A paedophile imam who abused young girls while teaching at a mosque has been jailed for two years. Ebrahim Yusuf Kazi, 67, was told by a judge he would have been jailed for longer – but the law prevented it as the offences took place 27 years ago. The cleric sexually assaulted three victims – all aged under 11 – during class as he taught groups of youngsters alone inside the mosque, Swindon Crown Court heard. He would invite the girls to read a passage from a book in front of the other children – before groping and touching their genitals under the desk. He also locked himself in a toilet cubicle with one of the girls, removed her clothes before he touched and licked her body. Ebrahim Yusuf Kazi, 67, looked quizzically at his interpreter – translating in his native Gujarati – as he was ordered down to the cells. Kazi’s campaign of abuse only surfaced 27 years later when the brave victims finally decided to speak out and confront him in court. The women wept yesterday as they saw Kazi jailed after being convicted on five counts of sexual assault at the court in Wiltshire. Judge Euaun Ambrose said: ‘You were in a position of very considerable status, trust and authority.
Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Friday, April 29, 2011
University campuses are 'hotbeds of Islamic extremism'
Islamic fundamentalism is being allowed to flourish at universities, endangering national security, MPs and peers say.
Islamic fundamentalism is being allowed to flourish at universities, endangering national security, MPs and peers said yesterday.
Academics are turning a blind eye to radicals because they do not want to spy on students, a report claimed.
Despite "damning evidence" of a serious problem, little progress had been made in tackling the unsustainable situation, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Homeland Security said.
They urged the Government to tackle the issue on campuses with "utmost urgency".
Such extremism "endangers our security at home and has international implications that are serious enough to threaten our alliance relationships", said the group, which includes the former home secretary Lord Reid.
Secret files obtained by The Daily Telegraph and WikiLeaks disclosed this week that at least 35 terrorists held at Guantánamo Bay were indoctrinated by extremists in Britain.
The leaked documents, written by senior US military commanders, illustrated how Britain effectively became a crucible of terrorism over the course of two decades.
MORE
Islamic fundamentalism is being allowed to flourish at universities, endangering national security, MPs and peers said yesterday.
Academics are turning a blind eye to radicals because they do not want to spy on students, a report claimed.
Despite "damning evidence" of a serious problem, little progress had been made in tackling the unsustainable situation, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Homeland Security said.
They urged the Government to tackle the issue on campuses with "utmost urgency".
Such extremism "endangers our security at home and has international implications that are serious enough to threaten our alliance relationships", said the group, which includes the former home secretary Lord Reid.
Secret files obtained by The Daily Telegraph and WikiLeaks disclosed this week that at least 35 terrorists held at Guantánamo Bay were indoctrinated by extremists in Britain.
The leaked documents, written by senior US military commanders, illustrated how Britain effectively became a crucible of terrorism over the course of two decades.
MORE
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Sharia lessons for pupils aged six: BBC uncovers 'weekend schools' that teach pupils how to hack off thieves' hands
Pupils asked to list the 'reprehensible' qualities of Jews
Around 5,000 children attend a network of 40 schools
Diagrams show children how to hack off hands and feet
Investigation: A BBC Panorama programme has found that around 40 weekend schools are teaching Sharia law to British children as young as six.
Children in Britain are being taught brutal Sharia law punishments, including how to hack off a criminal’s hand or foot.
So-called ‘weekend schools’ for Muslim pupils as young as six also teach that the penalty for gay sex is execution and that ‘Zionists’ are plotting to take over the world for the Jews.
One set textbook challenges youngsters to list the ‘reprehensible’ qualities of Jews.
Another for six-year-olds asks them to answer what happens to someone who dies who is not a believer in Islam. The answer being looked for is ‘hellfire’.
A BBC Panorama investigation, to be screened tonight, identified a network of more than 40 weekend schools teaching around 5,000 children, from age six to 18.
The schools – which offer the hardline Saudi National Curriculum – are run under the umbrella of ‘Saudi Students Clubs and Schools in the UK and Ireland’.
They are not state-funded, and do not use Government buildings. They are able to exploit a loophole which means weekend schools are not inspected by Ofsted.
Last night, experts at the Policy Exchange think-tank warned that similar extremists could seek to exploit the Government’s policy of giving greater freedoms from state control to free schools and academies
Clear message: Education Secretary Michael Gove has said he would not tolerate anti-Semitism and homophobia in English schools.
They call for the establishment of a due diligence unit to check whether those applying to open the schools have an extremist background.
Current checks are largely limited to fraud, criminal convictions and funding.
Education Secretary Michael Gove, who is believed to be supportive of the idea, said he would not tolerate anti-Semitism and homophobia in English schools.
The Panorama investigation identified a book for 15-year-olds being used in the classes which teaches about Sharia law and its punishments.
It says: ‘For thieves their hands will be cut off for a first offence, and their foot for a subsequent offence.’
There are diagrams showing children where cuts must be made. One passage says: ‘The specified punishment of the thief is cutting off his right hand at the wrist. Then it is cauterised to prevent him from bleeding to death.’
For acts of ‘sodomy’, children are told that the penalty is death and it states a difference of opinion whether this should be done by stoning, or burning with fire, or throwing over a cliff.
Panorama alleges that a building used for one of the schools, in Ealing, West London, is owned by the Saudi government.
Mr Gove told the programme: ‘I have no desire or wish to intervene in the decisions that the Saudi government makes in its own education system.
‘But I’m clear that we cannot have anti-Semitic material of any kind being used in English schools. Ofsted are doing some work in this area.
‘They’ll be reporting to me shortly about how we can ensure that part-time provision is better registered and better inspected in the future.’
The text books for 15-year-olds revive the so-called ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which teach that Zionists want to establish world domination for Jews.
The Saudi text books instruct pupils: ‘The Jews have tried to deny them (the Protocols) but there are many proofs of their veracity and their origin among the elders of Zion.’
The text books say the ‘main goal’ of the ‘Zionist movement’ is ‘for the Jews to have control over the world and its resources’ which, the book allege, Zionists seek to achieve partly by ‘inciting rancour and rivalry among the great powers so that they fight one another.’
Mr Gove said anyone who cites the Protocols of Zion is ‘indulging in one of the oldest and foulest anti Semitic smears that, that we know of’.
In a written response to the findings, the Saudi ambassador said the schools had nothing to do with the Saudi embassy.
It stated: ‘Any tutoring activities that may have taken place among any other group of Muslims in the United Kingdom are absolutely individual to that group and not affiliated to or endorsed by the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia.’
Referring to the lesson that tasks children to list the ‘reprehensible qualities of the Jews’, in a letter to the BBC, the Saudi ambassador said it was ‘dangerously deceptive and misleading to address such texts and discuss them out of their overall historical, cultural and linguistic contexts’.
Panorama separately claimed some Muslim private schools have expressed extreme sentiments on their school websites.
These include: ‘We need to defend our children from the forces of evil’, and ‘our children are exposed to a culture that is in opposition to almost everything Islam stands for’.
Policy Exchange says Britain’s faith and other schools are increasingly vulnerable to extremist influences.
It claims in a report that the Department for Education, Ofsted, education authorities and schools are ‘not equipped’ to meet such challenges.
Current checks for extremism are described as ‘piecemeal’.
The report adds: ‘The Government’s policy of opening up the education system to new academies and free schools programmes could be exploited unless urgent measures are taken to counter extremist influence.’
WATCH THE VIDEO
Around 5,000 children attend a network of 40 schools
Diagrams show children how to hack off hands and feet
Investigation: A BBC Panorama programme has found that around 40 weekend schools are teaching Sharia law to British children as young as six.
Children in Britain are being taught brutal Sharia law punishments, including how to hack off a criminal’s hand or foot.
So-called ‘weekend schools’ for Muslim pupils as young as six also teach that the penalty for gay sex is execution and that ‘Zionists’ are plotting to take over the world for the Jews.
One set textbook challenges youngsters to list the ‘reprehensible’ qualities of Jews.
Another for six-year-olds asks them to answer what happens to someone who dies who is not a believer in Islam. The answer being looked for is ‘hellfire’.
A BBC Panorama investigation, to be screened tonight, identified a network of more than 40 weekend schools teaching around 5,000 children, from age six to 18.
The schools – which offer the hardline Saudi National Curriculum – are run under the umbrella of ‘Saudi Students Clubs and Schools in the UK and Ireland’.
They are not state-funded, and do not use Government buildings. They are able to exploit a loophole which means weekend schools are not inspected by Ofsted.
Last night, experts at the Policy Exchange think-tank warned that similar extremists could seek to exploit the Government’s policy of giving greater freedoms from state control to free schools and academies
Clear message: Education Secretary Michael Gove has said he would not tolerate anti-Semitism and homophobia in English schools.
They call for the establishment of a due diligence unit to check whether those applying to open the schools have an extremist background.
Current checks are largely limited to fraud, criminal convictions and funding.
Education Secretary Michael Gove, who is believed to be supportive of the idea, said he would not tolerate anti-Semitism and homophobia in English schools.
The Panorama investigation identified a book for 15-year-olds being used in the classes which teaches about Sharia law and its punishments.
It says: ‘For thieves their hands will be cut off for a first offence, and their foot for a subsequent offence.’
There are diagrams showing children where cuts must be made. One passage says: ‘The specified punishment of the thief is cutting off his right hand at the wrist. Then it is cauterised to prevent him from bleeding to death.’
For acts of ‘sodomy’, children are told that the penalty is death and it states a difference of opinion whether this should be done by stoning, or burning with fire, or throwing over a cliff.
Panorama alleges that a building used for one of the schools, in Ealing, West London, is owned by the Saudi government.
Mr Gove told the programme: ‘I have no desire or wish to intervene in the decisions that the Saudi government makes in its own education system.
‘But I’m clear that we cannot have anti-Semitic material of any kind being used in English schools. Ofsted are doing some work in this area.
‘They’ll be reporting to me shortly about how we can ensure that part-time provision is better registered and better inspected in the future.’
The text books for 15-year-olds revive the so-called ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which teach that Zionists want to establish world domination for Jews.
The Saudi text books instruct pupils: ‘The Jews have tried to deny them (the Protocols) but there are many proofs of their veracity and their origin among the elders of Zion.’
The text books say the ‘main goal’ of the ‘Zionist movement’ is ‘for the Jews to have control over the world and its resources’ which, the book allege, Zionists seek to achieve partly by ‘inciting rancour and rivalry among the great powers so that they fight one another.’
Mr Gove said anyone who cites the Protocols of Zion is ‘indulging in one of the oldest and foulest anti Semitic smears that, that we know of’.
In a written response to the findings, the Saudi ambassador said the schools had nothing to do with the Saudi embassy.
It stated: ‘Any tutoring activities that may have taken place among any other group of Muslims in the United Kingdom are absolutely individual to that group and not affiliated to or endorsed by the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia.’
Referring to the lesson that tasks children to list the ‘reprehensible qualities of the Jews’, in a letter to the BBC, the Saudi ambassador said it was ‘dangerously deceptive and misleading to address such texts and discuss them out of their overall historical, cultural and linguistic contexts’.
Panorama separately claimed some Muslim private schools have expressed extreme sentiments on their school websites.
These include: ‘We need to defend our children from the forces of evil’, and ‘our children are exposed to a culture that is in opposition to almost everything Islam stands for’.
Policy Exchange says Britain’s faith and other schools are increasingly vulnerable to extremist influences.
It claims in a report that the Department for Education, Ofsted, education authorities and schools are ‘not equipped’ to meet such challenges.
Current checks for extremism are described as ‘piecemeal’.
The report adds: ‘The Government’s policy of opening up the education system to new academies and free schools programmes could be exploited unless urgent measures are taken to counter extremist influence.’
WATCH THE VIDEO
Friday, August 6, 2010
British parents’ fury at plans for halal-only menus in primary schools
THE DAILY MAIL (UK)
Parents have expressed fury at plans to serve pupils halal-only menus for school dinners. In a move which has also enraged animal welfare groups, only meat from animals killed and prepared using Islamic teaching may be allowed at 52 primaries in Harrow.
The local authority is thought to be the first in England to consider insisting on a halal-only menu apparently after recommendations of dietitians.
Using the halal method, animals are slaughtered by being slashed across the neck and being left so that the blood drains from the carcass.
The religious ritual, which does not allow the animals to be stunned beforehand, is considered cruel by campaigners and is exempt from animal welfare laws.
Harrow resident Sheila Murphy told the Harrow Observer: 'I am appalled at Harrow Council’s decision to serve only Halal meat in the borough’s schools.
'The Farm Animal Welfare Council has lobbied the government in the past to get the Kosher and Halal method of slaughter banned.
'The Halal method, in which animals are slaughtered by a single slit to the throat, is the only way of killing livestock allowed under Islam but this method is deemed cruel by some animal-lovers, who object to the slow death it involves.
'Harrow Council’s decision is also taking away the choice of children and their parents over what meat they eat and I urge Harrow residents to make their views known to Harrow Council and get this decision overturned.'
MORE
WHY CHRISTIANS SHOULD AVOID HALAL FOOD
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Britain’s battle against radical Islam
JERUSALEM POST
Listening to Douglas Murray, one gets a picture of a world turned on its head, one where relativism has trumped common sense, where the state pays its enemies more than its soldiers and where turning in the inciters becomes an act of incitement.
Murray is the 31-year-old director of the Center for Social Cohesion, a London-based think tank that studies radicalization and extremism in the UK, and he is an outspoken critic of the British government’s response to the challenge of radical Islam.
Our meeting takes place shortly after the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks, four suicide bombings committed by British Muslim men that killed 52 people and wounded hundreds of others. Murray believes that while the security services have learned the lesson of that event, government and politicians have so far failed to do so.
Britain’s thinking and its political culture, Murray says, have “gone bad” and it has become afraid to state its own values. Britain has become a society that no longer knows how to draw the line.
He is particularly critical of the government’s “Prevent” strategy, set up after the 7/7 bombings to tackle Muslim radicalization by providing a counternarrative. “Prevent,” says Murray, is an example of the government attempting to “do theology.”
“When the British government comes out after 7/7 and says, ‘Islam is a religion of peace,’ you can understand the reasons it is saying this – it is trying to reach out – but obviously there is something terribly counterproductive about this,” says Murray. “The problem is that the government seems to believe it can do theology. I’m a small government guy and I like government to do as little as possible.
The way I see it is that government can’t do many things very well – it doesn’t even do taxes very well, it doesn’t do policing very well, but the thing it definitely can’t do very well is theology, in particular a theology it knows very little about, or is only starting to learn about.”
For Murray the answer lies not in outreach, but in affirming the values of the state and in laying down the law.
“Instead of getting embroiled in endless wars and debates about a religion which is not our national religion, which after all is a minority religion and has no particular history of any significance in Britain – instead of getting involved in that conflict, which may or not be won by the progressives, you say what you are as a state,” he declares.
“A lot of young Muslims have said to me in recent years, ‘You ask me to integrate, but what are we integrating into? What is Britain, what are British values?’ It’s very hard to tell people to integrate if you don’t tell them what they are integrating into. It’s very hard to tell them to be British if they don’t know and you don’t know what Britishness is. The fact is that we have been very poor in saying what we are and we have also been very poor is saying what we expect people to be. We’ve been very good in stressing what rights people get when they come to Britain and very bad at explaining what responsibilities come with them.”
Britain, says Murray, has made a terrible mistake in the direction it has taken with its Muslim minority since the Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses affair.
“The problem is,” he explains, “that the British government has pushed young Muslims into becoming young Muslims when it should have pushed them into becoming young Brits. In other words, the direction of travel it sent them in has been deeply backward.”
MURRAY DESCRIBES himself as a long-standing critic of multiculturalism.
“Pluralism or multiracial societies seem to me to be good and desirable things,” he says. “Multicultural societies, where you encourage group differences, seem to me to be a very bad thing.”
For Murray, multiculturalism is a moral vacuum, and “into a moral vacuum always bad things creep.”
The Eton and Oxford educated Murray quotes Saul Bellow in his introduction to The Closing of the American Mind: “When public morality becomes a ghost town, it’s a place into which anyone can ride and declare himself sheriff.”
“Once so-called multicultural societies decided that they didn’t have a locus, that they didn’t have a center of gravity, anyone could ride in and teach the most pernicious things,” Murray expounds. “It didn’t matter. It was just another point of view.
“It’s an extraordinary situation. We allow absolutely anything. This is the reason the British police used not to investigate certain types of killing, like honor killings. This is a community matter, they’d say. Police have admitted that now. This is why tens of thousands of women from certain communities have been genitally mutilated. We have made ourselves entirely relative and its time to change that.”
Another instance of multiculturalism gone mad that Murray cites is a 2007 case where a Channel 4 documentary, Undercover Mosque, uncovered in the West Midlands clerics who they recorded preaching murder of minorities. The police were sent the tapes by Channel 4 and infamously decided to try to prosecute Channel 4 for incitement in broadcasting this material.
Murray says that a few months after the case, while lecturing senior police officers, he mentioned it and was told by one officer that he “had to understand we live in a very multicultural area.”
Murray replied to the officer that he was basically stating that to pursue the multicultural dream, he would allow certain minorities to have their lives threatened by other minorities because it would cause too much trouble. “He wouldn’t comment,” says Murray, “but this was clearly the decision they had made.”
Murray charges that because of its multicultural approach, the government has allowed certain groups to be approached through self-appointed leaders such as the Muslim Council of Britain.
“In Islam in Britain we have a bizarre situation where people are spoken of, or spoken to, through clergy,” he explains. “If I’m a young man born to Anglican parents, the idea that I can only be accessed via my local vicar is mad, but you now have this weird situation where, as it were, the more religious you are, the more devoted you are to the mosque and to the political organization of certain mosques in Britain, the more likely you are to have a voice.”
Murray paraphrases Henry Kissinger’s famous comment: “What number do I dial to reach Europe?” by saying that the British government has basically decided what number to dial to reach its Muslim minority, handing over the community’s voice to the clergy.
“It’s a pathetic, ridiculous idea,” he charges. “My belief is that you should encourage people to believe that they are represented in the same way everybody else is represented, by their MP, by their local councilor and so on. An Irish immigrant friend of mine put it to me rather beautifully when he said that the moment when you become most integrated into a society is not when you get special bribes, special rights, special laws etc., but when you have to put up with the same sh*t as the rest of us.”
Murray gives what he calls the tragic example of a “very unpleasant sinister figure” from the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawala.
Bunglawala is quoted in Kenan Malik’s book From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy as saying that Rushdie affair is what radicalized him, what got him politicized. He says he didn’t really go to the mosque that much, hadn’t really read the Koran, but that he heard about the novel and he thought, “Why are we being singled out? Why are they only attacking us.”
“This is a tragedy,” says Murray, “because this was the moment when somebody in a position of power could have said: ‘You know what? You’re not being singled out; you are being subjected to exactly the same treatment that free societies exact on everyone.’ Nobody said that. It was repeatedly given out that there was a justifiable grievance and that’s what’s still understood today. We should have at that point said at that point in 1989 said that a society where even your deepest feelings can be trodden on is the only society worth living in. We should have said a long time ago and it’s still not too late to say it now.”
Murray calls Britain a “soft touch” on immigration and welfare, citing the case of Anjem Choudary, a co-founder of the now proscribed Al- Muhajiroun movement, whom he describes as “one of the most notorious loud-mouthed idiots in Britain.”
“Choudary has a few children and a wife – he’s a qualified solicitor but as far as we know has never sought employment. He receives £25,000 a year in benefits, untaxed, and among other things he and his welfare jihadi friends go and abuse British soldiers coming home from Afghanistan when there are homecoming parades."
“Now this has caused a lot of bitter and understandable resentment in Britain. The thing that people haven’t quite realized is the most perverse about this is that a soldier in Afghanistan, starting out, fighting for Britain, receives something like £15,000 a year on which he is taxed to fight the Taliban, whom Choudary and his supporters support. So the British state will currently give you £15,000 if you’re willing to fight her majesty’s enemies and £10,000 more if you are willing to support her majesty’s enemies.
It’s probably not the first time in history where one side has paid its enemies and its own men, but its probably the first war in history where somebody has paid its enemies better than its own men.”
MURRAY SAYS that the Mike’s Place bombing in April 2003, when two British Muslim suicide bombers attacked a bar in Tel Aviv, killing three people, was a transformative moment for him.
“If you have a problem you export, it does come home,” he says. “When those two young men, one of them from Kings College in London, came out to Tel Aviv, that should have been a moment when not just the British police and the British security services, but the British government and the British people woke up, to what they have made.”
Asked why is it that many of those Muslims who have committed terrorist attacks in the West have been very much a product of the West, affluent and privileged rather than poor, marginalized and alienated, Murray points to Britain’s universities as hotbeds of radicalism.
“The Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a rich Nigerian boy, lived in his father’s flat in the most expensive part of London and got radicalized while at University College London,” says Murray as an example. “I've said a lot in recent years on the university issue; I’ve kept on trying to get the universities to wake up to this. My center published a report called ‘Islam on Campus’ in 2008 which got huge attention because of very worrying findings, like a third of Muslim students saying that killing in the name of their religion could be justified, things like that.
“I have kept trying, the center has kept on trying to explain to the universities that this is their problem. Omar Sheik [a former student at the London School of Economics best known for his role in the kidnapping and execution of Daniel Pearl], Assaf Hani [one of the Mike’s Place bombers] and another LSE graduate, Abdulmutallab. The list is now pretty long."
“The only explanation I have for why it hasn’t been dealt with is that it goes so much against the narrative that privileged white Western liberals have got, that they can’t think their way out of it even when the evidence is to the contrary. If you believe Islamist terrorism is caused by poverty, lack of opportunity, lack of education, Israel, then you need things to fit that. Now you can put up with one thing bucking that trend, but when it happens repeatedly some people just dig themselves in and ignore it even more. In Britain, at any rate, you are more likely to become a terrorist if you go to university.”
Again Murray blames a failure to stand up for liberal values. “You are more likely to become a major terrorist if you’ve gone to university because, among other things, these places have two factors: one you come across the very softest, most apologist form of education you could find; you come across soft liberal Western opinion that cannot decide where to draw lines, cannot decide how to defend itself, cannot explain the superiority of some liberal values and won’t argue its case. Then you come across the thing that has taken advantage of this – Muslim groups who week in, week out bring in radical speakers from the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbullah.
“Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomber, is sitting in his penthouse in a country that he doesn’t know very much and he will probably notice the following. He would notice that you aren’t allowed to recruit for the British army at University College London, but he would also notice that pretty well known jihadis can speak on campus. In other words this young man can get in touch with the top jihadis via his Islamic studies society.”
Referring to an earlier he comment on how when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they will always back the strong horse, and how if people see that the state is weak, unbothered even by its assassins, then they will not back the state, they will not back the country they are in and they will not integrate further, Murray says: “You would get a very warped idea about which was strong horse and which was the weak horse if you were Abdulmutallab. After Christmas Day I assumed it would stop, I have to say I’m still waiting for it to happen. I don’t know what it takes, in other words. I thought after Mike’s place they’ll wake up, they must wake up now. I thought that after 9/11, I thought that after 7/7.
After every incident you say, surely they are gong to wake up now. The only good thing is that some people do and everyone that breaks the silence encourages other people to do the same.”
MURRAY DOES feel, though, that with the recent election of a new Conservative-led government the situation has improved somewhat, but on the other hand he says he is “very concerned about the Liberal Democrats, the junior partner in the coalition, because of their tendency to harbor rabid anti-Semites, people like Jenny Tonge.”
“I’m not a supporter of any of the parties,” says Murray, “but the Conservatives do have some people who do get this. [Secretary of State for Work and Pensions] Ian Duncan Smith has stated his desire to stop the welfare culture. He hasn't said this, but it is the welfare culture which has fueled a lot of this in Britain – the situation where you do jihad on the dole.
“Others have signaled they know the right way to go. The new home secretary [Theresa May] banning [radical Muslim preacher] Zaki Naik was a good example. She said entry to Britain is not a right, it’s a privilege, so he’s not coming in. There are some signs, but to my mind to sort this out now requires a huge degree of political leadership and I don’t think there is any of that or much of that around. You have to break through a set of barriers in order to deal with this.”
While Murray feels the clock is now showing “five minutes to midnight” and the danger exists of a European city falling to Islam – and in Britain the possibility of “no go areas” in Birmingham, the country’s first Muslim majority city – it is not yet too late to turn the situation around, he says.
One of the things Murray calls for is a clampdown on immigration.
“There has to be a clampdown,” he says, “There has to be severe restriction on it. It seems very obvious to me that a society that does not believe it has anything it needs to protect, that it has no identity to keep, will melt down and end. There is a level of immigration above which you cannot integrate people, and I believe that is what we’ve seen in Britain.”
There is, he adds, also a level at which people can be integrated. “It is generally accepted now that the grandparents of young Muslims today are better integrated then their grandchildren are,” he says. “There is something seriously wrong when you are practicing reverse integration like that.”
Dealing with immigration is just the start for Murray. He also calls on the government to take strong line on hate speech and incitement, to expel foreign clerics if necessary and not to allow Britain “to remain a retirement for would-be jihadis who then claim European Convention of Human Rights grounds for not going to other countries.”
He says that Britain must step out of the CHR. “You have to have a British bill of rights,” he says, “which means some of the insanities that now hinder some of Britain’s own fight are not allowed to persist. You have to end the era of funding Muslim groups, you take away the idea that you can get special access to Downing Street or the UK government just for being a so-called, self-appointed Muslim leader.
You say no, like the prime minister of Denmark did during the cartoon crisis when the delegates of Muslims came to him to complain. He said, ‘No, they will have to learn. I am not seeing them; they will have to learn.
We have a free press and the government does not control that; the sooner they learn that, the better.’” Turning the situation around will be the work of at least a generation, probably more, says Murray. But at the end of the day, he adds, what Britain has to do is to return to a period in which it says: “This is what we stand for, this is what we permit and this is what we do not permit. We are not an entirely relative society. We believe some aspects of our society are better than aspects of other societies. We have allies, and we have friends that we stick beside, and that’s nonnegotiable. We don’t put up with blackmail.”
He also believes that one of the things that needs to be tackled to turn the clock back is the UK’s attitude to Israel, which he likens to appeasement. “If it [the British government] continues to feed the lies that have been told, Britain will suffer angst. It is astonishing that the no major politician since [Tony] Blair has understood Israel’s right to defend herself.
“They consistently speak about such a right in theory, but whenever in practice, whether its Gaza or the flotilla, they don’t, and they condemn Israel on it. I hate reverting to 1930s quotes, because I don’t think history is an endless lesson of repeating the 1930s, but you know [Winston] Churchill’s famous description of an appeaser as someone who feeds the crocodile and hope it will eat him last. Some major leader has to explain in relation to Israel and Britain that this crocodile would eat us next, not last. Therefore it would be a very very stupid thing, for your own security, as well as your own sense of what’s morally right, to keep sacrificing Israel in this way.”
ARE YOU optimistic that the battle will be won? I ask Murray in conclusion.His answer is not entirely reassuring; the clock, he says, will continue to tick down. “The problem is that it’s five to midnight. The reason it’s so close is that this is seen currently as being unturnaroundable, and I think it can be turned around because I have faith in the fact that things will happen that will mean that the politicians, eventually, at one minute to midnight, will realize how badly they screwed up and this will have to be rectified.
“I’ll tell you why I’m optimistic, which is this. I honestly believe that our values are better; the values of democratic pluralistic societies are better. I honestly think that in a debate between a rigid totalitarian interpretation of my ideology and liberal democracy, liberal democracy has everything going for it and Islamism has nothing going for it. And if we explain ourselves better, we win. If we explain ourselves as badly as we are at the moment, then we lose.
Listening to Douglas Murray, one gets a picture of a world turned on its head, one where relativism has trumped common sense, where the state pays its enemies more than its soldiers and where turning in the inciters becomes an act of incitement.
Murray is the 31-year-old director of the Center for Social Cohesion, a London-based think tank that studies radicalization and extremism in the UK, and he is an outspoken critic of the British government’s response to the challenge of radical Islam.
Our meeting takes place shortly after the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks, four suicide bombings committed by British Muslim men that killed 52 people and wounded hundreds of others. Murray believes that while the security services have learned the lesson of that event, government and politicians have so far failed to do so.
Britain’s thinking and its political culture, Murray says, have “gone bad” and it has become afraid to state its own values. Britain has become a society that no longer knows how to draw the line.
He is particularly critical of the government’s “Prevent” strategy, set up after the 7/7 bombings to tackle Muslim radicalization by providing a counternarrative. “Prevent,” says Murray, is an example of the government attempting to “do theology.”
“When the British government comes out after 7/7 and says, ‘Islam is a religion of peace,’ you can understand the reasons it is saying this – it is trying to reach out – but obviously there is something terribly counterproductive about this,” says Murray. “The problem is that the government seems to believe it can do theology. I’m a small government guy and I like government to do as little as possible.
The way I see it is that government can’t do many things very well – it doesn’t even do taxes very well, it doesn’t do policing very well, but the thing it definitely can’t do very well is theology, in particular a theology it knows very little about, or is only starting to learn about.”
For Murray the answer lies not in outreach, but in affirming the values of the state and in laying down the law.
“Instead of getting embroiled in endless wars and debates about a religion which is not our national religion, which after all is a minority religion and has no particular history of any significance in Britain – instead of getting involved in that conflict, which may or not be won by the progressives, you say what you are as a state,” he declares.
“A lot of young Muslims have said to me in recent years, ‘You ask me to integrate, but what are we integrating into? What is Britain, what are British values?’ It’s very hard to tell people to integrate if you don’t tell them what they are integrating into. It’s very hard to tell them to be British if they don’t know and you don’t know what Britishness is. The fact is that we have been very poor in saying what we are and we have also been very poor is saying what we expect people to be. We’ve been very good in stressing what rights people get when they come to Britain and very bad at explaining what responsibilities come with them.”
Britain, says Murray, has made a terrible mistake in the direction it has taken with its Muslim minority since the Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses affair.
“The problem is,” he explains, “that the British government has pushed young Muslims into becoming young Muslims when it should have pushed them into becoming young Brits. In other words, the direction of travel it sent them in has been deeply backward.”
MURRAY DESCRIBES himself as a long-standing critic of multiculturalism.
“Pluralism or multiracial societies seem to me to be good and desirable things,” he says. “Multicultural societies, where you encourage group differences, seem to me to be a very bad thing.”
For Murray, multiculturalism is a moral vacuum, and “into a moral vacuum always bad things creep.”
The Eton and Oxford educated Murray quotes Saul Bellow in his introduction to The Closing of the American Mind: “When public morality becomes a ghost town, it’s a place into which anyone can ride and declare himself sheriff.”
“Once so-called multicultural societies decided that they didn’t have a locus, that they didn’t have a center of gravity, anyone could ride in and teach the most pernicious things,” Murray expounds. “It didn’t matter. It was just another point of view.
“It’s an extraordinary situation. We allow absolutely anything. This is the reason the British police used not to investigate certain types of killing, like honor killings. This is a community matter, they’d say. Police have admitted that now. This is why tens of thousands of women from certain communities have been genitally mutilated. We have made ourselves entirely relative and its time to change that.”
Another instance of multiculturalism gone mad that Murray cites is a 2007 case where a Channel 4 documentary, Undercover Mosque, uncovered in the West Midlands clerics who they recorded preaching murder of minorities. The police were sent the tapes by Channel 4 and infamously decided to try to prosecute Channel 4 for incitement in broadcasting this material.
Murray says that a few months after the case, while lecturing senior police officers, he mentioned it and was told by one officer that he “had to understand we live in a very multicultural area.”
Murray replied to the officer that he was basically stating that to pursue the multicultural dream, he would allow certain minorities to have their lives threatened by other minorities because it would cause too much trouble. “He wouldn’t comment,” says Murray, “but this was clearly the decision they had made.”
Murray charges that because of its multicultural approach, the government has allowed certain groups to be approached through self-appointed leaders such as the Muslim Council of Britain.
“In Islam in Britain we have a bizarre situation where people are spoken of, or spoken to, through clergy,” he explains. “If I’m a young man born to Anglican parents, the idea that I can only be accessed via my local vicar is mad, but you now have this weird situation where, as it were, the more religious you are, the more devoted you are to the mosque and to the political organization of certain mosques in Britain, the more likely you are to have a voice.”
Murray paraphrases Henry Kissinger’s famous comment: “What number do I dial to reach Europe?” by saying that the British government has basically decided what number to dial to reach its Muslim minority, handing over the community’s voice to the clergy.
“It’s a pathetic, ridiculous idea,” he charges. “My belief is that you should encourage people to believe that they are represented in the same way everybody else is represented, by their MP, by their local councilor and so on. An Irish immigrant friend of mine put it to me rather beautifully when he said that the moment when you become most integrated into a society is not when you get special bribes, special rights, special laws etc., but when you have to put up with the same sh*t as the rest of us.”
Murray gives what he calls the tragic example of a “very unpleasant sinister figure” from the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawala.
Bunglawala is quoted in Kenan Malik’s book From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy as saying that Rushdie affair is what radicalized him, what got him politicized. He says he didn’t really go to the mosque that much, hadn’t really read the Koran, but that he heard about the novel and he thought, “Why are we being singled out? Why are they only attacking us.”
“This is a tragedy,” says Murray, “because this was the moment when somebody in a position of power could have said: ‘You know what? You’re not being singled out; you are being subjected to exactly the same treatment that free societies exact on everyone.’ Nobody said that. It was repeatedly given out that there was a justifiable grievance and that’s what’s still understood today. We should have at that point said at that point in 1989 said that a society where even your deepest feelings can be trodden on is the only society worth living in. We should have said a long time ago and it’s still not too late to say it now.”
Murray calls Britain a “soft touch” on immigration and welfare, citing the case of Anjem Choudary, a co-founder of the now proscribed Al- Muhajiroun movement, whom he describes as “one of the most notorious loud-mouthed idiots in Britain.”
“Choudary has a few children and a wife – he’s a qualified solicitor but as far as we know has never sought employment. He receives £25,000 a year in benefits, untaxed, and among other things he and his welfare jihadi friends go and abuse British soldiers coming home from Afghanistan when there are homecoming parades."
“Now this has caused a lot of bitter and understandable resentment in Britain. The thing that people haven’t quite realized is the most perverse about this is that a soldier in Afghanistan, starting out, fighting for Britain, receives something like £15,000 a year on which he is taxed to fight the Taliban, whom Choudary and his supporters support. So the British state will currently give you £15,000 if you’re willing to fight her majesty’s enemies and £10,000 more if you are willing to support her majesty’s enemies.
It’s probably not the first time in history where one side has paid its enemies and its own men, but its probably the first war in history where somebody has paid its enemies better than its own men.”
MURRAY SAYS that the Mike’s Place bombing in April 2003, when two British Muslim suicide bombers attacked a bar in Tel Aviv, killing three people, was a transformative moment for him.
“If you have a problem you export, it does come home,” he says. “When those two young men, one of them from Kings College in London, came out to Tel Aviv, that should have been a moment when not just the British police and the British security services, but the British government and the British people woke up, to what they have made.”
Asked why is it that many of those Muslims who have committed terrorist attacks in the West have been very much a product of the West, affluent and privileged rather than poor, marginalized and alienated, Murray points to Britain’s universities as hotbeds of radicalism.
“The Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a rich Nigerian boy, lived in his father’s flat in the most expensive part of London and got radicalized while at University College London,” says Murray as an example. “I've said a lot in recent years on the university issue; I’ve kept on trying to get the universities to wake up to this. My center published a report called ‘Islam on Campus’ in 2008 which got huge attention because of very worrying findings, like a third of Muslim students saying that killing in the name of their religion could be justified, things like that.
“I have kept trying, the center has kept on trying to explain to the universities that this is their problem. Omar Sheik [a former student at the London School of Economics best known for his role in the kidnapping and execution of Daniel Pearl], Assaf Hani [one of the Mike’s Place bombers] and another LSE graduate, Abdulmutallab. The list is now pretty long."
“The only explanation I have for why it hasn’t been dealt with is that it goes so much against the narrative that privileged white Western liberals have got, that they can’t think their way out of it even when the evidence is to the contrary. If you believe Islamist terrorism is caused by poverty, lack of opportunity, lack of education, Israel, then you need things to fit that. Now you can put up with one thing bucking that trend, but when it happens repeatedly some people just dig themselves in and ignore it even more. In Britain, at any rate, you are more likely to become a terrorist if you go to university.”
Again Murray blames a failure to stand up for liberal values. “You are more likely to become a major terrorist if you’ve gone to university because, among other things, these places have two factors: one you come across the very softest, most apologist form of education you could find; you come across soft liberal Western opinion that cannot decide where to draw lines, cannot decide how to defend itself, cannot explain the superiority of some liberal values and won’t argue its case. Then you come across the thing that has taken advantage of this – Muslim groups who week in, week out bring in radical speakers from the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbullah.
“Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomber, is sitting in his penthouse in a country that he doesn’t know very much and he will probably notice the following. He would notice that you aren’t allowed to recruit for the British army at University College London, but he would also notice that pretty well known jihadis can speak on campus. In other words this young man can get in touch with the top jihadis via his Islamic studies society.”
Referring to an earlier he comment on how when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they will always back the strong horse, and how if people see that the state is weak, unbothered even by its assassins, then they will not back the state, they will not back the country they are in and they will not integrate further, Murray says: “You would get a very warped idea about which was strong horse and which was the weak horse if you were Abdulmutallab. After Christmas Day I assumed it would stop, I have to say I’m still waiting for it to happen. I don’t know what it takes, in other words. I thought after Mike’s place they’ll wake up, they must wake up now. I thought that after 9/11, I thought that after 7/7.
After every incident you say, surely they are gong to wake up now. The only good thing is that some people do and everyone that breaks the silence encourages other people to do the same.”
MURRAY DOES feel, though, that with the recent election of a new Conservative-led government the situation has improved somewhat, but on the other hand he says he is “very concerned about the Liberal Democrats, the junior partner in the coalition, because of their tendency to harbor rabid anti-Semites, people like Jenny Tonge.”
“I’m not a supporter of any of the parties,” says Murray, “but the Conservatives do have some people who do get this. [Secretary of State for Work and Pensions] Ian Duncan Smith has stated his desire to stop the welfare culture. He hasn't said this, but it is the welfare culture which has fueled a lot of this in Britain – the situation where you do jihad on the dole.
“Others have signaled they know the right way to go. The new home secretary [Theresa May] banning [radical Muslim preacher] Zaki Naik was a good example. She said entry to Britain is not a right, it’s a privilege, so he’s not coming in. There are some signs, but to my mind to sort this out now requires a huge degree of political leadership and I don’t think there is any of that or much of that around. You have to break through a set of barriers in order to deal with this.”
While Murray feels the clock is now showing “five minutes to midnight” and the danger exists of a European city falling to Islam – and in Britain the possibility of “no go areas” in Birmingham, the country’s first Muslim majority city – it is not yet too late to turn the situation around, he says.
One of the things Murray calls for is a clampdown on immigration.
“There has to be a clampdown,” he says, “There has to be severe restriction on it. It seems very obvious to me that a society that does not believe it has anything it needs to protect, that it has no identity to keep, will melt down and end. There is a level of immigration above which you cannot integrate people, and I believe that is what we’ve seen in Britain.”
There is, he adds, also a level at which people can be integrated. “It is generally accepted now that the grandparents of young Muslims today are better integrated then their grandchildren are,” he says. “There is something seriously wrong when you are practicing reverse integration like that.”
Dealing with immigration is just the start for Murray. He also calls on the government to take strong line on hate speech and incitement, to expel foreign clerics if necessary and not to allow Britain “to remain a retirement for would-be jihadis who then claim European Convention of Human Rights grounds for not going to other countries.”
He says that Britain must step out of the CHR. “You have to have a British bill of rights,” he says, “which means some of the insanities that now hinder some of Britain’s own fight are not allowed to persist. You have to end the era of funding Muslim groups, you take away the idea that you can get special access to Downing Street or the UK government just for being a so-called, self-appointed Muslim leader.
You say no, like the prime minister of Denmark did during the cartoon crisis when the delegates of Muslims came to him to complain. He said, ‘No, they will have to learn. I am not seeing them; they will have to learn.
We have a free press and the government does not control that; the sooner they learn that, the better.’” Turning the situation around will be the work of at least a generation, probably more, says Murray. But at the end of the day, he adds, what Britain has to do is to return to a period in which it says: “This is what we stand for, this is what we permit and this is what we do not permit. We are not an entirely relative society. We believe some aspects of our society are better than aspects of other societies. We have allies, and we have friends that we stick beside, and that’s nonnegotiable. We don’t put up with blackmail.”
He also believes that one of the things that needs to be tackled to turn the clock back is the UK’s attitude to Israel, which he likens to appeasement. “If it [the British government] continues to feed the lies that have been told, Britain will suffer angst. It is astonishing that the no major politician since [Tony] Blair has understood Israel’s right to defend herself.
“They consistently speak about such a right in theory, but whenever in practice, whether its Gaza or the flotilla, they don’t, and they condemn Israel on it. I hate reverting to 1930s quotes, because I don’t think history is an endless lesson of repeating the 1930s, but you know [Winston] Churchill’s famous description of an appeaser as someone who feeds the crocodile and hope it will eat him last. Some major leader has to explain in relation to Israel and Britain that this crocodile would eat us next, not last. Therefore it would be a very very stupid thing, for your own security, as well as your own sense of what’s morally right, to keep sacrificing Israel in this way.”
ARE YOU optimistic that the battle will be won? I ask Murray in conclusion.His answer is not entirely reassuring; the clock, he says, will continue to tick down. “The problem is that it’s five to midnight. The reason it’s so close is that this is seen currently as being unturnaroundable, and I think it can be turned around because I have faith in the fact that things will happen that will mean that the politicians, eventually, at one minute to midnight, will realize how badly they screwed up and this will have to be rectified.
“I’ll tell you why I’m optimistic, which is this. I honestly believe that our values are better; the values of democratic pluralistic societies are better. I honestly think that in a debate between a rigid totalitarian interpretation of my ideology and liberal democracy, liberal democracy has everything going for it and Islamism has nothing going for it. And if we explain ourselves better, we win. If we explain ourselves as badly as we are at the moment, then we lose.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Islamic radicalization on British campuses
ALMASRYALYOUM, Egypt
Last November, two Asian Muslim university students were stabbed in central London on a Thursday evening after they were surrounded by more than 30 white and black youths. A passerby who tried to defend the students was knifed as well.
The incident is the worst, following a series of verbal abuse directed at male and female Muslim students (especially those covered in concealing garments known as niqabs), and the latest of a string of physical attacks that in one incident left one student with a fractured skull, according to reports by the Guardian at the time. The incident happened near City University, and the victims were undergraduate students, all younger than 20 years of age. Some arrests followed the stabbings.
At the time, criticism of the university's Muslim students was rising, especially on right-wing blogs. And the university's Islamic Society (ISOC) known as City ISOC, which is the equivalent of an Islamic campus club or Usra as these organizations are known in Egypt, was accused of harboring radical students and hosting events featuring extremist Muslim clerics.
The Federation of Student Islamic Societies told the Guardian after the attack that there had always been sporadic attacks directed at Muslim university students.
Weeks after the incident, the alarm remained, both with Muslim students who feared for their lives and with others in the non-Muslim British community. Not a few number of young people, experts, journalists and citizens have remained highly suspicious of young Muslims--if protests, letters to local and national newspapers, local news reports and opinion columns are anything to go by.
The events that followed didn't help alleviate any of the fear or the suspicion on both sides.
Emails from the Islamic Society of the City University, where I acquired a masters degree in investigative journalism, flooded my inbox since I'm signed up to their mailing list.
The young heads of the City ISOC, which besides being centered on religion also does charity work, were extremely worried. The acting vice-chancellor of the university, Professor Julius Weinberg, had given Muslim students the freedom at the time to skip late afternoon and evening classes and go home early for their safety.
Some of the emails sent around advised Muslim students to "always travel in groups, do not go home alone. Leave university by 4 PM. Be vigilant, careful and stick together ... Make constant duaa [supplication] to Allah ... do not despair for the victory of Allah is indeed near. Listen and obey the order of the Ameer [headbrother] and let's be patient and supportive to the brothers."
The excerpt was from an email from the "sisters," female members of the City University ISOC. As the case with many Egyptian Muslim student groups, boys and girls are segregated during prayers, activities and even on electronic mailing lists.
Clearly, the students were shaken. More follow-up emails were sent.
But all efforts from the university to make the students feel safe and integrated went downhill when, months later, specifically in March 2010, the Muslim prayer rooms at the university were closed down. At the time, John Tibble, director of services for students, had told the student paper City Offline that this action was taken following the knife attacks for the protection of the students themselves, denying it was a discriminatory action, as Muslim students had claimed.
"The university has to think about the security and safety of their students first and foremost. We don't think the risk to our students is any less now than it was in November. When students finish in the evening they come out and disperse in a way that all university students would disperse," he was quoted as saying.
Muslim students, however, were not convinced, and protests took place on campus in addition to congregational mass prayers on Fridays in the university's square as a form of protest. When the university offered a new prayer space that is not exclusive for Muslims, the ISOC placed a sign on it reading, "It is Haram (forbidden) for Muslims to pray here," accompanying it with the Quranic verse "And the places of worship are only for Allah, so pray not unto anyone along with Allah," suggesting that this verse forbids Muslims to pray where non-Muslims do.
They were angry and vocal, and for some understandably so, and the incidents spurred a series of questions and discussions on-campus and off, on faith, safety and what exactly Muslim students say or do in their meetings and their closed-off prayer rooms. And for many, those questions were legitimate.
However, in lieu of further wide discussions, or perhaps more deliberations, between university management and members of the Islamic society, the university ruled last month that "it is no longer associated by the Islamic Society after a report found that the society's actions and views reflected those of a small minority of radical Muslim students," according to editor of student newspaper City Offline Jonross Swaby.
"It was found that the majority of Muslim students did not agree with the society, in which Shiite Muslims in particular were reportedly treated as outcasts--leading a separate society to be formed for Shias," said Swaby. "In the coming months, a new, more inclusive Islamic society will be set up, which should be approved by the university."
Since this decision is fairly recent, it's yet to be seen how provocative it will be for the students now termed "radical" by the university's administration. Or not.
By the time the stabbings happened, I'd just finished an investigation into some of the claims against Muslim students, and City's in particular, charging at precisely some of these questions and worries.
Extremist ideologies did seem to be burgeoning among British Muslim students, upon initial inspection. And the popularity of Imams, literature, and events that channel Islamist and separatist ideas to vulnerable young Muslims through university-based Islamic societies seemed to be a problem that both universities and government, it seems, did not know how to deal with, without appearing "Islamophobic," politically incorrect and without tramping on essential human rights, like the freedom to believe and practice faith freely.
Reactions seemed to waver between being over-sympathetic with students or too harsh or dismissive. There didn't seem to be a middle ground in which fruitful discussion and introspection within the Muslim community could take place.
Investigating issues of terrorism and the allure of extremist ideology and Islamic militancy among university students is a very complicated issue. Like a cobweb, each thread intersects with another and in the end everything is connected: anti-terrorism policy, human rights, arbitrary arrests among Muslims and visitation to their houses by the British security service, known as MI5, or police, allegations of complicity in torture, media biases, the influence of oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia, who not only advocate an extremist and uncompromising form of Islam but also export it to Europe, Islamophobia, the popularity of certain outspoken Arab and Pakistani sheikhs and Imams, and identity problems among students.
In short, it’s a monstrous and murky issue, but it is a timely one. At the rate at which some Muslim students become alienated from their Western community and feel victimized and angry, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it’s a ticking bomb. Some of the clerics, which I have seen praised by some students, like Anwar al-Awlaki are turning out to be not as "harmless" as they had been thought to be years earlier. Al-Awlaki, who has become central to my research because of the status he holds among many students, has just been warned against as a rising threat during a talk in June 2010, held by the Carnegie endowment for International Peace, because of his ties to Al-Qaeda and his "powerful appeal to violent extremists."
What does this mean? Does it follow then that acolytes of Al-Awlaki in British universities are "violent extremists" or "terrorists"? Do ISOCs indeed carry within their ranks hidden "terrorist" cells? Not all all. Or at least not necessarily.
It doesn't seem to be a white-and-black issue; there are no easy answers, as experts and observers I interviewed have testified. And in my investigation, which will be published starting next week in a series of four stories, I set out not only to examine evidence of extremism, radical Saudi-style ideologies in universities and the degree to which some politicized Imams are popular among students, but to also give an insight into the campus life of some conservative Muslim students and the activities they engage in through their respective Islamic societies, which serve as their number one source for same-faith friendships and peerage, literature, charity activities and Islamic education.
Readers who have attended university in Egypt should be able to draw parallels between the experiences of these Muslim British students and their ultra-conservative counterparts in Egyptian universities. The work should provide an insight into the lives of these students, why they choose certain ideologies, and what attracted them to certain speakers or to the ISOC itself.
It's not meant to be inclusive and it certainly doesn't set out to place a verdict on either Muslim students or those who misjudge them. It also doesn't clear the Muslim community of responsibility towards the "radicalism" that takes place inside the heads of some of these students, whether through university societies, mosques, powerful Islamic figures or the lack thereof. And it doesn't lift responsibility off the students' themselves.
The work, which will come out every Monday and Wednesday, takes the form of a narrative and aims to be literary and entertaining as well as informative.
In a separate column, to be published in the wake of this series, I will also shed light on the journalistic and individual challenges that I have encountered during research and reporting for this story, why I chose to write about the subject and some of the lessons that this journey might have taught me.
Last November, two Asian Muslim university students were stabbed in central London on a Thursday evening after they were surrounded by more than 30 white and black youths. A passerby who tried to defend the students was knifed as well.
The incident is the worst, following a series of verbal abuse directed at male and female Muslim students (especially those covered in concealing garments known as niqabs), and the latest of a string of physical attacks that in one incident left one student with a fractured skull, according to reports by the Guardian at the time. The incident happened near City University, and the victims were undergraduate students, all younger than 20 years of age. Some arrests followed the stabbings.
At the time, criticism of the university's Muslim students was rising, especially on right-wing blogs. And the university's Islamic Society (ISOC) known as City ISOC, which is the equivalent of an Islamic campus club or Usra as these organizations are known in Egypt, was accused of harboring radical students and hosting events featuring extremist Muslim clerics.
The Federation of Student Islamic Societies told the Guardian after the attack that there had always been sporadic attacks directed at Muslim university students.
Weeks after the incident, the alarm remained, both with Muslim students who feared for their lives and with others in the non-Muslim British community. Not a few number of young people, experts, journalists and citizens have remained highly suspicious of young Muslims--if protests, letters to local and national newspapers, local news reports and opinion columns are anything to go by.
The events that followed didn't help alleviate any of the fear or the suspicion on both sides.
Emails from the Islamic Society of the City University, where I acquired a masters degree in investigative journalism, flooded my inbox since I'm signed up to their mailing list.
The young heads of the City ISOC, which besides being centered on religion also does charity work, were extremely worried. The acting vice-chancellor of the university, Professor Julius Weinberg, had given Muslim students the freedom at the time to skip late afternoon and evening classes and go home early for their safety.
Some of the emails sent around advised Muslim students to "always travel in groups, do not go home alone. Leave university by 4 PM. Be vigilant, careful and stick together ... Make constant duaa [supplication] to Allah ... do not despair for the victory of Allah is indeed near. Listen and obey the order of the Ameer [headbrother] and let's be patient and supportive to the brothers."
The excerpt was from an email from the "sisters," female members of the City University ISOC. As the case with many Egyptian Muslim student groups, boys and girls are segregated during prayers, activities and even on electronic mailing lists.
Clearly, the students were shaken. More follow-up emails were sent.
But all efforts from the university to make the students feel safe and integrated went downhill when, months later, specifically in March 2010, the Muslim prayer rooms at the university were closed down. At the time, John Tibble, director of services for students, had told the student paper City Offline that this action was taken following the knife attacks for the protection of the students themselves, denying it was a discriminatory action, as Muslim students had claimed.
"The university has to think about the security and safety of their students first and foremost. We don't think the risk to our students is any less now than it was in November. When students finish in the evening they come out and disperse in a way that all university students would disperse," he was quoted as saying.
Muslim students, however, were not convinced, and protests took place on campus in addition to congregational mass prayers on Fridays in the university's square as a form of protest. When the university offered a new prayer space that is not exclusive for Muslims, the ISOC placed a sign on it reading, "It is Haram (forbidden) for Muslims to pray here," accompanying it with the Quranic verse "And the places of worship are only for Allah, so pray not unto anyone along with Allah," suggesting that this verse forbids Muslims to pray where non-Muslims do.
They were angry and vocal, and for some understandably so, and the incidents spurred a series of questions and discussions on-campus and off, on faith, safety and what exactly Muslim students say or do in their meetings and their closed-off prayer rooms. And for many, those questions were legitimate.
However, in lieu of further wide discussions, or perhaps more deliberations, between university management and members of the Islamic society, the university ruled last month that "it is no longer associated by the Islamic Society after a report found that the society's actions and views reflected those of a small minority of radical Muslim students," according to editor of student newspaper City Offline Jonross Swaby.
"It was found that the majority of Muslim students did not agree with the society, in which Shiite Muslims in particular were reportedly treated as outcasts--leading a separate society to be formed for Shias," said Swaby. "In the coming months, a new, more inclusive Islamic society will be set up, which should be approved by the university."
Since this decision is fairly recent, it's yet to be seen how provocative it will be for the students now termed "radical" by the university's administration. Or not.
By the time the stabbings happened, I'd just finished an investigation into some of the claims against Muslim students, and City's in particular, charging at precisely some of these questions and worries.
Extremist ideologies did seem to be burgeoning among British Muslim students, upon initial inspection. And the popularity of Imams, literature, and events that channel Islamist and separatist ideas to vulnerable young Muslims through university-based Islamic societies seemed to be a problem that both universities and government, it seems, did not know how to deal with, without appearing "Islamophobic," politically incorrect and without tramping on essential human rights, like the freedom to believe and practice faith freely.
Reactions seemed to waver between being over-sympathetic with students or too harsh or dismissive. There didn't seem to be a middle ground in which fruitful discussion and introspection within the Muslim community could take place.
Investigating issues of terrorism and the allure of extremist ideology and Islamic militancy among university students is a very complicated issue. Like a cobweb, each thread intersects with another and in the end everything is connected: anti-terrorism policy, human rights, arbitrary arrests among Muslims and visitation to their houses by the British security service, known as MI5, or police, allegations of complicity in torture, media biases, the influence of oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia, who not only advocate an extremist and uncompromising form of Islam but also export it to Europe, Islamophobia, the popularity of certain outspoken Arab and Pakistani sheikhs and Imams, and identity problems among students.
In short, it’s a monstrous and murky issue, but it is a timely one. At the rate at which some Muslim students become alienated from their Western community and feel victimized and angry, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it’s a ticking bomb. Some of the clerics, which I have seen praised by some students, like Anwar al-Awlaki are turning out to be not as "harmless" as they had been thought to be years earlier. Al-Awlaki, who has become central to my research because of the status he holds among many students, has just been warned against as a rising threat during a talk in June 2010, held by the Carnegie endowment for International Peace, because of his ties to Al-Qaeda and his "powerful appeal to violent extremists."
What does this mean? Does it follow then that acolytes of Al-Awlaki in British universities are "violent extremists" or "terrorists"? Do ISOCs indeed carry within their ranks hidden "terrorist" cells? Not all all. Or at least not necessarily.
It doesn't seem to be a white-and-black issue; there are no easy answers, as experts and observers I interviewed have testified. And in my investigation, which will be published starting next week in a series of four stories, I set out not only to examine evidence of extremism, radical Saudi-style ideologies in universities and the degree to which some politicized Imams are popular among students, but to also give an insight into the campus life of some conservative Muslim students and the activities they engage in through their respective Islamic societies, which serve as their number one source for same-faith friendships and peerage, literature, charity activities and Islamic education.
Readers who have attended university in Egypt should be able to draw parallels between the experiences of these Muslim British students and their ultra-conservative counterparts in Egyptian universities. The work should provide an insight into the lives of these students, why they choose certain ideologies, and what attracted them to certain speakers or to the ISOC itself.
It's not meant to be inclusive and it certainly doesn't set out to place a verdict on either Muslim students or those who misjudge them. It also doesn't clear the Muslim community of responsibility towards the "radicalism" that takes place inside the heads of some of these students, whether through university societies, mosques, powerful Islamic figures or the lack thereof. And it doesn't lift responsibility off the students' themselves.
The work, which will come out every Monday and Wednesday, takes the form of a narrative and aims to be literary and entertaining as well as informative.
In a separate column, to be published in the wake of this series, I will also shed light on the journalistic and individual challenges that I have encountered during research and reporting for this story, why I chose to write about the subject and some of the lessons that this journey might have taught me.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Islam, a retrograde force?
While Brits are casting their votes in their national general election, the future of their nations could depend on how the current generation listens their straightforward leaders, and how it effectively learns from its historical mistakes
The well-known British Statesman, Sir Winston Churchill, who the Churchill rd in the centre of Addis Ababa is named after, delivered an amazing speech in 1899 when he was a young soldier and journalist.
Sir Winston Churchill was, without doubt, one of the greatest men of the late 19th and 20th centuries. he was a brave young soldier, a brilliant journalist, an extraordinary politician and statesman, a great war leader and prime minister, to whom the western world must be forever in his debt. he was a prophet in his own time. he died on 24 January 1965, at the grand old age of 90 and, after a lifetime of service to his country, was accorded a state funeral.
Here is the epic speech:
"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries!besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the prophet rule or live.
A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement the next of its dignity and sanctity. the fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. no stronger retrograde force exists in the world .
Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. it has already spread throughout central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome. "
Sir Winston Churchill
(the river war, first edition, vol. ii, pages 248-50)
The well-known British Statesman, Sir Winston Churchill, who the Churchill rd in the centre of Addis Ababa is named after, delivered an amazing speech in 1899 when he was a young soldier and journalist.
Sir Winston Churchill was, without doubt, one of the greatest men of the late 19th and 20th centuries. he was a brave young soldier, a brilliant journalist, an extraordinary politician and statesman, a great war leader and prime minister, to whom the western world must be forever in his debt. he was a prophet in his own time. he died on 24 January 1965, at the grand old age of 90 and, after a lifetime of service to his country, was accorded a state funeral.
Here is the epic speech:
"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries!besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the prophet rule or live.
A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement the next of its dignity and sanctity. the fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. no stronger retrograde force exists in the world .
Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. it has already spread throughout central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome. "
Sir Winston Churchill
(the river war, first edition, vol. ii, pages 248-50)
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