Dispatches does mosques. Boooo.
Latest Updates: British Muslims RSS
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thabet
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thabet
A five-year-old British boy, of Pakistani origin, has been kidnapped while in Pakistan:
Sahil Saeed from Oldham, Greater Manchester, was taken from the Punjab region this morning after the family was held captive and robbed by five men armed with guns and hand grenades.
Sahil had been staying with his grandmother in the city of Jhelum and was due to return home today, the British high commission in Islamabad said.
Sahil’s father, Raja Naqqash Saeed, described today how his family were beaten and kicked during a six-hour ordeal that began when men broke into the house last night.
“They took me into the separate room and they tortured me,” he told Sky News. “They said: ‘We will take your son and you will have to pay £100,000.’
“They took my son. They were fully loaded with guns and hand grenades. All Pakistan police know about this, and the British Council.”
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thabet
Two women barred from flight to Pakistan for refusing full-body scan:
Manchester airport confirmed today that the women, who were booked to fly to Islamabad with Pakistan International Airlines, were told they could not get on the plane after they refused to be scanned for medical and religious reasons.
The women had been selected at random, said the airport.
The Muslim woman decided to forfeit her ticket and left her luggage at the airport. Her companion also left the airport saying she did not go through the scanner on medical grounds because she had an infection.
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thabet
A new poll on the attitudes of religious people to the main political parties has been published by Theos. Here’s the ‘Muslim bits’:
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It’s like these people read Mad Mel and then think her paranoid rants should be used to form the basis of ideas like this:
The proposed arches, part of a “cultural trail” through the street – immortalised in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane – have been criticised as “misconceived” and “excluding”. Locals have said they risk ghettoising a community that considers itself tolerant and diverse [...] One local Muslim woman has told the council that the stainless-steel, illuminated arches “create a stereotypical image of Islam, and endorse the practice of the veil that not all of us are happy with. It is a divisive image and one that in the present climate is highly inappropriate. Tower Hamlets should be seeking to bring communities together at this moment.” Another, a hijab wearer, said that to call the gates anything other than a hijab was “just semantics”. She said: “It is a huge waste of money. There has been enough conflict and tension since Brick Lane started developing after the yuppies moved in. This looks to me like a tool of aggravation and is taking a step backwards.”
I want to know how much Tower Hamlets (a totally inept borough in my experience) paid the ‘cultural consultant’ who dreamt up this idea.
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Imam from east London mosque is jailed for beating a nine-year-old boy:
Gulam Hussain, 44, of Knotts Green Road, in Leyton, was jailed for 12 weeks today at Walthamstow Magistrates’ Court after pleading guilty to common assault by beating.
The court heard that Hussain, who was an Imam at The Jamia Mosque in Lea Bridge Road, Leyton, had previously been cautioned in 2005 for a charge of actual bodily harm (ABH) against an 11-year-old.
Chair magistrate Dr Paul Davis told Hussain through an Urdu interpreter that he was being jailed, “for the protection of the public”.
This mosque has shall we say a ‘colourful’ history to anyone who grew up in the area. Wouldn’t surprise me if accusations of dirty dealings between the boys parents and people keen to take charge of the mosque committee emerge, such as those which have surfaced on a forum frequented by British Muslims. But whatever the truth of these accusations, this doesn’t excuse the teacher for abusing his power over the children.
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johnpi
Richard Bartholomew reviews my post on Charlie Flowers EDL connection and concludes that I’ve made an “unsustainable imaginative leap.”
However, I believe Bartholomew has gone too far in the other direction of being too restrained in appraising the photo I posted from Flowers’ Facebook page showing him and several activists from different groups gathered around a St. George’s Cross flag. Bartholomew writes:
The obvious problem here is that just because the EDL uses the St George’s Flag, it hardly follows that anyone who makes use of a St George’s Flag must be an EDL sympathizer.
Who else in the UK is marching in public with the flag except members of the EDL and their supporters?
But Bartholomew’s objection raises a new possibility: It may be that there is now developing a loosely connected alliance of small political groups for whom the flag is a signifier, all of whom declare themselves to be in opposition to Muslim extremism and Shariah law.
For Muslims and Asians though, this is the flag of the mobs that have been engaged in a number of acts of violence and intimidation against their communities, and it would be hard for anyone in the UK who pays attention to this issue not to know that. The people who fly this flag must know that they are tapping into that history of intimidation when they display it in public.
I doubt you will find a UK organization that is sincerely trying to confront extremism among Muslims without impugning the larger Muslim community that is flying the St. George’s Cross at their demonstrations.
So are Flowers and the ‘Cheerleaders’ supporters or members of the EDL, or just in solidarity with its history of intimidation against Muslims? I don’t know, but it may be a distinction without a difference.
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thabet
The British Social Attitudes survey shows how ‘perceptions’ are just as important as ‘reality’:
A large proportion of the country believes that the multicultural experiment has failed, with 52 per cent considering that Britain is deeply divided along religious lines and 45 per cent saying that religious diversity has had a negative impact.
Around 3% of the population in England and Wales, less than 1% of the population in Scotland, and barely 0.1% of the population in Northern Ireland, would be call themselves Muslim (and all these people must be considered ‘nominally’ Muslim for the purposes of statistics, unless the census is accompanied with a detailed checklist on what these individuals believe). How then can Britain be even remotely ‘divided’ along ‘religious’ lines? Where are these ‘divisions’? There is nothing even close to genuine religious divides that are part of Britain’s history. There are other, far more pressing divisions, which threaten the country; it is a shame these are not fully debated (especially not by politicians who want to have ‘debates’ on cheap political scoring points).
The attitudes identified by the BSA are not new though, and that might be most alarming aspect. How much of these attitudes are related to the drip-feed of stories about ‘cultural backwardness’ of Muslims, or magnifying problems their context, or even just outright lies?
As Andrew Brown notes, while ‘freedom of speech’ is trumpeted as a ‘core value’ by numerous liberal pundits, especially an act of faith which distinguishes ‘us’ from ‘them’, the survey shows many Britons don’t buy into that argument:
This makes odd reading in the face of continuing propaganda about how freedom of speech is one of the core values we defend against Islamists.
This might seem odd given the BSA also show Britons are also becoming socially liberal on issues such as homosexuality and cohabitation.
Or it may just be that liberals, like their ‘enemies’, are forced into adopting cultural protectionism when they feel under threat?
(The two newspapers I link to above also highlight their editorial biases. The Daily Telegraph concentrates on the suspicion towards religious groups, especially Muslims. The Guardian meanwhile sticks with reporting the views on social liberalism.)
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UN report concludes that the UK is complicit in the mistreatment and possible torture of its own citizens:
In a report published today that will make difficult reading for ministers who repeatedly denied the UK’s involvement in torture, UN officials have indicated that there is clear evidence of the UK’s role in the secret detention overseas of several British Muslims.
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johnpi
Majority of English are concerned that the UK is becoming deeply divided by religion.
Only a quarter of respondents said they ‘feel positive’ toward Muslims.
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johnpi
The Sun reports that the cellmate of the girl believed the police were stricter with her because she was a Muslim of Pakistani descent:
“She’s a British girl but a Muslim, so I think they were tougher on her because of that.
“She was trying to report the rape but soon realized the policemen were more interested in how often she has sex with her boyfriend.
“They even asked if she did just normal sex or anything else in bed.”
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johnpi
The flyer for the event being held at the East London Mosque on January 1st by Noor Pro Media, which will also be selling Anwar al Awlaki tapes there.
One of the contributors over at The Spittoon blog analyzes it. Anybody have a problem with this or care to rebut?
Grave Worship – Salafi-inspired Islamism has long accused both the Shi’a and Sufi of being “grave worshippers”.
The destruction of the tombs of Sufi shaykhs in Somalia by Islamist terrorists, the destruction of the tombs and shrines of the family of the Prophet in Medina and elsewhere by the Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia (together with repeated threats from such to destroy the tomb of the Prophet) remain an enormous loss not just to Muslim believers, but to the world.
New Age Islam – This is clearly targetting the new Sufi orders that have sprung up in the West, and more widely the emergence of Western Islam, with its criticism of Islamism and its support for liberal, progressive, reformatory interpretations of Islam – interpretations that stress the seperation of religion and state, secularism, tolerance and democratic norms.
Sihr – the traditional Arabic for witchcraft. For Salafi-inspired Sunni Islamism, sihr is not simply witchcraft, but any pre-Islamic or allegedly non-Islamic cultural practices that may be embedded in the various forms of Islam that have grown up over the centuries across the world. Equally, this is an assault on the dhikr of the Sufi and other non-Salafi groups. In contrast, the Islamists stress a monolithic and ultimately totalitarian brand of Islam that is completely intolerant of the rich plurality of traditions and practices that have historically marked Islam.
In all, the sinister flyer advertises the narrow-minded, ahistorical, authoritarian bigotry of the Salafi-inspired Islamism at the very heart of the “Islam” being promoted by ELM and its followers. -
johnpi
More crazy American right-wing ideas: This editorial calls on the US government to put “diplomatic and extra-diplomatic pressure” on the UK to “act” against the “notorious” East London Mosque.
And what should they do? Blow it up?
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johnpi
US Islamophobe Debbie Schlussel is really targeting UK Muslims when she calls for the end of the Visa Waiver program.
Abdulmutallab–from a prominent, wealthy, religious Muslim Nigerian family–was recruited to become a jihadist, not in his native Nigeria, but in Great Britain, where he spent three years as a student at University College London.
It’s yet another reason why the Visa Waiver program (granting certain designated Western countries an exemption from the usually more stringent visa process to travel to the U.S.) is a huge mistake. We know Muslims come to the U.S. from various assorted Western Visa Waiver countries, and even though Abdulmutallab did not, he was recruited and radicalized in a Visa Waiver Country, Britain, where British nationals are also recruited for Islamic terrorism.
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johnpi
UK Islamophobe ‘Mad Mel’ uses the attempted bombing of a US airliner to pile on UK Muslims.
…the astounding fact is that Islamic extremist networks are still allowed to flourish in Britain, largely through the obsession of its governing class with multiculturalism and ‘human rights’.
As usual, the real target is European liberalism.
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johnpi
The UK tabloid The Sun reports that there are 25 “British-born Muslims” in Yemen where they are “plotting to blow up airliners.”
The British extremists in Yemen are in their early 20s and from Bradford, Luton and Leytonstone, East London.
They are “training” in “five groups” the Sun alleges.
Special Branch monitored them as they flew to Yemen, in the Middle East, from British airports in the spring and summer.
The Sun cites a “Scotland Yard source.” Let’s hope it’s a better one than Glen Jenvey and Dominic Wightman, who have also been Sun sources.
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johnpi
Nigerians: ‘Don’t blame Nigerian Islam, the problem is UK Islam.’
For residents in his home town, it was Umar Abdulmutallab’s foreign education, not his roots in Muslim northern Nigeria, that radicalized him and led him to try to blow up a U.S. passenger plane.
….If Abdulmutallab was radicalized outside Nigeria as many of his compatriots believe, his case would have precedents.
Ahmed Saeed Omar Sheikh, or Sheikh Omar, who was sentenced to death in Pakistan in 2002 for the killing of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl and suspected of links to the September 11, 2001 attacks, came from a similarly privileged background.
Born in Britain in the early 1970s, Omar was the son of a wholesale clothes merchant from Wanstead in northeast London who went to an expensive school but dropped out of one of Britain’s top universities, the London School of Economics.
Young Muslims who grew up in Funtua insist it was Abdulmutallab’s life overseas, which they view as alien, not Nigerian Islam that gave rise to his extremist views.
“We the children of the masses in this country, we don’t know anything about terrorism because our parents are poor. They don’t have the money to take us abroad,” said 25-year old student and Funtua resident Usman Mati.
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thabet
Emir of Qatar ‘helped Jack Straw win election’:
The justice secretary’s help in fixing the gift was used by the Labour party to woo the Muslim vote, it was claimed this weekend.
MPs, security experts and moderate Islamic leaders said Straw’s role raised serious concerns about the way some foreign states were trying to sway the religious views of British Muslims.
Straw wrote a letter of introduction to help his friend and political ally Lord Patel of Blackburn persuade the emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa al-Thani, to part with £1.5m.
It is always worth investigating where money coming into mosques and Muslim institutions (usually registered charities), but I am not sure Haras Rafiq or Patrick Mercer, both quoted in The Times article above, have much in the way of credibility if this is the game they wish to play. Rafiq is part of the Sufi Muslim Council (enough said), and Mercer has not properly answered questions about his role in the terror headline scandal involving Glen Jenvey.
Jack Straw’s links with the Blackburn Muslim community were subject to attention during the 2005 General Election, most notably a campaign by Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK, and (separately) Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, who stood as a candidate against Straw.
These links to Muslim groups were under scrutiny again last week, although this time from MI5:
A senior security figure who has seen the report said it underlined concern among cabinet colleagues that Straw could be “too close” to the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), a prominent Muslim umbrella group. The government formally severed links with the group after a blazing row over extremism earlier this year.
“Jack’s a bit too close to the MCB — he sometimes appears to suggest they are the only game in town. There is a concern that proximity to them may colour [his] judgment,” the insider said.
Since we don’t live in a millet system, it might be better to reduce reliance on these acronyms altogether.
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thabet
On a post at Comment is Free which calls for an investigate and prosecute British Bangladeshis who are accused of being involved in war crimes carried out in the 1971 war between West and East Pakistan, Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain says:
[Answer from Bunglawala:] I was born in the UK and am not Bangladeshi, so to be honest, I very rarely think about the 1971 war. I reckon it is of much more import to those of Pakistani/Bengali backgrounds than to me.
I do nothing whatsoever to bring justice to Muslims in East Pakistan. I have enough on my plate here in the UK.
Which might be a principled response, except back in 2008, Bunglawala wrote:
Why is calling for the story of Srebrenica to be told despite the fact that he is not Bosnian? And his website, iEngage, has numerous articles on the war crimes committed against Palestinians, despite the fact he isn’t Palestinian. A bit of a weak response from Bunglawala there, which I think only highlights the blind spot British Muslims (mostly Pakistanis) have about the genocidal behaviour of the (West, as it was then) Pakistani Army, and subsequent dismissal of the need to investigate these crimes.
I expect the original Comment is Free post, which includes allegations of war crimes against a prominent British Bangladeshi, to disappear once he gets around to contacting his legal advisers, and I would agree with the other point made by Bunglawala: if someone has evidence against individuals involved in the war crimes, and currently living in the UK, prominent or otherwise, document it, publish it, and promote it.
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thabet
A report which explores the philosophical and theological perspectives on what it means to be a Muslim in Britain today has been published by the Centre for Middle East and Islamic Studies at Cambridge:
The group agreed that Muslims should assert and teach what they see to be the truth of their faith, but also recognise the existence of different religions and the right of others to do the same. Their study urges Muslims to identify shared values between Islam and other world views, pointing out the Qu’ran’s emphasis on qualities such as good neighbourliness, charity, hospitality and non-aggression.
The report also redefines a number of terms which the authors believe have been misinterpreted. It notes, for example, that both Muslims and non-Muslims often have “skewed understanding of the term Shari’ah, which conjures up images of floggings and beheadings.”
In fact, it stresses, Shari’ah is a way of life based on an ethical code that emphasises dignity, equality and justice for all. Islam, it says, teaches the equality of all human beings regardless of gender.
The report was produced by 26 British Islamademics, and there’s a foreward by the Grand Mufti of Bosnia. It’s 80-odd pages long so I haven’t in great detail yet, only skimmed through it quickly: they seem to be seeking to reconcile topics such as human rights and the sharia; politics, citizenship and God’s sovereignty; and secularism and religion.
(Via Yahya.)
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A new feed/blog on Muslims in Britain, from the author of Virtually Islamic: Computer-mediated Communication & Cyber Islamic Environments.
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Back in 2005, Atif Imtiaz wrotes a series of essays (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). It’s a very rich series of essays, and while he talks about Muslims in the UK, I think his point about the communicating with others would of interest to all:
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thabet
Shorter Ed Husain: Give Quilliam all the money.
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There’s a discussion at Pickled Politics across a handful of posts on government’s CONTEST strategy. It relates well to another thread on the report about young Muslims feeling alienated.
Sunny also links to a report by Yahya on the Prevent strand of CONTEST, and its failings, which has also come under scrutiny from a parliamentary committee. Yahya’s report criticises the unfocused approach of current initiatives, which mix supporting communities with tackling terrorism.
I think it is always worth putting so-called ‘Muslim problems’ should always be placed in wider context, because when we look closer we may find poverty, a sense of alienation, political apathy, distrust of our ruling classes, etc are not really ‘Muslim problems’ at all (i.e. Muslims are human, and are not immune to social currents, trends, fashions, problems, etc).
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Andrew Brown was right in noting that the response by British Muslims to Sebastian Faulks’ interview in The Sunday Times (for which he apologised) was almost non-existent (contrary to claims by Ian O’Doherty). At least I haven’t seen anyone telling me to burn copies of Birdsong, or demanding we protest against A Week in December. Perhaps we’ve grown up a little.
Ajmal Masroor’s, of the Islamic Society of Britain, did offer some words though:
Masroor’s words have obviously been picked up by jafis as a ‘veiled threat’ (but to them any Muslim who is living and breathing is a ‘veiled threat’). Maybe the words have been badly reported and edited, or maybe Masroor (who some may remember from the hilariously bad Make Me a Muslim series on Channel 4) could have chosen his words more careful. Better yet, offer a response to Faulks’ comments rather than demand he say nothing at all out of respect (which is always a double-edged sword).
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Research into Young British Muslims is published:
The report for the Policy Research Centre, an Islamic think tank, was intended to give young Muslims their own voice to counter assumptions made by outsiders.
It said young Muslims had been portrayed in the media as a threat to society and often struggled to convince people that they can be both British and Muslim at the same time.
You can see the report at the Policy Research Centre’s website.
I wonder how these experiences compare with the experiences of young people in the wider population?
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thabet
If Sayyid Qutb was the ‘father of Islamism’, then perhaps Syed Abul A’ala Maududi is its long forgotten (desi) uncle.
I may get panned for saying this, but the widespread links of British Muslim organisations to Maududi and his organisation shows that, until fairly recently, ‘Islamism’ of one kind or another was pretty much the only politics available to Muslims (cf. communism and the left). Personally, I expect these links to die off due to a combination of public scrutiny, lack of interest, and simply old age.
It’s only now that we’re in a ‘post-Islamism’ phase, and Islamism as an ideology is but one of the political languages out there. (How this phase comes to be characterised — liberalism, traditionalism, perhaps something new altogether, etc — is up for grabs I think.)
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The visit of Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, the imam of Makka, to the UK has upset a few people.
It is true that if you’re going to have a policy which bans far-right racists and shock jock bigots, then imams who spew antisemitic diatribes should also be banned. But what the entry of the imam really shows is that the Saudis are our ‘friends’, and Saudi establishment figures should not be subjected to orders from the Home Office the same way others are. After all, what’s a little mosque tour of the UK, when our political leaders are more than happy to subvert our rule of law for them?
And what about Muslims who invited the imam? Yusuf Smith once noted that if people from Makka had to be invited to attend mosque functions in the UK then why not invite someone whose beliefs would probably be more in keeping with the wider British Muslim population. That an imam from Makka can be invited and warmly welcome, regardless of his theological beliefs, underlines the ‘allure’ (some say ‘problem’) of Makka. (There is also a form of self-hatred going on here.)
What is also interesting about al-Sudais leading prayers in one of the mosques he has visited, the Al Tawhid Masjid in east London, isn’t the choice of venue — this mosque was opened by a Saudi dignitary in the 1990s — but that one of the imams of this mosque is Dr Usama Hasan, who (last time I checked) was on friendly terms with the Quilliam Foundation.
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thabet
Yahya Birt is not happy with this attack on The City Circle.
