No option when Allah and his Messenger have decreed a matter
Andrew Gilligan tells us that the Muslim Council of Britain says…well actually I’m not sure what he tells us it says, and I can’t find the statement itself so that I can say what it says as opposed to what Gilligan says. Frankly he could have done a better job with this – he should have included a link and he should have put the crucial bit inside quotation marks so that we would know who said what. As it is it isn’t clear. The words “women,” “niqab,” and “veil” are not inside quotation marks, so I’m left wondering exactly what the MCB said.
Here’s Gilligan’s unhelpful summary:
The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said that not covering the face is a “shortcoming” and suggested that any Muslims who advocate being uncovered could be guilty of rejecting Islam.
In a statement published on its website the MCB, warns: “We advise all Muslims to exercise extreme caution on this issue, since denying any part of Islam may lead to disbelief.
“Not practising something enjoined by Allah and his Messenger… is a shortcoming. Denying it is much more serious.”
See? You can’t tell what the MCB said! Gilligan didn’t even specify “not covering the face” is a “shortcoming” for women, so we can’t tell if the MCB said that. Sloppy; very sloppy.
I can’t find the statement on the MCB site, either; maybe they’ve taken it down now. I can find lots of people quoting Gilligan, but not the primary source. This is annoying.
At any rate – if the MCB did say what Gilligan seems to be saying they did, that’s interesting and worth noting. The quoted passage from the Koran is a flawless bit of theocratic tyranny:
The statement quotes from the Koran: “It is not for a believer, man or woman, that they should have any option in their decision when Allah and his Messenger have decreed a matter.”
In other words, “believers” (who are not allowed to stop being “believers,” don’t forget, on pain of summary execution) have to do whatever clerics tell them to do. Period.
Other signatories of the statement include Imran Waheed, spokesman of the extremist group Hizb ut Tahrir and several other extremists including Haitham al-Haddad, who has denounced music as a “prohibited and fake message of love and peace”. All 27 signatories, who describe themselves as “Islamic groups and scholars,” are male.
Of course they are. God hates women.
I think this is it …
http://www.islam21c.com/editorials/218-important-advice-to-the-muslim-community-in-light-of-the-debate-over-the-veil
It’s also buried on their site as a pdf.
http://www.mcb.org.uk/uploads/Joint%20Statement.pdf
I particularly liked this part…
Well, I also describe myself as an Islamic group and scholar; I declare a fatwa on any Islamic group or scholar that forces a woman to cover her face over badly worded verses in the Koran that are open to multiple, contradictory interpretations.
Ah, thank you, Stephen! I was hoping someone would do further digging for me. I opened a lot of things on the MCB site and then gave up.
It doesn’t quite exactly say what Gilligan implies – which may be why he didn’t quote it directly. It clearly wants to (the authors want to), but it weasels. It weasels a lot. It avoids saying, exactly, “all Muslim women have to wear the niqab.” It nevertheless does everything short of saying that.
It’s a horrible document.
For what it’s worth, the date on the document on their website is 17th October 2006.
Yes, Gilligan did say it was from an older dispute – it’s from that fuss about Jack Straw’s saying he wasn’t all that happy about talking to women in niqabs in his office.
The document says:
Surely this a blatant example of revisionism, demanding that their strict reading is correct and that other millions of other Muslims have for hundreds of years been wrong?
Here us what Michael Gove has to say about the MCB in his book Celsius 7/7:
I have no love for Michael Gove, but it is heartening to know that there is a least some awareness of the danger in government circles.