The British Left’s Hypocritical Embrace of Islamism
Anti-extremist
campaigner Maajid Nawaz embodies grievances that liberals claim to care
about. So why is he being viciously attacked by them?
08.09.15 7:30 AM ET
The
desire to impose religion over society is otherwise known as theocracy.
Being veterans of the struggle to push back against fundamentalist
Christians, American liberals are well acquainted with the pitfalls of
the neoconservative flirtation with the religious-right. How ironic,
then, that in Europe it is those on the left—led by the Guardian—who
flirt with religious theocrats. For in the UK, our theocrats are brown,
from minority communities, and are overwhelmingly Muslim.
Islam is a religion like
any other. Islamism is an ideology that seeks to impose any version of
Islam over society. When expressed through violence, I call it jihadism.
It is obvious to an American liberal that Christian fundamentalism must
be made to respect personal choice. Likewise, it is as plain as the
light of day to me—a Pakistani-British liberal Muslim—that any desire to
impose any version of Islam over anyone anywhere, ever, is a
fundamental violation of our basic civil liberties. But Islamism has
been rising in the UK for decades. Over the years, in survey after
survey, attitudes have reflected a worrying trend. A quarter of British
Muslims sympathised with the Charlie Hebdo shootings. 0% have expressed tolerance for homosexuality. A third have claimed that killing for religion can be justified, while 36% have thought apostates should be killed. 40% have wanted the introduction of sharia as law in the UK and 33% have expressed a desire to see the return of a worldwide theocratic Caliphate. Is it any wonder then, that from this milieu up to 1,000 British Muslims have joined ISIS, which is more than joined the Army reserves. In a case that has come to symbolize the extent of the problem, an entire family of 12 recently migrated to the Islamic State. By any reasonable assessment, something has gone badly wrong in Britain.
But for those who I have
come to call Europe’s regressive-left how could Islamist tyranny—such as
burying women neck deep in the ground and stoning them to
death—possibly be anything other than an authentic expression of Muslim
rage at Western colonial hegemony? For don’t you know Muslims are angry?
So angry, in fact, that they wish to enslave indigenous Yazidi women
for sex, throw Syrian gays off tall buildings and burn people alive? All
because… Israel. For Europe’s regressive-left—which is fast penetrating
U.S. circles too—Muslims are not expected to be civilized. And
Muslim upstarts who dare to challenge this theocratic fascism are
nothing but an inconvenience to an uncannily Weimar-like populism that
screams simplistically: It is all the West’s fault.
It
is my fellow Muslims who suffer most from this patronizing, self-pity
inspiring mollycoddling. And just as American Muslims, with some reason,
fear becoming targeted by right-wing anti-Muslim prejudice, British
Muslims are being spoon-fed regressive-left sedatives, encouraging a
perpetual state of victimhood in order to score their petty ideological
points against “the West.” In the name of cultural diversity, aspiration
is being stifled, expectations have been tempered and because Muslims have their own culture don't you know, self-segregation and ghettoization have thrived.
Finally, on July 20 the British Prime Minister David Cameron mustered the political will to deliver a comprehensive speech
setting out the UK’s approach to tackling the long rising tide of
theocratic extremism in our communities. At last, Cameron named and
shamed the Islamist ideology as a major factor behind the rise of such
extremism. As founding chairman of Quilliam—an organization that seeks to challenge Islamism though civic debate across political divides—I was proud to have played a role
in advising Downing Street on some of the core messages for this
speech. I did this despite my being a Liberal, and not a member of the
Prime Minster’s Conservative party. I did this because extremism affects
our national, not just party-political, interests.
The Guardian, it
seems, was not happy. Rather than react by providing much beleaguered
feminist, gay or ex-Muslims with a crucial platform—as one would expect
from a progressive newspaper—they featured a doting interview
with the UK front-leader for the Islamist extremist group Hizb
ut-Tahrir (HT) complaining about the Prime Minster’s speech. HT wishes
to resurrect a theocratic caliphate, in which—according to its draft constitution
available online—they would execute “apostates.” They also believe in
ISIS-style medieval punishments, such as stoning, amputations, punishing
homosexuals, and approving of slavery in principle. I should know, for
13 years I was on the leadership of this group, serving five of those
years as a political prisoner on its behalf in Egypt.
But this is not new for the Guardian. As the UK media industry magazine Private Eye
later noted, over the years the paper has provided column space to
supporters of al-Qaida, including Bin-Laden himself. On 23 February this
year, the paper published
a column by the leader of HT’s Australian branch, Uthman Badar, in
which he makes it clear that though HT does not support ISIS, “neither
will we condemn them,” for to do such a thing would be “morally
repugnant.” Indeed, 10 years ago the Guardian even had a member of HT on its staff as a trainee journalist. Dilpazier Aslam’s affiliation was exposed
on the blogosphere after he wrote an equivocating piece on the 7/7
terrorist attacks in London. Amidst public outrage, the paper was forced
to pay him £30,000 as severance,
probably to avoid a hearing at which editors may have had to admit that
they knew about his HT affiliations all along. Like the Daily Mail of old, which to its eternal shame appeased the rise of Nazism, the Guardian
is blinded by its infantilizing approach to minority communities,
promoting the most regressive of theocrats, simply to “stick it to the
man.”
And while the
regressive-left have taken this approach with Islamist extremists, they
have been simultaneously marginalizing that great political
inconvenience, liberal Muslims. On July 21, a day after the Prime
Minister’s speech, the Guardian G2 magazine’s commissioning editor Nosheen Iqbal wrote a glowing email
to my office requesting an interview in order to discuss my
“consistently dedicated work to combat extremism” and to build on the
“momentum” of the Prime Minister’s speech so as to “flag up the crucial
work being done behind the scenes.” Keen to engage the audience most
hostile to liberal Muslims in the past, I was struck by the change of
tone in this request, and felt that an opportunity to repair ties was at
hand, so I agreed to the interview.
What I hadn’t seen was this same editor’s tweet, only a week prior, in which she made her dislike of me
crystal clear. The resulting piece—conducted by David Shariatmadari—was
nothing short of a character assassination. I have since responded in full
to this hatchet job on my public Facebook page. Suffice to mention here
that the article relied on no less than three anonymous hostile quotes,
among countless other petty jibes and omissions of my actual answers.
In fact, the piece was so bad that it appears to have violated the Guardian’s own editorial code on anonymized quotes. As was pointed out in the comment section, the Guardian reader’s editor has a policy on anonymous sources: they should “use
anonymous sources sparingly (and)—except in exceptional
circumstances—avoid anonymous pejorative quotes….the use of anonymous
quotes is widespread within newspapers and is…particularly insidious
when used to snipe at public figures in profiles.”
Other journalists and bloggers responded to the Guardian with advice, criticism, incredulity, scolding, and even a lesson in recent history. But it was mockery that proved to be the Guardian’s
Achilles’ heel. By focusing on my personality, fluency, dress and
beverage tastes—instead of my ideas and “crucial work” — the paper
opened itself up to attack by a cleverly put together and popular satirical and irreverent piece.
Satire has been a sanctuary historically monopolized by progressives,
originally used as a discreet tool against Western religious
fundamentalism. Of course, an authentic Muslim should not dress well,
speak lucidly nor drink, of all things, a skinny flat white coffee. The real Muslim is scruffy. A credible
Muslim can only be inarticulate, someone who requires an intermediary
to ‘explain’ their anger, invariably through the prism of leftist
ideological dogma. And if a Muslim does speaks for themselves, they must
only do so when full of rage, obviously.
How patronizing.
As another blogger accurately noted
in response, the problem begins when journalists and others seek out
“community representatives,” or “credible Muslim voices” to fit into
convenient boxes. This relies on so many assumptions that it is hard to
know where to begin. Not all Muslims wish to express themselves in
public through a communal religious identity. Identities are multiple,
and some may wish to speak instead just as citizens in their
professional capacity, through their political party, or their
neighborhood body. Those Muslim who do speak through their communal
religious identity are not homogenous. This particularly holds true
because majoritarian Islam has no organized clergy, and no pope. The
question of religious “representation” becomes particularly difficult to
achieve as a result. And in its most extreme sense it is undesirable
anyway, leading logically to nothing but ISIS-style bloodshed and
theocracy. Muslim “credibility” is just as flimsy an idea to pursue
doggedly. In fact, this is nothing but a variant of the African-American
“not black enough” theme. Who decides whose “Muslim experience” is
real, and whose is not? Is the credible Muslim only he who dresses in
Arab robes, eats spicy food and drinks cava? And yet we then worry about
profiling?
The great irony is that, unlike many of today’s champagne socialists and shisha-jihadists my entire life has been a prototype of their archetypal aggrieved Muslim. Unlike the Guardian’s
private school, Oxbridge-educated journalist David Shariatmadari, I am a
state school-educated Muslim and racial minority. I have been stabbed
at by neo-Nazis, falsely arrested at gunpoint by Essex police, expelled
from college, divorced, estranged from my child, and tortured in
Egyptian prison, and mandatorily profiled. I’ve had my DNA forcibly
taken at Heathrow Airport under Schedule 7 Laws, which deprive terror
suspects of the right to silence at UK ports of entry and exit, among
much else. I’ve been blacklisted from other countries. I am every
grievance regressive leftists traditionally harp on. Yet their
first-world bourgeois brains seem to malfunction because I refuse to
spew theocratic hate, or fit their little “angry Muslim” box. Yet they
talk to me about privilege, and non-fat lattes?
There is a natural fear
among Europe’s left, that challenging Islamist extremism can only aid
Europe’s far-right. But the alternative to this fear must not be to
instead empower theocratic fascism. There is a way to both challenge
those who want to impose islam, and those who wish to ban Islam. It has
not escaped me, nor other liberal Muslims, that while challenging
Islamist extremism we must remain attentive to protecting our civil
liberties. We are born of this struggle, after all. Over the years I have opposed past UK government ministers on ethnic and religious profiling, opposed Obama's targeted killings and drone strikes and opposed Senator King in the UK Parliament over his obfuscation and justification for torture. I have been cited by the UK PM for my view
that though Islamist extremism must be openly challenged, non-terrorist
Islamists should not be banned unless they directly incite violence. I
have spoken out against extraordinary rendition and detention without charge of terror suspects. I have supported my political party, the Liberal Democrats, in backing a call to end Schedule 7.
It is due to this very same concern for civil liberties that I
vehemently oppose Islamist extremism and call for liberal reform within
our Muslim communities, for our Muslim communities. We believe civil liberties cut both ways, for and upon minority communities, and it is due to this same passion for human rights that my organization Quilliam put out this anti-ISIS video only a day after the Guardian’s unfortunate sting. We chose to let our work speak for itself.
But if the regressive-left
has its way, why worry about medieval punishments conducted in Islam’s
name, such as the lashing of Saudi bloggers like Raif Badawi? Let us not be Uncle Toms, after all. Israel is the real enemy. Keep it real, man.
