Tangled Roots…

People only like debating when they think they’re good at it. You can take special pleasure from dancing or football if you happen to be talented but they have other virtues that appeal regardless. Once you’ve lost the smugness of perceived superiority, however, all debating is is a parlour game for assholes. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to make a point without being oppositional. So it is as one regards the head-shaking and finger-wagging directed at people who see violence erupt in response to a film and interpret it in an unsympathetic light. These arguments are bound to occur again and so it’s worth dealing with ones you disagree with the most onerous ones soundly.

Jeff Sparrow compares the reaction of protesting Muslims to that of Indian rebels of the 1800s, for whom the news that their cartridges were greased with tallow was the straw that snapped the proverbial humpbacked creature’s spine. This is an example of the irrational generalisation of Eastern misery that I discussed here. It’s frankly insulting to compare the downtrodden sepoys to the well-off Indonesians, free Australians and residents of peaceful Tunisia who’ve been kicking off, never mind to scheming Salafists of Libya and Egypt. The former bear no comparison to the latter. Sparrow’s explanation might retain a touch of plausibility if it such protests were uncommon, or if their targets were only imperial powers. They’re not. We’ve seen them directed against Swedes, in the form of Lars Vilks; Danes like Kurt Westergaard; Dutchmen such as Van Gogh; English people like Salman Rushdie; Frenchmen, represented by the blokes of Charlie Hebdo; Pakistanis like poor Asia Bibi and Rimsha Masih; Tunisians such as Nabil Karoui; Saudis like Hamza Kashgari; Indonesians like Alexander Aan et cetera ad nauseum.

Sparrow continues by comparing the strange film that incited much of this anger to the Protocols, and writes that “no-one’s surprised when Jews…mobilise against some fresh incarnation of that notorious document”. Funny. The Arabic media regularly produces anti-semitic content, from the Jew-hating Palestinian Mickey Mouse to the Egyptian Candid Camera show that disturbed a guest by introducing her to men who claimed to be Israelis. Violent protests? There were none. If Israelis or Americans had taken to the streets and set upon Arabic embassies, though, it’s hard to believe that liberals and socialists would be in such a hurry to contextualise their deeds.

On the day that Sparrow’s article was featured on Counterpunch, by the way, they published “Pol Pot Revisited” by the Swedish anti-semite Israel Shamir. Even as Cambodia’s genocide court continued its exposure of atrocities of that vile little man, Shamir saw fit to claim that “the Pol Pot Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist” and insist that we “reassess the brave attempts to reach for socialism in various countries”. He did not, of course, cite any polls that might support this view, or even name a single Cambodian who believed it. I’m not implying that Mr Sparrow is responsible for the opinions of the people his thoughts share space with but if it’s real, ignorance that vexes him he could look closer to home.

Think Progress, meanwhile, writing on the Ayaan Hirsi Ali article I critiqued here, succumb to an annoying habit of liberals – and, in fairness, I’m sure I’ve done as well – which entails the quotation of views as if they’re evidently disreputable when they are not. Hirsi Ali said, as they prissily observe, that…

The Muslim men and women (and yes, there are plenty of women) who support — whether actively or passively — the idea that blasphemers deserve to suffer punishment are not a fringe group. On the contrary, they represent the mainstream of contemporary Islam.

This is, in fact, correct as various Islamic figures have been proving in the last week. The Saudi Grand Mufti, the Imam of Al-Azhar and even the supposedly moderate Prime Minister of the Turks have been demanding that insults against Muhammad be recognised as crimes. Now the head of the OIC has insisted that nations worldwide should “come out of hiding from behind the excuse of freedom of expression” and criminalise blasphemy. The nations he represents can be so fervid with intolerance that a schoolgirl can be threatened and detained and he’s worked up over behaviour in Western countries? Their response should be a word that’s made up of two letters. It begins with “n” and it’s not “ni”.

One cannot, of course, explain these men’s responses by claiming that they’re manifestations of anti-imperial rage – or, at least, you’d have to woefully condescending to imagine that such sober and intelligent gentlemen don’t mean what they say. They make little secret of the facts that the defenders of their faith ignore: that they feel that their religion is so sacred as to render disrespect intolerable, and that, in accordance with popular interpretations of its scriptures, they believe it mandates that its precepts be enforced rather than being adhered to as a matter of choice. That hundreds of millions of people think and act on this doesn’t mean their beliefs and deeds can’t also be inspired and influenced by a host of other factors. Yet it’s nonetheless true, and it really does matter.

While I’m largely interested in the response to the film the movie itself provokes worthwhile questions. Not its contents, of course, but its origins. It has to be learnt exactly who produced and funded it; not so they can be locked in the slammer but as if there’s a powder keg lying around it’s worth knowing who’s going to do their utmost to ignite it. The reaction to the reaction also deserves comment but I’ll restrict myself to one point. Ralph Peters, a bloodthirsty man who’s previously fantasised about military attacks on war correspondents, has insisted that the deaths of four Americans be answered with the deaths of four hundred Libyans. No. Just – no. The closest that our armies should get to the Middle East is when the troops have time off and play Medal of Honor. Let’s be more outspoken but less militaristic. More criticism and fewer bombs is not, I think, too nightmarish a vision of the future.

 

The Myth of Muslim Misery…

If you’d told me that a Coptic refugee would make a blasphemous film with people including a militant Christian activist and a gay porn star and incite demonstrations by Muslims across the world I’d have said it was an interesting synopsis and I’d look forward to watching it. As these curious events have turned out to be real, though, I can’t help offering my two penn’orth.

Commentators trying to explain incidents of violence or oppression in the Middle East tend to divide between those who emphasise the importance of material and ideological contexts. It’s a false dichotomy. Islamic supremacism inspires people regardless of how comfortable they are but the conditions of their lives make it and elements of it more or less attractive. If your nation has been on the wrong end of a storm of violence provoked by Westerners, say, you’re far more likely to be energised by a doctrine that offers explanations for their deeds and a chance for revenge. There is a myth of Muslim misery, however, which interprets all manifestations of religious anger as cries of a desperate people. Myriam Francois-Cerrah writes…

Muhammad is a man whose status in the eyes of many Muslims, cannot be overstated. When your country has been bombed, you’ve lost friends and family, possibly your livelihood and home, dignity is pretty much all you have left.

The largely illusive cohesion of the Ummah can lead people to generalise experiences of some Muslims as being those of all 1.6 billion of ‘em. Here, then, Francois-Cerrah makes an Islamic world that’s pockmarked with conflicts sound like a giant smoking crater. Yet millions of Muslims enjoy lives of peace and, indeed, relative prosperity. Muslims in Tunisia haven’t lost their homes. Muslims in Indonesia haven’t lost their friends and families. If Muslims in Australia or France have seen their countries bombed it comes as news to me. To reduce such people, many of whom have endured no worse hardship than you or I, to something more akin to wounded animals than creatures of reason is, among other things, not a little condescending.

The idea that these are just reactions against Western imperialism attains plausibility due to our media’s heavy coverage of those bursts of outrage directed against Western targets. Yet this is a limited perspective. Violence and censoriousness frequently erupts against local incidents of perceived disrespect. Alexander Aan, born and bred in Indonesia, was attacked and jailed over his nonbelief. Nabil Karoui saw his home firebombed after broadcasting the film Persepolis in Tunisia. Rimsha Masih and family live in fear in Pakistan after the poor girl was charged with blasphemy. The people who bullied this schoolgirl were not pissed off over Iraq.

It’s worth mentioning that relatively few people have been demonstrating. Protests have boasted hundreds of people in countries of millions. The people who’ve been so worked up as to take to the streets are the radical fringe. While the bulk of their countrymen think the film no less obnoxious they’re apparently more worried by their jobs, their families and all their quotidian concerns than some America movie. They believe in a political Islam: in states in which religious precepts are enforced by institutions of government. Thus, we find the Saudi Grand Mufti and Imam of Al-Azhar demanding that insulting Muhammad be prohibited worldwide. This sort of moderate extremism – extreme in ambition; moderate in manner – is no more congenial but at least we can snub and avoid it.

 

I’m Sensitive…

You’ll have doubtless heard of Tom Holland’s documentary on the origins of Islam. I’m not so clued-up as to offer a judgement of its worth. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed casts a few unfair insinuations in his critique – it seems odd to accuse Holland of a “colonial mindset” for observing that pre-Islamic Arabs were considered savages when (a) they were and (b) they were by Muslims – but he offers substantive points that at the least deserve responses. May the experts debate and the truth be revealed.

Much of the backlash, however, has been obscurantist and hostile. There have been furious responses on Twitter – including diagnoses of Holland as a Jew and fantasies about his being stabbed in the face – but the most disturbing reaction has been that of the Ramadhan Foundation, which launched an extraordinary attack that made a couple of erroneous criticisms, warned that they’d find Islamic scholars to critique the film and then demanded that Channel 4 withdraw it and apologise. Yes – they wanted its withdrawal, and apologies, before they’d even found out if and how it was mistaken.

I can understand why religious people might have been sensitive to Holland’s film. It cast doubt on their most sacred of beliefs and this has to be painful. They believe it was fallacious and to have such a belief misrepresented must be aggravating. Islam hasn’t faced the scepticism Christian ideas have in recent centuries so doubt must, for many, be peculiar. Still, I’m sensitive as well. I’m sensitive to violent and censorious reactions to freethinking. It’s a touchy subject. You see, it’s my fundamental belief that human knowledge advances through the criticism of each others’ ideas and when I see people implying or asserting that their own are too sacred to be questioned I’m liable to become ill-tempered.

You can understand, looking across the world, why these sensitivies might cause me to grow heated. When people who share the violence of the Twitter bullies and the intolerance of the Ramadhan Foundation have power they exert a dreadful philistinic influence. The Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie is an infamous example but there have been multifarious more recent cases. After withdrawing copies of Irshad Manji’s heretical polemic from the nation’s stores Malaysian police have arrested its publisher. When Manji toured Indonesia in the spring she was assaulted, while elsewhere on the island a publisher faced outrage after releasing a book that disrespected Mohammad and was forced to apologise and burn all of his copies of it. Alexander Aan was beaten up and jailed for two years. Ismail Rasheed was stoned, stabbed and driven out of the Maldives. The Egyptian Gamal Abdou Massoud will spend the rest of his teenage years in prison. These examples are representative of an allergy to scepticism and irreverence that provokes destructive reactions against the freedom of individuals and the well-being of societies.

People who dislike and disagree with criticism of their religious beliefs are welcome and, indeed, encouraged to defend their ideas against it but those who assume they have a right to be untroubled are going to have to learn to cope with exposure to doubt because people who share the sensitivities I’ve admitted to are not going to become any more tolerant of obscurantism and censorship.

 

Girl Accused…

It’s somewhat futile to complain about people granting more attention to cause X than causes Y and Z. Our empathetic capabilities are limited and our feelings aren’t proportioned according to the consequence of the events that we observe but a myriad of ethical, aesthetic, opportunistic and circumstantial factors. Typically, when loads of people care about one issue the alternative is their ignoring all of them. Had people stopped being interested in Kony 2012, for example, they wouldn’t have begun to campaign to end starvation; save the whales and preserve Dandy magazine but gone back to laughing at pictures of cats in hamster wheels.

Still, while so many are so outraged by the treatment of activists who kicked up a stink in someone else’s church it would be nice to have more realisation of the fact millions don’t have the freedom of peace in their own homes. The Guardian reports on how the reaction to the supposed blasphemy of an 11-year-old girl has endangered hundreds of Pakistani Christians…

An 11-year-old Christian Pakistani girl could face the death penalty under the country’s notorious blasphemy laws, after she was accused by her neighbours of deliberately burning sacred Islamic texts.

Rifta Masih was arrested on Thursday, after complaints against her prompted angry demonstrations. Asif Ali Zardari, the president, has ordered the interior ministry to investigate the case.

As communal tensions continued to rise, about 900 Christians living on the outskirts of Islamabad have been ordered to leave a neighbourhood where they have lived for almost two decades.

On Sunday, houses on the backstreets of Mehrabadi, an area 20 minutes’ drive from western embassies and government ministries, were locked with padlocks, their occupants having fled to already overcrowded Christian slums in and around the capital.

One of the senior members of the dominant Muslim community told the Christians to remove all their belongings from their houses by 1 September. “I don’t think anyone will dare go back after this,” said one Christian, Arif Masih. “The area is not safe for us now.”

Being a Christian in Pakistan is something like being the only Celtic fan at Ibrox on a baking August day in which the only liquid in the stadium is beer. It is, however, much scarier. Asia Bibi remains in jail – three years after she was attacked under suspicion of the “crime” of insulting Muhammad and almost two since she was sentenced to death for it.

To say the countries’ religious Muslims are intolerant to deviance is like saying that bubble boys are sensitive to infection. Last year another Christian schoolgirl was the focus of controversy for nothing more than a naive misspelling. Tasked with writing a poem to celebrate Muhammad, she added a gratuitous dot to the term “naat”, which refers to devotional poems, and thus turned it into “lanaat”, which means damnation. She was thrashed by her teacher and expelled from her school; her Mother was banished from the town and the family fled the region.

I suspect that Masih won’t be sentenced to death – as, if nothing else, it would make aid to Pakistan untenable – but the threat of vigilantism remains acute. Shahbaz Batti, the one Christian in the Pakistani cabinet, was gunned down merely for opposing the nation’s blasphemy laws. The fact that such grandees aren’t immune from vengeance, nor people as young as Masih safe from violent indignation, intimidates the nation’s other Christians into staying quiet and not posing the slightest challenge to the self-righteous supremacists.

 

On The Islands…

The Maldives, a clutch of islands with a population about the size of Leicester’s, has a reputation as a sunkissed idyll of beaches, blue oceans and fresh tuna. It is also, regrettably, proof that the darkest of doctrines can be prevalent in the brightest of places. The Maldivian law code is based on a foundation of strict Islamic jurisprudence, which upholds the supremacy of the faith and subjegates other forms of belief to the point that non-Muslims may not even become citizens. This isn’t enough for its most ardent believers, though.

Things really kicked off when Navanethem Pillay, the UN’s Commissioner for Human Rights, visited the Maldives and asked its officials to consider rethinking their policy of whipping adulterers. The Adhaalath Party was enraged, insisting that it was…

…part of a “broad scheme” by the government to “pulverize Islam in the Maldives and introduce false religions”.

The enemies of the Maldivian President, Mohamed Nasheed, had long been claiming that he had an anti-Islamic agenda. He’d presided over an administration that was loyal enough to the sharia that it had upheld public flogging but his nods towards reform – such as proposing that school curricula might benefit from the input of sources other than Islamic doctrine – were enough to lead them to believe that he was involved in a conspiracy to rid the islands of their faith. The Dhivehi Qaumee Party issued a pamphlet that accused Nasheed of trying…

…to erase the age-old holy religion of Islam from the hearts of Maldivians, provide opportunities for religions other than Islam and demolish the religious unity and faith of Maldivians.

After a foolish attempt to impose his authority by arresting hostile officials, Nasheed was ousted.

Ismail Rasheed, who I’ve written of before, was a blogger who was critical of Islamic authoritarianism. For this he received a string of his death threats before his website was closed by the authorities. He organised a protest with a handful of supporters and faced a hail of rocks from thuggish supremacists. The police reacted by arresting not the assailants but Rasheed himself – once he’d been treated for a skull fracture, anyway. Six months later – six weeks ago -  he was stabbed in the neck.

Censored, stoned and stabbed; all, it seems, for his words. He’s now fled the country and declines to reveal his new location. Dissidents and demonstrators who’ve remained on the islands face abuse from bullies of the public and private sphere. When female supporters of an opposition party demonstrated against the opening of the new parliament several of them were apparently detained, stripped and forced to endure sexual assault.

Unopposed, political and religious figures have been moving to force anything that might be viewed as secular from the islands. The “country’s Islamic fabric has tattered over the years,” huffed the new President, Mohamed Waheed Hassan, encouraging the upturn in authoritarianism. The Adhaalath Party has, for example, been campaigning against inter-school singing competitions – “un-Islamic activities”, as they see them. Other unknown radicals decided that deviant trends weren’t just to be eliminated from the present day but expunged from the past. Before there were militants smashing landmarks in Mali there were vandals breaking into the National Museum of the Maldives and destroying statues from its Buddhist past. “The collection was totally, totally smashed,” said its director, “The whole pre-Islamic history is gone.”

My coverage of affairs in Southeast Asia isn’t, I’ll admit, solely due to my interest in its nations and concern for its peoples. This undersung place offers insights into social phenomena one can observe worldwide, without their being obscured by the controversies of other regions. Maldivian politics offer a glimpse of the nature of Islamic supremacism. It’s the fundamental view of its dogmatists that they’re entitled to govern all areas of public and private life, and while even outposts of resistance endure they’re frighteningly unsatisfied. What’s interesting is that extraordinary self-entitlement is accompanied by an equally formidable self-pity. They could have all of the sweets in a candy store but if a pack of liquorice allsorts is claimed by someone else they’ll act as if they’ve been subjected to staggering deprivation. The suggestion that whipping females might cross a line is thus an attempt to “pulverize” their faith. Nasheed and thirty of his friends asking for tolerance was said to have been an affront that “shocked the nation”. A handful of protestors obstructing a sermon were claimed to be fighting “a great war to destroy religion”. Thus can the supreme power of the ruler be fused with the aggrieved passion of the revolutionary.

 

Rip It Up…

Earlier this evening, at some blog you’ll never have heard of, I questioned the description of Islamic totalism as “conservative”. Far from being traditionalists, it seems to me, the most dangerous Islamic supremacists are revolutionaries – trampling on the traditions of such age-old peoples as the Copts of Egypt, the Assyrians of Iraq and the Buddhists of Southeast Asia as part of their attempt to realise an incredibly quixotic vision of a society.

Razib Khan, I find, is making pretty much the same point, and quotes from a Washington Post report on the devastation of Timbuktu by Taureg rebels…

Four of Timbuktu’s landmarks are included on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites, but history and heritage mean nothing to the leadership of Ansar Dine, which has destroyed at least six above-ground mausoleums of religious figures regarded as saints and, on Monday, the door of one of the city’s most sacred mosques.

Timbuktu, a center of Sufi mysticism, apparently represents a broad-minded world view at odds with Ansar Dine’s radical conservatism.

If you have no respect for history and heritage you aren’t, in fact, much of a conservative of any kind.

My problem with this habit of commentators – aside from the very fact of its apparent incorrectness – is what I perceive to be its implication of the inevitability of liberalism; the idea that Islamic radicals are on the defensive in the face of reformist progress. They, to a great extent, are the force of change; the revolutionary opponents of age-old values and traditions; the dreamers who yearn to actualise utopian ideas. In a time where progress is idealised as a goal it’s perhaps hard to grasp that such ambitions could be bad but to imply that jihadists are hidebound cranks is to understate their danger.

 

Inciting Religious Hatred…

Having observed the totalists among us it’s worth reminding ourselves of the consequences of such ideologues gaining power. In Sumatra Alexander Aan has been sentenced…

An Indonesian man arrested after writing “God doesn’t exist” on his Facebook page was jailed for 30 months Thursday for sharing explicit material about the Prophet Mohammed online.

Alexander Aan, 30, was found guilty of “deliberately spreading information inciting religious hatred and animosity”…

It’s true that Mr Aan incited religious hatred – that of the religious people who assaulted him before he was dragged off to jail. I doubt it was deliberate, though; on his part, at least. His only consolation, of course, is the thought that he is at least a citizen of “moderate” Indonesia. Had it been Kuwait he was unfortunate enough to dwell in he might, like poor Hamad al-Naqi earlier this month, have been locked up for a decade.

Elsewhere on the islands a publisher is absolving himself of blame for the swiftly rescinded publication of a book by US theologian Douglas Wilson…

Indonesian publisher Gramedia Pustaka Utama burned hundreds of copies of a book that called the Prophet Muhammad a pirate and a murderer on Wednesday following protests by the hard-line Islamic Defenders Front.

The books were burned outside the Bentara Budaya cultural hall in the Kompas Gramedia complex in Palmerah, West Jakarta. Company president director Wandi S. Brata oversaw the book burning, along with several Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) officials, including deputy chairman Ma’ruf Amin.

You can’t have too many witnesses when books are being burned. Think of the consequences of a page or two escaping before they’ve been fully charred.

 

It Doesn’t Look Good…

On Monday a Kuwaiti received ten years in jail for a blasphemous tweet. On Tuesday a Bangladeshi court issued an arrest warrant over a blasphemous book. The case of theocratic suppression of ideas contrary to Islamic doctrine that I’d like to focus on, however – as they are so numerous that once you’ve begun to notice them they grow almost routine and, thus, fail to be as affecting as they really should be – is taking place on a sunny island in the Maldives.

The blogger and journalist Ismail Rasheed has been stabbed in the neck near his home in the capital Malé. It’s possible that the crime is unrelated to his work but once you’ve acquainted yourself with the formidable struggles this man has endured you’ll see this is unlikely.

Mr Rasheed, a Sufi Muslim, was critical of the religious totalism that’s a feature of the Islamic state. In return he was besieged with death threats. Websites demanded his prompt beheading. Rasheed weathered that storm but in November of 2011 the government closed his blog: accusing him of publishing “anti-Islamic material”.

Rasheed was undaunted. Despite the fact that his support base was as large as a Wolves football fan’s in West Bromwich he organised a small protest against this intolerance. A group of thugs swept down; pelted him and his supporters with rocks and fractured his skull. The government sprang into action! They arrested Rasheed. Amnesty International, in its aggrieved response, noted that despite credible photographic evidence of the event no efforts were made to arrest the man’s attackers.

Now, after years of abuse from the state and his fellow citizens, Mr Rasheed seems to have faced his most serious challenge yet. The only heartening fact is that the bastards still can’t kill him. In a letter to Amnesty a couple of years ago he wrote that he…

…would greatly appreciate if you can help me find temporary asylum in a friendly democratic country until I feel it is safe for me to return to Maldives…

It would be nice if a government could offer this after he’s recovered. Such a courageous defender of the freedom of conscience would be a privilege to host.

The suppression of dissenting or just differing opinion is, in callous terms, a somewhat useful feature of a creed. Sure, it’s terrible for the society it inhabits – a recipe for cultural and intellectual barrenness – but in the sense that it ensures that minds will be starved of nourishment for their doubts and scepticism it has an unpleasant logic. This is also why it could be the most dangerous feature of totalistic belief: because it ensures that everything else associated with it is perpetuated.

 

Two Can Bring Awareness…

I’ll say one thing for Sheikh Haitham al-Haddad: where he goes you can be sure of trouble. He crops up among clerics and speakers and around him you find all manner of demagogic theocrats. He’s set to address another Islamic student society: in Roehampton this time. The theme is the end of the world and they’ve produced this rather unpleasant advert…

So, what kind of man is prepared to appear with Haddad? Dr Khalid Fikry is less prolific than his comrade but intriguing regardless. A profile in the Arabic media reports that the doctor was educated in Egypt and was arrested by President Anwar Sadat as part of his crackdown on religious extremists. This leads me to suspect that he’s the Dr. Khaled Fekry who authored this fond tribute to Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Blind Sheikh and leader of the Islamic Group…

We never forgot you our dear sheikh and we will never forget you. Allah is your supporter and defender.

Rahman was a committed enemy of secularism whose group was founded with the purpose of establishing sharia law in Egypt. It waged a campaign of violence throughout the nineties that killed hundreds of Egyptians. Rahman also travelled to Afghanistan where he empowered the Mujahideen and befriended the now-notorious jihadists Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdullah Azzam. Later, in the US, even while denying the accusations of seditious conspiracy, he called on his fellow Muslims to “rise in God as one man” and warned, “Don’t take the Christians and the Jews as your friends”.  His life was devoted to the cause of righteous violence with the aim of upholding the laws of Allah, and he inspired countless Muslims to join him in this work. This is the “dear Sheikh” that Fekri rhapsodised about.

He also praises supposed “good people” among the Sheikh’s supporters, like Aboud Al-Zomor, who was arrested for conspiring in the assassination of President Sadat and later said it was because he was “standing against sharia, against its implementation and application”, and Ahmed Refai Taha, who led the group after Abdel-Rahman’s departure and is thought to have been involved in atrocities such as the Luxor massacre.

As well as his interesting choice of friends Fikri seems to have an intriguing take on community relations. His speeches denounce Shia Muslims: castigating them as an “ignorant kaffir sect”. They are, he says in tones of awed disgust, “the greatest allies with the Americans, as well as with the Jew”. Shock horror! (Audaciously, despite these words, he’s tried to have a heretical Shiite cleric prosecuted for – get this – inciting sectarian unrest.)

These gentlemens’ presence is yet further evidence of how preposterous it is that it’s continually insisted that the claim that dangerous theocrats are preaching to students is an “absurd conconction”. Amandla Thomas, the spokesman of FOSIS, wrote that “a quick perusal of colourfully-themed “Islam Awareness Weeks” across the country…dispel such myths”. I’m perusing the leaflet for Roehampton’s, held last month, and their guest speaker was Abdulrahman Green, whose defence of wifebeating, endorsement of the deaths of adulterers and homosexuals and advocacy for a theocratic state we’ve come across before. Sorry, dude, but those claims are as mythical as marmalade, manatees and Margaret Thatcher and deserve more attention.

As for Fikry…

Dr. Fikri was granted political asylum in Britain in 2005.

So was Abu Qatada. So was Anas al-Liby. So was Mohammad al-Massari, Omar Bakri Mohammad and Yasser al-Siri. Why did we spend months debating whether Raed Salah was allowed to come here for a holiday when such men are allowed to settle? I’m aware that some of ‘em were allowed in out of spite for enemies our government happened to share at the time but whatever the reason judiciousness must be restored. I wouldn’t let a man into my house, however miserable his circumstances, if I thought he might endanger me and my family. This principle should be extended to our borders.

 

Teenage Nightmares…

I’m not going to turn this blog into Islamic Firebrand Watch but it’s a theme I’m going to continue pursuing. Theocrats are easy to ignore when you’ve presumed that they’re a marginal phenomenon but when the thought occurs that they are actually a pervasive, influential force one tends to dwell on their appearances in the public eye. That they are more than a fringe of impotent ideologues is hardly a consensus opinion, of course, but that’s a reason to share the fascination.

I’ve mentioned Haitham al-Haddad: a Saudi Sheikh whose totalistic ideals lead him to strive to make Islamic law “dominant in the world”, with its accompanying threats to apostates – who “deserve…capital punishment” – young women – whose mutilation is virtuous - gays – “criminal[s]” to him – and so on. Travelling to Denmark he was greeted with a storm of controversy and faced the threat of deportation. In Britain he presides over Sharia courts; is a regular guest at Mosques and a favourite of Islamic societies and now, rather disgustingly, has spoken at a school.

It was a Sixth Form College, yes, but a school nonetheless: the former Leyton Senior High School for Boys; whose alumni include Alan Booth, a marvellous writer on Japan, and Sir Giles Brindley, who you may be unaquainted with but might one day come to appreciate for his research into the treatment of erectile dysfunction. The subject of Haddad’s speech, with grim irony, was “Does Islam Oppress Women?”. A man who feels that half his audience might profit from having their labias hacked at and that spousal abuse is none of our business should answer in the affirmative but I doubt he did. This was just part of “Discover Islaam Week” at the school. Elsewhere one Adnan Rashid asked the question “Sharia Law – Curse or Cure?”. Mr Rashid is the author of a lengthy essay which attempts to make the case that “peace and justice emanat[ed] from the Islamic system” so I think one can predict where his judgement fell.

Rashid, and the like-minded Hamza Tsorsis, who also spoke at the Leyton College, are speakers of the Islamic Education and Research Academy (iERA). It’s concerned with “educating the public through lectures, seminars and publications”. If we visit its website we find that one of its trustees is Abdurraheem Green: a theocrat we’ve encountered before who, among other things, has defended wife beating and claimed that gays and adulterers should endure “a slow and painful death”. Their advisors have included Bilal Philips – who’s most famous for endorsing the execution of homosexuals – Hakim Quick – who’s called for Allah to “clean and purify [Israel] from the filth of the Yahud” (Jews) and joined his comrade in wishing death on gays – Hussein Yee – who’s claimed “the Jews” are “the extremists of the world” and “kill because they believe that they are the chosen people” – and the all too familiar Haitham al-Haddad.

These are the sort of cruel, doctrinaire theocrats who’ve been touring British universities for years and now, with a mere whisper of controversy, are taking their message into schools to feed into e’er younger minds. This demands for more attention and anger than it has received but the most serious and discomfiting problem isn’t just that theocratic speakers occupy such platforms but that there’s such an imposingly large audience for them.