On the subject of responsibility
Zaki Badawi, the UK media’s second favourite Islamic scholar after Omar Bakri, has been quoted in the media as saying that perhaps Muslim ladies should remove their hijabs, given the present volatile situation. I have to say that my heart sank when this report hit the news; while in extreme circumstances women are allowed to remove their hijabs, those we live in now are far from those circumstances. There has been a single incident, in Nottingham, of a Muslim male being killed; a few other isolated reports of harrassment. We don’t have a situation of persistent violence against Muslims. (As an example of the sort of violence I’m talking about, after the Gujarat “riots” of 2002, Muslims were afraid to be identified as Muslims in public, lest they were murdered in the streets. They even had to teach their children not to use the Muslim words for mum and dad while out in the street.)
What we have seen is a spate of proclamations intended to whip up anger against Muslims – demands for Muslims to “offer allegiance” or else leave, and calls to shore up some sort of “British identity”. These are mostly coming from the Tory party and its press – alhamdu lillah, we have already had the General Election and it may be nearly five years before that miserable bunch can hope to gain power.
As Abu Easa points out over at IslamiBlog, much of the bigotry is aimed at Asians generally and not just at Muslims, and much of it is just what people feel they have an excuse to express, rather than resentment inspired by the bombings. But Muslims have fought hard to gain acceptance for the way our women dress. To withdraw from this now may well result in it becoming permanently lost. Muslims need to be very responsible about this kind of issue – given the current talk about “integration”, this could well become an excuse for anti-hijab actions.
While still on the subject of irresponsible statements, MPAC UK earlier this week published an article by one James A David, about how US support for Israel contributes to terrorism. They accompanied this with a graphic of a satanic character peering out from under a US flag. A little bit of investigation by one of the guys who writes for Harry’s Place revealed that this graphic came from a neo-Nazi website called Global Fire. MPAC UK explains this by saying that the image was turned up by a Google Images search and the person who posted the article didn’t check where it came from. David T today posted another example of “the sort of stuff MPACUK ‘accidentally’ puts on its website, through no fault of its own” – an article culled from David Irving’s website.
Brothers, please read this carefully. Our community needs good public relations at the moment – we don’t need the people who are trying to do this for us messing it all up by being careless about where they get their material from. Do we want to go down the same route as the US where CAIR, MPAC et al are continually accused of having links to Hamas or al-Qa’ida? If you want to represent us in the media, check your material with great care and if it turns out to come from a neo-Nazi or similar website, don’t post it.
