Londonistan

by Melanie Phillips

  The response to the show was, however, remarkable. The MCB’s public affairs officer, Inayat Bunglawala, who had attempted to dismiss his own anti-Jewish remarks as “youthful indiscretions,” now wrote: “The Panorama team is more interested in furthering a pro-Israeli agenda than assessing the work of Muslim organisations in the UK. . . . The BBC should not allow itself to be used by the highly placed supporters of Israel in the British media to make political capital out of the July 7 atrocities in London.”43

  There were no such links to Israel; indeed, the director and reporter on this show were not Jews. So much for the Muslim representative organization considered to be “moderate” by the British establishment.

  The essence of a “moderate” attitude in a minority is that it is prepared to live as a minority, to subscribe to the overarching values and institutions of the state while practicing its own culture in the private sphere. British Muslims, however, are increasingly pushing for their culture to be highly visible and given parity in the public sphere. Halal meals and separate prayer rooms are now commonplace throughout British institutions. At the University of Newcastle, the Islamic society persuaded the students’ union to back their demand for Friday afternoon teaching to be rescheduled around prayer times in accordance with “the right to education without discrimination against religious needs.”44 At the University of Leicester, Muslim students asked for halal food and were told they could have their very own café. Elsewhere in the city, municipal swimming pools provide separate women’s sessions and even a separate session for women to swim fully clothed in chadors. When sporting or music activities are planned, some Muslim groups say they don’t want men and women to sit or participate in the activity together. Meetings held in public buildings are sometimes divided by screens so that women are separated from men.45 No other minority group has asked for such privileges. That is because they run counter to the normal relationship between British society and its minority groups. While minorities are free to pursue their own customs, they do not expect public services available to all to be adapted to their requirements, let alone encourage a form of separate development.

  In many areas, old churches, public houses or other buildings are being bought by Muslims and converted into mosques, along with brand new mosques that are springing up, backed by the kind of international funds that no other faith groups can command—mosques which sometimes promulgate clearly dubious attitudes.

  In June 2004, the New London Muslim Centre opened in east London. With room for ten thousand worshippers, it was said to be one of the largest Islamic cultural centers in Europe. Among those leading Friday prayers at its opening was one Sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Sudais. This gentleman has distinguished himself in the past by calling for violence against Christians, Hindus and Americans. He has also called the Jews “calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers . . . the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs. . . . These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil, and corruption.”46 No one in the wider community saw fit to comment on the propriety of inviting such an individual. Virtually no one even knew of his record.

  There are now proposals to build a massive mosque beside the Olympic complex in London for the 2012 Olympic Games. The mosque is planned to hold seventy thousand people, only ten thousand fewer than the Olympic Stadium, and would become the “Muslim quarter” for the Games. The cultural significance and symbolism of a project on this scale are unmistakable. It would make the most powerful statement possible, on the back of the high-visibility Games, about the primacy of Islam in Britain. That is why it is being proposed. “It will be something never seen before in this country. It is a mosque for the future as part of the British landscape,” said Abdul Khalique, a senior member of Tablighi Jamaat, which is behind the proposal.47

  Tablighi Jamaat is often described as a “worldwide Islamic missionary group” and is said to be pacific and apolitical. Two years ago, according to the New York Times, a senior FBI antiterrorism official claimed it was a recruiting ground for al-Qaeda. The counterintelligence expert Alex Alexiev characterizes Tablighi Jamaat as a driving force of Islamic extremism and a major recruiting agency for terrorist causes worldwide.

  For a majority of young Muslim extremists, he says, joining Tablighi Jamaat is the first step on the road to extremism. Perhaps 80 percent of the Islamist extremists in France come from Tablighi ranks, prompting French intelligence officers to call Tablighi Jamaat the “antechamber of fundamentalism.” U.S. counterterrorism officials are increasingly adopting the same attitude. “We have a significant presence of Tablighi Jamaat in the United States,” the deputy chief of the FBI’s international terrorism section said in 2003, “and we have found that al-Qaeda used them for recruiting now and in the past.”48 Is this really what Britain wants to symbolize its culture at the 2012 Olympics?

  But then, Britain is sleepwalking into its relentless transformation. In 1980, the Islamic Council of Europe published a book called Muslim Communities in Non-Muslim States, which explained the Islamic Agenda in Europe. When Muslims lived as a minority, it said, they faced theological problems, because classical Islamic teaching always presupposed a context of Islamic dominance. The book told Muslims to organize themselves with the aim of establishing a viable Muslim community, to set up mosques, community centers and Islamic schools. The ultimate goal of this strategy was that the Muslims should become a majority and the entire nation be governed according to Islam.49

  By no means all British Muslims would support such a plan. Nevertheless, it was surely an unfortunate oversight that such a conference proclaiming such an intention in London, and with a sizeable Muslim community in Britain, should have been paid no attention whatsoever by the host community. For there is evidence that some of the stages of such a strategy are indeed being implemented, and that a majority of British Muslims want—if not that the “entire nation be governed according to Islam”—at least a parallel legal and cultural system of their own.

  A poll conducted by the Guardian newspaper found that 61 percent of British Muslims wanted to be governed by Islamic law, operating on Sharia principles—“so long as the penalties did not contravene British law.” A clear majority wanted Islamic law introduced into Britain in civil cases relating to their own community. In addition, 88 percent wanted to see British schools and workplaces accommodating Muslim prayer times as part of their normal working day.50

  The Association of Muslim Lawyers went even further, saying that it wanted formal recognition of a Muslim man’s right under Sharia law to have up to four wives. Ahmad Thomson, a member of the AML, said: “Under the Human Rights Act they actually have a right to live and practise as Muslims and part of that is having this principle recognised by the law of the land.”51 Thomson, who has given the Blair government legal advice on official recognition of the Sharia legal system, is now one of the advisers to the British government on dealing with Muslim extremism.

  As government officials noted, “There are tentative moves towards developing Islamic jurisprudence for Muslims living in Europe and the Western World.”52 This, however, has drawn no adverse comment from the host community on the grounds that such moves might undermine social cohesion and the common values of British citizenship. Indeed, there has been no discussion of it at all, even though the aims of the Islamic Sharia Council—the Muslim body that is developing claims for such a parallel jurisprudence—could not be plainer. The council says on its website that it wants Parliament “to take into consideration the Islamic point of view in their legislation in at least the field of family law,” which it claims is a right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.53 But no other minority has ever required the host community to adapt its laws to that minority.

  Although there is at present no question of English family law being so adapted, there is a slow acceptance of a parallel jurisdiction taking place. After considerable Muslim lobbying, maj
or banks now offer non-interest-based, Sharia-compliant “Islamic mortgages.” This is even though the European Council for Fatwa and Research, which recommended that Muslims use Islamic alternatives to forbidden usury, nevertheless also ruled that Muslims could buy houses using interest-based mortgages according to the ancient Islamic edict that “it is permissible for Muslims to trade with usury and other invalid contracts in countries other than Islamic countries.” The implication, according to the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, is that Sharia-compliant mortgages are a political maneuver to create a separate Islamic space in Britain.54

  If so, the British authorities are falling over themselves to help this process along. The Inland Revenue revealed that, after representations from Muslims, it was considering recognizing polygamy for tax purposes. Existing rules allow only one wife for inheritance tax purposes. Officials have agreed to consider relaxing this rule to allow a Muslim with up to four wives to divide his estate between them.55

  And while polygamy is not recognized in English law, Britain is turning a blind eye to the practice. Muslim men are entering into polygamous marriages by going through mosque ceremonies not recognized under English law. This leaves many such “wives” in a parlous state, with no rights to their husband’s income, pension, benefits or share of the family home should the relationship break up.

  There are British Muslims who are deeply opposed to this and are campaigning to have it stopped. Dr. Ghayasuddin Siddiqui of the Muslim Institute says he wants imams to be prevented from carrying out a marriage service unless they have also seen the certificate from the civil ceremony.56 But those Muslims who actually want to subscribe to British norms find that the British are busy tearing them up. Resistance to acknowledging polygamy, for example, is being made very much more difficult by the fact that in the wider community having multiple sexual partners, along with having multiple babies by different fathers or mothers, is now commonplace and even regarded as normal. Why, then, should a minority feel expected to toe a cultural line that is fast disappearing?

  In February 2006, Dr. Patrick Sookdheo, director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, warned that the day was coming when Islamic communities in Britain would form “a state within a state.” He said he believed that “in a decade, you will see parts of English cities which are controlled by Muslim clerics and which follow, not the common law, but aspects of Muslim Sharia law. It is already starting to happen—and unless the Government changes the way it treats the so-called leaders of the Islamic community, it will continue. . . . The more fundamentalist clerics think that it is only a matter of time before they will persuade the Government to concede on the issue of Sharia law. Given the Government’s record of capitulating, you can see why they believe that.”57

  As in so many areas of contemporary British life, truly moderate Muslims are finding that the host community is cutting the ground from under their feet and delivering them into the hands of the extremists by its refusal to hold the cultural line. According to Dr. Siddiqui, most Muslims have never discussed whether they want Sharia law or not. Often, he says, they don’t understand what issues like this are actually about. British Muslims need guidance from the majority, he says, to show them what proper minority status requires of them.58

  But Britain is not giving them such guidance because it no longer seems to know whether it wants to be a majority culture. Indeed, Britain is making it more and more difficult for itself even to study the faith at the core of this particular minority in an objective fashion. In its willingness to tear up its own tenets in the scramble to appease Muslim demands, it is destroying one of the cardinal rules of secular scholarship. When religion is taught at university level, a crucial issue for teachers is to explain how scriptures are situated in their historical context. A number of academics, however, report that this is fast becoming impossible. Because of Muslim sensitivities, they cannot teach historical criticism of the Koran.

  According to Professor Alan Billings, who teaches religious studies at Lancaster University, students would normally be made aware of the origins of the sacred texts and the history and development of the faith, the notion that there is a history and a development, and that people don’t necessarily believe in the same way that they did in earlier centuries. “But with the Koran this is totally avoided,” he said. “It is presented instead as if it has immediate and direct relevance, so you read off from that document into your present situation.”

  In other words, British universities are teaching the Koran not as an objective and detached analysis of a religion, as would be the case with teaching any other religion, but from the perspective of the most obscurantist believer that it is true and not open to challenge. So British universities, the supposed stewards of rationality, have been suborned into becoming instead tools of religious indoctrination. And any backsliding into the realm of objective scholarship is punished.

  “I was once teaching an undergraduate course on the subject of Islam and women,” said Professor Billings. “I wanted to go back to the Prophet, but this was thought irreligious and blasphemous because it dealt with concubines and sex with children. On another occasion, I remarked that suicide bombers posed a real problem because normal constraints don’t apply if you think your death will lead to God. For this, I was reported to the vice-chancellor, who told me to back off.”59

  As Lamin Sanneh has written, British Muslims have resolved to make Islam count in the public realm, in schools and universities, the upbringing of children, marriage, divorce, property, inheritance, taxation, banking and trade, and to give the state a role in enforcing religious laws including rules against blasphemy. The secular state thus qualifies, he says, as a kind of surrogate Sharia institution. And so the public space abandoned by Christianity is filled.60 By no means all Muslims want this to happen. A growing number of them are actually rather keen on benefiting from the personal freedoms and tolerance that are the British way. The problem is that the British no longer appear to agree.

  · CHAPTER SIX ·

  SCAPEGOATING THE JEWS

  In the attempt to establish whether “moderate” Muslim attitudes are truly moderate, there is one infallible litmus test that can be used. It is the attitude to Israel and the Jews. This issue is absolutely fundamental to understanding the terrorist threat against the Western world. Tragically, however, Britain has completely misunderstood it and consequently negated the message that it carries.

  Many, if not most, people in Britain—certainly, the majority of the educated classes—believe that Israel is at the root of the terrorist threat. So it is—but not in the way they think it is. They have got it totally backwards. And this crucial error is preventing them from properly understanding the Islamist threat to themselves.

  Many people in Britain think like this: They are aware that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is a principal and incendiary grievance among Muslims. They have a great deal of sympathy with this grievance. They think the root of it is that the Palestinians have been prevented from having a state of their own by Israel, which oppresses them. They believe it is this apparent injustice that is fueling the Muslim animus against the West. The United States has made itself into the principal target for Islamist aggression, they go on, only because of its slavish support for Israel in pursuing this agenda of stifling the Palestinians. That was why, after 9/11, there was a groundswell of feeling in Britain that the Americans “had it coming to them.”

  This analysis, which is based on widespread and profound ignorance of the history of the Middle East, is warped out of all recognition. In the vacuum created by the combination of this knowledge deficit and the contemporary inability to distinguish between truth and lies, the British have largely swallowed Muslim and Arab propaganda, which has denied historical evidence, replaced it by mythology, lies and libels, and reversed victim and oppressor in the Middle East conflict. As a result, the British have come to believe that Israel is the oppressor and the
Arabs are its victims. This is a total reversal of the historical reality that Israel has been the target of annihilatory aggression by the Arab world without remission since the institution of the Jewish state in 1948, as the Jews of Palestine were the same target in the decades before its creation.

  The British also think that Jews and Muslims coexisted perfectly well until Israel was created. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The only circumstances in which Muslims have been content to live alongside Jews are where Jews have been a powerless minority within an Islamic society. Muslim hostility to Israel is rooted in Muslim hostility to Jews. Drawing on a theological animosity, it is based on the belief that the Jews are a Satanic force and a conspiracy to destroy Islam and rule the world; and that, since the Jews control Western society, it follows that Israel is the forward flank of the West’s attempt to subjugate Muslims everywhere.

  At the core of the Arab and Muslim fight against Israel, therefore, lies a visceral hatred and prejudice towards the Jewish people. Given the belief that the Jews rule the West and want to take over the world, the hatred of the Jews and of Israel lies at the heart of the hatred of the West. It is not that Israel’s behavior has inflamed the jihad against the West (although it is certainly used to whip up hysteria and thus recruitment). It is rather that the jihad, which views the West as a threat to Islam, sees Israel’s existence as living, breathing proof of the Western and Jewish intention to rule the planet. The battle with Israel is thus conceived as a metaphysical struggle between good—the Islamic world—and evil—the Jewish-backed Western world. Israel’s struggle to defend itself against this monstrosity is therefore the West’s struggle to defend itself against the same monstrosity.