Anya Hart Dyke
I’d never been inside a mosque in Britain before September 2008. I have come a long way since then.
Despite the headlines, too little is known about Britain’s second largest religion. The majority of us don’t have Muslim neighbours or colleagues. Perhaps this is why, as I set foot for the first time in a mosque in Leyton, east London, I did so with mild trepidation—feeling as I have done innumerable times when I have been in unfamiliar surroundings, be it in Albania, Cambodia, Morocco or The Gambia. It was quite unexpected; I was still in England. I was there by appointment, yet felt oddly self-conscious. What was the protocol?
I was shown first to the women’s section that was alive with women and girls preparing for an event. I watched closely for hints on how to behave appropriately. Of course, I learned nothing new beyond what my common sense dictated. What on earth had I expected?
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Anshuman A Mondal
Click here to discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
In his response to my article “A Muslim middle way?” (Prospect, August 2008), Ed Husain does not so much rebut my arguments as reassert his own. While Husain concedes that Islamism is a diverse phenomenon, he continues to insist: “it is a fact that Islamism, in all its diversity, has led to jihadism.” The implication is clear: whatever kind of Islamist you are, one day you will graduate to jihadism. Since all Islamist roads lead to the single destination of extremism, presumably “moderate” Islamism is a contradiction in terms—despite overwhelming evidence that moderate Islamists exist.
To make his point, Husain uses the example of individuals who have taken the “escalator” from Islamism to jihadism. But, as I pointed out in the article, this in no way proves that there is a causal link between the two. If so, how do we explain those Islamist groups like the forebears of the AK Party in Turkey, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who have moved in the opposite direction, away from jihadism? (Husain cites the case of Zawahiri, but he must know, surely, that Zawahiri left the Brotherhood to join a radical splinter group precisely because the Brotherhood was moving in a more moderate, centrist direction.) Indeed, how would Husain explain his own movement—and those of others he cites—away from Islamism?
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Ed Husain
I wrote my book The Islamist last year to try to break the hold of closet extremists over British Muslim discourse. One year on, the debate is in far healthier shape. Thoughtful young Muslims are becoming more boisterous in their rejection of Islamism as a political model—much to the frustration of Islamists and hard-left dinosaurs.
Last month’s Prospect essay by Brunel academic Anshuman A Mondal was a reasonable attempt to assess the Quilliam Foundation, Britain’s first counter-extremism think tank, which I co-founded last year. But there were several factual and analytical inaccuracies that I want to put right.
Mondal suggests that Quilliam “represents” moderate or liberal Islam. In fact, Quilliam has argued that British Muslims should now move away from the first-generation Islamist immigrant game of “Muslim representation,” and engage with mainstream civil society as full citizens. Bodies such as the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) were established by a Tory government, and others have been promoted by Labour. They have done more harm than good, putting emphasis on religious identity above the other factors which shape human identity. Quilliam seeks to provide new thinking for western Muslims, and does not wish to play “community leader.”
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Anshuman A Mondal
In recent months, two British groups representing moderate or liberal Islam—British Muslims for Secular Democracy and the Quilliam Foundation—have been launched to considerable media fanfare. The Quilliam Foundation in particular has caught the eye. Partly because it is the work of two ex-Islamists—Mohammed “Ed” Husain and Maajid Nawaz, deputy director and director respectively—Quilliam is being seen as a major new development in the battle against extremist Islam in Britain.
Quilliam’s profile has been boosted by the success of The Islamist (Penguin), Husain’s book about his years in London as a member of the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. The Islamist was one of the publishing sensations of 2007, selling over 50,000 copies. The paperback comes garlanded with praise from some of Britain’s leading opinion-formers. And the book’s influence has reached into government. The BBC reported that “one government official emailed scores of colleagues inside Whitehall… instructing them to read it.” Given that Quilliam’s agenda has been substantially shaped by Ed Husain, it is worth taking a closer look at the account of political Islam in Britain found in The Islamist.
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Husain’s active involvement in Islamism—the modern, politicised form of Islam which seeks to impose an Islamic state and sharia law—seems to have begun in 1990 and lasted roughly a decade and a half. His early devotion to an elderly Bengali Sufi mystic whom his Indian Muslim father had introduced him to, and whom he called “Grandpa,” made him eager to learn more about Islam at school.
“The first book I read about Islam in English was Islam: Beliefs and Teachings by Ghulam Sarwar,” Husain writes. Sarwar was “the brains behind the… Muslim Educational Trust (MET). What seemed like an innocuous body was, in fact, an organisation with an agenda… It all seemed harmless but the personnel all belonged to Jamat-e-Islami [a Pakistan-based Islamist party] front organisations in Britain.”
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David G Green
Now that the dust has settled, we can look more calmly on the issues raised by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sharia speech. He did not call for sharia law to be imposed, and he was well aware of the unequal treatment of women under some forms of sharia and the dangers of coercion. But he did say that sharia had already been recognised to some extent and that further recognition was unavoidable. Moreover, he called for a “market” (his term) in rival jurisdictions in order to have a “transformative accommodation” of both mainstream British law and religious legal traditions. And, paradoxically, he thought that such a choice between secular and religious law would help integrate religious minorities.
When the archbishop said sharia was already with us, he was referring mainly to legal changes to permit sharia-compliant mortgages. However, it would be truer to say that a legal sleight of hand has been constructed to allow Muslims to circumvent the Koranic prohibition of the payment of interest.
The archbishop also argued that the Jewish beth din had set a precedent. If it’s legitimate for orthodox Jews, then why not Muslims? But under our laws, a beth din is a system of private arbitration. Its decisions have no legal force. A divorce granted by a beth din, for example, counts only for religious purposes and a couple must also obtain a civil divorce. The legal framework is the Arbitration Act of 1996, which allows people in dispute to agree to accept the decision of an independent adjudicator. But if their bargaining power were substantially unequal, they could be judged not to have given consent. Famously, our courts long ago prohibited individuals from voluntarily accepting a contract of slavery. Similarly, our minimum wage law prevents individuals from accepting a contract of employment for a wage less than a certain amount. Private agreements, therefore, are not enforceable in a court, and may even be found to be illegal if they do not conform to basic principles of fair play.
What would it mean to apply these principles to sharia councils? Can it be said that they are no more than consensual private arrangements for settling disagreements? The first question is whether consent has been freely given. If there is an atmosphere of intimidation, no such assumption can be made. Second, is there formal equality between the parties? Under some (but not all) forms of sharia, a woman’s voice counts for half that of a man. Many sharia councils, therefore, fail the test of justice at the first hurdle. Tolerating the operation of sharia councils in this country means turning a blind eye to the subjection of women in our own midst—as several liberal Muslims, such as Ziauddin Sardar and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, have pointed out. And further encouragement to sharia, far from helping integration, will undermine the efforts of British Muslims struggling to evolve a version of Islam at home in a tolerant and pluralistic society.
It is, of course, permissible in a liberal society for people to join private associations that impose constraints on behaviour. The vital point is that anyone must be free to leave without costs being imposed on them other than the inevitable consequence that they will no longer be in good standing with the people they have left behind.
Women are not equal under orthodox Judaism, not least because only men can divorce women and not vice versa. However, orthodox Jews who object to this inequality are free to become reform or even secular Jews. So long as people are free to leave the faith without threats or penalties, such practices can be treated as private arrangements not enforceable in a court.
The same freedom to leave the faith is not always found among Muslims. Some believers do abandon their faith, but they can receive threats of punishment or even death. So long as leaving the faith is subject to such threats, no Muslim should be expected to submit to the decisions of a sharia council.
In addition, although many constraints imposed by private associations are acceptable, some such requirements are or should be against the law. For instance, parents in some religious sects try to prevent their children from having life-saving blood transfusions. Such decisions are contrary to British law.
But would it be feasible to regulate sharia councils to ensure that they do comply with our system of justice? One approach would be to require all hearings of a sharia council to be conducted in the presence of an independent adjudicator appointed by the state to ensure that no disputing party was in fear and that British law was being respected. Another way would be to require that all their decisions were compatible with the Human Rights Act.
Under the watchful eye of state regulators and/or the HRA, it is possible that sharia councils could become no more than systems for reminding believers of the moral principles that ought to guide a person wishing to lead a good life. But as they stand, sharia councils are not compatible with the fundamental principles of a liberal, democratic and pluralistic society.
Thom Dyke
Following Rowan Williams’s comments on sharia law, Sayeeda Warsi, the Conservatives’s shadow community cohesion minister, said “Williams seems to be suggesting that there should be two systems of law, running alongside each other, almost parallel, and for people to be offered the choice of opting into one or the other… that is unacceptable.”
In fact, Williams suggested nothing of the sort. This was not a call for sharia principles to be “incorporated” into British law by the same formal mechanism that the European convention on human rights became part of domestic law through the Human Rights Act in 1998. Neither was it an argument for the supremacy of sharia law to English law, in the way that the 1972 European Communities Act established the primacy of European legislation.
As the archbishop said, some elements of sharia are fast becoming the default position in Muslim communities throughout the country. While no one knows the exact numbers of sharia courts currently operating, one organisation, the Islamic Sharia Council in Leyton, east London, has dealt with over 7,000 cases since it was founded in 1982. Such bodies are entirely unregulated, and no formal qualifications are required to hand down interpretations of Koranic law.
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Shiraz Maher
It was only a matter of time before British Islamists began celebrating the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. “Allah Akbar! Best news I’ve heard in a long time! May Allah destroy all the agents of the [infidels]. What a beautiful day!” wrote “Abu Junayd” from Slough on a forum that hosts mainly British members of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) and the now defunct al-Muhajiroun. With contributors from Australia, Indonesia and the middle east, the site provides a valuable barometer for a strain of global Islamist thinking.
Another comment came from long-standing HT member Showkat Ali, who had previously issued veiled threats against Ed Husain, author of The Islamist, and celebrated the stabbing of former jihadist Hassan Butt. “We shouldn’t grieve for Benazir,” declared the trainee teacher from Milton Keynes. “Muslims should not shed any tears for the tyrants and oppressors who have spent their lives looting and pillaging the wealth of the ummah whilst serving the interests of the [infidel] colonialists in the west.”
Sustained unrest in Pakistan, and its strategic importance to the west, has ensured it remains the single most important country in the war on terror, eclipsing Iraq and Afghanistan. And with nearly half of British Muslims describing their ethnic background as Pakistani, turbulence in the subcontinent resonates here.
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HA Hellyer
Reading Shiv Malik’s article, I found it refreshing to see someone actually bother to go and talk to the oft-demonised communities of British Muslims rather than simply talk about them. Malik points out that alienation was an issue; what he does not make clear is that double alienation was at work. The “myth of return” to the homeland, described by Muhammad Anwar in 1979, was prevalent among the first generation of British Muslims, and as such, they did not attempt to help along the integration of their children. The second alienation process came from the class and race-conscious white mainstream, which was not particularly welcoming to this new British population, predominantly poor and brown.
Malik is right to indicate that British Muslims became enamoured by a politicised interpretation of Muslim identity; that is how all minority communities come of age. They find an identity that is “their own.” The Muslim community bore witness to a number of events that politicised their maturity: the Rushdie affair in 1989; the Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation in the 1980s; and perhaps most significantly, the genocide of Bosnian Muslims in the early 1990s.
This politicisation is not necessarily a problem. The idea of belonging to a faith-based community under God (an ummah) has never meant the creation of a fifth column bent on destroying society from within: it means only a recognition of a metaphysical connection between Muslims the world over. But when that recognition is hijacked by heterodox figures at a time when Muslims feel under siege, it allows for all sorts of ideologies to thrive.
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David Goodhart
Dear Tariq,
I was disappointed by your piece in the Guardian on Monday 4th June. For what it’s worth, I have spent quite a lot of time in the past year or two defending you from the many people in the British political class who are influenced by the predominant French-American view that you are a dangerous extremist (recently rehearsed, as you will know, by Paul Berman in the New Republic). Having heard you speak several times, and interviewed you in depth for Prospect, I concluded that whatever your former beliefs, you now thought that Muslims should embrace and integrate into western societies. You even seemed to be edging towards a non-literalist reading of the great texts of Islam. To the extent that you did prevaricate over reform—the famous moratorium on stoning for adulterers, for instance—I took this to be an example of your “realpolitik” belief that you would lose credibility with mainstream Muslims if you moved too far ahead of your people. As the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, you are, after all, minor royalty in parts of the Muslim world.
Perhaps you have your “realpolitik” reasons too for repeating the grievance-seeking, responsibility-avoiding diatribe that I read in the Guardian—all too familiar from far less accomplished Muslim thinkers than yourself—claiming that all this Muslim extremism in Britain is someone else’s fault, probably the British government’s. But it is still nonsense. You come close to repeating the canard that Mohammad Sidique Khan was a well-integrated young British-Pakistani driven mad by Tony Blair’s foreign policy. Well, I implore you to read the cover story in the latest issue of Prospect magazine by Shiv Malik. It describes how Khan, who had indeed been relatively well integrated as a youngster, became seduced by the temptation of extreme Muslim identity politics. There are two reasons why Muslim youth seem to be especially vulnerable. First, the acute generational conflict created by moving from traditional social and moral orders to a modern liberal society; second, the existence of various Islamist political-religious ideologies offering a total explanation of the world and the young Muslim’s potentially heroic role in ushering in a new one. Khan had swapped his parents’ traditionalist Islam for the “pure” Wahhabi faith in the mid-1990s, and by 1999 he was already seeking to perform violent jihad—many years before 9/11 or the Iraq war. (Of course, the latter did enrage him too, and it made Britain his target instead of Kashmir or Israel.)
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Yahya Birt
Shiv Malik’s essay, “My brother the bomber” (Prospect, June 2007), sets out a detailed account of the life and motivations of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the ringleader of the 7/7 bombings. But Malik reads too much into this one case study.
Much of the detail in Malik’s piece has either been previously reported or is disputed. Some locals argue that the name “Mullah boys”—the group Malik describes of young Muslim boys in Beeston that formed initially in response to local drugs problems—is media hype, that this loose network didn’t really go in for enforced “cold turkey” sessions, and that Khan had fewer associations with them in later years than did Shehzad Tanweer, his fellow cell member. Most importantly, some sources argue that Khan only become prayerful and pious in 2003, even if his political radicalisation came earlier. By contrast, Malik describes a long gestation over ten years, from Wahhabi literalist piety to jihadism to terrorism, which leads him to base his analysis on theological and cultural rather than political issues.
Malik’s explanation rests on a tendentious thesis—terrorism as the result of Islamic liberation theology and intergenerational dislocation. He argues that violent extremism is a fringe element in a broader religious revival among young Muslim people, driven by a generational shift towards more autonomy and choice in the name of Islam. This is set in the context of Beeston, where young Pakistani men are given free rein so long as they affirm (but not necessarily practice) traditional Islam, remain teetotal and marry within the clan ( baraderi). Younger Muslims often criticise this combination of religio-cultural strictures with their elders’ myopic response to their wider concerns. Khan’s father cut him off when he married outside the clan, yet the elders in Beeston did nothing to tackle the rise of drugs in the area, leaving it to initiative-takers like Khan.
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