{"id":182,"date":"2008-05-15T01:03:07","date_gmt":"2008-05-15T00:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2008\/05\/15\/challenging_the_future_with_a_profound_lack_of_history"},"modified":"2025-10-09T19:22:02","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T18:22:02","slug":"challenging_the_future_with_a_profound_lack_of_history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2008\/05\/15\/challenging_the_future_with_a_profound_lack_of_history","title":{"rendered":"Challenging the future with a profound lack of history"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week the Quilliam Foundation<\/a>, a think-tank founded by Ed Husain and his acolyte Maajid Nawaz, held its grand launch event at the British Museum in London. It was entitled "Reviving Western Islam & Uniting Against Extremism", and attended by, among other people, Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, Jemima Khan, Timothy Garton Ash, Dr Usama Hasan, Shaikh Abdul-Aziz Bukhari, Dr Musharraf Hussain of Nottingham (a prominent and fairly moderate Bareilawi imam), and Rachel North<\/a>, a prominent survivor of the 2005 London bombings. All the speeches, and the question-and-answer session afterwards, are now available to be watched online<\/a>. The first speech after the introduction was by Ghayasuddin Siddiqui<\/a>, and I intend to concentrate on that here. (More: Abu Eesa<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I have written about Ghayasuddin Siddiqui before; he was the leader of the Muslim Parliament, which was originally set up by Kalim Siddiqui and was part of what I call the Khomeini fan-club in London. It is best-known for supporting Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I am neither sympathetic towards Rushdie nor do I take the position that Shi'ites are infidels, but the Muslim Parliament and its related institutions were clearly a public relations effort on behalf of the Iranian regime in its effort to extend its influence over the Muslims outside Iran. Besides giving a spurious legitimacy to this outfit, he also turned up at “>"British Muslims for Secular Democracy"<\/a> along with Taj Hargey a couple of weeks ago.<\/p>\n

Siddiqui begins his speech on "The Need to Rid Ourselves of Islamism" by saying Islamism is a distortion of Islam, and thus must be rejected, and that Islam is a deen<\/em> (religion), not an ideology. He tells us that Islam involves belief in Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, who is the Creator of all children of Adam, who "does make any distinction", and that Islamists regard Him as "a private god, obedient to their wishes; if they like something, they can provide all kinds of justification to support that love and affection". The accusation against Islamists that they regard Allah ta'ala as "private" to them is absurd and scandalous, particularly if applied against all Islamists of whatever persuasion, and there are many, and the weird use of English reflects his lack of fluency in English. One would have thought that, having been in this country since the 1960s, he would have better command of English than he does, particularly as he is a public figure, or aspires to be.<\/p>\n

Siddiqui opined that the core values of an Islamic society are justice (adl), benevolence (ihsan), wisdom (hikma) and compassion (rahma), and that "whatever we do in life, that action has to be a middle path, not going either way into either extremes". Clearly he has misunderstood what the Middle Path in Islam means; the Middle Path is Islam itself. In most respects, Islam does indeed take a middle path between the strictures of some of the older book-based religions and, say, Christianity or modern secularism. Its rules on ritual purity, for example, are considerably less onerous than those of Judaism or Zoroastrianism, while those of some other faiths, notably Protestantism, and of none, have no concept of ritual purity at all.<\/p>\n

He states that mankind are all brothers and that neighbours have rights over us, but as an Islamist, his "priorities were different; Islam was an ideology", and he was on a mission to "create a 7th-century Arab society", because he believed that that was "the best exemplar of society", and to establish such a society, he was expected to use jihad against the non-believers, and as such he was expected to regard his neighbours as enemies unless they were Muslims. Islamists, he says, reject serving society in favour of dominating it. This is a huge generalisation; it may be true of some Islamists, but the rights of neighbours and the duties of Muslims towards them – in particular, to avoid being of grief or nuisance to them – are clearly laid down in the source texts of Islam.<\/p>\n

He then claimed that one thing which "decided the fate of Islam" was what happened in Moorish Spain in the 12th century, when people like Ibn Rushd (Averroes) declared that truth can be reached through human reason as well as by faith; Ibn Rushd allegedly "went on to say that we need to separate religion and politics, and secularism ought to have a space when it comes to public space" (sic). After 300 years, after much debate, he said, Europe accepted "the supremacy of human reason over faith", while the Muslims came to regard philosophers as enemies of Islam and concluded that "dogmatic faith should have precedence over human reasoning". Besides the dubious claim about Ibn Rushd, who was a well-regarded Maliki scholar and acted as a qadi<\/em> (Shari'a judge) in the sultanates of his time, the notion of "dogmatic faith" is problematic when applied to Islam. While we are commanded to believe in the Unseen, proof is a major component in faith also and has been since the beginning, when the character of the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam), whom nobody, not even Abu Jahl, would call a liar, was the foremost proof of his authority and authenticity. One could say that the western world rejected one set of dogmas in favour of another – that there is no Unseen and that whatever cannot be seen or measured is simply not there.<\/p>\n

The love Muslims have for the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam), he alleged, "gave rise to Salafism, and over 800 years, these ideas went through various avenues, even taking some of the ideas from Marxism, and eventually it gave rise to Islamism". This is a bizarre over-simplification of how modern Islamism appeared. He then places Islamism at "the root of our decline and irrelevance", when much of it in fact appeared after the political decline of the Muslims and the colonisation of our lands, not before. "Salafism", i.e. Wahhabism, appeared in the deserts of Najd and was propagated by one errant scholar and his disciples who were eventually crushed by the Ottomans; they were able to reappear and dominate the Arabian peninsula, and to profit from the oil supply and propagate their ideology overseas, particularly among the diaspora and some convert populations in the West, because the Ottomans had been defeated from without and then from within.<\/p>\n

Siddiqui seems not to notice the difference between the various modern forms of Islamism. The extreme Wahhabis and the likes of Osama bin Laden may be Islamists, but their attitudes and character are nothing like those of Hizb-ut-Tahreer, while the modern Muslim Brothers are different again, as are Jama'at-e-Islami. Many of them were in fact influenced by modern ideas, and most regarded many aspects of traditional Islam, such as the following of the four madhhabs and the prohibition of speaking ill of the First Generation, as partly responsible for an intellectual decline which led to a material and political decline. (Many traditionalists today would counter that, on the contrary, not spending too much time discussing matters of religion that were settled centuries ago actually frees Muslims for other intellectual endeavours.)<\/p>\n

Siddiqui's poor grasp of Muslim history and scholarship have been displayed on previous occasions: for example, in a speech at SOAS in 2006, he talked of Islamists wanting to return to a "pure Islam" based on 7th-century Mecca, when in fact the first genuine centre of Islamic civilisation was Madinah. Even so, most of them would not reject most of the material advances that separate modern civilisation from 7th-century Arabia; even though they might live for a while in a camp in the desert or the mountains, they would prefer to go back to a house which had running water and electricty, and an Internet connection. Many of them embrace constitutional government (Hizb-ut-Tahreer have actually published a draft Islamic constitution) and not all of them reject participation in a non-Islamic democratic system.<\/p>\n

Of course, Siddiqui's playing fast and loose with history in his speech fits in perfectly with the entire modus operandi<\/em> of the Quilliam Foundation and those behind it going back to 2006 when "Ed" Husain first raised his head on DeenPort. They have misrepresented their so-called allies, having claimed at least four "advisers"<\/a> who turned out not to be (they have now taken their list of "advisers" off their website altogether); they have misrepresented their critics, claiming that the response to their efforts has consisted of threats and abuse, and largely ignoring the cogent criticism; and they have been content to be presented as brave Muslims who speak out against Islamism, capitalising on the desire of many non-Muslims to see such people in the wake of the 2005 bombings, which had nothing to do with the group they are most concerned with, when in fact many Muslims have been working within the community against all of those elements for years; and to top it all they have even misrepresented the man whose name they appropriated<\/a>. I am sure they have many perfectly sincere fellow travellers, but they should be warned that the Quilliam clique's credibility with the Muslims is very, very low indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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