Even now, even after everything that has happened, even after the recent tough talking about defeating Islamist extremism on the battlefield of ideas and the apparent waking up to the extremism of bodies like the Muslim Council of Britain, the British government still doesn’t get it. Yesterday, at a conference on Islam in London, Tony Blair launched a new initiative to promote Muslim moderation and defeat extremism. He attacked the
often crude portrayals in the media or by those who deal only in stereotypes and seek to whip up Islamophobic sentiment
‘still, small voice of reason and moderation’ used by the majority of Muslims should not be drowned out by ‘those willing to come on television and articulate extreme and violent views’.
‘Crude media stereotypes’? Hardly. From their own mouths, more than half of Britain’s Muslims reveal they believe in demented and paranoid theories, refuse to take responsibility for the part played by their community and its faith in Islamist terrorism, and believe instead that Britain is a giant conspiracy against them. A very small voice of reason indeed. Are such people really to be called ‘moderate’? Mr Blair apparently thinks so. As he was reportedsaying:
The voices of extremism are no more representative of Islam than the use, in times gone by, of torture to force conversion to Christianity represents the true teaching of Christ.
This refusal by Blair to acknowledge the scale, scope and reach of the jihad causes him persistently to introduce policies against extremism that merely entrench it even further, because he persistently defines extremism far too narrowly and is too quick to hail as moderate those who may be against violence but whose views are anything but moderate according to any reasonable definition of the word. Yesterday’s initiative designed to screen out extremism from university courses in Islam was a case in point. It is throwing a million pounds at such courses which it has designated as ‘strategically important’ to national interests, allowing tighter official scrutiny of their syllabi. This is apparently because it believes that such courses expose students to narrow interpretations of Islam and must be reformed to combat violent extremism.
But as the national curriculum debacle has so graphically demonstrated, such initiatives almost invariably have a boomerang effect. When central government tries to shape what is taught in order to combat one vested interest or another, the new courses are invariably hijacked by those very vested interests which then become even more entrenched by government imprimatur. Thus the national curriculum was instantly captured by the very same cultural Marxists that it was aimed to confront. And so it will be with the new Islamist courses, as has already become plain.
According to a report by the government’s designated expert on the matter, Dr Ataullah Siddiqui, many university courses focused too narrowly on the Middle East and failed to reflect the ‘realities’ of Muslim life in multi-cultural Britain. It said that the teaching of Islam had been conducted in ‘complete ignorance of the Muslim community and their patterns of belief and practice and called for a shift from courses that focus purely on an ‘Arab and Middle Eastern perspective to that of a plural society in Britain.
Accordingly, it recommended that Islamic studies courses be brought up to date, look beyond Middle East, and include modern day practice in Europe and Britain, involving Islamic scholars; that all universities should employ part or full-time male and female Muslim chaplains or advisers; that Islamic studies should be linked with job opportunities such as teaching, chaplaincy and Islamic banking; that universities should offer add-on modules for all students to have the opportunity to study Islam; and that guidance should be given to all universities on Friday prayers, Ramadan and halal food.
But this is all about making such courses more Muslim-friendly. It has nothing to do with addressing extremism. Indeed, it sidesteps completely the most important and pernicious element of many such Islamic courses —that Islam is not taught in the same way as other religions, as objective disciplines which place the religion in the context of its time, but as the literal word of God.
Drummond Bone, the president of the vice-chancellors’ organisation, Universities UK, yesterday sonorously intoned:
It is important that all academic disciplines follow the normal quality procedures that ensure critical intellectual rig-our and openness.
This alarming trend is illustrated by the body running yesterday’s conference, the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, which appears to be run by people who believe not that Muslims should integrate into British mores but that Britain should integrate into Islam. Dhimmi Watch quotes Professor David Ford, Director of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, saying this:
In the past, policy has too often focused on the question of integrating Muslims into secular society. In fact we live in a complexly religious and secular society where the expression of religious beliefs remains important to huge numbers of people…Speakers and guests will be encouraged to consider the contribution Islamic debate has made to a host of contemporary topics including citizenship, the place of Islamic law, women and human rights.
The question facing British society, and society as a whole, is not how we encourage minorities to engage with western countries, but how those countries define themselves as a collage of different religious cultures. We hope that this conference will enable those responsible for encouraging and building unity in communities to approach the task from that perspective.
As David Conway of the Centre for Social Cohesioncommented yesterday:
For those for whom the government’s previous zeal for multiculturalism is at least as much to blame for the recent radicalisation of so many young British-born Muslims as its foreign policy, Mr Winter’s statement is not exactly reassuring. This is so, especially when it turns out that, under his Muslim name of Abdal Hakim Murad, this same lecturer, a convert to Islam, delivered a BBC Radio Thought for the Day broadcast in September 2003 that was made the subject of an unsuccessful complaint for ‘preaching bigotry and hatred towards Israel’ because in it he had referred to Israel as ‘the traditional enemy of the Arabs’.
Such misgivings as to the firmness of the government’s previously announced resolve to eschew dealings with immoderate Muslims are reinforced by details of which other speakers are speaking at the conference besides the Prime Minister. They include Shaykh Ali Gomma, Grand Mufti of Egypt. Among his ‘moderate’ credentials according to a report in the Daily Telegraph last June, was his having delivered a fatwa banning all ‘decorative statutes of living beings’. This fatwa reportedly led to a black-clad woman screaming ‘Infidels, Infidels’ attacking three statutes in a Cairo museum. Its curator reportedly said that the attacker ‘had been listening to the mufti and was following his orders’. A spokesman from the Al Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo was also quoted as saying of the fatwa: ‘We are seeing an increase of conservative , Islamist feeling. The Islamisation of Egyptian society is happening from the bottom up. And now it has reached the middle classes – the doctors, the lawyers’.
Another speaker at today’s conference is John Esposito, director of the Prince Waleed Bin Taleel Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Although not himself a Muslim, he has in the past served as a consistent apologist for many Muslims extremists, as I pointed out in a recent posting.
No less disappointing is it that the government should have turned to Dr Ataullah Siddiqui for advice on how Islam and British imams should be taught here, given reported close links between the rector of the institution where he works, the Markfield Institute of Higher Education, and the Pakistani Islamist party, Jamaat e-Islami of which the rector at Markfield is vice-president. Another ex-lecturer there is Azzam Tamimi, head of the Muslim Association of Britain, whose own version of Islam and views are very bit as extreme as those of the Muslim Council of Britain. Furthermore, last year the Charity Commission ordered the charity that established and controls the Markfield Institute to sever all its links with two of its trustees because of their links to violent extremist Muslim organisations.
* Definition of ‘dhimmi’ from the Dhimmi Watch site:
Dhimmis, ‘protected people,’ are free to practice their religion in a Sharia regime, but are made subject to a number of humiliating regulations designed to enforce the Qur’an’s command that they ‘feel themselves subdued’ (Sura 9:29). This denial of equality of rights and dignity remains part of the Sharia, and, as such, is part of the law that global jihadists are laboring to impose everywhere, ultimately on the entire human race.
The dhimmi attitude of chastened subservience has entered into Western academic study of Islam, and from there into journalism, textbooks, and the popular discourse. One must not point out the depredations of jihad and dhimmitude; to do so would offend the multiculturalist ethos that prevails everywhere today.