Muslims living in the UK increasingly want self-determination and the implementation of Sharia law nationwide, according to radical Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary.
Choudary, speaking in an exclusive interview, was responding to polling data last month that suggests a fundamental gap between the values of British Muslims and the rest of society.
Trevor Phillips, the former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the activist who popularized the term Islamophobia, commented on the survey results. He explained the statistics show “the unacknowledged creation of a nation within the nation, with its own geography, its own values, and its own very separate future.”
Asked to respond to Phillips’ statement about a “nation within a nation,” Choudary replied:
I think that we are increasingly heading toward that direction, definitely. The more the population grows, the more they find their roots, the more they want to implement Islam in their lives; and the more they see around the world the failure of so-called democracies and socialist governments, the more they want self-determination.
And we can see that that is not just the case in the Middle East and Africa, but also in the West. People want to call for the Sharia. And we shouldn’t be surprised. Europe had the Sharia for about 800 years in Spain so why not in Britain? You know, we don’t call for the killing or the oppression of anyone. We want to live peacefully together. So why not try divine law? We tried secularism for long enough.
Choudary said he was not surprised by that finding.
We live at a time now, Aaron, of third or fourth generation Muslim communities. Where they have no trust of the government. Many people have grown up and all they have known are wars against Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan and now in Syria.
So, you know, if you are 20-year-old individual living in Britain for most of your life, you’ve seen wars against Muslims. So when you ask them these questions, whether they would actually cooperate with the police, they see the raids and arrests. They see a lot of draconian laws which accompany these wars as well, and the Muslim community has been the recipient of these oppressive measures. We’re living in a kind of an apartheid state in Britain as a Muslim community today.
The survey also discovered that more than half of Muslims think that homosexuality should be illegal in Britain and 23 percent of Muslims want Sharia to replace British law in certain parts of the country.
The findings also revealed that 39 percent of Muslims thought that their wives should always obey their husbands and 31 percent thought it was acceptable to have more than one wife.
A shocking five percent of Muslims sympathized with people who took part in stoning adulterers.