Author: Ophelia Benson

Well it’s about time. Hooray for the Observer. It is about damn time.

The Muslim Council of Britain is officially the moderate face of Islam. Its pronouncements condemning the London bombings have been welcomed by the government as a model response for mainstream Muslims. The MCB’s secretary general, Iqbal Sacranie, has recently been knighted and senior figures within the organisation have the ear of ministers. But an Observer investigation can reveal that, far from being moderate, the Muslim Council of Britain has its origins in the extreme orthodox politics in Pakistan.

Oh yes? Tell us more.

Far from representing the more progressive or spiritual traditions within Islam, the leadership of the Muslim Council of Britain and some of its affiliates sympathise with and have links to conservative Islamist movements in the Muslim world and in particular Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami, a radical party committed to the establishment of an Islamic state in Pakistan ruled by sharia law…The organisation’s founder, Maulana Maududi, was a fierce opponent of feminism who believed that women should be kept in purdah – seclusion from male company. Although the MCB’s leadership distances itself from some of these teachings, it has been criticised for having no women prominently involved in the organisation.

One of the things it’s about time for is the realization and articulation of the possibility that opposition to terrorism is not the only issue, and not the best possible dividing line. It’s the same thing with Hizb ut-Tahrir – we keep being told that it’s non-violent, as if that’s all that needs to be said. Well non-violent is better than violent, to be sure, but there is a lot more to the subject than that. (And then, given the very real coerciveness of Islamism when it has power, coerciveness that involves beatings, acid attacks, and executions, it is not really all that non-violent anyway.) There are issues about attitudes to human rights, women’s rights, ‘apostasy’ and the like.

Last week, Salman Rushdie warned in an article in the Times that Sacranie had been a prominent critic during the Satanic Verses affair and advised that the MCB leader should not be viewed as a moderate. In 1989, Sacranie said ‘death was perhaps too easy’ for the writer. Rushdie also criticised Sacranie for boycotting January’s Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony. ‘If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Mr Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem,’ said Rushdie. A Panorama documentary to be screened next Sunday will also be highly critical.

Yeah! Take that, World Service and Jane Little! Strident yourself. ‘Hardly a respected figure’ yourself. Yaboosucks.

The origins of the Muslim Council of Britain can be traced to the storm around the publication of the Satanic Verses in 1988. India was the first country to ban the book and many Muslim countries followed suit. Opposition to the book in Britain united people committed to a traditionalist view of Islam, of which the founders of the Muslim Council of Britain was a part.

A worthy origin.

The MCB was officially founded in November 1997, shortly after Tony Blair came to power, and has had a close relationship with the Labour government ever since…It remains particularly influential within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which has a little-known outreach department which works with Britain’s Muslims. The FCO pamphlet Muslims in Britain is essentially an MCB publication and the official ministerial celebration of the Muslim festival of Eid is organised jointly with the MCB.

As Rushdie said – we have a problem.

There is no suggestion that Sacranie and other prominent figures in the Muslim Council of Britain are anything but genuine in their condemnation of the terrorist bombings of the 7 July. But their claims to represent a moderate or progressive tendency in Islam are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

Exactly. That’s just it. Merely condemning terrorist bombings is hardly enough to qualify an organization as progressive. Well done, Observer; well done, Panorama. It’s about time.

You want tradition? Here’s some tradition.

In this quiet northern valley, tucked into the Himalayan foothills, tradition and threats have forced Shad into an electoral profile so low it is almost invisible. She will never leave this high-walled compound to canvass votes, never knock on a single door…And even if Shad wins a seat in Lower Dir, an arch-conservative corner of North West Frontier Province, there is no guarantee the local Pashtun men will allow her to occupy it.

They don’t like the idea, you see. It’s not the tradition.

Since 2001 four women councillors have been killed in Frontier province. The latest victim died in June. Zubeida Begum, a veteran women’s rights campaigner, was shot nine times at her home in Upper Dir, close to Shad Begum’s home. The gunmen, who included one of her own relatives, also killed her 19-year-old daughter.

Thorough.

Hostility has been stoked by tribal and religious leaders who view women politicians as an insult to Pashtun custom and an unforgivable affront to Islam. “There is no place for a woman’s authority under sharia law,” says Maulana Hifz ur-Rehman, a cleric and former jihadi fighter who runs a madrasa on a mountain slope outside Ziarat Talash.

No, of course not, for obvious reasons – because men’s authority is so much more wise, and just, and compassionate.

Still, intimidation and social pressure is rife. Shad Begum says she has been tarred as a “Jewish conspirator” in a whispering campaign against her family because her aid agency receives help from western donors. “They say we are brazen people without honour,” says her brother, Shad Muhammad, whose pharmacy in Ziarat Talash has been attacked. “They say you want to take your women into the streets, and take ours with them.” Shad says the struggle is worth it. In the cloistered, tradition-bound world of Lower Dir, where women hardly dare step on the street, access to health and education is woeful. The district has just three female doctors for a population of more than 800,000; hardly any girls attend school; and so-called “honour killings” are common.

Honour. What a joke.

Roy Hattersley in the Guardian.

At one level, the attack on multiculturalism is no more than a refined, middle-class version of “Paki-bashing”. Yet people who ought to know better have joined in the chorus of intolerance. To demand that Muslims abandon their way of life – what they eat, how they dress, which way they choose their husbands and wives – is to make a frontal assault upon their faith. Islam is a total religion. People who go to church on Christmas Eve and think that makes them Christians may not realise that devout Muslims believe that the Qur’an should inform their whole lives.

Well, I don’t go to church on Christmas eve and I don’t aspire either to be or to think of myself as a Christian – so I do indeed realise that ‘devout’ (there it is again) Muslims believe that the Qur’an should inform their whole lives. But so what? That’s the problem, not an explanation that causes the problem to disappear. By the same token, ‘devout’ Southern Baptists believe that (their selective reading of) the Bible should govern their whole lives, too, and that therefore God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve and all the rest of the nonsense. That doesn’t make it okay – that doesn’t make it not a problem that they want to impose their religious views on other people. Nor does it with other holy books. Or any other books. ‘Devout’ Nazis could believe that The Passing of the Great Race should inform their whole lives, too, but I doubt Hattersley would urge us to respect that. So surely the mere fact that a group believes that a book should inform their whole lives is not automatically a reason to agree with them.

And then, Hattersley’s gloss on ‘their way of life’ is a tad inadequate. ‘what they eat, how they dress, which way they choose their husbands and wives’ – that leaves out a few items – such as ‘honour’ killing, female subordination, ‘which way they choose’ their underage daughters’ husbands. Even that ‘what they eat’ is evasive and euphemistic, because the issue there is a form of animal slaughter that is considered cruel to the animals. It is simply not self-evident that ‘devoutness’ should trump concern with animal suffering, and the issue should not be concealed by the choice of words.

Britain has to decide if the freedom that we so value is consistent with attempts to suppress the religious practices of the country’s fastest-growing faith. The fact that most of us do not share their beliefs (and some of us have no beliefs at all) is irrelevant. Only primitive people want to destroy everything they do not like or understand. The civilised, and sensible, approach is to welcome diversity as a stimulus to renewed vitality.

Oy veh. Here we go again. (Seriously. This kind of thing is so stale. Is that really the best they can do?) Which ‘religious practices’ does he mean? Does he in fact even really mean ‘religious practices’ or does he mean social customs. And as for beliefs and sharing or not sharing them – that’s just silly. The issue is not beliefs, it is indeed practices. What is done to people. And then destroying everything they do not like or understand – again, that’s just an empty, beside the point bit of abuse. And ‘welcome diversity’ – another evasive formula, as I said a few days ago about Canon Chris Chivers’ ‘It is to be hoped the proposed commission will identify ways grudging tolerance can now be transcended by genuine acceptance, understanding and respect, which turns neighbours into friends because it accords difference the dignity it always deserves.’ Not all difference does deserve respect, and neither should all diversity be welcomed. Some norms are desirable and necessary. One assumes that in other contexts, MPs are pretty well aware of that. It may be ‘different’ or ‘diverse’ to demand the death of a novelist or playwright for writing something that ‘offends’ our ‘beliefs’ – but that doesn’t make it worthy of respect or welcoming. So blanket endorsements of diversity and difference are worthless, and confusion-producing.

But it is the assault on Islam – its culture as well as its theology – that has alienated some Muslim youths to the point at which they will not condemn anyone who champions their religion…Assaults on their habits as well as their faith will alienate them still further.

Maybe so. But what can be done about it? What is the alternative? Huh? Just to give up and endorse all the ‘habits’ of ‘Muslim youths’ without further examination? What if those ‘habits’ include pushing women around and telling them what to do and what to wear, and calling them whores if they don’t obey? Does Hattersley expect everyone to smile placatingly and keep silent about situations like that?

But the laid-back British still failed to recognise the passion with which British Muslims support their culture and their religion. At the beginning of the row over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, I told worshippers at the Birmingham central mosque that they should be as calm about their faith as most Christians are about theirs. A man called Saed Moghul told me: “You may not care about your religion, but that is no reason why we should not care about ours.” His logic was irrefutable.

His what? His what was irrefutable? His logic was what?

Anyway – that was no ‘row’ – that was a very literal, serious, intended death threat. For writing a novel. Gore Vidal wrote a novel about Jesus – should passionate Christians (and there are some) be approved if they (caring about their religion as they do) put out a fatwa of their own?

The sensible alternative to that take-it-or-leave-it nonsense is acceptance that most Muslims will live Islamic lives and still accept the laws and conventions that hold Britain together…They were taught at school that free men and women are entitled to live as they choose as long as their habits do not imperil the tranquillity of the nation.

As long as their ‘habits’ do not imperil the tranquillity of the nation. Well what if their habits do imperil the flourishing of the girls and women among them? What if the phrase ‘free women’ has a slightly ironic ring in light of some of those ‘habits’? Or to put it another way, once the fine-sounding empty phrases are set aside, what exactly does Hattersley mean? Which differences and conventions and habits and practices are we talking about, exactly?