Indigo Jo Blogs

Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective

Hunt down the Sufis?

by · 17th December, 2007

David T today posted an alert at Harry’s Place about an article at MPACUK calling on Muslims to expose 8 so-called Sufis who did the “research” on which the recent Policy Exchange report relied. Those involved were unable to comment for the Newsnight expose, which showed that some (but not all) of the receipts were not genuine, because they were on a religious retreat in Mauritania. MPACUK’s tone is typically harsh:

You would have to be sitting in a darkened room repeating the name of Allah since 7/7 to be unaware that the new front against Muslims by the Government is being led by Sufi cults.

It’s an old Russian trick, they used Sufi sects to pacify the Mujahadeen who were fighting for their freedom from occupation. These Sufi cults taught them to forget the world and be content sitting in darkened rooms repeating the name of Allah over and over and over again. The British used it in India too, creating groups who focused on every minor ritual and repeated the words ‘no politics’ over and over and over again…anyone guess who they are? …

However as we have been reporting on this website, Newsnight uncovered that these Sufi researchers had in fact forged the receipts to prove the case.

These Sufi researchers then fled the country to Mauritania for what the Zio-Con think tank called ‘religious purification’!

MPAC now wants to find out exactly who these Sufis are, who are working for the Zio-Con think tank. There were 8 Sufis who worked for them, and all apparently have gone abroad to hide while the storm is raging. They worked, according to Policy Exchange for over a year on the project, so some Muslim out there must have come into contact with them.

Who are they, what are their backgrounds … MPACUK will dig deeper and expose every last detail of the Sufis who tried to destroy their own community.

David T compares MPACUK’s call to the racist website Redwatch, which gives names and addresses of so-called enemies of their so-called struggle; people identified on the site have been attacked and one person was nearly blinded. From my experience of MPACUK, I strongly suspect that no such thing will happen as a result of this; after all, all these people did was buy books from the mosque bookshop, as probably many people have done over the years; they may well have paid only one visit to the mosques concerned. I would not mind knowing myself who the “researchers” were, although I do not want to see their addresses made public. I do not support vigilantism, but I would like to know if there are people in whose company I have to be careful of what I say, lest he twist my words and use them against me later. However, I do not want to see a wave of mutual suspicion with Muslims accusing each other of being “Zionists” or spies, as I was by some of them a year or so ago.

I find the Mauritania story, in any case, not all that believable. I find it difficult to believe that people sufficiently attached to Islam to go to Mauritania for any religious purpose - the rural areas, in particular, are not easy places to live - would snoop on other Muslims and pass their findings onto an organisation as biased against Muslims as Policy Exchange is well-known to be. If they did have Muslim, or “Muslimoid”, researchers, I suggest they may well have been Bareilawi sectarians, people attached to Schwartz and Alawi, or even Qadianis or other un-Islamic elements. The country is best known as the source of Shaikh Hamza Yusuf’s shaikh, Murabit al-Hajj, and one of the teachers at his academy in California, namely Abdullah bin Bayyah, and some of them took part in the recent Radical Middle Way lecture tour.

MPACUK’s tirade about “Sufi Zio-Con Frauds” displays their usual ignorance and recklessness about condemning other Muslims. Most Muslims in this country, particularly those of Indian Subcontinental backgrounds, are if not “Sufis” then followers of tendencies of which Sufism is part. These include both Bareilawis and Deobandis. The MPACUK article calls them “Sufis” over and over again as if this was what motivated them to snoop and spy for Policy Exchange, but the majority of Muslims, whether attached to a Sufi shaikh or not, would not even consider helping an anti-Muslim organisation attack Muslims. The majority would condemn such an act.

Among the idiotic claims in this report is this:

The Sufi Muslim council are the recognisable face of the new Government appointed cults. However there are many Sufi groups operating throughout Britain doing work to pacify the Muslim mind.

The reality is that the SMC is an outfit whose membership could probably fit on one piece of furniture, headed by Haras Rafiq, a nonentity until he popped up on Panorama in 2005. I very much doubt that they have (or, as I should perhaps say, that he has) any links with any of the “Sufi” groups in the UK, other than what exists of the US-based Hisham Kabbani group. The other Sufi groups do not “pacify the Muslim mind” but seek to train and purify them, to perfect Muslims’ faith and attachment to Islam. They do not, at least not all, instruct Muslims not to be active in their community, even if they do not stand up and shout and wave their arms around so we know who they are. As for the “old Russian trick” accusation, while there may have been Sufi groups which collaborated with the Russians, it is well-known that they helped keep Islam alive in areas where Muslims were being persecuted under Soviet rule.

This affair has confirmed some Muslims’ view of the entire group of Muslims following shaikhs like Hamza Yusuf and Nuh Keller, and others who participated in Radical Middle Way and those around them in the Muslim world, as a government project, when it originated as a grass-roots movement among English-speaking Muslim youth in the 1990s (I must say I had my doubts about RMW myself, because it would encourage precisely this suspicion). The truth is that there is no evidence that Policy Exchange’s informants were part of the movement, or that the movement endorses it (I do not believe it does). There is no excuse for blaming Sufism for activity which may possibly come out of a group which uses Sufism as a means of achieving dominance over, or the status of spokesman for, the Muslims but which has no connection with authentic Sufism at all. Whether deliberately or thoughtlessly, MPACUK has, once again, slandered a whole swathe of the Muslim community.

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