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Posted on 04/04/2004 4:17:59 PM PDT by Eurotwit
The headline in last Thursday's Telegraph read "Islamic bomb attack foiled". Some Muslim organisations saw this as Islamophobia. I suppose the headline should have read, "Islamist bomb attack foiled" or "Bomb attack by Islamic extremists foiled", but these things happen.
Still, one doesn't have to be Muslim, Irish, Romany or et cetera, to understand how a community feels when it gets stuck with the actions of its worst members. When the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the bomb was not a "Jewish bomb", but the bomb of Jewish terrorists. That much is obvious. But coming to grips with the reaction of the Muslim community in Britain to Islamist terrorism is a little more complicated.
To begin with, it's not very easy to know what any "community" thinks. By default, one goes to those organisations that are designated "community leaders". The two groups that head the list are the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). They are quite different. The MCB is an umbrella for about 400 affiliated Muslim groups, including the MAB. Sheltering under that umbrella are the good, the bad and the ugly, which means that the MCB is pulled in many directions.
The MAB is quite a separate matter. It pulls firmly in one direction. Though its leaders are routinely used as spokesmen by media and politicians, this group has associations with the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother of all Islamist groups, founded in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood's ideal scenario is to reinstate the Islamic caliphate and have Muslims live in Islamic states under sharia. In pursuit of this goal, its members have been implicated in various assassinations in the Arab world, including that of Anwar Sadat. They have spawned terrorist groups in Pakistan and the Middle East, the best-known being Hamas.
The MAB's admiration of the Brotherhood has led it to venerate a number of very unpleasant people. The late Sheikh Yassin, former leader of Hamas, is described by them as a paraplegic of gentle mien and high moral principles. Putting aside one's views about how Yassin's life ended - assassinated by the Israelis - and concentrating on his life on earth, insofar as Yassin addressed anything moral, it was to bequeath a moral basis for mayhem, murder and suicide bombers.
Yassin was initially against using women as human bombs, but only for reasons of sharia: female bombers would have their body parts exposed when blown to bits and would also have to have a male escort when going to an assignment. He manfully overcame these scruples.
The MAB also extols the virtues of Sayyid Qutb and Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Qutb, one-time leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, a prolific writer and ideologist, was executed by the Egyptians for his attempted assassination of Nasser. "Sayyid Qutb," writes the MAB, went to Paradise, "a beautiful life he definitely and rightly deserved." Among Qutb's thoughts: "The real struggle is between Islam on the one hand and Russia and America on the other." "The Jews are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of the family and the dissolution of society. Principal among them are Marx, Freud, Durkheim and the Jew Jean-Paul Sartre." To be fair, Qutb didn't like Christians either.
Sheikh al-Qaradawi, another MAB favourite, heads the European Council on Fatwa and Research, the ruling ideological body of Islamic life. Given that Islam has not yet gone through a reformation, his pronouncements can sound medieval, although, to give him his due, al-Qaradawi tries to be progressive. His ruling on wife-beating, for example, prohibits using a stick and limits it to the hand (and exempts a wife's face as a target). Al-Qaradawi has condemned "suicide" but gives the green light to "martyrdom" - suicide on behalf of Shahadah (faith).
Last week, the other Muslim organisation - the MCB - wrote a letter distributed to the thousand mosques in Britain. The letter quotes a passage from the Koran that forbids killing "unless it be a person guilty of manslaughter or of spreading chaos in the land" (a rather elastic definition in my view) and calls on Muslims to give "the fullest co-operation" to the police in the fight against criminal activity, including terrorism.
The quick endorsement of these views by the MAB is an illustration of the letter's limitations. As a means of tackling Islamist terrorism or taking a stand, it is all but worthless. A meaningful letter needs to speak in the vocabulary of Islam. Among other things, the condemnation of "terrorism" and "criminal activity" would be replaced by an open condemnation of all acts of martyrdom as Shahadah . That means detonating al-Qaradawi's seven categories of terror - colonialist terror, state terror, international terror, political terror, terror that is permitted by Islamic law, terror that is prohibited by Islamic law and martyrdom.
The public laudations that greeted the MCB's letter aren't hard to understand. Modern Western societies genuinely prefer not to be in a state of conflict with any community. Both the Left and Right share a desire for an open, pacific society devoid of the strife, injustices, oppression and bloodshed that characterise most non-Western countries. We leap at any sign, no matter how illusory or transparent, that indicates the existence of moderates who think as we do, or whom we like to believe think as we do.
There are genuine liberal Muslim voices in our midst, uncompromising in their opposition to terror. One admires them all the more given the difficulty of speaking out against one's own. When the militants are violent, it also takes physical courage. There is a world of difference, though, between writers such as Fouad Ajami , Tarek Heggy (whose offices in Alexandria were burned by Islamists), the courageous London editor-in-chief of the Saudi newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Abd al-Rahman al-Rashed, and those people sold as moderates who, after a ritual sentence condemning "all forms of terrorism", will refuse to condemn truly appalling regimes and who continue to present the most one-sided view of Middle East and Western policies.
The great majority of Muslims, moderate and law-abiding, probably want to become assimilated in the new societies of their choice or of their birth, without denying their roots. They are not interested in marches or political involvement. Who can blame them? All the same, while one has the greatest sympathy for this position, it is a luxury.
The more assertive clerical voices become, the more trains are blown up, the more demands to establish separate communities are made, the more necessary it will become utterly and completely to repudiate the militants or take the natural consequences of being tarred with the same brush.
Pursuing paper tigers such as Fleet Street Islamophobia is easy, but the real tiger is Islamic extremism: it knows no distinction between the taste of infidels' blood and that of Islamic moderates - except, perhaps, that the latter is a more satisfying meal.
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Islamic bomb attack foiledIslamic Aluminum Foil Hats on sale everywhere.
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"Moderate Muslims cannot should not ignore the terror in their midst"
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