Hassan Butt explains.
By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the ‘Blair’s bombs’ line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology…And as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy. For example, yesterday on Radio 4’s Today programme, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: ‘What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.’
He did: here (fast forward ten minutes). He also said, to Ed Husain, ‘You’re absolutely right in what you say about the Wahhabi strand; the way you then demonize a whole load of genuinely representative Muslims is completely wrong.’ But Ed Husain wasn’t doing any such thing, as he kept trying to get Livingstone to see: he was distinguishing between Muslims and Islamists, while Ken was lumping them together.
Hassan Butt explains some more.
[T]hough many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many of my peers to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain, our own homeland and abroad, was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would eventually bring Islamic justice to the world…The centuries-old reasoning of Islamic jurists also extends to the world stage where the rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) have been set down to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war. What radicals and extremists do is to take these premises two steps further. Their first step has been to reason that since there is no Islamic state in existence, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr. Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.
So when it looks as if the goal is not to extort some concession or change of policy but just to kill as many people as possible – it looks that way because that is how it is. We are all part of Dar ul-Kufr, and we all need to be killed.
I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism. (The Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from this state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.)
Yeah. Let’s do that.
Ed Husain has a very good article in today’s Evening Standard; Allen sent me a copy and also posted a useful chunk of it on the Letters page.
Being a big‑tent liberal is laudable; but to fail to discern the difference between Islam, the religious tradition, and Islamism, the extremist political ideology hell‑bent on destroying the West, is a disaster for us all. By confusing regular religious Muslims with fanatical ideologues, Ken blurs the lines between right and wrong, and allows radicalism to flourish within sections of London’s Muslim communities…While living in Saudi Arabia two years ago, I remember watching in horror television images of Ken walking around with Yusuf al‑Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric based in Qatar, whose publicly stated attitude is that suicide bombers are martyrs. Yet it was Ken who said that “of all the Muslim thinkers in the world today, al‑Qaradawl is the most positive force for change”. By promoting these extremists, and their supporters, Ken gives them legitimacy. He helps set in motion the conveyor belt to terrorism.
Listen up, Ken.
