Innes Bowen’s study reveals how the government’s attitude towards British Muslims has been defined in part by ignorance
Christopher Bellalgue
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The minaret of Birmingham Central Mosque. Photograph: Martin Godwin
Along with the “Trojan Horse” controversy about the imposition of a strict Islamic ethos on a number of Birmingham schools, the disclosure that several hundred Britons have been to Syria and Iraq to fight with the jihadis has fired up those who believe that Islam represents an urgent threat to this country. Amid the hype – some of it justifiable, much not – nuance has inevitably been lost.
It is significant that the British jihadis have chosen to realise their fantasies not here but in Mesopotamia. From a theological point of view, a caliphate can only be set up in Muslim lands. Britain would be a poor choice even for a pilot scheme – it has a substantial opposing majority and a competent intelligence service. As for the Birmingham “conspiracy”, that, too, is more complicated than it seems: while there have undoubtedly been moves to Islamise the schools’ curricula and atmosphere, much of the pressure in this direction has come from parents.
It would be understandable if law-abiding families with children at schools such as the formerly “outstanding” Park View Academy – now deemed “inadequate” and placed in special measures – felt targeted by former education secretary Michael Gove’s campaign to “drain” the fundamentalist “swamp”. While in opposition, Gove (pictured) authored a famously error-strewn and intemperate screed on Islamic fundamentalism, “Celsius 7/7”. And before his unexpected sacking, he wanted to inculcate “British values” in people whose social attitudes suggest they have had a bellyful.
The deeper concern is that a significant number of British Muslims are getting more conservative while much of the rest of society – including, of course, very many other Muslims – liberalises apace. Exporting high-profile hate preachers such as Abu Qatada is no solution, for whether one likes it or not the values of conservative Muslims are “British”, too.
As the shortcomings of “Celsius 7/7” demonstrated, and as Innes Bowen confirms in her sober, meticulous and revelatory new book, the state’s attitude towards British Muslims has been defined in part by ignorance. In contrast to the Special Branch, which has gone to great lengths to understand Muslim communities “in all their complexity”, the Home Office has been more concerned to identify and latch on to presentable Muslim interlocutors, solicit from them the right public messages, and reward them with “representative” status, public funding and gongs.
For much of Tony Blair’s premiership, that representative was the Muslim Council of Britain. Founded in 1997 as an umbrella group, fronted by tie-wearers prepared to shake hands with women, the MCB had in fact almost from its inception been taken over by groups sympathetic to the late Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi, a highly influential Pakistani proponent of a Sharia-based government. The MCB’s then leader, Sir Iqbal Sacranie (who was knighted by Blair) organised a joint statement by 100 Islamic figures condemning the attacks of 7/7, but after that, journalists began exposing predictable flaws in the Maududists’ facade, including an imam’s tirade against the kuffar(infidels) in a Birmingham mosque and Sacranie’s support for Hamas, while The Islamist, the memoir of a Maududist renegade called Ed Husain, described MCB members as dreaming of a transnational caliphate.
As Bowen writes, the MCB and its component groups were damaged by these revelations because they were “so starkly at odds with their public image”. In the end, the MCB forfeited much government sympathy by refusing to honour Holocaust Memorial Day, and it has yet to fully win it back. The lesson is that no Muslim group should enjoy sole spokesman status and that the authorities must engage more fully with all the groups that organise Islamic worship, charity and education in Britain today.
A start for anyone in government should be to read Medina in Birmingham, Najaf in Brent, the fruit of 80 interviews over seven years by a respected editor at the BBC. In the course of visits to mosques and homes around the country, the liberal-minded Bowen discovers that segregation of the sexes is observed by virtually all British Muslim groups, and learns to avoid embarrassment by not proffering her hand to a Muslim man unless he extends his. “I might be inside my house,” Bowen is told by one woman who rarely steps out for reasons of Islamic propriety, “but my heart is liberated”.
Bowen devotes much attention to the Deobandis, proponents of a puritanical, Taliban-related Islam who control a score of seminaries and are associated with a huge missionary organisation targeting lapsed Muslims – the Tablighi Jamaat, or TJ, to which dozens of British-born terrorism suspects, including several of the 7/7 suicide bombers, had past links. The TJ’s second top sheikh, Riyadh al-Haq, once described Jews as monopolising “money … tyranny and oppression”. More recently, Mr Haq has assured Bowen that he would no longer say such things, “because I don’t believe them”, but is his change of heart real? One of the consequences of a series of journalistic exposes of clandestine extremism (in particular Channel 4’s Undercover Mosquedocumentary in 2007) is that non-Muslims have adjusted to the idea that Muslim leaders say one thing and believe something else.
For all the absolutism of the ideologues, Bowen finds a porous border between Islamism and aspects of modernity. A women-only disco organised by Young Muslims UK, a Maududist group that used to commend a “yearning for jihad” to its members, involves gyrating to Justin Timberlake “with a break halfway through to cover up and pray”. Then there is the imam and IT specialist Usama Hasan, who was expelled from his hardline mosque for promoting Darwinism and calling the hijab a cultural tradition, not a religious obligation. Usama Hasan’s deradicalisation was a “gradual process”, prompted in part by professional success – he teaches at Middlesex University and is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society – and partly by a contretemps with violent jihadists.
Bowen also describes benign minority groups such as the Khoja community of Shias, whose prayer hall in Harrow welcomes women without hijab and who sanction marriage across the sectarian divide. Then there is the debonair, well-tailored, endlessly philanthropic Aga Khan, 49th imam of the Ismailis, who serves wine at his table; but these are liberal exceptions that prove the conservative rule.
“What Muslims feel in their hearts about Britain and its people,” argues Bowen, “will have a huge impact upon the future of the UK’s community relations as well as its national security.” He is right to focus on Muslim hearts, and it is doubtful whether these will be won over by anti-terrorism tsars and secular teaching. That, roughly, was the approach adopted by Turkey to stem rising Islamism in the 1980s and 1990s – to strikingly counterproductive effect.
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Source: The Guardian
