishment.

Except, of course, that in the case of the Muslim community terms like “sell-out” are often applied not to individuals who speak out against their communities’ supposed leaders, but to false leaders and unrepresentative “representatives” the media or politicians want to foist on us. He alludes, for example, to a “whispering campaign” against Taj Hargey, linking to this article at Islamophobia Watch, which is actually run by non-Muslim Marxists. Still, the fact about Hargey is that he was an unknown until John Ware dug him out of obscurity for his attack on the MCB: when I tried Googling him, I found hardly anything. He had simply not paid his dues, and was trying to make a name for himself by cosying up to journalists who were looking for dirt and for “good Muslims”, and promoting the ideas of a fractious clique of “progressive Muslims” in north America which simply cannot be endorsed by religious and believing Muslims. Some of them are anathema to conservatives of other religions also.

He is not the only one; Haris Rafiq was not exactly a household name when he set up his so-called Sufi Muslim Council. He, and his admirers in the media, did not seem to notice the fact that a substantial proportion of Muslims with Sufi tendencies are conservative (the Deobandis, for example) and not at all in support of his friends in Washington, Hisham Kabbani’s so-called Islamic Supreme Council of America. Most recently, some woman called Gina Khan was given a lengthy feature in the Times, in which she alleged that mosques were “importing jihad” and that the community had simply refused to deal with the problems its women were facing. Running through much of this is the false notion that no Muslim circles exist in which to discuss the failures of the MCB, the extremist problem and the problems women have. There are: in the past there was Q-News, Trends magazine and various websites; now there are well-established blogs, web fora and a better-established Muslim media scene. Q-News did carry features criticising the Muslim Council of Britain, for example. It has carried articles criticising foot-dragging on the status of women. It even carried a letter from one Muslim man who said he had a good mind to start his own bombing campaign against Muslims who could not be bothered with the English language, among them mosque committees who bring imams from the village back home and “British-born imams trained at Dewsbury who insist on giving sermons in Urdu”.

It has been criticised by scholars - among them, for example, Shaikh Riyadh ul-Haq who condemned (in a tape, since withdrawn, called The Status of the Hijab) their feature on a Muslim female model, and it has carried a fair amount of objectionable content over the years. However, it demonstrates that not everywhere in the Muslim community are women only domestic drudges, since two of the three editors in its history have been women, as are two of its current contributing editors and several of those who have contributed over the years. Anyone who has been to the university campuses in London will see women with their heads covered, and even their faces, and no doubt the situation is similar in Birmingham and elsewhere in the Midlands and north, contrary to the broad stereotype advanced by Gina Khan; it suggests that Muslim women, and other Asian women, can be achievers. (No doubt more could be if there was more assistance; all students have to get money from somewhere.)

I reject the notion that the antics of Taj Hargey, in particular, and the protest of the IJV are morally equivalent. Among the IJV’s signatories may well be people who are Jewish only by ethnicity and some who reject the legitimacy of the state of Israel itself, but most object only to the silencing of critical voices and to the vilification and harrassment of those who protest against Israeli oppression. It certainly is not a vilification of ordinary Jews, an assertion that a lot of Jews really are in a conspiracy to rule the world from Jerusalem or a call for a ban on Jewish slaughtering methods. Hargey, on the other hand, dishonestly promotes a doctrine rejected by Muslims - the notion that Islamic law comes from the Qur’an alone - as being authentic, as with this article in the Daily Telegraph:

Although Muslims regard the Qur’an as the primary and inviolable foundation for Islamic legislation, radical preachers from a variety of denominations here and abroad persist in propagating an extreme millenarian vision of the faith that is not predicated upon the sacred scripture, but is founded on the reputed sayings (ahadith) of the Prophet Muhammad.

Compiled some 250 years after the prophet’s death, these subordinate pronouncements and practices usurp the authority of the Qur’an. The intervening years provided sufficient opportunity for forgery and fabrication.

Other press releases by his so-called Muslim Education Centre of Oxford (like this one) promote the same falsehood. The belief puts whoever holds it outside Islam. Now, one should not expect outsiders to concern themselves with Islamic doctrinal issues, but it is quite another matter when a non-Muslim advances his concocted ideas as being the “true” Islam while bad-mouthing the generality of Muslims in the circles of unknowing, yet powerful, outsiders. This is treachery itself. Among MECO’s press releases are some statements criticising the Danish cartoons and the invasion of Iraq, but it does not change the fact that Hargey has set himself outside the Muslim body, asserting that its practices and concerns are baseless, intending that those in power will listen to him and not to the rest of us.

Soumaya Ghannoushi, reacting to the Cameron speech and Policy Exchange report, had these fears:

So the Muslim will, under the Tories, have to face the state as a naked individual, without the protection of any community organisations, or lobbying groups to defend his/her interests. What other communities take for granted is thus deemed unacceptable and declared forbidden for Muslims. The truth is that, beautiful as it is, the notion of equal abstract citizenship is meaningless to the resident of a housing estate in Tower Hamlets, who is five times more likely to live in overcrowded accommodation than his “equal” fellow white citizens, four times more likely to be unemployed, twice as likely to have no qualifications, live in social rented accommodation, and suffer from ill health. In the real world, the equal citizen is little more than a sweet myth.

She noted that the report “lumps scores of vastly divergent positions together, democrats with theocrats, reactionaries with quietists, defenders of women’s rights with those opposed to them, all under the vague and misleading title of ‘Political Islam’” and that, as for the 37% of young Muslims who “expressed a desire to live under Sharia law”, what most Muslims understand by Shari’a is such things as eating Halal food, marrying according to Islam and having access to interest-free mortgages.

And this is what many Muslims look to community organisations to secure for them: allowances for religious needs in the education system, the workplace and in other areas of life, as well as a “talking head” to voice Muslim opinion. It does not mean we have to take orders from the MCB. That this organisation has its faults is well-known; it was dismissed by one writer in Q-News almost as soon as it was launched on the grounds of its leadership being made up of the same faces which keep appearing in the Daily Jang and condemned by letter-writers as having been hatched within the Home Office. However, quite unlike the “Sufi Muslim Council”, or the rump “Muslim Parliament” (or that organisation at any time in its history), let alone Taj Hargey’s “progressive” outfit, with its boasts of its media connections, it has some electoral legitimacy. Its list of affiliate Muslim organisations runs into the hundreds and include mosques, schools, ethnically-based groups and other organisations from right across the country; its committees and working bodies are elected by these affiliates. So naturally, it represents activists and the religious, who are those who are most in need of representing as Muslims, rather than on the basis of ethnicity or other distinction.

Much of the hostility towards the MCB, and other groups representing religious communities, comes from people hostile to religion itself and to anything a religious group might want, and there has been more than one attempt to deny the notion that a Muslim community might exist to talk to anyway. It’s true that the Muslim population is big, that we have many disagreements among ourselves and that, as you might expect, we do not all know each other. However, we have common beliefs and customs and by and large, when we meet and recognise each other as Muslims, we give each other the salaam and if we can talk about nothing else, we can talk about religion. This is part of what makes us a “Muslim community” and why people don’t talk of “the white community”, except perhaps where there is a white community which is not a local majority. As a religious community we have some needs which are not shared by the majority population but which really harm nobody to accommodate. If some of us choose not to be religious and thus do not need these things, this is their business. People attract the hostility of the Muslim community when they publically attack its values and claim that “real Muslims” do not wear hijab, do not care about halaal meat, are happy to shake hands with the opposite sex and do not care how foreign policy impacts on our brothers and sisters - by blood and by faith - overseas. These are the Uncle Toms, and minorities through the ages have had to deal with them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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