More and Better Religion
I saw this distatsteful item at Normblog. Guy called Faisal Bodi, news editor of the Islam Channel. He says things I disagree with. He also says things that strike me as incomplete, in an evasive way.
The working groups’ reports on extremism published last week have a sting in their tail that few in the Home Office could have expected…It says elements of the battered terrorism bill currently stuttering through parliament such as “glorifying terrorism” or banning nonviolent groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir will have little impact in the fight against criminal extremist violence and only further alienate Muslims.
People who read such things in a hasty way (as surely nearly everyone does – we don’t study newspaper columns as if they were great poetry or recipes for chocolate decadence cake) will get the impression that Hizb ut-Tahrir is a non-violent group in the sense of being a peace-loving gentle flower-sniffing innocent kindly group – a group that is about non-violence, in the way that peace marchers are. But as Ziauddin Sardar pointed out the other day and we discussed here, that’s not right.
The bearded and elegantly attired supporters of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), the fundamentalist Muslim group, like to emphasise the non-violent nature of their party. As a recent press release put it, they “have never resorted to armed struggle or violence”. This is correct as far as it goes. While HT has openly engaged in the politics of hatred, particularly towards the Jews, it has not, strictly speaking, advocated violence. But this does not mean that it is not a violent organisation…In fact, violence is central to HT’s goals. Its primary objective is to establish a caliphate…Their ideology argues that there is only one way Muslims can or should be ruled, that those who form this caliphate have the right to rule, that all others must submit unconditionally and that only this political interpretation of Islam is valid and legitimate. In other words, the caliphate of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s vision can be established only by doing violence to all other interpretations of Islam and all Muslims who do not agree with it – not to mention the violence it must do to the rest of the world, which also must eventually succumb.
Faisal Bodi sees things differently:
There is a big difference between someone with a strict approach to matters of faith and someone who uses indiscriminate violence for political ends: bushy beards and burkas do not a terrorist make.
Not nearly big enough, I would say. And what does he mean ‘strict’? And does he mean strict toward one’s own ‘faith’ – or does he mean strict toward, say, other people’s clothes and right to leave the house and items like that? That’s another ‘big difference’ that matters quite a lot – the big difference between a zealot who himself refrains from alcohol, kite-flying, music, image-making, whatever it may be, and a zealot who forces all those stupid prohibitions (and more, much more) on other people and whips them if they disobey. A big, big difference.
In fact the solution lies in more, and better, religion. The resort to indiscriminate violence against the homeland is often a reaction to a national disconnect, a lack of identification with a country that is persecuting fellow Muslims abroad and whose institutions remain pregnant with Islamophobic attitudes cultivated by orientalists over centuries.
No comment.
Ah, yes. More and “better” religion. What does “better” mean? Better for whom? What does “more” mean? What is this idiot really mumbling about? Is he saying that Britain just needs to expect more bombings, more deaths, more violence until the British just come to their senses and join that glorious, Allah-blessed caliphate with the glories of Shariah? No comment, indeed.
Faisal Bodi writes in the Guardian:
>Since then Tony Blair has continued to misrepresent the nature of the threat as a fight against adherents of a warped ideology bent on dragging us all back to a medieval caliphate.< Regardless of one’s view of Tony Blair, for the influential and (presumably) ‘moderate’ Muslim Faisal Bodi to imply that there is no threat from adherents of a warped ideology bent on setting up a medieval caliphate is in itself scary.
Yes, that was the line that concerned me most.
Isn’t this the whole point? People holding a warped ideology may not be violent in themselves but their ideology justifies the violence in others.
To say that the solution is more religion is understandable from Bodi’s point of view but would be suicidal to take up. Most religions batter down the critical faculties. Without critical argument anything goes and the strongest tend to win. In the case of the state supported C of E the effects have not been too bad. In the case of Saudi oil- supported Whahabism the prospect is genuinely frightening.
Incidentally, can Bodi demonstrate that “Institutions remain pregnant with Islamophobic attitudes cultivated by orientalists over the centuries”?
Of course it depends what he means by Islamophobia. The Cof E is a UK institution which denies the prophethood of Mohammed- is this Islamophobic?
Frankly most UK institutions over the centuries are more likely to be indifferent to Islam rather than actively hating or fearing it because, until recently, it has had virtually no influence in the UK.
It isn’t that UK institutions are anti- Muslim. They simply don’t care one way or the other.
MKJ wrote:
>Yes, that was the line that concerned me most. Isn’t this the whole point? People holding a warped ideology may not be violent in themselves but their ideology justifies the violence in others.< I had in mind the people with a warped Islamist ideology who *are* violent, whom Bodi seems to be denying are a threat.
F. Bodi needs to be taken down the pub, sat down quietly, and given a pint and a pork-pie.
He’d feel a lot better then!
G Tingey
“F. Bodi needs to be taken down the pub, sat down quietly, and given a pint and a pork-pie.”
This would sort out a great deal of the world’s problems, I agree.