No platform for religious conservatives

A few days ago I posted an entry on Yusuf al-Qaradawi, whose meeting with the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and subsequent defence of it, has produced an awful lot of controversy. I reject most of the accusations against Yusuf al-Qaradawi; his “extreme” views are fairly common in the Muslim world, except that unlike religious scholars from the Indian subcontinent, Arab society has been tested on these issues. I mentioned that he represents an ethnic minority within London’s Muslims – the Arabs who dominate west and central London rather than the Asians who predominate elsewhere – so that he might not be the most representative, and this was repeated by “david t” of Harry’s Place, on both that blog and on Crooked Timber. That paragraph was used to justify their position on al-Qaradawi, despite the fact that any Islamic scholar would have similar views (and would not condemn al-Qaradawi for his comments on suicide bombing; it’s a scholarly difference of opinion).

Peter Tatchell (the well-known gay activist) has a piece in this week’s New Statesman, which for some reason hasn’t made it into the online edition. (It may turn up on Tatchell’s website after a while, when this week’s NS is last week’s.) In the first paragraph, he calls al-Qaradawi “a Muslim cleric who says that the Asian tsunami victims were punished by Allah because their countries are centres of perversion”. He quotes the shaikh as saying:

“Whoever examines these areas discovers that they are tourism areas … where the forbidden acts are widespread, as well as alcohol consumption, drug use and acts of abomination … and sexual perversion … Don’t they deserve punishment from Allah?”

I did a search on Google for the phrase qaradawi tsunami “tourism areas” – which would return all the articles Google knows of with the two single words and the phrase “tourism areas”. I got 176 entries, from all manner of sources: This is Local London, the Hillingdon Times, the Harrow Times, the Richmond and Twickenham Times, Israellycool, Out in Seattle, Out in Atlanta, Out in Oklahoma City … but not one from an Islamic website. They claim it’s from a broadcast on Dubai TV. Well, I don’t have the time to go through all 176 of these articles, but a fair number of them quote these words from the Times, a London-based Murdoch broadsheet. (Yes, I know he’s not Jewish.)

Tatchell goes on with the familiar story about how Livingstone welcomed the shaikh as an “honoured guest” at London City Hall last July. “He dismissed the concerns of a coalition of Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Christians, homosexuals, humanists, women, students and refugees from Islamist repression,” alleges Tatchell. As we have seen, four of the signatories (three from Iran and one from Iraq) are Communists known for their hostility to Islam itself, not to “reactionary” or “radical” Islam. Livingstone also alleged that several of the Sikh organisations had distanced themselves from the dossier over its claims that al-Qaradawi favours forced conversions to Islam. (Who are these Hindus anyway? I wonder if any of them are connected with the Sangh Parivar mafia …) I’d like to draw attention to the stupidity of filling a PDF file with images of text, rather than text itself, which is what turns the “London Community Coalition” dossier to which Tatchell refers into a 38.9 megabyte download, and makes it impossible to search for text.

Tatchell calls the shaikh an “extreme right-wing Islamist”, as if to place him in the same bracket as the European far right, which is an enormous calumny. The main characteristics of the European far right are extreme nationalism and/or racism, and authoritarianism. Islamists, whatever else they are accused of, cannot be accused of racism, and despite the well-known distrust of democracy, we do not favour the personality-cult authoritarianism associated with fascism. Shaikh al-Qaradawi is a religious conservative, perhaps at the liberal end of that spectrum. I disagree with his statement, if he made it, that “rape victims who do not dress with sufficient modesty” are wholly or partly to blame for what they suffer; but the belief that the prevalence of indecent public dress contributes to the high occurrence of rape is a reasonable one.

I should add that the controversy over female circumcision has arisen only because of what we know of extreme forms which go on in places like Sudan and Somalia, and the dirty equipment sometimes used to perform the operation. Western feminists are aghast at all of it, of course, but what Islamic scholars approve of is minor forms of circumcision. (As for wife-beating, I’ve mentioned here before that a man hitting a grown woman is no worse than a grown woman hitting a small child – it’s certainly a fairer fight, if it comes to a fight. The latter is widely accepted, but they suggest that someone be ostracised for approving of the former?)

There’s a piece in this month’s Ecologist by Aidan Rankin, a gay ex-UKIP member, advocating the formation of a new Ecology Party. The current Green Parties have become, he says, “an appendage of the left’s culture of protest and authoritarian group-think”. He uses as an example the Greens’ recent participation in the campaign to block the appointment of a conservative Catholic, Rocco Buttiglione, as European commissioner for justice:

In the Buttiglione affair, the Green MEPs [Members of the European Parliament] displayed an essentially totalitarian attitude towards the human person. They assumed that personally held, religiously-based views preclude an objective approach to issues of discrimination. This is to acknowledge a concept of ‘thought crime’ and make a presumption of guilt rather than innocence. Furthermore, the Green stance mistakes for objectivity the highly subjective, one-sided claims of left-wing activism. … Buttiglione became the foil for a campaign of invective not against conservative or fundamentalist religion but religious belief in general. This inflexible variant of secularism discriminates against millions of European citizens and runs counter to the original Green approach, which was to reconcile politics with the spiritual impulse in its broadest sense.

It seems the same attitudes are at play in the Qaradawi affair: a chorus of people demand that he be shut out, mostly for holding rather traditional views on moral issues. The National Union of Students (and probably other unions) has a policy known as “no platform for fascists”, and bizarrely, the entries on this subject at Harry’s Place appear in the Anti-Fascism category. It’s worrying, to say the least, that traditional religious positions are being equated with fascism.