Saudi attitudes in Birmingham

An instructive row has broken out between the Quilliam Foundation, British Muslims for Secular Democracy, humanists, and progressive rabbis on the one hand, and the Green Lanes Mosque in Birmingham, over a couple of visiting Saudi imams who will preach there this weekend.

The Quilliam/BMSD complaint is that these people are well-documented anti-semites and preachers of hate; the mosque responds indignantly that the preachers are thoroughly opposed to al-Qaeda and to terrorism, and that the objectors are unrepresentative stooges.

The first question is whether the original charges are justified. Here, I think that the mosque has been caught bang to rights. The letter objecting to the preachers” visit lists some pretty hair-raising statements on their site. The links are to Arabic sound files, but I don’t see any reason to doubt their authenticity, which has not in any case been denied:

There is also a reference to Shias as “dogs”. This seems to me plain racial and religious hatred. No doubt it is the small change of Saudi piety, but that doesn’t make it any less nasty.

On the other hand, the mosque defends itself against the charge that it is sponsoring terrorism: “These speakers are academics who have specialised in Islamic sciences and are well respected in scholarly circles. It is grossly unjust to suggest that they belong to some fringe ideology rather than orthodox Islam.”

Is anti-semitism of this sort really mainstream, orthodox Islam? The mosque’s statement continues:

Now, I don’t think that this was the burden of the charge against them. The Saudi authorities have broken bloodily and decisively with al-Qaeda. No one is suggesting that their influence at the moment tends to make young men into terrorists. But the integration or accommodation of Islam into British life is about a lot more than not being a terrorist. The rejection of sectarian or anti-semitic hatred is almost more important. If the Green Lanes mosque could find Saudi preachers to do that, or even to defend such notions as the right of women to drive cars or to show their faces in public, it would be doing a whole lot more to encourage British Muslims to become productive members of society. But such preachers are unlikely to be Saudis.