the latest blethering from the egregious dr miller is that the “conservative thinktanks” policy exchange and the centre for social cohesion are soft-pedalling the racism and violence of groups like the bnp and edl because it “might deflect attention” from islamism – defined by him as:

“the catch-all term for politically active muslims”

now i carry no particular brief for either of the thinktanks he mentions, but this is breathtakingly brazen doublespeak: come on, dr miller – everyone knows what is meant by the term “islamist”. are the muslim brotherhood, jamaat-i-islami, tablighi jamaat islamists? of course they bloody are! are the quilliam foundation, of british muslims for secular democracy “islamists”? are the muslims who work for csc or policy exchange, “islamists”? or, for that matter, the muslim authors at the spittoon? of course not. there is no reason muslims shouldn’t be politically active – either as muslims, or as british citizens, but there’s plenty of reason to be rude about people who are pushing extremist, clerical fascist, racist and homophobic agendas – unless you’re a doctrinaire leftie, that is.

it gets worse – dr miller now appears to be attempting to suggest that by attacks on islamists bolster islamophobia, which ultimately results in things like the breivik atrocity in norway. this is an outrageous caricature – the sort of thing we’d normally expect to see coming out of exeter, not strathclyde! as any regular reader will know, we are not exactly fans of the bnp or the edl.

on the other hand, as we know very well here at the spittoon, “spinwatch” is not exactly careful with its analysis:

http://www.spittoon.org/archives/9428

perhaps we should not be surprised that dr miller can’t tell the difference between islamists and liberals; it seems to be a bit of a theme on the left these days.

i have for some time been aware of the powerful analytical frameworks for bio-psycho-social systems developed by the american psychologist dr clare graves and systematised for practical application by don beck and chris cowan in the excellent book “spiral dynamics” (i’m not affiliated with anyone concerned, incidentally). at the risk of sounding like somewhat of a “fanboy”, as i believe it is called on teh interwebs, i am convinced it constitutes an important piece of intellectual real estate for the understanding of complex socio-political systems, particularly in behavioural terms.

you can read more about the basics of spiral dynamics here and here - and i strongly encourage you to do so, but perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate its unique way of enabling insight into human nature is by a review of the various behaviours that have been exhibited during the riots. in the table below you will see a number of different types of responses and the messages associated with them, which you will have seen reflected by the proponents of these value systems in the various media channels. the vast majority of these types of response can present in either healthy or unhealthy forms – thus “C-P” (“red”) behaviours and messages were used both destructively (wanton destruction) and constructively (arresting looters) – in both cases, the behaviour was the demonstration of dominance and power, with corresponding public messages (a cartmanesque “RESPECT MY AUTHORITAAH!”) sent to the media.

you’ll see that whilst most of the operational trouble has functioned at C-P/red systems level, most of the discussion and analysis has been conducted by politicians and the media at blue (mostly “societal breakdown”, good-and-evil) orange (intellectual, opportunistic and tactical) and green (communitarian, progressive and inclusive) levels – and if the reactions are to be systematic, they will have to be a combination of green, blue and orange solutions appropriate to the situation, just as identifying looters using website photos (orange), communally organised clean-up squads (green) and attempts to strengthen traditional family structures (blue) have already been used. i note that ed miliband (who i usually have little time for) has supposedly come out against knee-jerk reactions and i think he’s correct in this at least; david cameron will not get very far if all his responses are couched in “blue” terms to appeal to the “respect for society must be restored” brigade and executed in “orange” technocratic action plans by community workers who are uncomfortable with anything which doesn’t take account of “green” inclusion. if he is serious about the “big society”, he will need to understand that the big society needs *all* these things, it is not a blue, orange or green concept, just as it needs “red” defences and alternative “purple” clan and kin affiliations than those of gang, patois and skin colour – and that includes the purple affiliations of the non-rioters, too! the “big society” could be second-order policy thinking and leadership, but that needs a shift in both our understanding of the situation and the strategies we use to manage it.

in all these cases i would say: if you want to find a constructive, insightful way of discussing the value systems that led to the events of the last couple of weeks, you would do worse than to look at how spiral dynamics sheds light on the tensions, relationships, structures and messages involved.

all comment and discussion welcome.

with this in mind, i thought it was worth setting out a few of the principles that i think are fairly basic to pursuing both the more aggressive and the more peace-loving sides without compromising the integrity of either. i believe we can both aspire to a more peaceful future at the same time as defending ourselves against those who threaten our society; i think these might be the things that we hold in common and the things which we believe are not held in common by those we oppose:

1. the belief that muslims have the potential to integrate into british (and other western) society as productively as jews have.
2. the belief that eventually mainstream islam will decisively reject the path of taking practical steps to take over the world and relegate this safely to the realm of the eschatological – at present the islamist movement still actually thinks it can win over this debate.
3. the belief that peaceful coexistence is possible even in the middleeast, given goodwill and a real desire to find a workable solution.
4. the acceptance that, islamism aside, there are a lot of people out there who have an unreasonable prejudice against any and all muslims, not just the fundamentalist sort – and that if we can only get the mainstream communities committed to a pluralistic, polycultural modern world rather than a salafist 7th century cloud-cuckoo-land, a commitment to standing shoulder-to-shoulder with muslims in fighting those islamophobes for their rights to be a part of that future.
5. the acceptance that 1, 3 and 4 also have ethnic dimensions and that we have nothing against arabs, persians, turks, pakistanis, bangladeshis etc qua arabs, persians, turks, pakistanis and bangladeshis etc.

if these can be accepted, without significant reservation, then we can begin to accept and deal with the following challenges that we believe to be real:

• a. that there are some muslims, whether individuals, groups, sects, parties or tendencies, that have the downfall of our society in mind and consequently hold what we consider to be unacceptable points of view – let’s say 13%, for argument’s sake; not even a particularly sizeable minority in relative terms, but in absolute terms, given the number of muslims there actually are, enough to cause problems for both their own communities and wider society.
• b. that some of these groups are busily trying to co-opt and own all the islamic community structures that presently exist, as well as present their narrative as that of “all” muslims.
• c. that these people have, over the years, received large amounts of funding and inspiration (with strings attached) from saudi and other insalubrious middle eastern places, as well as from credulous, starry-eyed orientalists in the guardianista / multiculti camp – without strings attached.
• d. that these people are busily engaged in not only political entryism a la tower hamlets, but in hoodwinking well-meaning liberals into acting as figleaves for their disingenuous political and religious programme and thereby bolstering their own credibility.
• e. that if you take a look into the history of many of these socalled respectable “community leaders”, you don’t have to look very hard before you start finding the bloody trail of the bangladeshi genocide as well as the knuckle-prints of the global islamist movements like the ikhwaan and hizb ut-tahrir, let alone all the dodgy things that get said in arabic, farsi, urdu and so on compared to what gets said in english for the benefit of the western media.

if one can accept all of these things, perhaps dialogue can get beyond the ceremonial and cynical to the meaningful and productive. i myself have to do some serious thinking about where i stand on “platform-sharing” issues in particular. on one hand, i try and follow mandela’s excellent principle of “talking to anyone that will talk to me”, but on the other, my deep distrust of certain people and groups, not to mention 16 years of experience, have led me to conclude that there are some people that it is not worth engaging with, like, say, the al-muhajigoonies of this world, who deserve nothing but merciless lampooning in the most liberal of terms (of late the ahmadis have been added to this list – so i saw with displeasure this morning an advert for them on the side of a bus). similarly, i have to consider the rabin principle – that it is one’s enemies that one makes peace with, not one’s friends and that platforms for dialogue will sooner or later have to address the points that i raise above – but you have to suspend certain questions until trust has been established; you can’t jump straight into a conversation about israel, for instance.

i would be most interested in whether people think i have the basis of the argument down correctly. alternatively, you can all call me an islamophobic racist or something.

The executive summary explains the depressing downside:

On one level it is not happy reading. It concludes that there is not a progressive majority in society and it reveals that there is a deep resentment to immigration, as well as scepticism towards multiculturalism. There is a widespread fear of the ‘Other’, particularly Muslims, and there is an appetite for a new right-wing political party that has none of the fascist trappings of the British National Party or the violence of the English Defence League. With a clear correlation between economic pessimism and negative views to immigration, the situation is likely to get worse over the next few years.

The key findings of the report:

A new politics of identity, culture, and nation has grown out of the politics of race and immigration, and is increasingly the opinion driver in modern British politics.

Six identity ‘tribes’ in modern British society. These are: Confident Multiculturalists (eight per cent of the population); Mainstream Liberals (16%); Identity Ambivalents (28%); Cultural Integrationists (24%); Latent Hostiles (10%); and Active Enmity (13%).

There is a clear correlation between economic pessimism and negative attitudes towards immigration. The more pessimistic people are about their own economic situation and their prospects for the future the more hostile their attitudes are to new and old immigrants.

There is a new middle ground of British politics that is defined by two groups of voters:Cultural Integrationists who are motived by authority and order; and Identity Ambivalents who are concerned about their economic security and social change. Together they make up 52% of the population.

‘Those identified as Identity Ambivalents could be pushed further towards the Right, unless mainstream political parties tackle the social and economic insecurity which dominates their attitudes. This is a challenge for the current Government – which is implementing deep spending cuts – and for the Labour Party, which is the traditional home of many of these voters. Almost half of all voters who do not identify with a party are Identity Ambivalents.

While more likely to consider ethnicity and religion to be important to their identity than nationality, Black and Asian minority groups share many other groups’ opinions on a range of issues, including the national and personal impact of immigration.

The British National Party (BNP) is in decline, entwined as it is with the old politics of race and immigration. Instead, groups such as the English Defence League (EDL), better adapted to the new politics of identity, are replacing them. However, there is a limit to the potential growth of this assertive and threatening form of nationalism.

There is popular support for a sanitised, non-violent and non-racist English nationalist political party. Britain has not experienced the successful far right parties that have swept across much of Western Europe. Our report shows this is not because British people are more moderate but simply because these views have not found a political articulation.

Hope Not Hate insists there is a positive side:

Political violence is strongly opposed by the vast majority of society and this is a ‘firewall’ between those concerned with immigration/multiculturalism and more open and hardline racists.

Over two-thirds of people view ‘English nationalist extremists’ and ‘Muslim extremists’ as bad as each other.

60% of respondents thought that positive approaches – community organising, education, and using celebrities and key communal movers and shakers – were the best way to defeat extremism in communities.

There is a real appetite for a positive campaigning organisation that opposes political extremism through bringing communities together. Over two-thirds of the population would either ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ support such a group.

An interesting factoid picked up by the Guardian report on this:

According to the survey, 39% of Asian Britons, 34% of white Britons and 21% of black Britons wanted all immigration into the UK to be stopped permanently, or at least until the economy improved. And 43% of Asian Britons, 63% of white Britons and 17% of black Britons agreed with the statement that “immigration into Britain has been a bad thing for the country”. Just over half of respondents – 52% – agreed with the proposition that “Muslims create problems in the UK”.

A key question that we hope gets answered is this: if a British Muslim believes homosexuals should be punished by death, and demands England closes its the gates to further immigration, and wants more public money to be granted to British Islamic institutions, and donates to Muslim charities which fund Hamas, does that make them a member of the “Confident Multiculturalists”, the “Identity Ambivalents”, the “Latent Hostiles” or the “Active Enmity” tribe?

The Independent:

In his speech, Mr Cameron rejected suggestions that a change in Western foreign policy could stop the Islamic terrorist threat and says Britain needs to tackle the home-grown causes of extremist ideology. “We have failed to provide a vision of society [to young Muslims] to which they feel they want to belong,” he said. “We have even tolerated segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values. All this leaves some young Muslims feeling rootless. And the search for something to belong to and believe in can lead them to extremist ideology.”

Mr Cameron blamed a doctrine of “state multiculturalism” which encourages different cultures to live separate lives. This, he says, has led to the “failure of some to confront the horrors of forced marriage”. But he added it is also the root cause of radicalisation which can lead to terrorism.

“As evidence emerges about the backgrounds of those convicted of terrorist offences, it is clear that many of them were initially influenced by what some have called ‘non-violent extremists’ and then took those radical beliefs to the next level by embracing violence. This is an indictment of our approach to these issues in the past. And if we are to defeat this threat, I believe it’s time to turn the page on the failed policies of the past.

“Instead of ignoring this extremist ideology, we – as governments and societies – have got to confront it. Instead of encouraging people to live apart, we need a clear sense of shared national identity, open to everyone.”

Mr Cameron went on to suggest a radically new government approach which Downing Street said would form the basis of a review of the “Prevent Strategy”, launched under Labour in 2007. “We need to think much harder about who it’s in the public interest to work with,” he said. “Some organisations that seek to present themselves as a gateway to the Muslim community are showered with public money despite doing little to combat extremism. This is like turning to a right-wing fascist party to fight a violent white supremacist movement.”

The Guardian:

Cameron will argue many young men have been drawn to extremism due to a rootlessness created by the weakening of a clear collective British cultural identity.

He will say: “Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream. We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong.

“We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values. So when a white person holds objectionable views – racism, for example – we rightly condemn them. But when equally unacceptable views or practices have come from someone who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious, frankly even fearful, to stand up to them.”

He will warn his audience: “Europe needs to wake up to what is happening in our own countries. We need to be absolutely clear on where the origins of these terrorist attacks lie – and that is the existence of an ideology, Islamist extremism.”

This ideology he says, is entirely separate from Islam, and “at the furthest end includes those who back terrorism to promote their ultimate goal: an entire Islamist realm, governed by an interpretation of sharia”.

But he adds: “Move along the spectrum, and you find people who may reject violence, but who accept various parts of the extremist world-view including real hostility towards western democracy and liberal values.

“If we are to defeat this threat, he says, its time to turn the page on on the failed policies of the past. So first, instead of ignoring this extremist ideology, we as governments and societies have got to confront it in all its forms.”

Muscular Liberal:

The truth that David Cameron appears to have realised is that it is not enough to oppose Islamist terror, we must oppose Islamism itself. Simply saying that you don’t wish to be violent does not make you a ‘moderate Muslim’ – moderation is about acceptance, tolerance and openness. If we only do battle with the few Islamists brave or stupid enough to attack us physically then we will be treating only the symptom, never the cause. We will fail to win the war of words and of ideas, the evil that drives some young men to violence will continue to be pumped into Britain’s Muslim communities and our society will continue to disintegrate. Cameron’s recognition of the futility of treating only violence as the problem – when the problem is evil ideas and despicable beliefs – gives us hope that now, finally Britain will fight back against the systematic undermining of our values. It may be too late, we may be too relativist and self-loathing a society to now succeed, but it’s got to be better than cowering in the corner and begging Islamo-fascists to be nice to us.

“Nationalism”. I believe the word instantly causes thoughts to materialise in one’s mind – of extremists, such as skinheads, thugs, nazis, people with “dark agendas” and violent or deceiving methods to fulfil said dark agendas. This is not me – but I still consider myself a nationalist. If you’re interested in more detail, I consider myself a “territorial nationalist”. That is to say, I don’t see colour / race and such as important, or a necessity to be “a part of the club”. I personally see it this way: everyone is a part of the club and should pull together and make this club a better place. I think most people are truly nationalists, even though they wouldn’t use that exact word to define themselves: “Hi, I’m ABC, I’m a nationalist.” But the dictionary definition tells us it is a person who loves his or her country, with synonyms such as “good citizen”. I am sure that we would all like to consider ourselves good citizens, people who care for the wellbeing of the nation and our neighbours. Sure! So, when a party brings a slogan to you like: “Putting British people first!” “People like you!” “Bring our troops home!”, they feel like reassuring statements, noble statements. Can they inspire to a degree and draw you in? Well, I thought so. I wanted to see how they were doing this and see these “people like me”. Obviously, there was a multitude of people saying this party was full of bad people, people not at all like me. As I saw myself as a nationalist, I thought they must be wrong and that I would be much, much more satisfied finding out what’s what for myself. This is how I am – always having to see for myself rather than taking someone’s word for it. Just because many people say so, that doesn’t necessarily make it true.

I wouldn’t deny for a moment from the beginning that there were bad apples within the group; you’re always going to get a few, (see if you spot the irony and please place answers on a postcard) and I feel it is unreasonable and lacking in logic to define an entire group by the actions of a small percentage. I spent months before the general elections and a few months after that becoming affiliated and trusted within the “online ranks” of the party. It got to a stage where in a relatively short time I had become respected and given Moderation / Administration authority within the groups. If I’m honest, this fuelled my ego. I started to try and educate and moderate the bad apples and promote the good parts of the party, always, always having to defend its past mistakes and errors. But I began to tire of defending the past, which I wasn’t a part of. Each time, I was assured by all the others that things such as that wouldn’t happen again – we were building a righteous nationalist party the land could be proud of, they just needed to realise we had changed! United, we had the power to change anything!

As time passed – especially after the elections – I saw more of the entrails of the beast; saw what it was and how it worked. The deeper inside, the uglier it got. Many people, making a racist remark here or slandering another who opposed them… I still held onto the idea that ‘Well, perhaps this is still just the bad apples; I need to reach the higher echelons.’ I was frustrated, because when I wasn’t there, keeping everyone in check, people would just come on and instantly start spouting hatred. There was no reason behind many people’s rants; they were blinded. “Nationalism seems to just draw this kind of people”, I thought. I finally got a meet with the area representatives; now I was buzzing, it was all going to be different, more positive, more progress, get to meet leaders – it’s going to be awesome. I had planned out so many ideas and suggestions and wanted to put them forward.

But at the meeting, all the ideas and topics I had to offer were shot down or ignored. They were much more interested in and – dead set focused on – ranting about “those damn blacks” and how “they didn’t belong here” and they were “invading inferior beings”. No matter what topic I tried to raise – always the same. It really came down to a personal hatred of black people. Now it was confirmed to me, finally. I had gone on to meet three influential people within the party, whose jobs and duties it was to encourage and promote to the members… All had blinding grudges and unreasonable hatred of other races; they had no interest in speaking to me about education, economy, health, welfare. So what are they teaching the rest of the group? Not many of those I encountered would second-guess them, or follow up on their statements -  they just wished to get people pissed off, because pissed-off people can be manipulated very easily. I felt sad, because I gave them the opportunity to prove me wrong and they, in my opinion, had sadly not done so.

These people just breed hatred and anger.  Maybe there’s something valid they’re upset about, something that looks like it needs looking into or stopping, but this sort of hate only breeds hate. The way they offer misinformation makes this a vicious cycle. I was asked to represent them, to encourage people my age and younger to join. That I just had to decline; I couldn’t encourage anyone to join a group which is so blinded.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

A Muslim woman living in Europe talks of her experiences with markers of Islam and her reasons for affiliating herself with Muslimness alongside equally powerful reasons for distancing herself from its overt expressions in the public sphere.

This was still a world before 9/11, and my article generated a lengthy, if unclear, counter-response in the Telegraph on the folly of my position – the writer, a prominent academic, assumed that this position was one of supporting the practice of veiling. My mother, reading both articles, made a perspicacious comment: that, having witnessed first hand the abuses of the pir system in a rural Bengali Muslim ashraf household, she could not understand what the fuss was all about: the burqa was, in her opinion, firmly a practice that degraded and entrapped women within patriarchy’s collusion with religion. Educated as a doctor in Calcutta, and married into what would be called a “highly progressive” Muslim family in which, for three generations, there had not been a veil in sight, she found it absurd that any woman would want to regress in this manner, especially if she had had the benefits of education.

1992-2010: Personal Experiments with Muslimness
Looking back to that moment a decade later, when the burqa ban in France brought the issue of women’s veiling back on the Liberal agenda, I am struck by two things. First, the ease with which one could open oneself to misunderstanding and rebuke from the Indian left if as a self-identified Muslim woman, I chose to analyse the choices other Muslim women were making in local and global spheres, rather than take overt sides. This would be even more so, if I chose to interrogate the responses of the so-called Indian “mainstream” to images of the veiled woman. Second, I realise how much more clearly I understand today my mother’s position and how much I appreciate being the legatee of the Nehruvian secularism that she was a beneficiary of and that my parents found the most congenial dogma to raise a family in post-Partition India. This benefit of hindsight has been enabled by a change, however, cosmetic, in the ideologies emanating from those that rule at the Indian Centre: through the 1990s and the 2000s, I had found myself, as a secularised Indian Muslim, thrown into epistemological and philosophical confusion about how I felt about markers of “Islam”.

During that period, I became a barometer that responded to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) aggressions by becoming a defender of practices and beliefs that were otherwise alien to me. Searching for ways to protect myself psychologically from daily polemical assaults on people like me – secular, middle class Indians who happened to be Muslims – I tried even to import practices of a Muslim habitus into my daily life – experimenting with fasting, praying namaaz, and reading the Qur’an every morning. But the truth was that, without food and coffee, I could not teach; I could not remember the motions of the wazu without reading my mother’s notes on the matter; and I found I would rather spend early mornings writing 500 words than struggle through Arabic script. I knew what those practices meant, but no one had forced them on me in childhood and as an adult I could not import them into my lifestyle willy-nilly. Close to veritable despair, I found anchor in a sense of humour, in the shared confusions felt by other Indian Muslim friends, and in the powerful spiritual energies of Sufi music and shrines, especially Ajmer, that called to me and somehow transmitted what the qawwals termed sukoon (peace of mind).

I still remember the day when my late father telephoned from Calcutta to tell me triumphantly that the BJP had lost the national elections. As we rejoiced together in some disbelief (I had gone to bed in Manchester listening to the NDTV psephologists prognosticating the BJP’s victory), I felt a burden physically slipping away from me. No longer, I realised in a flash, would I have to respond defensively to the BJP’s Hindutva agenda that had been pushing me ideologically into an ever-tighter corner. I emerged through that period when the BJP government went out of power, able to regain a sense of self again, of being strict about the principles of Nehruvian secularism that had shaped me as an individual and that, although old-fashioned, I realise I hold dear to me and are, paradoxically, akin to a religious affiliation. Now that the question of the veil has once more taken the global centre stage, I feel able to stare the issue squarely in the face and say with conviction, “I do not support the practice of full face covering, call it burqa or niqab, particularly when it comes in the form of a black, shapeless garment (however luxurious its material may be) and the extent of my distaste is such that I find myself fine with the French government’s ban on it.”

Cultural Relativism vs Humanism
This position is relatively rare amongst my friends, colleagues and acquaintances, whether in India, south Asia at large, or Europe. Indeed, it opened up a bizarre situation where I, of Muslim heritage, was expressing my lack of sympathy for those crying hoarse about the French ban, while colleagues with no such connections but with self-declared liberal affiliations all but rebuked me for my stance. What is this liberalism that goes about supporting the right of women to cover completely their faces and wander around beshrouded in shapeless black garments? Such is the topsy-turvy, post-postmodern, post-postcolonial world we live in, where Left and Right have totally interchanged positions that one might intuitively associate with them. Caught in the quagmire of argumentation, we inadvertently support stances we would normally distance ourselves from. We do not like the reactionary shades the French call for “laicité” seems to have taken on, and so we argue against their banning of the burqa, just as we might have rejected the idea of a uniform civil code when it was the BJP that called for it.
As a Muslim woman living in Europe, I experience powerful reasons for affiliating myself with Muslimness alongside equally powerful reasons for distancing myself from its overt expressions in the public sphere. The former arise from that grey zone where “religion” and “culture” intermingle. I feel a strange, almost romantic affinity with those who know what words like wazu and sehri imply, but a similar feeling resurges when I am in the company of someone who knows what a kofta or a dolma is. By that token, I feel that affinity with anyone belonging, say, to a one-time Ottomanised cultural sphere, such as my Bulgarian friend who knows what a shelwar is, and knows that I know too. The more I work through this instinctive affiliation, the more strongly I realise that what I am responding to is historical membership of an Islamicate heritage that was shaped by and shaped the forces of modernity. The kofta becomes a version of a Masonic handshake. On the other hand, the roots of my disaffiliation to veils of any kind, or to dietary restrictions imposed by religion, lie in the fact that my strongest ideological affiliations are to principles of secularism, socialism, and humanism.

This realisation has helped me arrive at a situation of no compromise over some fundamental issues that include veiling practices, although I can tolerate the headscarf (for reasons I explain below). I admit I may seem full of contradictions as I try to work my way through a mesh of local, global and national politics that once again draws sustenance through the Muslim woman’s veiling practices. It is only superficially paradoxical, however, that I feel strongly the need to retain for myself the label of “Muslim” precisely while being as far away from any kind of head covering as can be: ironically, those who want to seek out the “moderate Muslim” do not seem to want to acknowledge that in the existence of such a strange creature, a self-declared Muslim woman who has no truck with veiling practices, may lie that Holy Grail they are so fervently searching.

An Anti-Veiling Rationale
But there is another reason why I cling to the label “Muslim”. Attached to the adjectives “Indian” and “Bengali”, it encapsulates for me a political, ideological and affective heritage that is no less than a specific trajectory of south Asian modernity. This is my inheritance, and the very rejection of the burqa and niqab that I feel able to articulate is predicated on it. It is no contradiction to my mind, that along with the Sufi music of Ajmer and Nizamuddin Aulia, and the Baul music of Bengal, I appreciate the local vernacular practices of my Bengali Muslim world where grandmothers, mother, aunts and even I can discreetly draw the end of a sari across the head if occasion calls for it – which can range from visiting a graveyard to protecting oneself from the sun’s rays – and equally seamlessly let it drop once the moment is over. This was the very spirit celebrated (and its disappearance mourned) in Sabiha Sumar’s fine film Khamosh Pani, through the juxtaposition, in particular, of two distinct scenes.

The first was a wedding scene where men and women singing traditional songs were separated by a flimsy and translucent curtain that, at the height of merriment, was playfully breached; the second was one where young men of the village sought earnestly to erect a brick wall around the girls’ school to protect the “modesty” of their female counterparts. Separating the two scenes is the gradual radicalisation of those youth by Islamic fundamentalist preachers from Lahore (the film retrospectively explores the Islamicisation of Pakistan under Zia-ul-Haq). It is no coincidence that those Muslim women whose views on veiling resonate most closely with mine are from Bangladesh and Pakistan as well as India (rather than second or third generation Europeans). The visual contrast between the flexibility of the curtain and the rigidity of the brick wall is the same that distinguishes the flexibility of the pallu/aanchol and the rigidity of the burqa and niqab, which renders problematic even the basic act of eating in public.

At the heart of my objections to this practice, is, finally, a very simple matter – the intrinsic humanism of conducting person-to-person contact by allowing your interlocutor to see your face. Whether we like it or not, those of us conducting this conversation about full veiling move in a modernised public sphere, at the basis of which is the assumption that we speak to each other, face to face. This is not merely an aspect of humanism but an aesthetics of the face, where aesthetics stands not for elite privilege but is akin to rasa – the ability to enjoy and savour life in heightened form, to adorn and to express oneself. The amassing of sequins and encrustations of embroidery on a burqa renders it not a whit more aesthetic to me, but rather makes it more sinister, more counter-aesthetic in this fundamental sense that I am proposing. This is a practice that signals to me sullen joylessness, a declaration of shutting out the world.

How to Spot the Moderate Muslim
This interpretation also furnishes me with the reason why I do not condemn the headscarf (though I do not like it): it does not necessarily breach my framework of humanism and a rasa-driven aesthetics. It can also explain why I can find unreasonable the French government’s ban on the turban, which does not obscure the face of the wearer and in whose colour-coordinated care I locate a true note of rasa. I appreciate that Sarkozy’s government is driven by bigotry and arrogance, and that expounding freely about the anti-humanism of full veiling can easily be misinterpreted as support of that bigotry and arrogance. But on balance, the dangers of keeping quiet about one’s objections to full veiling cedes ground to the forces within Islam that have been attempting to seize control over what “Islam” can and must mean. The biggest problem is that the liberal, leftist position all over the world seems determined to accept their definitions, while hunting high and low for where the moderate Muslim might lurk, and for ways to coax him or her out of hiding.

Ananya Jahanara Kabir (a.j.kabir@leeds.ac.uk) teaches at the School of English, University of Leeds, UK.

Let us suppose that Hindutva extremism had somehow become acceptable because it encapsulated the doctrine of “defensive Jud’dha”, made palatable by “socially conscious” liberals who saw within it elements of a response to colonialism and US imperialism. They argued that the doctrine of religious warfare was a theocratic norm accepted and acceptable to all Hindus. Furthermore, any attack and criticism of Hindutva terrorism (let’s call it Hindutvaism for the purposes of this illustration) was simply racist and a fundamental attack of ordinary Hindu individuals. These liberals even came up with a neologism for this kind of criticism; they called it ‘Hinduphobia’. What was more, any liberal pushback of Hindutvaism was deemed ‘Hinduphobic’.

Gradually Hindutvaism became the cause célèbre of the trendy left libral intelligentsia in some parts of the Guardian, the New Statesman and the far-left. They dragged in every stripe of apologist from the pro-Hindutva camp to expound on the justfication of extremist strains in Hinduism, including child marriage, extreme homophobia and passive-aggressive vegetarianism. They took pains to explain that the extremist elements in Hindu scripture formed a normative and natural progression to Hindutvaism. Credulous politicians too busy too read their briefing papers, of both the left and the right, came to regard Hindutva as the only expression of Hinduism expressed by those funny brown Hindu voters. An “umbrella organisation” of Hindutva temples and non-elected “community leaders” calling itself the Hindu Council of Britain became the primary body of representation for British Hindus.

Soon the situation became so chronic that even ordinary Hindus began to believe that Hindutvaism was a reasonable and valid interpretation of Hinduism. Very convenient for white left-liberals and pro-Hindutva academics, because it allowed them to nod sagely and point to the growing numbers of violent Vegetarianists as justification for their support of these newly radicalised, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-Western, Western Hindus.

And so gradually formed the symbiotic relationship between the Hindutvas and the white liberal far-left. Soon institutions of the wider civil society formed alliances with vegetarian Hindus without realising that they were actually Hindutva fronts. It didn’t matter because no one could tell the difference anymore – since Hindutvaism had become universally accepted as the normative expression of Hinduism. Extremist Hindutva politics began to seep into every level of the British polity, from local councils to the House of Lords. Amnesty even began to champion Hindutva terrorists who waged war against the West and justified terrorism as an ethical form of liberation politics which they worked into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They called it “defensive Jud’dha”.

A blog run by a group of non-Hindus called “Fickle Politics” sprung up [www.ficklepolitics.com]. It was lauded by the liberal Left and the Guardian. Its owner was an accomplished self-publicist who published article after article, arguing for the engagement with Hindutva politics and its exponents. Their reasoning was mainly this: because ordinary Hindus came from a background of oppression and racism received at the hands of the White Man so the Hindutvas, though violent and misguided, had religious and political ideas built into their supremacist ideology which would raise the social standing of the Brown Man in general and the Hindu in particular.

The resurgence of the Hindutva was attributed to nothing less than the reinstatement of Hinduism to its rightful exalted place in world history, and the Modern world had better put up or shut up. The “noble savage” had finally made his comeback. It didn’t matter in the slightest that historical evidence showed that the Hindutva had killed and oppressed more members of their own kith and kin than the combined forces of Western imperialism ever did.

And so it had become politically correct to support religious extremism. Extremists from every other confessional group stridently demanded their stake in carving up society along religious cleavages.

However, there was still a minority of moderate Hindus who were dubious of this state of affairs. They saw through through the Hindutva delusion because, amongst other things, they had been personally affected by Hindutvaist supremacism. But their protests were shouted down, and they were charged as being effete, urbanised Uncle Toms and stooges of the West by the media, New Statesman and Fickle Politics. On the other hand, extremist Hindus who championed Hindutvaism became lionised and hero-worshipped by the liberal left, its newspapers, blogs and talking heads. Ordinary Hindus became sidelined and demonised because they refused to kowtow to the left-liberal establishment which held Hindutvaism aloft. They refused to subscribe to the narrative that Hindutvaism was a legitimate response to the hegemony of the “evil West”, but to no avail. Hindutavism or fundamentalist Hinduism had devoured its critics and had become the dominant interpretation of the Hindu faith in the West.

This is only an hypothetical scenario; it never took place. For many, the idea that the politics of the Hindutva entering into political institutions of civil society and becoming sanitised by the liberal left would be an unconscionable nightmare. But this is an analogous illustration of a reality which is equally unconscionable.

The fashion police, at least, have already arrived, a decade early and without any help from Islamists. But rather than forcing women to wear the burqa or niqab, their job is to force them not to. Earlier this month Italian police in the northern city of Novara fined a Tunisian immigrant, Amel Marmouri, €500 for being veiled in a post office. Belgian police are likely to be doing the same after the Brussels parliament outlawed the burqa. France expects to pass a similar law by the autumn. Holland could follow suit. The Spanish city of Lleida has forbidden the burqa in public buildings; the Minister of Labour and Immigration Celestino Corbacho has hinted at a national ban. In Canada, the Quebec government has drafted an anti-burqa law. Australian politicians are demanding one too.

The rhetoric accompanying the bans has been as gushing as the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. Jean-Francois Copé, leader of the majority UNP party in French National Assembly, has talked of ‘a reaffirmation of our ideals of liberty and fraternity’. For the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, the bans are nothing less than a ‘defence of the Enlightenment’. According to Celestino Corbacho without a burqa ban it would not be possible to protect ‘the values of our society’.

There is certainly something medieval about the burqa and the niqab. The idea that in the 21st century women should be hidden from view for reasons of modesty or religious belief is both troubling and astonishing. Yet, there is also something surreal about the way that this piece of cloth has been turned into a battleground for Western values and about the idea that the burqa poses some kind of existential threat to the West.

The campaign against the burqa is particularly puzzling when in reality so few women choose to wear it. The sight of a burqa in Paris or Brussels is almost as rare as a glimpse of a bikini in Riyadh or Karachi. France has a Muslim population of 5 million. Its government estimates that fewer than 2000 women wear a niqab or burqa. (The original survey, conducted by DCRI, the French secret service, came up with the oddly precise figure of 367; that was so low that the Interior Ministry told the DCRI to count again.) In Holland some 500 women in a Muslim population of one million do so, in Denmark the estimate is fewer than 200 out of 170,000 Muslims.

So why, at a time when Europe is beset by so many fundamental economic and social problems, have legislators become so obsessed by this piece of cloth? There are three main kinds of arguments against the burqa: practical, political and existential.

The burqa, Jean-Francois Copé has suggested, ‘poses a serious safety problem at a time when security cameras play an important role in the protection of public order’. Many worry that the burqa would allow terrorists to evade airport security or provide the perfect camouflage for bank robbers. Others fret that wearing the burqa makes it difficult to perform certain jobs, particularly those that require face-to-face contact with clients or the public – doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers.

There are clearly practical problems that come with wearing the burqa. It is, after all, a piece of clothing designed for feudal life, not the modern world. Practical problems, however, can usually be solved on a case-by-case basis without the need for national soul searching or draconian legislation. Airports already require veiled women to reveal their features when passing through security. Police have no problem demanding to see faces when checking ID cards. And if banks insist that people should not wear bulky clothing, so be it. But that is very different from the state imposing an outright ban on such clothes.

If wearing a burqa is incompatible with the needs of particular jobs, then those particular employers – hospitals, schools, shops even- can legitimately demand that employees not be clad from head to foot. But again, one can impose dress codes for certain jobs without banning a type of clothing for everyone. After all, we don’t have judges and teachers wearing bikinis on the job either.

The practical arguments for a ban on the burqa are weak and shallow. More profound is the political case. The burqa, proponents of a ban argue, undermines gender equality and makes social integration impossible. It is, Bernard-Henri Lévy has written, ‘not a dress, it’s a message, one that clearly communicates the subjugation, subservience, the crushing and the defeat of women.’

The burqa is certainly demeaning to women, and often used to enchain them. Many other practices and rituals that Western societies tolerate are, however, also degrading. Orthodox Jewish women must shave their heads and wear a wig when they marry. The Catholic Church forbids women priests. Many Protestant evangelical churches insist that wives must ‘obey’ their husbands and that the role of women is to breed new evangelicals. Nobody seriously suggests that Jewish marriage rituals be banned or that the Catholic church be forced to accept gender equality or that evangelical wives be saved by state legislation from being baby factories.

A liberal society accepts that individuals should be free to make choices that may not be in their own interests and that, to liberal eyes, demean them. This applies even to particularly distasteful expressions of degradation, such as the wearing of the burqa.

What of the suggestion that women are forced to wear the burqa, and so need protection from the law? It is true that in countries such as Saudi Arabia or Yemen women have little choice but to cover up their face. That in itself is a good reason for liberal societies not to impose coercive dress codes.

If women are forced to do something against their will, the law already protects them in democratic countries. But what evidence exists, suggests that in Europe most burqa-clad women do not act from a sense of compulsion. According to the DCRI report in France, the majority of women wearing the burqa do so voluntarily, largely as an expression of identity and as an act of provocation. A second French report by the information authority, the SGDI, came to similar conclusions. Burqa wearers, it suggested, sought to ‘provoke society, or one’s family’, and saw it as a ‘badge of militancy’, and of ‘Salafist origins’. The burqa ban will only deepen the sense of alienation out which the desire for such provocation emerges.

The burqa is a symbol of the oppression of women, not its cause. If legislators really want to help Muslim women, they could begin not by banning the burqa, but by challenging the policies and processes that marginalize migrant communities: on the one hand, the racism, social discrimination and police harassment that all too often disfigure migrant lives, and, on the other, the multicultural policies that treat minorities as members of ethnic groups rather than as citizens. Both help sideline migrant communities, aid the standing of conservative ‘community leaders’ and make life more difficult for women and other disadvantaged groups within those communities.

What of the impact of the burqa on social integration? The veil has been rightly described as ‘ghetto walls that a person wears’. It often inhibits normal social interaction – that, after all, is its very purpose – and may preclude those who wear it from integrating into society. But given that virtually no Muslim woman actually wears the burqa, it can hardly be held responsible for creating a sense of social separation.

The real significance of the burqa is that it has become a symbol of the anxieties that have come to beset Western nations. What does it mean to be French? Or British? Or Swedish? Most Western nations have undergone a crisis of identity as both traditional values, and trust in the institutions in which those values were invested, have become eroded. Unable to define clearly the ideas and values that characterize the nation, still less to win people to those ideas and values, politicians have taken the easy step of railing against symbols of ‘alienness’. In this sense the burqa bans are similar to the prohibition imposed last year by the Italian city of Lucca on kebab shops ‘to protect our culinary tradition’ or to the decree by the mayor Rome that schools can no longer serve couscous or Chinese fried rice but only ‘regional cuisine dishes’. They are attempts to define ‘Western values’ or the republican tradition by showing what such values or traditions are not at a time when politicians find it increasingly difficult to express what they are.

And this takes us to the existential argument against the burqa. ‘This is not about the burqa’, Bernard-Henri Lévy claims. ‘It’s about Voltaire. What is at stake is the Enlightenment of yesterday and today, and the heritage of both, no less sacred than that of the three monotheisms. A step backwards, just one, on this front would give the nod, all fanaticism, all the true thoughts of hatred and violence.’

The idea that the entire weight of the Enlightenment tradition should rest on banning a piece of cloth worn by a few hundred women shows how absurd has become the debate about the burqa. Certainly, it is important to defend liberal social values, the secular society and the heritage of the Enlightenment. But we cannot do so by promoting illiberal policies, stigmatizing immigrants, or banning symbols of ‘otherness’. The very values that Lévy believes are undermined by the burqa demand that we oppose any attempt by the state to ban it.

recently, i gave up posting on pickled politics, partly because of the level of personal animosity i was facing, but mostly just in frustration at my apparent inability to get my point across. now, i suppose i have nobody very much to blame for that apart from myself, but i’ve never felt that was a problem before now. now, i think i’m starting to work out what it is that is bothering me; certainly, it’s not about the denizens of one blog, or even the blogosphere, or even the media. it’s not any one set of views, not any one person, but a set of trends, a collective movement i sense in wider society.

one of the things i like about the spittoon and my co-contributors is that they take a robust approach towards the cosy relationship between the left and the various apologists for, supporters of and partisans of islamist extremism. they take, of course, an equally dim view of other forms of clerical fascism, whether it be jewish, christian, or hindu, although, of course, we are often excoriated for not writing sufficiently on these subjects. and why is that? well, the answer that “they’re not as big a problem” simply won’t do. clearly, the activities of the likes of rss/shiv sena in india, or hardcore fundamentalists in the american south ultimately affect all of us. for me personally, the behaviour of both the extreme west bank settlers and that of rejectionist ultra-orthodoxy evokes both profound heartache and deep anger – just as the “as-a-jew” clique that only appear as jews in order to display their preening self-importance whenever an opportunity to attack israel arises. however, i would nonetheless argue that, from the perspective of wider UK society, these concerns are less immediate, in that these groups have no meaningful accommodation with either our government or the UK media, however influential they may be in the communities they come from. what bothers me, really, is what the effects of ongoing and intensifying fundamentalism on me, my family and community and wider society – in this, locally speaking, islamists are in the vanguard, as the leading proponents and practitioners of violence against my community specifically and, generally, against UK civil society.

the question inevitably arises – who’s really worse? well, i think i would on balance come down in favour of the idea that wherever a particular group becomes influential and the closer they come to the levers of power, the more of a problem they are in a particular country. thus, in the UK, the utterly misguided, racism-of-lower-expectations the-west-is-ultimately-responsible-for-everything-bad-y’know attitude has allowed the entryism of islamist organisations and sympathisers everywhere from the police to government to the left-wing media. but would it be any different anywhere else? i expect not – militant fundamentalist christians are busily inching closer to the levers of power in washington, india has had already had one bjp government and i think we’re all aware of the subversion of mainstream democracy and the processes of civil society in israel by the religious parties and the settler lobby. we’ve got a lot of muslim fundamentalists here in the UK and, in a profound act of ignorance and credulity, we’ve allowed islamic education to be systematically outsourced to salafi and wahhabi dawa organisations for a generation, with entirely predictable results – i think we can say the same of many european countries, although i would fall well short of the apocalyptic and hysterical “eurabia” scenario – in fact, i’d be more worried personally about the behaviour of the catholic party in poland led by an anti-semitic priest and any prospective alliance of a russian political party with the orthodox church – not trend anyone jewish can afford to ignore.

of course, in europe particularly, this isn’t the first time we’ve been here. there was of course an “enlightenment”, which consisted in large part of reaction against the authoritarianism of various forms of christianity, whether by trying to eliminate it altogether and replace it with a sort of ersatz state paganism, as in france, or whether to regulate it as a sort of national industry, as in germany and scandinavia, or whether to simply satirise and philosophise it into a manageable social pressure and community support lobby, as in britain. the enlightenment taught that religion was nothing but a corrupt power structure which only the mad, the bad and the deluded would indulge. as we also know, removing religion simply forced the mad, the bad and the deluded to find other channels for their unpleasant attitudes and activities. we still see this outdated and reductionist position being reinvented for modern times using all the tools of modern cultural influence, from popular science to childrens’ books to comedy. religious people are portrayed as knaves or fools. there appears to be no middle ground, no compromise possible – religion must be rooted out, cleansed and exterminated.

of course, we’ve been there before too – modern fundamentalism, as karen armstrong (before she started to become part of the problem by sucking up to the goons at MPAC-UK) pointed out in her still masterful study of fundamentalism “the battle for G!D” evolved largely as a reaction against the enforced, clumsy and often brutal imposition of modernity on societies all around the world. the fundamentalisms we have today have reached their current forms because of the political, technological and social realities of the societies in which they evolved. their priorities and obsessions are driven by the battles they originally fought, against pluralism, liberalisation of dress, behaviour, increased social equality (or inequality), against practically irreversible geopolitical realities, against the aftereffects of wars and economic dislocation. those who give aid and comfort to fundamentalists are inevitably picking and choosing where they have shared priorities and obsessions – anti-imperialism, anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, anti-israel, social breakdown, the emancipation of women, the legacy of slavery – but they are always at odds with fundamental features of the societies they criticise.

what i see developing, however, is a sort of multi-lateral polarisation in which the first casualty is moderation, the second is tolerance and the third is social consensus. the effects of this, however, touch all of us, but the effects are peculiarly corrosive on those of us who are able to combine amd integrate reason and religion and deal with the subtleties of creation, revelation and evolution. we are frequently at odds with obscurantists and bigots within our faith, but we are now fighting a rearguard defence against anti-religious forces, without any letup in the attack on reasonableness, complexity and dialogue that continues from reactionary fanatics. both sides, naturally, accuse us of giving aid and comfort to the other in its mission to destroy them – if we’re not with them, we’re against them – and no prisoners will be taken.

so, on one hand, we have the forces of militant anti-religion mounting attacks on everything from headgear to faith schools, on the other we have the walls of the ghetto being built anew, only with gun-ports this time. we can also see the social contract of the enlightenment renewed; previously, the deal was “give up your difference and you’ll get rights as a citizen” – this time, it’s “you’ve abused your rights as a citizen, we can no longer tolerate your differences”. the behaviour of religious fanatics, in their quest to dominate their own communities, has destroyed the delicate balance which allowed religion to be an integrated part of civil society. naturally, comes the response: they want all or nothing? fine – let them have nothing. but what of those of us who always wanted to co-exist? who prize our cultural and spiritual distincitiveness? oh no, distinctiveness is still allowed – but religion will no longer be a valid reason for it. diversity in sexuality, gender, disability, intelligence, talent, wealth – all these are permitted, but not religion. we are offered the choice – everything or nothing. well, we want neither.

i refuse to hide in the ghetto. i contribute to this society. i work. i pay my taxes. i don’t walk about naked, nor do i hide my face from the world. i will not assimilate, nor will i act as if i am living in another country or another century. i refuse to eat foods that are forbidden to me and i refuse to forbid those foods to others who may want them. i refuse to give up the sabbath, the festivals, the Torah and my other sacred texts – and i refuse to impose my vision of them on those who do not share my perspective. if i am attacked, i will defend myself. if i am insulted, i will respond in kind. i am not looking for a fight, but i will not shrink from one. i will not allow others to define what i am. the search for social consensus has been a long and painful one – and now it has been destroyed again, by the hubris and arrogance of religious and anti-religious fanatics. i do not know if we can put the pieces back together again, but there has to be a basis for us to live together – both enforced segregation and enforced assimilation are fascistic responses.

judaism has always been not so much a culture or a religion as it has been a 3000+ year-old argument. there is nothing so boring as loads of people violently agreeing with each other – except perhaps two groups of people refusing to concede anything that the other is saying has any value or validity. the counter-enlightenment is in full swing, without any sign that it has learnt anything from the enlightenment.

This is a very interesting take on the hijab debate – a video about a British Muslim woman who decided to take off the hijab after realising she was wearing it not for personal pious reasons but political ones – contrary to what Islamists claim. She is of the opinion that it’s better for society that men learn how to function appropriately around unveiled women than that society shroud women from men and place the blame for men’s behavioural inadequacies on women’s shoulders.

Watch it through as she visits various Muslim women around the world and investigates their attitudes towards the hijab.

****

Hat tip: Averroes Press

“A pope with no moral authority simply cannot function as a pope. Yes, he has ecclesiastical power. But ecclesiastical power without moral authority merely exposes the hollowness of an unaccountable, self-perpetuating clerisy. Does he think we don’t know? Does he understand that any parent of any child will be unable to imagine themselves in the same moral universe as this man?”

and some of them are even sort-of-default-catholics for whom this is the final straw:

“I could hardly be described as a good, or even decent, Catholic, but I’d managed to hang on in there, in the vaguest way imaginable.  Vague because it’s hard to pay lip-service to a faith that you feel hates you; a faith that would rather let you die in childbirth than have an abortion, won’t let you take the contraception necessary to prevent said abortion, hates gay people despite having many homosexual priests; a faith that talks ignorant nonsense about HIV and Aids, that would rather watch people die in Africa than let them use a condom; a faith that is unbelievably slow to say sorry about the fact that some of its members are habitual rapists of children.

I mean, you know, at some point you just give up. Not one of these things is defensible taken individually. Collectively, they are beyond comprehension.”

faith central has a bunch more, thanks to the always-charming ruth gledhill.

and now, of course the pope’s opposite number in the atheist world, the ever-reliable richard dawkins and his fellow diatribalist christopher hitchens (the man who, i was appalled to discover, repeated the “hole in the sheet” legend as fact in his anti-religious tract “G!D Is not great” without doing basic research) have volunteered to “do a pinochet” on big bad benny before his lips touch the tarmac at heathrow.

"science be praised!"

now, i have to admit that part of me admires them for having the stones to try and, frankly, i’d rather not foot the tax bill for his security. however, it is only fair to point out, as indeed does libby purves at the times, that:

“We know that even if the Vatican had never done anything legally dubious or morally wrong, Hitch and Dawk would still hate it.”

although on balance, i think i agree with her that this needs airing and dealing with properly if the church is not to avoid a fatal collapse in its already critically compromised moral authority. aside from the pre-vatican 2 accusations of deicide and more than a thousand years of clerical jew-hatred (oops, i’m not sure we’re done with that), i have, i think, a fairly relaxed attitude to catholicism and a great admiration for my many friends who seek to remain within its communion, even if i always thought the theology was a bit on the prudey-square side and have never, ever seen eye-to-eye with celibacy.

i’m actually not sure if it’s the general or the specific that worries me; i always admired peter tatchell when he tried this kind of stunt, but that’s peter tatchell, he’s a principled sort of bloke. it’s just that i could envisage dawkins and hitchens trying exactly the same thing on, say, an israeli chief rabbi or the sheikh of al-azhar; it’s all the same to them, of course, but if they were to get this to fly, you could see exactly what would happen with every single-issue campaigner/gadfly/wingnut: the same thing that happened with tzipi livni. we are, after all, talking about a mentality that will try any stunt, no matter how stupid, counterproductive and unhelpful, that gets them into the paper.

i suppose south park are right:

Dawkins knew that logic and reason were the way of the future. But it wasn’t until he met his beautiful wife that he learned using logic and reason isn’t enough. You have to be a dick to everyone who doesn’t think like you.

1. transparency at the jewish leadership council

ok, we know who the board of deputies are. we know what it’s for. we know how it’s funded. we know how you get to be on it. we know who it represents. now, we have this new organisation called the “jewish leadership council”. on it, you have various movers and shakers, you’ve got the vc/banking/property tycoons, you’ve got the charity/safety/israel activists, you’ve got synagogue movement machers, you’ve got access, you’ve got international connections, you’ve got lords, baronesses, knights and the chair of ujs – you’ve got two women and no rabbis, for some reason. you’ve got no haredim, for some other reason. you’ve got leaders from the most broad-based and influential organisations in the community – but what are they for? clearly, this is an influential bunch of people, but who chooses them? who decided that there should be a jewish leadership council in the first place? how are they accountable? what is their strategy? what is their relationship with the board? how is it funded? i for one would like to know.

2. promote jewish (especially sephardic) cultural literacy

we are not short, for good or ill, of jewish education organisations, from the controversial chabad to the inestimable limmud and all points beyond. however, for the most part, systematic approaches aimed at enhancing jewish identity are without exception entirely religious-based. more worryingly, they seem to be ignoring the question of cultural literacy. whilst there are instances of successful specific initiatives, like the yiddish summer school run by the jewish music institute, or the various ulpanim run by israel-focused organisations, there is a distinct lack of provision for the sephardic and oriental communities to promote the learning of ladino and judeo-arabic – essentially, globalisation is being driven by majority tastes, hence the largest groups attract the most funding and if one didn’t learn it at one’s mother’s knee, one might struggle to gain familiarity with anything from cookery to piyyutim, history to dress. there are organisations, including musical groups and individual tutors, who are promoting and disseminating the results of their knowledge and expertise in specific areas, normally as a result of academic research, but there is no-one who can teach you about the culture of, say, an “indian iraqi”, everything from how to make sambusak and sehug to singing shbahoth pronounced correctly – in other words, the customs, the language, the music, the food, the history. and the same goes for the different ashkenazi traditions, with the possible exception of chabad, who integrate their cultural traditions such as “farbrengen” as part of their outreach programmes. it is possible that this may be the result of a hundred years of zionist shelilat ha-galut (“negation of diaspora behaviours”) or an enlightenment/modernist hangover against the backward ways of “ghetto culture”, or simply the influence of organisations whose sole concern is increasing religious observance, but surely one can no longer argue that diaspora jewish is simply something to be outgrown. yet we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater on this one – and forgotten much of what made being jewish interesting. this is something i believe where we can learn something from how other diasporas have preserved their cultures, the various south asian communities being a case in point.

3. take a lead on environmental frumness

something was said about making Shabbat the “greenest day of the week” – now, i am the first to expound on the benefits of one day with no driving, tv or communications, but i worry about the effects on the planet of copious use of tinfoil, urns, hot-plates, leaving lights on and most of all the use of disposable plates, cutlery, glasses and so on for ease of clear-up at synagogue kiddushim or on other communal occasions. i was less than underwhelmed at chiefy’s “green shabbat” damp squib and am regularly appalled at the environmental disaster area that most community functions seem to be. there is an opportunity for the community to change this – it is 100% wrong that correct religious observance should be in breach of Torah prohibitions on wastefulness and the destruction of natural resources. i would be delighted if religious organisations could take a lead in this department – the progressive movements have already made steps in this direction and organisations like limmud have made concrete moves to make policy into reality on its conferences. there are organisations such as hazon that are focused specifically on doing this in a jewish way – it is about time that the religious establishment, particularly within the traditional communities, does the same. a set of guidelines would be a start.

4. break the stranglehold of fiftysomething personal fiefdoms

i lose count at the number of community organisations in this country whose leadership and patronage is controlled by middle-aged people who run them as if they were their own personal kingdoms. sometimes, these people have some claim to expertise, or have built the organisations up, but more often than not, they have simply prevented the organisations from developing by hanging on to all the levers of power, dispensing patronage with the help of compliant boards of part-time trustees, picked for their names, contact books, relations and fat wallets. how many of these organisations have executive scrutiny from anyone under 35, let alone under 30? how many of these boards provide an effective check on the power of the chief executive or director? more worryingly, what happens when an organisation which has no competition begins to stifle innovation in its key area of focus and actively prevent other organisations challenging its dominance, or even block activities in its area which are not under its control? i propose that all community organisations adopt a code of practice which includes a commitment to the future planning of the organisation, specifically to succession planning and provides for some kind of non-executive checks and balances. not being an expert in charity law, i’m not sure what the actual rules are, but enough charity scandals have made it into the papers (and i know of some which haven’t even got that far) to suggest that there is something to address here, perhaps through the board?

5. shul and mosque twinning

although there are a plethora of opportunities for the ceremonial activities associated with interfaith dialogue (i’m thinking here of the likes of the indefatigable and admirable sir sigmund sternberg) and quite a few effective practical collaborations amongst communal professionals and academics (i’m thinking here of the leo baeck college jewish-christian-muslim conferences in germany and the tireless liaison work done by the cst) there are still far too few grass-roots initiatives (here, i’m thinking of the likes of radio salaam-shalom or the alif-aleph student dialogue activities) in the mainstream synagogue movements. i would propose a simple solution – a programme of twinning between synagogues and mosques, perhaps trilaterally including churches if it helps. by the same token, i think jewish-sikh dialogue has long been neglected and, particularly in view of our similarities as religions with a partly ethnic element, it would be extremely helpful to bring gurdwaras into the mix. a programme of working together on uncontroversial and useful community projects such as litter collection or redecorating local facilities would enable the building of links which would contribute strongly to community cohesion.

6. transparency in the tzedakah industry

every day, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds are donated by religious jews to the needy. the giving of “tzedakah” (not exactly the same thing as charity) is a religious obligation that is taken extremely seriously by both observant and non-observant jews. however, this system lacks transparency. every traditional morning service includes a point at which money is ceremonially donated, usually into a collection box. usually this money is given as coins or even notes, but there are a number of schemes, widely used in the strictly orthodox community, whereby tzedakah vouchers are purchased en masse, donated by the purchasers and then redeemed by the recipients. however, these cashflows, which are then collected and redistributed by either communal officials or charitable networks, undeniably place significant amounts of patronage in the hands of synagogues, rabbis and charities. there is little transparency about these donations, how they are used or what strings may or may not be attached.

on the other side of the transaction, a huge industry has built up around getting money donated for tzedakah to “the needy” or “for Torah study” – however, a sizeable (though who knows how much?) amount is directed towards ultra-orthodox institutions both here and in israel. similarly, the communities for whom “Torah is their profession” (in other words, they don’t work for a living, but live off these donations whilst studying full-time) are disproportionately benefited. i’m not saying they live in the lap of luxury, but they certainly have a lot of children, don’t pay a lot of tax (or, in israel, serve in the army) and don’t seem to pay much attention to the talmudic maxim, which is part of the normative halakhah of the shulhan arukh, that “he who does not teach his son a trade, teaches him to be a thief” (BT qiddushin 29a). moreover, if you spend any time in the strictly orthodox community, you will become aware of the number of people who come asking directly for money from the community during prayers, in most cases waving a laminated note under your nose about the operation they need to pay for, the medication they need to take, the institution of Torah learning that they are supporting or even the wedding they need to make for one of their 12 children. all of them seem to be able to afford plane tickets and most of them seem to think if you are collecting in the UK, you have no obligation to ask in english or provide any kind of english explanation of what you’re asking for, which is just plain rude.

now, i don’t deny that some of these are worthy causes, but some of them definitely aren’t. the money isn’t audited at either end. the tax authorities certainly aren’t consulted. money often goes missing, is diverted, is used to gain undue influence or ends up funding things of which i certainly do not approve (like illegal settlements) and we are all aware of the recent scandals in america over money-laundering. there is a secondary industry (well known in stamford hill) whereby you can hire a driver for a couple of days who has a list of addresses where people live who give to good causes live and the amount they are likely to give and he will shuttle you round from door to door in return for a cut. one person of my acquaintance used to keep a wodge of five pound notes by the door for when anyone rang – and, apparently, a lot of them complained about how little he gave! now it is all very praiseworthy that the jewish obligation for charitable giving is so powerful, but it is currently driving a lot of very, very questionable behaviours and practices.

the authorities have long been interested in the hawala system by which muslims raise money for good (and some not so good) causes and a focus on this is part of most anti-money-laundering computer systems. it is only a matter of time before the tzedakah system comes under scrutiny as a racketeering practice. in fact, it probably already is. my advice, particularly to the strictly-orthodox communities is this: clean house. do something about the lack of transparency. get audit trails and control systems in place – or you will live to regret it when this augean stable is eventually cleaned. there is an opportunity for, among other things, a cashless system to be introduced whereby people seeking donations can be issued a portable card reading device. similarly, if we can issue hechshers (stamps of kashrut) for food, there is no reason why we cannot do the same at the UK end for reputable collectors of funds – that way, we who wish to fulfil our obligation to donate can be assured that our funds are going to someone or a cause who really deserves it and not to anywhere else.

7. call the kiruv industry to account and combat the influence of artscroll

regular readers of the spittoon will be aware of my opinions on the kiruv or “outreach” industry and the organisations that are engaged in it. many of these organisations worry me. not because i object to bagels and speed-dating, but because i object to the hidden agendas of these organisations and the power they are increasingly gaining within the communal mainstream. at least one major united synagogue has outsourced its jewish education to a kiruv organisation in the past, which has been a source of some controversy. the ideology that drives these people comes straight from the haredi world. that is not to say that it is necessarily such a bad thing, but it’s simply not healthy that it is allowed to infiltrate and take over the mainstream of jewish education. the stalking-horse of this entryism is the powerful “mesorah publications” publishing house, home of the artscroll series of books. now i don’t know of one jewish house that doesn’t have at least one of their books, including mine, but i for one worry about allowing the hashkafah (“worldview”) of this part of the community to become dominant. both artscroll and the kiruv movements push a monolithic, heavily edited, selective, prudish, intolerant and above all doctrinaire view of judaism which flies in the face both of our history and the jaw-dropping complexity of jewish thought, theology, law and culture. people like simplicity and for things to be set out for them to understand – that’s fine. but what goes with this, both in the publications and the programmes, is an ideology – and it’s not an ideology that we should be comfortable or complacent about. the traditionalist mainstream has been supine in the face of this onslaught, in many cases sympathising with its negation of non-orthodox communities and streams of thought and, in many cases, actively encouraged by the power players in the religious leadership. it is time we fully understood what these organisations stand for, what their political aims are, what links they have to israeli political parties on the [ultra]religious right and what influence they have over the community in this country. they have been able to buy silence so far with what is in many places entirely praiseworthy community work, but it is time we had some transparent scrutiny of these organisations.

all suggestions are welcome!

Dispatches Islamophobic documentary

Channel 4’s Dispatches is due to broadcast a damaging and misleading programme on Monday 1st March at 8pm. For nearly a year the programme had undercover reporters attending events (including private meetings) of Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) and passing themselves off as Muslims and friends, but acting as agents provocateurs to solicit replies to use against IFE.

IFE is a mainstream community organisation with members hailing from different walks of life. Its activities and events are open to the public and publicised widely. No request was made by Dispatches to gain access to IFE’s activities or projects. Instead by using undercover reporters and ‘covert filming’, Dispatches has portrayed IFE as a secretive organisation, arousing much suspicion.

The Dispatches programme on 1st March is set to falsely portray IFE as an extremist and sinister organisation, and undo the years of good work in the community. The programme wrote to IFE few days ago asking for their response/comment on around 23 different issues and allegations, including links to Al-Qaeda  and engaging in “entryism” in an attempt to bring about an Islamic ‘coup’ within mainstream British politics, or achieve political domination.

As concerned citizens of this country, we strongly condemn this demonization of an organisation with a track record of transparency, integration and engagement. Moreover this programme is not only politically-motivated due to the upcoming elections, it is also Islamophobic in nature – preying on public fears about extremism.

Please protest against this divisive programme by registering your complaints to the producers of Dispatches, Channel 4, Ofcom (regulatory body) and John Fitzptrick MP who has been feeding drivel to Dispatches.

following the links to register complaints appears the template letter to register a complaint:

TEMPLATE LETTER AND POINTS

Please use the letter below as a template to register your complaint to Channel 4’s Dispatches:                                     

Date…

Dear Sir/Madam,

I write to express my utter disgust and disappointment at Channel 4’s Dispatches “Britain’s Islamic Republic”, which levels wholly inaccurate and defamatory accusations on the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE).

The documentary is not only Islamophobic in nature but it preys on public fears about extremism. The programme utilises emotive and provocative language and misleading information to create an impression that IFE is a sinister, secretive and anti-democratic organisation which condones and promotes violent extremism.

At a time of rising far right activism and an increased reporting of Islamophobic and racist attacks on Muslims, Channel 4 has acted wholly irresponsibly. The IFE is a mainstream Muslim organisation which has for many years worked to encourage active citizenship and community development. It is reprehensible that the Dispatches programme has made such a crude attempt at defaming the IFE. It appears that Dispatches has joined those in society who are hell bent on creating division, paranoia and distrust amongst communities.

Yours faithfully

[insert here your name and city]

even more helpfully, the following are also included:

Additional Points for Individualised Letters and Points to Raise When Making Telephone Complaints.

You may also choose to incorporate some of the following in your letter of complaint If you are able to, please consider using the following points in your letter of complaint:

1. Coming so close to a general election, the documentary is politically motivated.  
2. The programme will undoubtedly increase community tension and harm genuine attempts at community cohesion.
3. The documentary is a dishonest attempt at scaremongering and vilifying Muslim communities and religious institutions.
4. The documentary panders to the BNP and the Far Right
5. It begs the question; what is wrong with Muslims being politically engaged and active in civic society and the politics of the common good?
6. This dishonest portrayal of a mainstream Muslim organisation like the IFE will only contribute to further alienating young Muslims and draw them towards extremism.
7. Similar claims were made in the not so distant past against the Irish and Jewish communities.
8. This is part of a series of organised, vindictive and orchestrated witch hunts against Muslim personalities, institutions and organisations which aims at undoing the excellent work done by these.
9. This is irresponsible and reprehensible journalism by Channel 4, which makes a mockery of its stated aim of representing and celebrating Britain’s diversity and multi-culturalism.
10. The picture painted of IFE is contrary to our knowledge and experience of the organisation and indeed its track record.

but not, i fear to ours. jolly well organised, though – i’m sure this is an excellent way to strike back against jewish zionist control of the media and, y’know, how islamists muslims are denied a voice and that. anyway, i’d like to thank naeem for showing me how to complain about this programme, which i’ll undoubtedly want to do, of course.

scary kiruv cartoon

on reading it, i didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. on one hand, it’s a caricature of the position of the kiruv (“outreach”) organisations, but on the other hand, once you start digging into their theology, their internal politics, their fundraising activities and their influence on the jewish community and israeli politics, it’s hard not to find them scary.

i’ve been thinking about this for a good long time, because as an observant jew, albeit one who was became observant as an adult, i am constantly aware of the phenomenon of the ba’al teshuvah, the “penitent”, the returner-to-traditional-judaism. when you’re trying to do this, the kiruv organisations are the first to stand up and say they’ll help. however, i never took them up on their offers, because i could see where it led and i had seen its effect on friends and family when conflict arose. i won’t say that i’ve never met fantastic rabbis from chabad, project seed, aish or the jewish learning exchange – but i was always aware of the kiruv undercurrent and kept my involvement at arm’s length. it would appear, however, that not everyone is in possession of the requisite confidence and critical faculties to counter the half-truths, mendacious reasoning, tendentious interpretation and evangelistic love-bombing; people want their outer message of family values, Torah and a truly integrated lifestyle to be true – and so it is.  and, yes, of course these people are often more amusing than scary:

Lubavitch Sends T-800 Back in Time to Protect Holy Temple (thanks, the Knish)

but that’s not all it is.

what i truly find sinister about these organisations is their monolithic nature. like all fundamentalisms, they take a mythologised golden age (which may or may not have happened) and posit a fall from that state, which can only be regained by a return to the actions, behaviours and values espoused by the organisations which claim to represent the legacy of that golden age. whether this is an idealised picture of the yeshivas of lithuania, the shtetls of poland, or indeed the era of the prophets, patriarchs and classical rabbinic sages. if only we all attained that standard, they claim, it would all be different – the world would be transformed and us with it.

well, the world would be transformed all right, but something vital would be lost – and that is the vitality of religious biodiversity. there has always, *always*, *always* been variation in both belief and practice, there has *never* been a time in which we all did exactly the same thing and observed a uniform code of dress, behaviour, ritual and belief. maimonides’ “13 principles of faith” divided the community for a century. the hasidim and mitnagdim fought like cats and dogs (and continue to do so) – the accommodators of modernism and the NAY-SORRENDUR vanguard, the rationalists and mystics, the scholars and the businessmen – we’re all necessary just as much as we always have been. what i really, deeply object to is this idea – shared either overtly or covertly by all kiruv organisations, is the concept that we must all dress like this:

and spend all our time doing this:

hevruta study in a yeshiva

and everyone else should just be happy to pay for us to do this, because after all – we’re doing the world a favour by sitting and studying Torah all day. now, actually, i don’t entirely disagree that studying Torah a lot is a good thing for the world, but i also note that the sages expected us to Get A Job and Pay Our Taxes as well. rashi had a job. rabbi akiva had a job. maimonides had three jobs. now, suddenly, we’re expected to all wear the black-hat uniform and aspire to a life of Torah study?

i’m sorry, it’s never been like that and, hopefully, it’ll never be like that. but of course, we must remember what the consequences of not being like that are, in the view of the people in the ultra-orthodox world who fund the kiruv organisations. i was not entirely surprised, of course, to find that these cartoons are supposed to have caused the haitian earthquake – that’s right, because G!D Is bound to kill thousands of people in the caribbean just to get the jewish community’s attention.

this sort of thing is a wake-up call. these people are not the future of judaism – they are our wahhabis, generous, well-funded, well-organised and intelligently marketed – and puritanical, intolerant and disingenuous. just as we outsourced islamic education to the saudi international dawah programme a generation ago and are now reaping the dubious benefits, we are in the process of handing these people the future of jewish education. we should take ownership of our own Torah back before it’s too late.

in the spirit that got these imbeciles to cancel their most recent demo and, naturally, in tribute to the recent foiling of the detroit pants bomber, i humbly propose the following:

let all who wish to show this truly grotesque man up as the nasty, ridiculous bigot he is – FLY THE UNDERPANTS!

some pants yesterday

yes, we all know that angry andy and the bombastic beards of barminess would be applauding the Glorious Pants Of Terror right now if it had all gone as planned on flight 253, so let’s throw it right back in their faces. take a broomhandle or some other stick-type object and fly a pair of y-fronts off them as a flag. stick them in the window of your house or the window of your car, like people did in the last world cup. if all else fails, leave your trousers at home or wear your pants outside your trousers like a superhero! yes, the humble underpant must now become a SYMBOL OF RESISTANCE!

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Quran inscriptions on wall, Lodhi Gardens, Delhi. Credit: Shashwat Nagpal

Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam is an Abrahamic faith and a Monotheistic religion. Its followers are called Muslims. Islam was founded in Arabia in the 7th century by the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) fought against oppression, injustice and corruption. During his lifetime he was able to create a just and fair society based on religious tolerance. After his death Islam quickly spread to various parts of the world and within a hundred years it had attracted a huge following. Various Muslim Empires were created by Muslims. Islam had not defined a set political system so these Empires were able to establish themselves and flourish by using the systems which Muslims encountered when they gained hegemony.

In the early 20th century the age of Empires was coming to an end. The Ottoman Empire had collapsed and the British Empire was withdrawing from areas it had previously occupied. A political and social vacuum was being created in former colonial territories. This political climate resulted in new ideologies emerging. In Europe totalitarian ideologies such as Communism and fascism had arisen that claimed to overcome the decadence of the dominant liberal democratic societies of the West and create the basis of an alternative modernity in a new socio‐political order. In the Middle‐East ideologies such as Ba’athism and Islamism formed which made parallel claims in the Muslim world. These ideologies were primarily reactions to Colonialism.

What is Islamism?

It is important to note that just as there is no one single definition of Communism, there is also no one single definition of Islamism. There are, however, certain characteristics within Islamism that distinguish it from established religions, particularly from Islam itself.

One fact about Islam that influences Islamism’s nature as a political ideology is that Islamist’s are able to manipulate Islamic scripture and history in order to justify their socio‐political aims. For example, the Qur’an mentions the virtues of being a ‘just leader’, and the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) maintained a political, as well as spiritual, leadership in the society he established in Medina, drawing treaties and taking part in battles. For these reasons Islam is seen by many Muslims as being operative in all spheres of life, including politics.

Yet though most Muslims regard Islam as being operative in all spheres of life, including politics, this does not mean that Islam has predefined a political system or stance that it is incumbent on all Muslims to believe in. For example, there is no mention of statehood in the Quran, nor are there pre‐ordained political principles prescribed in any of the Islamic holy texts that Muslims are required to follow. Islamists, however, will argue that Muslims are only allowed to follow and participate in one type of political system, and that all other political systems and ideologies are “un‐Islamic”. This is quite unprecedented and lacks historical or scriptural justification. Muslim empires in the past have had multiple legal and political systems. Today Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia all see themselves as “Islamic states”, yet their political systems are different. This is due to the fact that Islam is not a political ideology, and has not ordained a particular political system for Muslims to abide by.

The key difference between Islam and Islamism is that Islam is not, and has never been described as, a political ideology.

Furthermore, one could even argue that there is in fact scriptural justification for the separation of Church and State in Islam, so that there is no real scriptural justification for establishing an Islamic state as Islamists maintain. I refer to the saying of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) “You know your worldly affairs better than I do, and I know your religious matters better than you do” (Muslim ‐ 139‐141). Many have interpreted this to mean that although the Prophet was a religious and political leader, he was not infallible when it came to politics and that Islam makes no prescriptions about the way human beings should organize the political realm while on earth.

It is thus in marked contrast to both the history of Muslim societies and world majority Muslim opinion that even today the Islamists regard Islam axiomatically as a revolutionary political ideology surpassing all other political ideologies, such as Communism and Capitalism, since it is a divine ideology rather than one based on fallible man‐made concepts and ideas. An implication of this is the Islamist assertion that Islam must have provided a detailed and divinely pre‐ordained stance on matters such as political structure or the economy and these can be realized, by definition, only by destroying institutions based on Capitalism and Communism which have no basis in the Qur’an. If these structures and systems are deemed absent, the Islamists will work to bring them about.

A further implication of this belief is that Islam, as a political ideology, must also be in perennial conflict with other dominant political ideologies, in the same manner that Communism was in perennial conflict with Capitalism during the Cold War.

Ironically, Islamism, thanks partly to the absence of a fully developed tradition of political theory in Islam, borrows heavily from Europe’s revolutionary political ideologies such as Marxism‐Leninism in its organizational and operational structure, and due to this fact many of the concepts within Islamism resemble those within Marxism.

Since Islam is seen by Islamists as a political ideology destined to achieve hegemony within the modern world, they assert that the Shariah, which is the Muslim religious code of conduct, demands implementation not just as the basis of social norms but of state law and of political institutions. Any nation or state that does not implement their version of Shariah thereby becomes dar al‐harb (an abode of war) and shall remain so until the Shariah is imposed on a constitutional level. Once such a state is created it shall cease to be dar al‐harb and will become dar al‐Islam (land of Islam).

Following on from this Islamists also make the claim that the global Muslim community, or Ummah, represents a political bloc rather than merely a spiritual community, an idea that shares many similarities to the Marxist concept of the proletariat. Loyalty and allegiance is thus owed to this political bloc rather than to any state or nation, hence an Islamist would reject any form of national identity and would identify himself/herself as a Muslim only, rather than a British Muslim or a Pakistani Muslim etc.

The religion of peace

The ultimate objective of Islamism, in contradistinction to historical and scriptural Islam, is the creation of a super expansionist Islamist state, or a Caliphate, that would do away with borders and unite all Muslim majority countries into one unitary state. In its more extreme formulation this aim is expressed in terms of a ‘global Caliphate’ that extends its authority over the world of non‐Muslims as well. Again, until such utopian goals are achieved all countries that are not united under this expansionist state or submit to Islamic authority are regarded as dar al‐harb. Just as the international proletariat, the global political bloc for Communists, required an expansionist state to proactively ‘liberate’ workers from the tyranny of Capitalism, likewise the Caliphate must proactively intervene in the affairs of other states so as to ‘liberate’ Muslim residents from the yoke of kufr, or disbelief.

Despite the fact that since 9/11, 7/7 and the Madrid bombings Islamism has come to dominate the world’s headlines in the West, the vast majority of the world’s Muslims continue to believe Islam is not a political ideology and do not pursue the revolutionary goals that Islamists have projected onto it. In the Quran Islam is described as ‘Deen‐al‐Islam’ which translates as ‘religion of peace’.

Download the full PDF version.

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Having listened to the two young ignoramuses put forward by the BNP to represent them on BBC’s Radio 1 last week, I began to think of a debate I had with some of my friends a few years ago.

You see, all my life up until then I had never considered myself British, I had always seen myself as English. My argument was that since I was born in England, spoke English as a first language and displayed a culture that was distinctively English, and different when compared to a Scottish, Welsh or Irish identity, I had a right to identify myself as English.  This right should be extended to my children, my children’s children, and so on regardless of the fact that my parents were born in Zanzibar.

For my two white friends, however, this assertion caused problems.  In the most amicable of terms they explained to me that, whilst they understood that I was a “British national”, the fact that I was both black and a Muslim meant that they believed that I was not even ‘ethnically British’, let alone ‘English’.  “You wouldn’t call a Chinese person living in Africa African would you?”, one of them said, and it did make me think.

Now I know my friends are not racists, the worst that can be said of them is that, at times, they go too far in trying not to offend my racial sensitivities!  I managed to somewhat bring them round to my way of thinking by using the examples of Black English footballer players, and why, for some reason, the public so readily regard them as English when they represent our country on the pitch and sing our national anthem.  And also the fact that so many people in our school had French or Jewish sounding surnames, yet we would never dare question their Englishness or Britishness.  Why the double standards with Black and Asian Britons?

So you can imagine my surprise listening to the BNP activists on the radio the other day, as I realised that my friends actually shared identical opinions with “Joey”, who we now know is Joseph Barber, the pleasant chap who runs the BNP’s record label ‘Great White Records’, and is apparently its “leading artist”, for anyone who dares to listen!

You see, “Joey” also agrees that I am only “Civic-ly British”, and any suggestion that I am British or English is an attempt at “denying (his) heritage” for “it would be an awfully long time before someone”, like me, could become “ethnically British”, (whatever that actually means).  This is something that the BNP have argued about before.  Earlier this year Nick Griffin caused outrage when he suggested that the term ‘Black Briton itself does not even exist’.  Instead, we should be called ‘racial foreigners’.  My attempts at assuming the English identity was an example of a ‘bloodless genocide’ that is currently taking place which, with the so-called Islamification of Europe, means that for Griffin both my racial and religious identities are trying to wipe out White Anglo-Saxon Protestants! No guesses as to who would be their main targets of persecution were they to get into power!

Now I wasn’t shocked at the views expressed by the BNP, they were to be expected.  I was more shocked at the fact that they shared similar sentiments to my close friends, and many of the people who commented on the issue, such as those commenting on the Mail on Sunday’s online article.  What they were basically saying is that although you may talk like us, dress like us, and act like us in every manner, you will never be truly ‘one of us’.  What is even more ironic is the fact that these are often the same people that, whilst arguing that people of colour cannot be described as British or English, also criticize Black and Asian Britons for not trying to integrate and assimilate.

Now, due to my personal certainty that I feel English (way more than I feel African, Arab or even British) I have a particular take on this debate- this should be enough.  I am sure that there are many people out there who would agree with me, as well as others who would disagree.  And I think it is important to debate whether those who disagree with me have a point.

Is my claim to being English or British as ridiculous as saying that ‘an Englishman living in Hong Kong is Chinese’, as Nick Griffin argues?  Do you have to be white to be truly considered English or British?  Is there a difference between being ‘ethnically British’ and being ‘civically British’?  Why is it easier for an Asian Scotsman like Hardeep Singh to call himself Scottish, whilst it is harder for me to call myself English?  Will Black and Asian people ever be able to call themselves English, or British, in the same comfortable manner that people of French or Polish ancestry do so? And lastly, is the so-called ‘indigenous population’ of England ready to accept people of colour as being ‘ethnically British’.

With the BNP appearing on Question Time next Thursday these questions seem ever more important, and need to be discussed openly.

This is a very interesting take on the hijab debate – a video about a British Muslim woman who decided to take off the hijab after realising she was wearing it not for personal pious reasons but political ones – contrary to what Islamists claim. She is of the opinion that it’s better for society that men learn how to function appropriately around unveiled women than that society shroud women from men and place the blame for men’s behavioural inadequacies on women’s shoulders.

Watch it through as she visits various Muslim women around the world and investigates their attitudes towards the hijab.

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Hat tip: Averroes Press

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Muslims living in Britain and around the world are often outraged when Muslims are killed or Muslim holy sites attacked. This is a normal and often admirable reaction. However, I am increasingly frustrated that this moral outrage is often highly selective and is only ignited when it is non-Muslims who are doing the killing and attacking.

In the mid-90s, I remember the outrage amongst Muslims in Britain when the Bosnia tragedy was unfolding. There were street protests, leaflet campaigns, conferences and a great deal of activism and mobilisation against the war. Muslims were equally vocal about the war in Chechnya and yet there was total silence about the simultaneous events in East Timor. Here we had Indonesia – the world’s most populous Muslim country – organising and arming militias to conduct an armed campaign which left 1400 dead and made 300,000 into refugees. This followed a 24 year occupation by Indonesia in which an estimated 102,800 died. Did the fact that this time it was Muslims doing the killing make a difference?

The same applies to the situation in Darfur today. For decades, the people of Darfur have suffered years of intense racism and neglect at the hands of Sudan’s Arab-dominated government. Because they were Black Africans, they were looked down upon as not worthy of the same rights to land and government help as their Arab compatriots. Years of frustration and anger boiled over in 2003 as militias from Darfur clashed with Sudanese government forces. What followed was a campaign of rape, theft and systematic genocide. Sudanese government forces and Janjaweed militias attacked villages in Darfur, slaughtering men, raping women and burning down entire villages. It is estimated that up to 300,000 people have been killed to date with a further 2 million made homeless. Many Darfurian women were kidnapped by the Janjaweed and kept as sex slaves for weeks on end. Has there been moral outrage amongst Muslims in Britain? Have there been street protests in the Arab world? Have there been effigy burnings in Pakistan? No. No. And No!

The deafening silence over Darfur is no isolated incident. During Bangladesh’s Liberation War of 1971, Pakistani troops are believed to have killed between 300,000 and 3 million civilians and raped between 200,000 and 400,000 women. Again this was met with very little protest in the Muslim world and continues to be a taboo subject that is often denied in Pakistan today. Similarly since 1975 Morocco has illegally occupied Western Sahara whilst the indigenous Sahrawi people remain exiled in dust-blown refugee camps in neighbouring countries. The plight of the Kurds, the single largest ethnic group in the world without a state, continues to be ignored by Muslims across the world. Discussions about the conditions in the Palestinian territories continue to ignore the abject poverty and squalid refugee camps across the Arab world that the home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The bloody Muslim-on-Muslim violence that erupted in Afghanistan after the USSR’s retreat as well as the Taliban’s brutal treatment of women and political opponents have also incited very little outrage.

However, when a small Danish newspaper decided to publish offensive pictures of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006, Muslims around the world reacted with fury. Embassies were attacked, nuns were killed and Christians living in Muslim majority countries feared for their safety. Yet the Saudi destruction of holy sites in Mecca and Medina continues to go largely ignored by Muslims around the world. Since occupying the Hejaz region of the Arabian Peninsula, our great allies the Saudis have gone on a rampage that has included the destruction of homes, graves and mosques that belonged to the Prophet Muhammad’s family and companions. This has included the destruction of the house of Khadija (the first wife of the prophet) to make way for public toilets, the bulldozing of the Prophets daughter Fatima’s grave, the destruction of the home of one of the Prophets closest companions and even the home of the Prophet himself. If this destruction had been undertaken by a Western army the entire Muslim world would have exploded with outrage. Yet on this subject – like so many others – the Muslim world is almost silent.

The often selective nature of Muslim activism is not healthy and is not in line with the principles of Islam or universal moral values. Leftists who encourage Muslims to pursue such selective activism are guilty of the racism of lower expectations. It’s as if these people look at Muslims and say to themselves that ‘of course Muslims will only care for their own, we can’t expect them to have concerns for the whole of humanity, After all, they’re just Muslims’. We need to stop feeding the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ mentality by viewing the world in terms of two zones and only caring for the side we see ourselves as belonging too. The Al-Qaida narrative of ‘they are killing our people and therefore we should fight back’ is the exact same argument that Kind Ferdinand of Spain used to expel Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. He cited the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmud the conqueror and the subsequent oppression of Christians in the former Byzantine territories as the reason why the Muslims of Spain should be fought and driven out. It was also the same argument used by Pope Urban the second to galvanise the first crusades.

Now of course Muslims and all sound-minded citizens should continue to speak out against that which we find objectionable in the world. The US invasion of Iraq is just one example of this. But moral outrage should not be limited to non-Muslim actions alone nor should we only object to non-Muslim silence in the face of evil. We as Muslims must condemn actions because they are wrong in themselves – not just because they were they were done by the West. When, for example, will we begin to acknowledge the very little known fact that Hitler’s SS had a Muslim unit, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem? This unit recruited largely from the Muslim populations of Bosnia and Kosovo and helped the Nazi regime to exterminate 60,000 Jews and 20,000 Roma gypsies. If we as Muslims want the world to take our moral outrage seriously we need to stop being selective and instead to begin following the Quranic injunction that we should “enjoin the good and forbid the evil” regardless of who the perpetrators of violence or its victims are.