We don’t need a Gandhi
The Daily Telegraph last Saturday published a piece by Charles Moore, Where is the Gandhi of Islam?, containing an awful lot of waffle and a few plainly false assertions. The article basically casts doubt on the integrity of “moderate” Muslims and alleges that no specific denunciation has been forthcoming from Muslim leaders.
After a few introductory paragraphs about the “Blitz spirit” etc., Moore has a go at Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick for their attempts to disassociate Islam from last week’s terrorist attacks on London. In one case he makes a false extension and in the other he mistakes rhetoric for literal meaning.
His assessment of Livingstone’s speech from Singapore:
They were not, he said, attacks “against the mighty and the powerful”, but against “working-class Londoners”. Would they have been all right, one wondered, if they had been against the mighty and powerful, or if they had cleverly found a way of killing only middle-class Londoners?
Well, he didn’t say that, did he? His point was that the bombing may have seemed to its perpetrators to be a protest against the G8 or the war in Iraq, but in fact killed only innocent people. It was all the worse for the killing of innocent people with no connection to either. In the case of Paddick’s assertion that “Islam and terrorism don’t go together,” the obvious meaning was that Islam does not support this kind of action. The fact that Muslims can do this sort of thing doesn’t change that.
Even his comparison with the Irish situation (most Irish were not IRA, but nearly all the IRA were Irish) does not fully apply. The IRA appealed to certain sections of northern-Irish society (and southern-Irish society, to a lesser extent) and had a support network. It was also known for maintaining control of its constituency by intimidation and murder. This isn’t the case with the al-Qa’ida type of terrorist.
There were places in London where extremist ideologies were openly preached, but in the last few years the groups have been disrupted, their leaders jailed and the mosque they controlled returned to those who originally ran it. Most mosques, on the other hand, are dominated by communities originating in India or Pakistan. In some cases, their constitutions restrict membership to one sect or school of thought, as if to prevent infiltration and the taking-over of the mosque by members of another group, and one of the groups has been accused of kufr (disbelief) by at least one of the extremist ideologues.
On top of which, there is an important fact which would in fact dissuade ordinary Muslims, whatever their opinions about foreign policy, from supporting these terrorists, namely that they seem to display no concern whatsoever for the interests of the Muslims. They do not choose targets commonly seen as hostile to Muslims; in fact, Muslims may indeed have been deliberately targeted in this latest attack. If Muslims were responsible for this, it is clear that their intention is not to free Palestine or Iraq or Muslims anywhere. Their intention is to rule the Muslims.
Moore next moves onto an attempt to use out-of-context verses from the Qur’an to demonstrate that the nature of Islam makes Muslims susceptible to violence:
In Sura No 8, for example, God is quoted as saying: “I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, strike off the very tips of their fingers!” This punishment comes to them for having “defied God and His apostle”. It seems reasonable to ask Muslims what this sort of remark means in the modern world.
Well, the verse is clearly in the first person and therefore not an imperative. No doubt its context is an actual battle, and the difference between a battle and the bombing of a trainful of unsuspecting and non-hostile people should not need to be explained to anyone. Moore concedes that “similarly nasty dictums” are to be found in the Old Testament, but he believes that “it is surely significant that they are very much harder to find in the New Testament”. What does the New Testament say about war anyway? Not much in the way of legislation appears anywhere in the New Testament, the cause of an awful lot of the conflict which plagues the modern-day churches.
Moore seems to expect that Muslims embrace pacifism, something he displays no intention of advocating for his own race. He is displeased by the Muslim Council of Britain’s refusal to “condemn the killing of British troops in Iraq … in absolute terms”, which nobody can do, certainly no Muslim, because the British troops are an occupying force; they do not even have the dubious authority of the United Nations. If the attacks are by a terrorist organisation which wants to claim power in Iraq for itself to turn it into a socialist republic or an even more extreme variant of Saudi Arabia or Iran or to bring Saddam Hussain back, I would certainly oppose such actions (as well as all by the group concerned). But the fact is that being attacked is an occupational hazard for any occupying army.
He then resorts to a links-and-ties smear against Muhammad Abdul-Bari of East London Mosque, who welcomed the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca to the opening of the London Muslim Centre (the extension to the East London Mosque in Whitechapel). Sudais is reported to have delivered a sermon in Mecca a couple of years ago containing various derogatory remarks about Jews. It is quite possible that the mosque’s extension received Saudi assistance, which is the likely explanation for Sudais being invited to the opening. Sudais is a well-renowned Qu’ran reciter whose recitations can be bought on cassette or CD; it is likely that people enjoyed the opportunity to hear him recite in person.
As for his comments about Jews, the context of his sermon (such as what the Israeli government had been doing in the immediate period before) is missing, but he was most likely talking about the Israelis and their supporters. Arabs (I personally heard this for myself when in Egypt) refer to the Israelis as Bani Isra’il, the “children of Israel”, rather than by a phrase like Ahlu Ard Isra’il (the people of the land of Israel). This phrase does not, in itself, refer to Jews not of that lineage, or even to the land of Israel, but is commonly used for this purpose. “The Jews” is likewise used to refer to the state of Israel, is people, and its overseas support network. Saudi Arabia is nominally at enmity with Israel, although its contributions even when there were actual wars were limited. I agree that it’s not fitting sermon material, although one notes that MEMRI are not around to record what Israeli rabbis say about Arabs, and we are not told if and when these rabbis visit the UK.
Moore next brings up the wafflings of “Sheikh Dr Abdul-Qadir as-Sufi” in the Muslim Weekly. The Muslim Weekly is a thin volume which sells for 50p, whose editing standards have not always been very impressive. Abdul-Qadir, as Moore would have found out if he had done some very basic research, is a highly controversial character, at least among those who have even heard of him. His followers are nearly all converts, not Muslim immigrants or their descendents, and he lives in a part of Scotland which is extremely remote from any Muslim community. Some of his followers books (mostly translations of classical texts) are well-known, but Abdul-Qadir himself is a marginal figure. (The Qaradawi controversy has been dealt with before; I’m not going to rehash it here.)
Moore suggests two reasons why “many Muslim leaders appear unable or unwilling to break absolutely with the teachings that give cover to violence”: the fact that Islam is partly a political faith, and fear. The political aspects to Islam, he claims, are why “Muslim leaders find it very difficult to resist the hotheads who say that Sharia – the divine law – should be imposed wherever possible”. But the “hotheads” are not the people who say this; they are the people who make inflammatory and absurd claims and demands, who suggest that un-Islamic means (like blowing up trains and buses) are somehow justified by the ends, and condemn as “sell-outs” anyone with a conciliatory stance, even if this is only on a community relations level. Not renouncing an entire tranche of our religion is not the same thing as not being a hothead.
I should add, regarding Islam’s prohibition on non-Muslims residing permanently in the Arabian peninsula, that the region concerned is of limited value to non-Muslims. It is not fertile, and until the discovery of oil, the region was not rich; Alexander the Great famously abandoned his own attempt to conquer the territory.
Moore’s contention that Muslim leaders “cannot say very fierce things against the extremists” for fear of losing control over “their people”, or for fear of violence, is also baseless in my opinion. Numerous Muslim leaders have condemned all of the terrorist acts attributed to al-Qa’ida and similar groups without any disguise, and still walk the streets and turn up for the prayers they lead. These include acts the common people might have sympathised with (such as the bombings of US bases in Saudi Arabia), and Palestinian suicide bombings (some scholars agree with the tactic, others don’t). Mufti Barkatullah, in a speech given after the expulsion of Abu Hamza’s group from Finsbury Park mosque, spoke about the “physical and spiritual filth” they had introduced, and about how they had cursed the Saudi royal family from the pulpit after they had contributed to the mosque’s finances. You will not find many Muslims with any great sympathy or affection for the Saudi royals, but the mufti still walks the streets.
Next, we see what amounts to an advocacy of right-wing anti-immigration policies and an attack on recent sensitive policing policies. While I thoroughly disagree with ID cards, a policy targeted at “the usual suspects” (men with light-brown skins and beards) seems outdated given the suggestions that recent acts of terrorism appear to be the work of drug dealers who smoke and drink. One of the newspapers this morning even mentioned “white mercenaries” as possible culprits for last Thursday, meaning not that old-public-school-boy gang rotting in Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea, but white Muslims from the Balkans. Either way, an anti-terrorist policy which assumes the ordinary white bloke is not a terrorist because he’s an ordinary white bloke may be as ineffective as one which picks on an innocent Muslim because he seems a bit hostile (maybe he thinks you’re a dirty kafir, or maybe he just got out of the wrong side of the bed).
And what’s with these silly right-wing canards about it being too easy to get here through marriage, about our supposed ceding of asylum policy to the EU (fact: the UK is not in the Schengen treaty, and unlike many continental countries, you need a passport to go to other EU countries, except Ireland)? The fact is that people, of no apparent terrorist threat, experience considerable difficulty in obtaining residency through marriage (the ongoing saga of the Cable family is one example), and the Blair government has been willing to deport asylum seekers to such a plainly unsafe country as Zimbabwe. The UK has no excuse for not knowing who is in the country and who isn’t.
A number of accusations are made about the police’s policy on dealings with Muslims; if it really is ‘to seek the consent of those he supposes to be community leaders before “going in”‘, this would seem absurd if the suspicion is, say, an imminent terrorist threat. Some of it may be to do with simple community relations; if you cause offence to the religious sensibilities of an entire community, it may store up future hostility to the police which may surface when they need to know what led to a police officer being killed, for example. In fact, the police raided a mosque in 2002 to remove illegal immigrants, so it should not be doubted that they would do so if the suspicion was that guns or explosives were being stored there. (It stands to reason that Muslims, if they want to protect the sanctity of the mosque, should not use it for these purposes.)
The most important question is for Muslims, and the authorities’ attitude towards them. Embedded in modern government are too many advisers who believe in a quietist policy. To them, the most important thing is to avoid a “backlash” against Muslims. But the truth is that the backlash only threatens because the terror strikes.
By the same token, terror strikes only because of British or American foreign policy; this is an idea which earns much condemnation whenever it is raised in the media, particularly as it gives the impression of the person raising it harbouring some sympathy or glee. He next accuses the government, “mired in ignorance”, of having “little idea how to find the trends in Islam that could really improve the life of our country, and run with them”. The problem is that Muslims have made efforts to distance themselves from the aspects of British society which drag it down, but are routinely accused of separating themselves from society through such means as Islamic schools (and even homeschooling). There are aspects of Islam which could improve the life of this country, but they are not things which could be brought in by government: dressing decently, polite and appropriate conduct, respect for elders and other people generally.
Moore then makes a number of accusations about the community not doing enough to disassociate itself from its violent elements.
When did you last hear criticisms of named extremist groups and organisations by Muslim leaders, or support for their expulsion, imprisonment or extradition? How often do you see fatwas issued against suicide bombers and other terrorists, or statements by learned men declaring that people who commit such deeds will go to hell?
The Salafi Publications website, which represents western followers of the establishment scholars in Saudi Arabia, is full of condemnations of the extremist groups, some by name and some in general. I am not a “Salafi” myself and disagree with much (if not most) of its content, but most of the al-Qa’ida type of terrorist are “Salafi”, i.e. Wahhabi, by sect. The site also contains a piece by Ibn Uthaimeen (a senior Saudi establishment scholar who died a few years ago) condemning suicide bombers.
As for “support for their expulsion, imprisonment or extradition”, this requires that we jump to the conclusion that what the security services and politicians say is likely to be correct, and I’m sure Muslims are not alone in rejecting such assumptions. Even when I wrote my article on “Shaikh” Faisal, I sought assurance from a scholar that I would not be responsible for whatever harm Faisal might come to if, for example, he were to be deported to Jamaica.
When do Muslim leaders and congregations insist that a particular imam leave his mosque because of the poison that he disseminates every Friday?
Where do imams disseminate poision every Friday? Having never encountered a situation where this was happening, I can’t say if it would or wouldn’t happen. I don’t know of anywhere this has happened other than Finsbury Park.
When did a British Muslim last go after a Muslim who advocates or practises violence with anything like the zeal with which so many went after Salman Rushdie?
How do you mean “go after”? There were demonstrations over Rushdie’s book, but there were measured responses as well, and condemnations by Muslim organisations of Khomeini’s fatwa, which certainly succeeded in raising pro-Iranian sympathies among ordinary Muslims.
Why is not more stigma attached to the Muslims who are murdering other Muslims every day in Iraq and the Middle East?
What does Charles Moore know about what Muslims think of the various armed factions in Iraq who carry out acts of terrorism? A small fraction of Britain’s Muslim community are Iraqi – we do not have much knowledge about what goes on there other than that bombings take place on a regular basis. I should add that Muslims are generally distrustful of the media, and may suspect that the true nature of some of the armed factions is different to how the press portrays them. But that does not mean that a Muslim would not condemn outright atrocities, if he knew for certain that one had taken place.
What communal protection is offered to those Muslims who really are brave and confront Islamist violence, or the poor treatment of women, or call for democracy in the Middle East?
What evidence exists that any protection is needed? There is no history of assassinations or acts of sabotage among the Muslim community here, and very little in the USA (there was an incident in New York where an imam who opposed a particular sectarian group in the Lebanon was beaten up, but I can’t think of anything else). Websites like Muslim WakeUp! have caused much controversy and offence among even mainstream Muslims, but its authors are not under round-the-clock police protection to my knowledge.
How much do mainstream political parties with Muslim councillors and candidates really insist on their religious moderation and co-opt them to extrude the bad people lurking within their communities?
Very simply, extremists do not join political parties. Besides being opposed to democracy anyway, they regard these particular parties as the enemies of Islam, and Muslims who join as sell-outs and even apostates. Some of the Muslim politicians are not actually all that religious.
Towards the end, we have the old call for a “Gandhi” to appear among the Muslims:
When a nation, a race, a political movement, a group of workers, the followers of a religion have legitimate grievances, there generally arises amongst them a champion who can command respect for his advocacy of peace, his willingness to fight without weapons and to win by moral authority. There may be many such grievances for Muslims in Britain, and in the West, but we are still waiting for the Gandhi or the Martin Luther King to give them the right voice.
It may have escaped Moore’s attention, but there is no mass movement of any sort among British Muslims, so it appears that the community does not have the grievances necessary to sustain such a movement, violent or otherwise. History shows that non-violent resistance is sometimes effective (as in India), but sometimes it isn’t, and force is needed to expel or otherwise remove the offenders (as in Ethiopia and Romania). Even Martin Luther King said, “if your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi. But if you enemy has no conscience, like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer”, a Lutheran pastor executed for plotting to assassinate Hitler.
Our community leaders do not stand out as “non-violent resistance” leaders because there is no major violent tendency in the community here (and the small minority who may be sympathetic to the idea do not respect these community leaders anyway). We have been told since 9/11 that an attack has been inevitable, and it has indeed happened, but the Muslim community itself has not been a source of violence. There have been no attacks on targets hostile to Muslims (even in the Netherlands, there has been only one such incident), nor even campaigns of intimidation or sabotage similar to those of the animal rights movement. No, we have seen four random bombings, two of them in or near Muslim areas, with apparent Muslim casualties. So there is no reason why the fingers should be pointed at “the Muslim community”, given that we have no reason to support actions like this. If we are not forthcoming with information on the “terrorists in our midst”, it’s because they don’t tell us who they are.
(Update 16th July: a few months ago I heard a story on Radio 2’s morning thought slot about Badshah Khan, a Pathan Muslim contemporary of Gandhi who also advocated non-violence. The problem was that I thought he was saying “Pacha Khan”, and I did a Google search for him while planning this piece, but not suprisingly found nothing related to Badshah Khan. Thabet has an entry on him at his blog. The Radio 2 report interestingly mentioned a phenomenon Badshah Khan noticed which is still prevalent in our Ummah today: the tendency to ridicule and insult others’ religions, while taking grievous offence when non-Muslims ridicule ours. Does Allah ta’ala not tell us in the Qur’an not to curse others’ idols, lest they insult Allah in their ignorance?)
