Al-Muhajiroun back with a vengeance
I had prepared an article on yesterday’s fiasco at Central Mosque in London in which, it seems, former members of al-Muhajiroun disrupted a presentation by the Muslim Council of Britain and assaulted Iqbal Sacranie. I actually deleted that article, but after being requested by sister Aicha, I’ve decided to write another, insha Allah. Today, the papers are reporting a similar performance in east London, in which George Galloway was attacked and Oona King’s car vandalised. The culprits are said to be the same or similar people.
These people appear to have been members of the so-called Saviour Sect, which itself appears to be the regrouping of members of al-Muhajiroun which was disbanded by its founder, Omar Bakri Muhammad, earlier this year. The group has a higher profile than its membership would merit, due to its high-profile stunts, posters stuck over public property (a writer in Q-News a few years ago called them morons, and suggested that they put their posters inside the bins rather than on them), and the continual invites Omar Bakri got to air his views in the media.
That group staged an earlier stunt at Central Mosque in which flour and eggs were thrown over the Lib Dem mayoral candidate Susan Kramer a few years ago. But ruining somebody’s clothes is a whole different story from actually assaulting somebody. Of course, Sacranie is entitled to retaliate – if not in this world then in the Next. I should add that a lot of Muslims have a low opinion of Sacranie and his council. Several of them are known to be of one particular ethnicity – the Memons of Gujarat. But nobody else has seen fit to attack them physically.
The so-called Saviour Sect’s website has all the stamps of al-Muhajiroun, right down to the slogans. Ironically, it appears to be al-Muhajiroun without what may come to be seen as Omar Bakri’s moderating influence. The old slogans, which they used to stick on lamp-posts and other public furniture on such places as London Road in Croydon, are still there: “Vote today, Hellfire tomorrow”. They have a whole list of so-called munaafiqeen (hypocrites or dissemblers): the MCB (they say the M stands for Mushrik, meaning pagan, instead of Muslim), the Muslim Association, MPAC UK, Islamic Society of Britain, al-Muntada, the “fake Salafis”, Respect (“Kaafir hypocrites”), CAIR and numerous other associations. Stop Political Terror, a Muslim group which campaigns against excesses in anti-terror enforcement, are described as “very close to becoming Munaafiqeen”. Some of these people are in the forefront of campaigning for the rights of Muslims and against anti-Muslim violence; some, indeed, are regularly accused of being extremists.
Might I also add that the very name reflects their poor command of English – “Saviour Sect” should read “Saved Sect” (in Arabic, al-Firqat an-Najiya) and refers to the group of Muslims whose beliefs are correct. This is only one of a number of tiny groups which claim this title and consign the entire rest of the Muslim community to Hellfire – the others include groups identified as “fake Salafis” in the list I just mentioned.
I’d also voice my doubts that these are members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Hizb-ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) are a political party, and while banned by several dictatorships in the Arab world, they are legal in the UK. If they really were involved in terrorism, they could easily have been banned when their activities became known in the mid-1990s during the campus controversies. The activist youths left along with Omar Bakri to join al-Muhajiroun; the pseudo-intellectuals are the people left in HT. I’ve met a few of them and they are often obnoxious, but they don’t go in for these types of stunts or attacks.
Opposition to voting has long been a key plank of all of these groups’ ideologies, although it’s reported that HT has softened its stance lately. The stance is based solely on interpretations they themselves support, such as the notion that voting carries an implicit bay’ah (allegiance) towards the British state or monarch (as a lifelong British citizen, I’ve never been asked about my allegiance). Among the slogans we’ve seen since the recent wars began are “don’t stop the war – except by Islamic politics”, rightfully dismissed by the community since “Islamic politics” are not available to us right now. We have to use what is there. A lot of Muslims have in the past not voted, either here or in other countries, because they saw candidates and parties who were as bad as each other; Shaikh Hamza Yusuf remarked in his speech to ISNA that, until last November’s presidential election, he had never seen any such election as important, and an article posted at the marriage-oriented site Zawaj.com called the 2000 Bush-Gore election a contest between “president Bad” and “president Wicked”. And even in this election, some Muslims will be influenced by issues like taxes and education rather than the war in Iraq – after all, the last Tory government went to war in Iraq as well.
This year, the voting campaigns are targeted at constituencies, rather than encouraging Muslims to vote for individuals in their constituencies rather than for parties, since after all, our system works seat-by-seat rather than on a whole-country basis. I think a Labour victory would be preferable (let’s face it, a Lib Dem victory is not on the cards, although I could be wrong), but a few bloody noses and a reduced majority, getting rid of the marginal “Blair’s babes”, would be no bad thing.
