Towards the end of last year, following separate exposes by John Ware and Martin Brightof just how immoderate the views and policies are of the leaders of the Muslim Council of Britain, until then the government’s preferred interlocutors when dealing with the country’s two million Muslims, it looked as though at last the government was finally about to get serious about henceforth dealing with and supporting only genuinely moderate Muslim organisations and their leaders.
In a blaze of publicity, Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly announced ‘a fundamental rebalancing’ of the government’s relations with the Muslim community, indicating that, in future, only those Muslim organisations that had shown themselves to be genuinely moderate could expect any government grants or its ear.
Well, we can see from two news items in today’s press just how feeble and short-lived this government resolve has turned out to be.
First, as reported in many of today’s newspapers, Tony Blair attended and delivered an opening address this morning at a two-day conference starting today in London entitled ‘Islam and Muslims in the World Today’ in which he announced new government support and funding for the university-level teaching of Islam and the training of British imams.
Second, it was alsoreportedthat a report was published today entitled ‘Islam at Universities in England’ that the Department for Education had commissioned the British-based Muslim academic Dr Ataullah Siddiqui to write, and in which he makes various recommendations about how to strengthen the teaching of Islam and cater to Muslim students at British institutions of higher and further education. It is towards implemening these recommendations that apparently a good part of the new funding announced by the prime minister is to go.
Among Dr Siddiqui’s reported recommendations are the following: that all British universities employ male and female Muslim chaplains and advisers; that Islamic studies be linked with job opportunities such as teaching, chaplaincy and Islamic banking; that all universities should offer all students add-on modules on Islam, and that all universities should receive guidance on Friday prayers, Ramadan and halal food.
In its news report about the conference at which the Prime Minister announced his government’s £1 million giveaway for teaching Islam and Britain’s future imams, the Times noted that no representatives from the Muslim Council of Britain had been invited to speak, suggesting a great new dawn may finally have arrived in terms of the government avoiding sharing a platform or otherwise supporting Muslim extremists.
Sadly, appearances can be deceptive, and if you were thinking from these reports that the government has finally got serious about avoiding having dealings with and otherwise supporting immoderate Muslims, think again. Here’s why.
First, (hat-tip: Dhimmi Watch) the organiser of the two day conference opening today is the University of Cambridge’s Inter-faith programme based in that university’s Divinity faculty a lecturer of whose in Islamic Studies, Timothy Winter, has saidon its website about today’s conference:
‘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.’
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 the government’s previously announced resolve to eschew dealings with immoderate Muslims iare 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 linksbetween 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.
All in all, if, as the title of the Times news report about today’s conference puts it, Britain’s leaders are seeking to engage moderates, then all that I can say is that they need to try a darn sight harder.
