A few days ago I posted a piece about a Pakistani TV programme, which featured a panel of violently intolerant religious fanatics ranting about what they feared was a wave of unbelief and blasphemy threatening the country of the pure. Well, that’s one explanation I’ve seen for the country’s name: ‘paki’ – ‘pure’, ‘stan’ country. I’ve also seen another explanation that claimed the ‘Paki’ element is an acronym made up with the country’s various provinces. These men claimed to have seen a report by the Federal Intelligence Agency and the branch of the country’s judiciary or law enforcement tasked with protecting the Pakistani people from blasphemy, that there were 400,000 internet accounts put up by blasphemers. They then went on to complain that despite these numbers, only 119 people had been arrested and of these only 11 were executed. Later on in the programme they claimed that the blasphemous internet accounts had started with only four people, who had been arrested and executed, but the number had mushroomed. This was accompanied with histrionic demonstrations of grief and outrage. One of them wished he had died before he had seen this day. Another wondered if they shouldn’t react to this news by burning down the towns. I hope that’s just hyperbole, otherwise it’s going to kill an awful lot of people and increase any disaffection with Islam. An elderly mullah was seen crying in a corner of the studio. They also went to describe the dreadful acts the blasphemers were committing, claiming that it was all part of a conspiracy to bring down the country and that the blasphemous internet sites were using women to lure men onto them to commit these outrages. I’m not going to describe them, as they are very shocking, far more extreme than the Danish cartoons that provoked such outrage across the Islamic world when they were published.
The ex-Muslims atheists on the net believed that the stories of these blasphemous acts were genuine, and were an expression of real, bitter hatred by alienated young Pakistanis against the country’s dominant religion. But the acts they described are so grotesque, I wondered if they weren’t made up. Years ago I read an account of the furore over the Danish cartoons on one of the Islamophobic sites. After the cartoons had been published in a Danish provincial paper, the Jyllands Aftenposten or whatever it was, a group of five imams went on a tour of the Muslim world to show them to the masses. However, it seems that one of the cartoons they showed had not been published by the paper.
I’ve been told that in that part of the world there’s a culture of embroidering the truth in disputes. It was a problem for the British authorities during the Raj, as both sides would start inventing details to reinforce their side of the argument until it was impossible to tell who was actually in the right. I don’t doubt that there are internet sites in Pakistani posting blasphemous material, but I wonder if the supposed acts they contained weren’t, in actual fact, the products of the nasty, lurid imaginations of those complaining about them.
The ex-Muslims themselves wondered about how many of the 400,000 blasphemers were really non-Muslims. Islam in Pakistan is composed of different sects – Sunni, Shia, Barelvi, Deobandi and so on, some of whose doctrines are seen as blasphemy by the others. So some of what was being denounced as blasphemous by the various fanatics could simply be honestly held beliefs by pious Muslims, who themselves see them as true and respectful expressions and formulations of their religion. Some of the ex-Muslims therefore suggested that the number of real blasphemous internet accounts was therefore half the official number, 200,000. But even if 400,000 is the real figure of atheists attacking Islam on the Pakistani net, it’s a trivial number compared to the country’s population. I think Pakistan has a population of c. 250 million. Which means that the proportion of people posting this material is less than 1/500 millionth of the population. In other words, a vanishingly small number. To outsiders like myself, when put like this the issue seems hardly worth bothering with. But not to these guys, who lined up in the studio to sing a song about how they would cut the heads off the blasphemers and burn them by day and night.
The same week Pakistani television broadcast this fiasco, Muslims in Britain had been celebrating Eid with the Big Iftar, in which they shared their religious meal with their non-Muslim neighbours. The One Show also covered on Muslim, who had dedicated himself to doing good deeds during Ramadan, and had assembled a team of Muslims and non-Muslims to help him. All of which was obviously far more constructive than the Pakistani programme’s demands for mass death. As for its wretched song, I can remember when one of the great Pakistani Sufi musicians came to Britain with his band back around 1991. He performed in Bradford, I think, and the Beeb televised the concert late one evening. I watched some of it, as I was then trying to do a postgraduate degree in British Islam. What came across from the little I saw was the sheer joy of the musicians and the audience. Joy in their religion, joy in the music. No hate at all. Round about the same time there was a documentary about Islam, Living Islam, which attempted to give a positive view of the religion. When it came to Pakistani politics, the presenter admitted that yes, politically the Pakistani electorate did demand more Islam. When the politicians attempted to give it to them, however, they were much less enthusiastic. Looking back, this is a mistakenly optimistic view. But then, despite the continuing controversy over the Satanic Verses, in some ways the ’90s were far more optimistic when it came to race and religion than today. To many people, both Black and White, racism was declining as conditions for Blacks and minorities improved. Another piece of optimism that has vanished in recent years.
Some of the posts I’ve seen about it made the point that the country has bigger issues to worry about than blasphemy. The country is supposedly deteriorating economically, socially and politically. But I wonder if that wasn’t the point. It looks like a diversion, to get ordinary Pakistanis to look away from the country’s real, material problems. Just like the Conservative MP Lee Anderson wants his party to fight on the culture war issues, because Rishi Sunak’s material policies about the economy are terrible and indefensible.
Even so, the programme is still chilling for the hatred it was trying to stir up. Accusations of blasphemy have resulted in rioting, murder and assassination in Pakistan. In one particular insane case, a schoolgirl allegedly murdered her teacher. The teacher herself hadn’t actually blasphemed. The child merely dreamed that she had, and so attacked and killed her. In my previous post about this I worried that this could set off a wave of mass persecution. So were the ex-Muslims, one of whom urged people to post about this and add hashtags copying in the American embassy and British High Commission as it looked like this could lead to serious human rights violations. And there’s the additional problem that this fanaticism could easily spread over here. The rioting between Hindus and Muslims that erupted a few months ago was supposed to have been caused by radical preachers from India and Pakistan.
We really need preachers now to emphasise peace against all the bigots anywhere in the world trying to divide us with hatred.
One of the other issues that really concerns me at the moment is continuing revelations about the Pakistani grooming gangs. Last week it was revealed that gangs in Telford had preyed on a further thousand victims, and that this had been ignored by the police and the local authorities. I’m absolutely disgusted by this, and infuriated by the response of these organisations and the left to it. There were angry scenes at a council meeting in Oldham last week when the council blithely claimed that there had been no cover-up. a Tory councillor shouted that there was, and he had one of the victims of these gangs there to prove it. I’ve also heard it alleged that it’s still going on. This is being used by the right to discredit the left, meaning particularly the Labour party, as the local authorities that allowed it to go on for decades were Labour. Various right-wing channels and YouTubers are stating that the left prefers rapists to accusations of racism, which is absolutely correct. But it also shows an underlying, profound inability in the left to deal with anti-White racism.
The anti-racist movement and its various organs, like the former Commission for Racial Equality, were set up to deal with anti-Black and anti-Asian racism, particularly after the race riots and the stabbing of a Black man just for having a White girlfriend at the Notting Hill Carnival. And there was a lot of very blatant racism, right down to the bullying of peeps from ethnic minorities by their workmates. There really were signs saying ‘No dogs, no blacks, no Irish’. And the continuing poverty, poor educational performance and marginalisation of the Black community has continued this focus on Black racial welfare. At the same time, the biased reporting in the right-wing press of Black crime and the victimisation of Whites in Black and ethnic majority areas was a part of a wider campaign against non-White immigration. This was rightly attacked as racism, especially as the real Fascists of the BNP and National Front used it as part of their political campaigns, while making up a few facts of their own. One of the grotesque examples of this was Nick Griffin or one of his wretched storm troopers telling his minuscule legions that Stephen Lawrence was a crook at school who forced the other kids to give him their dinner money. Completely made up! But when did that bother the political heirs of Hitler and Goebbels? What this has done is made the left in particularly absolutely terrified of acknowledging, let alone combating, anti-White racism.
This hasn’t been the case all the time. The Independent journo Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote a report for the CRE about anti-White racism, and the issue was discussed in the Guardian. But this was two decades and more ago. And the left is continuing to mishandle the issue of the grooming gangs by signally failing to protest against them. It means that the issue is being exploited by racists and islamophobes like Tommy Robinson. The left, meanwhile, protests against him while saying nothing about the racism against the White girls who were raped and exploited by the gangs.
I believe there is a way to tackle this, and that the left has the resources within it. I think what is needed is for the left to hold multicultural rallies against the gangs, just as Whites have marched with Blacks and Asians against racism and prejudice against them. I have therefore sent emails suggesting this to my local branch of the Labour party and to Asher Craig, the deputy mayor for Bristol and head of children and equalities for the city. My email to the local Labour party runs
‘Dear Sir,
I am writing to you as a member of the local Labour party to express my growing concern about the recent revelations of the rape and racist abuse of White girls by grooming gangs of men of Pakistani origin. I am particularly dismayed by what I feel is the complete lack of an appropriate response by the Labour party and the local authorities. In towns and cities like Bradford, Oldham and Rotherham, these gangs were allowed to get away with their predations for decades because the police and local authorities were afraid of being accused of racism. This past week it has emerged that a further 1,000 girls were raped and abused of the decades in Telford. This abuse has been confounded by police officers turning up to talk to one of the victims because she appeared on GB News to talk about her experiences. This grotesque inaction and the attempts by the police and authorities to contain this story, complete with denials that there has been any cover-up, reflects extremely badly not just on the police and local authorities in those areas, but on the left and the mainstream anti-racist movement generally. There have been videos about this scandal on YouTube that make it very clear that the posters believe that the authorities cannot be trusted and that the Left as a whole finds the racist abuse of White girls perfectly acceptable. The anti-trans activist Kelly-Jay Keen has put up a video, for example, with the title ‘the Left – Better a Rapist than a Racist’. The right-wing YouTube group The Lotus Eaters have been covering this issue for years, expressing similar views about the left. And the anti-immigrant YouTuber, ‘We Got A Problem’ included on his video about the issue the advice that people should start organising themselves to protect their children against such predatory gangs because the police and authorities won’t protect them. This is a call for vigilante gangs and racist lynch mobs, and the first step to Fascism.
I believe that this issue has and is being disastrously mishandled by the left and the conventional anti-racist movement because of a long-standing failure to treat anti-White racism equally with anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. This seems based on the fear that any mention of racism by Blacks and Asians towards Whites will spark race riots and bring back the spectre of Enoch Powell and his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. But the opposite seems to be the case, as people are going back to Enoch Powell because of the left’s refusal to tackle these gangs. See recent posts by the History Debunked channel. While the left appears to give the impression that racism towards Whites is acceptable, it is islamophobes such as Tommy Robinson who are successfully manipulating the issue so that they appear inclusive. A few months ago Robinson, formerly of the anti-Islam organisations the EDL and Pegida UK, as well as the BNP, held a rally in Birmingham to promote the launch of his film, ‘The Rape of Birmingham’, complete with interviews with the abused girls. There was a counterprotest by Unite and Stand Up To Racism. However, instead of demonstrating that they were also against the grooming gangs, they simply shouted the usual slogans of ‘Refugees welcome’ and ‘Off our streets, Fascist Scum’. But it was Robinson’s group that really appeared to be inclusive and genuinely anti-racist. Their video of the rally prominently shows a young Black man wearing a ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’ anti-racist T-shirt.
This is what the Left needs to be doing. A few decades ago it was prepared to discuss and condemn anti-White racism as well as racism against Blacks and Asians. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote a report on it for the Committee for Racial Equality back in 1997. In the early part of this century, a Muslim Guardian journalist wrote a piece in that paper stating that working class Whites and ordinary Muslims should united against Islamist organisations like Hizb-ut Tahrir. And I have heard complaints from other moderate Muslims that they have received zero coverage and support from mainstream British society in their protests against the preachers of hate in their religion.
I feel very strongly that what is needed is a multicultural rally bringing Whites, Blacks and Asians together to condemn the grooming gangs and their predations as part of the wider anti-racist movement, to show that every form of racism, against all ethnic groups, is equally unacceptable. After all, Whites have shown their support for their Black friends in marching with them against their discrimination in the Black Lives Matter rallies, for example.
While Bristol is not one of those cities what has been preyed upon by these gangs, I believe it can play a major part in combating them through launching such a rally. Bristol has a diverse, multicultural population with Bristolians of all colours enjoying events such as the St. Paul’s carnival and the Asian melas, as well as the Pride events last weekend. I feel it is absolutely imperative that a multicultural rally should be staged to combat this racism, not just for itself, but to nip in the bud any further exploitation of it by the racist right.
It would be excellent if the Labour party in Bristol, or just the local Labour party in south Bristol, could organise such a rally or march, even if only on a small scale. I understand that there is no monthly meeting in August, but if this affair continues to develop then I will try and put forward this suggestion as a motion at the September meeting. In the meantime, if you can suggest other people or organisations I should contact to get this going, I would be very grateful.
I eagerly await your response.
Yours sincerely,
David Sivier’
And here’s my email to Craig
‘Dear Asher,
I am writing to you in your specific capacity as the official in charge of child services and equalities in our great city. I am very much concerned by the recent revelations about the grooming gangs of men of Pakistani heritage and the way their predations on vulnerable White girls were ignored by the police and authorities because of fears that they would be accused of racism. This past week, as I’m sure you know, it has been revealed that there were a further 1,000 girls abused by these gangs in Telford. I am deeply worried at what I believe is the disastrous way Labour and the anti-racist organisations are handling this crisis, and the way it is now being perceived and exploited by the right. Thanks to this mishandling, many people now believe that the Labour party regards such abuse as perfectly acceptable. The anti-trans activist, Kelly-Jay Kean, has put up a video entitled ‘The Left – Better a Rapist than a Racist’. The Lotuis Eaters, a right-wing, Libertarian YouTube channel, have devoted a stream of videos to this issue, which they regard as a form of anti-White racism. And not only is the Labour party tarnished by this inaction, but so is are the police, the BBC and the authorities generally. The anti-immigrant YouTuber ‘We Got A Problem’ posted a video last night stating that people should organise themselves to protect their children because the authorities would not protect them. This is a call to set up vigilante groups, with the attendant danger of racist lynch mobs. As I’m sure I needn’t tell you, the first step on the road to real Fascism is when there is a profound breakdown of trust between the authorities and their citizens on issues of race and nation.
I also believe that the racist right are far better at exploiting this issue,, and are doing so because they are doing what the left should be doing, but isn’t. The islamophobe Tommy Robinson, formerly of the EDL, Pegida UK and, I gather, the BNP, held a rally and a public showing of his film ‘The Rape of Birmingham’ a few months ago. He was met by a group of counterprotesters from Stand Up To Racism and Unite the Union. But they did not tackle Robinson on the subject of the grooming gangs. They merely recited the usual anti-racist slogans of ‘Fascist scum off our streets!’ and ‘Refugees welcome’. But they did not recognise that here there was a genuine, serious issue of the racist abuse and victimisation of White girls or demonstrate any support for the victims. When someone from the Lotus Eaters asked them if they did agree with the girls’ abuse, they said that of course they didn’t. But this isn’t good enough. They have to publicly show that they don’t. And they haven’t. Their failure to do so very much contrasts with Robinson’s own presentation of himself and his supporters. He claims not to be racist, and in the video he made of his rally there is a young Black man amongst his supporters, wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’. This is what the left should also be doing about these gangs.
For decades now, White people have marched in support of Blacks and other people of colour against racism and discrimination. I’m sure you remember the marches against the BNP and institutional racism in the 1980s and musical events in that decade and the ’70s by Rock Against Racism. I strongly believe that we need similar multicultural rallies against the grooming gangs. I realise that as head of equalities for Bristol your specific focus is tackling racism and improving conditions for the Black community. But the Black community, in my experience, is also able and willing to discuss racism and racist abuse directed against Whites. The I journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown authored an official report into anti-White racism by Blacks and Asians in 1997, and a Muslim Guardian journalist called for moderate Muslims and the White working class to unite against Islamist organisations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir. One of the complaints of moderate Muslims is that they are given no media coverage or support when they demonstrate against their religion’s preachers of hate.
I believe very strongly that the only way to tackle this is to organise a multicultural rally bringing Whites, Blacks and Asians together to condemn the gangs. We have to show unity, and that all forms of racism are equally unacceptable, just as White support for Black Lives Matter two years ago showed that the wider community despised anti-Black racism. I realise the gangs are a northern phenomenon, but there have been suggestions that it started in the south. And while Bristol hasn’t been touched by them, I believe the city could play a leading role in this because of its diverse population and the popularity of multicultural events such as the St. Paul’s Carnival and the Asian mela.
It is absolutely imperative that this should be done to show that Labour and the authorities are not complacent about any kind of racism, and that paedophile gangs of whatever colour are not welcome in our city.
As the head of equalities, I hope you may be able to organise such a rally for the city. If you cannot, I would be grateful if you could direct me to someone who could.
Ed Hussain, Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain (London: Bloomsbury 2021)
Ed Hussain is a journalist and the author of two previous books on Islam, the House of Islam, which came out in 2018, and The Islamist of 2007. He’s also written for a series of newspapers and magazines, including the Spectator, the Telegraph, the Times, the New York Times and the Guardian. He’s also appeared on the Beeb and CNN. He’s an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and has been a member of various think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations. The House of Islam is an introduction to Islamic history and culture from Mohammed onwards. According to the blurb, it argues that Islam isn’t necessarily a threat to the West but a peaceful ally. The Islamist was his account of his time in Hizb ut-Tahrir, a militant Islamic organisation dedicated to restoring the caliphate. This was quoted in Private Eye, where a passage in the book revealed that the various leaders Tony Blair appealed to as part of his campaign against militant, extremist Islam weren’t the moderates they claimed to be, but the exact type of people Blair was trying to combat. Among the Mosques continues this examination and critical scrutiny of caliphism, the term he uses to describe the militant to set up the caliphate. This is an absolute Islamic state, governed by a caliph, a theocratic ruler, who is advised by a shura, or council. This, however, would not be like parliament as only the caliph would have the power to promulgate legislation. Hussain is alarmed at how far this anti-democratic ideology has penetrated British Islam. To find out, he travelled to mosques across Britain – Dewsbury, Manchester, Blackburn, Bradford, Birmingham and London in England, Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland, the Welsh capital Cardiff, and Belfast in Northern Ireland. Once there, he goes to the local mosques unannounced, observes the worshippers, and talks to them, the imams and other local people. And he’s alarmed by what he sees.
Caliphism Present in Mosques of Different Sects
The mosques he attends belong to a variety of Islamic organisations and denominations. Dewsbury is the centre of the Deobandi movement, a Muslim denomination set up in Pakistan in opposition to British imperialism. Debandis worship is austere, rejecting music, dance and art. The Barelwi mosque he attends in Manchester, on the hand, is far more joyful. The Barelwis are based on an Indian Sufi preacher, who attempted to spread Islam through music and dance. Still other mosques are Salafi, following the fundamentalist brand of Islam that seeks to revive the Islam of the salaf, the Prophet’s companions, and rejects anything after the first three generations of Muslims as bid’a, innovations. But across these mosques, with a few exceptions, there is a common strand of caliphism. The Deobandi order are concerned with the moral reform and revival of Muslim life and observance, but not political activism, in order to hasten the emergence of the caliphate. Similar desires are found within the Tableegh-e Jama’at, another Muslim revivalist organisation founded in Pakistan. This is comparable to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Christianity, in that its method of dawa, Muslim evangelism, is to knock on lax Muslims’ doors and appealing to them become more religious. It’s a male-only organisation, whose members frequently go off on trips abroad. While the preaching in Manchester Central Mosque is about peace, love and tolerance as exemplified in the Prophet’s life, the Barelwis themselves can also be intolerant. Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin of Salman Taseer, the governor of the Punjab, was a member of the Barelwi Dawat-e-Islami. He murdered Taseer, whose bodyguard he was, because Taseer has dared to defend Pakistani Christians accused of blasphemy. Under strict Islamic law, they were gustakh-e Rasool, a pejorative term for ‘insulter of the Prophet’. The penalty for such blasphemy was wajib-e qatl, a mandatory death. Despite being tried and executed, Qadri is regarded by many of the Pakistani faithful as a martyr, and a massive mosque complex has grown up to commemorate him. In his meetings with various imams and ordinary Muslims, Hussain asks if they agree with the killing of blasphemers like Taseer, and the author Salman Rushdie, who had a fatwa and bounty placed on his life by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for his book, The Satanic Reverses. Some of them give evasive replies. One imam even defends it, claiming that Rushdie deserved death because he insulted love, as represented by Mohammed and Islam. A Muslim female friend dodges answering by telling him she’s have to ask her husband.
In the mosques’ libraries he finds books promoting the Caliphist ideology, denouncing democracy, immodest dress and behaviour in women, who are commanded to be available for their husband’s sexual pleasure, even when their bodies are running with pus. Some are explicitly Islamist, written by Sayyid Qutb and his brother, the founders of modern militant Islamism. These mosques can be extremely large, serving 500 and more worshippers, and Hussain is alarmed by the extremely conservative, if not reactionary attitudes in many of them. In many, women are strictly segregated and must wear proper Islamic dress – the chador, covering their hair and bodies. The men also follow the model of Mohammed himself in their clothing, wearing long beards and the thawb, the long Arab shirt. But Hussain makes the point that in Mohammed’s day, there was no distinctive Muslim dress: the Prophet wore what everyone in 7th century Arabia wore, including Jews, Christians and pagans. He has a look around various Muslim schools, and is alarmed by their demand for prepubescent girls to wear the hijab, which he views as sexualising them. Some of these, such as the Darul Ulooms, concentrate almost exclusively on religious education. He meets a group of former pupils who are angry at their former school’s indoctrination of them with ancient, but fabricated hadiths about the Prophet which sanction slavery, the inferior status of women, and the forced removal of Jews and Christians from the Arabian peninsula. They’re also bitter at the way these schools did not teach them secular subjects, like science, literature and art, and so prepare them for entering mainstream society. This criticism has also been levelled Muslim organisations who have attacked the Darul Uloom’s narrow focus on religion. The worshippers and students at these mosques and their schools reject the dunya, the secular world, and its fitna, temptations. One Spanish Muslim has immigrated to England to get away from the nudist beaches in his home country. And the Muslim sections of the towns he goes to definitely do not raise the Pride flag for the LGBTQ community.
Hussain Worried by Exclusively Muslim Areas with No White Residents
Hussain is also alarmed at the way the Muslim districts in many of the towns he visits have become exclusively Muslim quarters. All the businesses are run by Muslims, and are geared to their needs and tastes, selling Muslim food, clothing, perfume and literature. Whites are absent, living in their own districts. When he does see them, quite often they’re simply passing through. In a pub outside Burnley he talks to a couple of White men, who tell him how their children have been bullied and beaten for being goras, the pejorative Asian term for Whites. Other Whites talk about how the local council is keen to build more mosques, but applications by White residents to put up flagpoles have been turned down because the council deems them racist. Hussain objects to these monocultures. Instead, he praises areas like the section of Edinburgh, where the Muslim community coexists with Whites and other ethnicities. There’s similar physical mixture of Muslim and non-Muslim in the Bute area of Cardiff, formerly Tiger Bay, which has historically been a multicultural cultural area. In the mosque, however, he finds yet again the ideology of cultural and religious separatism.
The Treatment of Women
He is also very much concerned about the treatment of women, and especially their vulnerability before the sharia courts that have sprung up. A few years ago there were fears of a parallel system of justice emerging, but the courts deal with domestic issues, including divorce. They have been presented as informal systems of marriage reconciliation. This would all be fine if that was all they were. But the majority of the mosques Hussain visits solely perform nikah, Muslim weddings. Under British law, all weddings, except those in an Anglican church, must also be registered with the civil authorities. These mosques don’t. As a result, wives are left at the mercy of Islamic law. These give the husband, but not the wife, the power of divorce., and custody of the children if they do. Hussain meets a battered Muslim woman, whose controlling husband nearly killed her. The case was brought before the local sharia court. The woman had to give evidence from another room, and her husband was able to defeat her request for a divorce by citing another hadith maintaining that husbands could beat their wives.
London Shias and the Procession Commemorating the Deaths of Ali, Hassan and Hussain
Hussain’s a Sunni, and most of the mosques he attends are also of that orthodox branch of Islam. In London, he attends a Shia mosque, and is shocked and horrified by the self-inflicted violence performed during their commemoration of the Battle of Karbala. Shias believe that Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, was the true successor to Mohammed as the leader of the early Muslim community. He was passed over, and made a bid for the caliphate, along with his two sons, Hasan and Hussain, who were finally defeated by the Sunnis at the above battle. This is commemorated by Shias during the month of Moharram, when there are special services at the mosque and the jaloos, a commemorative procession. During the services and the processions, Shias express their grief over their founders’ martyrdom by beating their chests, matam, faces and whipping themselves. They also slash themselves with swords. All this appears to go on at the London mosque, to Hussain’s horror. He is particularly disturbed by young children beating their chests and faces in the worship the night before, and wonders how this isn’t child abuse.
Separatist Attitudes and Political Activism in Mosques
He is also concerned about the political separatism and activism he sees in some of the mosques. They don’t pray for the Queen, as Christians and Jews do, but there are prayers for the Muslim community throughout the world and funeral prayers for Morsi, the former Islamist president of Egypt. He finds mosques and Islamic charities working for Muslims abroad, and activists campaigning on behalf on Palestine, Kashmir and other embattled Muslim countries and regions, but not for wider British society. Some of the worshippers and Imams share his concern. One Muslim tells him that the problem isn’t the Syrian refugees. They are medical men and women, doctors, nurses and technicians. The problem is those asylum seekers from areas and countries which have experienced nothing but war and carnage. These immigrants have trouble adapting to peace in Britain. This leads to activism against the regimes in the countries they have fled. Afghan and Kurdish refugees are also mentioned as donning masks looking for fights. Some of the worshippers in the mosques Hussain attends had connections to ISIS. In London he recalls meeting a glum man at a mosque in 2016. The man had toured the Middle East and Muslim Britain asking for signatures in a petition against ISIS. The Middle Eastern countries had willingly given theirs. But an academic, a White convert who taught at British university, had refused. Why? He objected to the paragraph in the petition denouncing ISIS’ enslavement of Yazidi and other women. This was in the Quran, he said, and so he wouldn’t contradict it. This attitude from a British convert shocked the man, as usually objections to banning slavery come from Mauretania and Nigeria, where they are resented as western interference. And in another mosque in Bradford, he is told by the imam that he won’t allow the police to come in and talk about the grooming gangs. The gangs used drugs and alcohol, which are forbidden in Islam and so are not connected to the town’s mosques.
Islamophobia against Northern Irish Muslims
But Islam isn’t a monolith and many Muslims are far more liberal and engaged with modern western society. Going into an LGBTQ+ help centre, he’s met by a Muslim woman on the desk. This lady’s straight and married, but does not believes there’s any conflict between her faith and working for a gay organisation. And in reply to his question, she tells him that her family most certainly do know about it. He meets two female Muslim friends, who have given up wearing the hijab. One did so after travelling to Syria to study. This convinced her that it was a pre-Islamic custom, and she couldn’t find any support for it in the Quran. She also rejected it after she was told at university that it was feminist, when it wasn’t. In Belfast he visits a mosque, which, contrary to Islamic custom, is run by two women. The worship appears tolerant, with members of different Muslims sects coming peacefully together, and the values are modern. But this is an embattled community. There is considerable islamophobia in Northern Ireland, with Muslims sufferings abuse and sometimes physical assault. One Protestant preacher stirred up hate with a particularly islamophobic sermon. Many of the mosque’s congregation are converts, and they have been threatened at gun point for converting as they are seen as leaving their communities. Travelling through Protestant and Roman Catholic Belfast, Hussain notices the two communities’ support for different countries. On the Nationalist side of the peace walls are murals supporting India and Palestine. The Loyalists, on the other hand, support Israel. But back in London he encounters more, very modern liberal attitudes during a conversation with the two daughters of a Muslim women friends. They are very definitely feminists, who tell him that the problem with Islam, is, no offence, his sex. They then talk about how toxic masculinity has been a bad influence on British Islam.
Liberal Islam and the Support of the British Constitution
In his travels oop north, Hussain takes rides with Muslim taxi drivers, who are also upset at these all-Muslim communities. One driver laments how the riots of 2011 trashed White businesses, so the Whites left. In Scotland, another Muslim cabbie, a technician at the local uni, complains about Anas Sarwar, the first Muslim MP for Scotland. After he left parliament, Sarwar left to become governor of the Punjab in Pakistan. The cabbie objects to this. In his view, the man was serving just Muslims, not Scotland and all of its people. During ablutions at a mosque in Edinburgh, he meets a British army officer. The man is proud to serve with Her Majesty’s forces and the army has tried to recruit in the area. But despite their best efforts and wishes, Muslims don’t wish to join.
In London, on the other hand, he talks to a modern, liberal mullah, Imam Jalal. Jalal has studied all over the world, but came back to Britain because he was impressed with the British constitution’s enshrinement of personal liberty and free speech. He believes that the British constitution expresses the maqasid, the higher objectives Muslim scholars identified as the root of the sharia as far back al-Juwaini in the 11th century. Jalal also tells him about al-shart, a doctrine in one of the Muslim law schools that permits women to divorce their husbands. The marriage law should be reformed so that the nikah becomes legal, thus protecting Muslim wives with the force of British law. And yes, there would be an uproar if prayers for the Queen were introduced in the mosques, but it could be done. Both he and Hussain talk about how their father came to Britain in the late 50s and early 60s. They wore three-piece suits, despite the decline of the empire, were proud to be British. There was time in this country when Muslims were respected. In one factory, when a dispute broke out, the foreman would look for a Muslim because they had a reputation for honesty. The Muslim community in these years would have found the race riots and the terrorist bombings of 7/7 and the Ariana Grande concert simply unbelievable. Had someone told them that this would happen, they would have said he’d been watching too much science fiction.
Muslim Separatism and the Threat of White British Fascism
Hanging over this book is the spectre of demographic change. The Muslim population is expected to shoot up to 18 million later in the century and there is the real prospect of Britain becoming a Muslim majority country. In fact, as one of the great commenters here has pointed out, this won’t happen looking at the available data. If Scotland goes its own way, however, the proportion of Muslims in England will rise to 12 per cent, the same as France and Belgium. For Hussain, it’s not a question of how influential Islam will be in the future, but the type of Islam we will have. He is afraid of Muslim majority towns passing laws against everything the Muslim community considers forbidden. And as politicians, particularly Jeremy Corbyn and the Muslim politicos in the Labour party treat Muslims as a solid block, rather than individuals, he’s afraid that Muslim communalism and its sense of a separate identity will increase. This may also produce a corresponding response in the White, Christian-origin English and Brits. We could see the rise of nationalist, anti-Islam parties. At one point he foresees three possible futures. One is that the mosques will close the doors and Muslims will become a separate community. Another is mass deportations, including self-deportations. But there are also reasons to be optimistic. A new, British Islam is arising through all the ordinary Muslims finding ways to accommodate themselves within liberal, western society. They’re doing it quietly, unobtrusively in ordinary everyday matters, underneath all the loud shouting of the Islamists.
The Long Historical Connections between Britain and Islam
In his conclusion, Hussain points out that Islam and Britain have a long history together. Queen Elizabeth I, after her excommunication by the Pope, attempted to forge alliance with the Ottoman Sultan. She succeeded in getting a trading agreement with the Turkish empire. In the 17th century, the coffee shop was introduced to Britain by a Greek-Turk. And in the 8th century Offa, the Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia, used Muslim dirhams as the basis for his coinage. This had the Muslim creed in Arabic, with his head stamped in the middle of the coin. Warren Hastings, who began the British conquest of India, opened a madrassa, sitting on its governing board and setting up its syllabus. This is the same syllabus used in the narrowly religious Muslim schools, so he’s partly to blame for them. During the First World War 2.5 million Muslims from India willingly fought for Britain. Muslim countries also sheltered Jews from the horrors of Nazi persecution. He’s also impressed with the immense contribution Muslims gave to the rise of science, lamenting the superstition he sees in some Muslim communities. He really isn’t impressed by one book on sale in a Muslim bookshop by a modern author claiming to have refuted the theory that the Earth goes round the sun.
To Combat Separatism and Caliphism, Celebrate British Values of Freedom and the Rule of Law
But combatting the Muslims separatism is only one half of the solution. Muslims must have something positive in wider mainstream society that will attract them to join. For Hussain, this is patriotism. He quotes the late, right-wing philosopher Roger Scruton and the 14th century Muslim historian ibn Khaldun on patriotism and group solidarity as an inclusive force. He cites polls showing that 89 per cent of Brits are happy with their children marrying someone of a different ethnicity. And 94 per cent of Brits don’t believe British nationality is linked to whiteness. He maintains that Brits should stop apologising for the empire, as Britain hasn’t done anything worse than Russia or Turkey. He and Imam Jalal also point out that the Turkish empire also committed atrocities, but Muslims do not decry them. Rather, the case of a Turkish TV show celebrating the founder of the Turkish empire, have toured Britain and received a warm welcome at packed mosques. He points out that he and other Muslims are accepted as fellow Brits here. This is not so in other countries, like Nigeria and Turkey, where he could live for decades but wouldn’t not be accepted as a Nigerian or Turk. And we should maintain our country’s Christian, Protestant heritage because this is ultimately the source of the values that underlie British secular, liberal society.
He also identifies six key values which Britain should defend and celebrate. These are:
The Rule of Law. This is based on Henry II’s synthesis of Norman law and Anglo-Saxon common law, to produce the English common law tradition, including Magna Carta. This law covers everyone, as against the sharia courts, which are the thin end of an Islamist wedge.
Individual liberty. The law is the protector of individual liberty. Edward Coke, the 17th century jurist, coined the phrase ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’. He also said that ‘Magna Carta is such a fellow he will have no sovereign’ It was this tradition of liberty that the Protestant emigrants took with them when they founded America.
Gender equality – here he talks about a series of strong British women, including Boadicea, the suffragettes, Queen Elizabeth and, in Johnson’s opinion, Maggie Thatcher. He contrasts this with the Turkish and other Muslim empires, which have never had a female ruler.
Openness and tolerance – here he talks about how Britain has sheltered refugees and important political thinkers, who’ve defended political freedoms like the Austrians Wittgenstein and Karl Popper.
Uniqueness. Britain is unique. He describes how, when he was at the Council for Foreign Relations, he and his fellows saw the Arab Spring as like Britain and America. The revolutionaries were fighting for liberty and secularism. There was talk amongst the Americans of 1776. But the revolutionaries didn’t hold western liberal values.
Racial Parity. Britain is not the same nation that support racists like Enoch Powell. He points to the German roots of the royal family, and that Johnson is part Turkish while members of his cabinet also come from ethnic minorities. Britain is not like France and Germany, where Muslims are seen very much as outsiders.
Whatever your party political opinions, I believe that these really are fundamental British values worth preserving. Indeed, they’re vital to our free society. On the other hand, he also celebrates Adam Smith and his theories of free trade as a great British contribution, because it allowed ordinary people and not just the mercantilist elite to get wealthy. Er, no, it doesn’t. But in a book like this you can’t expect everything.
Criticisms of Hussain’s Book
Hussain’s book caused something of a storm on the internet when it was released. The peeps on Twitter were particularly upset by the claims of Muslims bullying and violence towards Whites. There was a series of posts saying that he’d got the location wrong, and that the area in question was posh White area. In fact the book makes it clear he’s talking about a Muslim enclave. What evidently upset people was the idea that Muslims could also be racist. But some Muslims are. Way back c. 1997 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote a report for the Committee for Racial Equality as it was then on anti-White Asian and Black hatred and violence. Racism can be found amongst people of all colours and religions, including Muslims.
People were also offended by his statement that in the future there could be mass deportations of Muslims. From the discussion about this on Twitter, you could be misled into thinking he was advocating it. But he doesn’t. He’s not Tommy Robinson or any other member of the far right. He’s horrified by this as a possibility, a terrible one he wishes to avoid. But these criticism also show he’s right about another issue: people don’t have a common language to talk about the issues and problems facing Britain and its Muslim communities. These need to be faced up to, despite the danger of accusations of racism and islamophobia. Tanjir Rashid, reviewing it for the Financial Times in July 2021, objected to the book on the grounds that Hussain’s methodology meant that he ignored other Muslim networks and had only spoken to out-of-touch mullahs. He pointed instead to an Ipsos-Mori poll showing that 88 per cent of Muslims strong identified with Britain, seven out of ten believed Islam and modern British society were compatible and only one per cent wanted separate, autonomous Muslim communities. It’s possible that if Hussain had also travelled to other towns where the Muslim population was smaller and more integrated with the non-Muslim population, he would have seen a very different Islam.
Intolerant Preaching Revealed by Channel 4 Documentary
On the other hand, the 2007 Channel 4 documentary, Undercover Mosque, found a venomous intolerance against Christians, Jews and gays being preached in a hundred mosques. A teacher was effectively chased out of his position at a school in Batley because he dared to show his pupils the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in a class on tolerance. He is still in hiding, fearing for his life. Hussain cites government statistics that 43,000 people are under police surveillance because political extremism, 90 per cent of whom are Muslims.
These are vital questions and issues, and do need to be tackled. When I studied Islam in the 90s, I came across demands in the Muslim literature I was reading for separate Muslim communities governed by Islamic law. This was accompanied by the complaint that if this wasn’t granted, then Britain wasn’t truly multicultural. More recently I saw the same plea in a book in one of Bristol’s secondhand and remaindered bookshops, which based its argument on the British colonisation of America, in which peoples from different nationalities were encouraged to settle in English territories, keeping their languages and law. It might be that the mullahs are preaching separatism, but that hardly anybody in the Muslim community is really listening or actually want the caliphate or a hard line separate Muslim religious identity.
Conclusion
I do believe, however, that it is an important discussion of these issues and that the sections of the book, in which liberal Muslims, including Hussain himself, refute the vicious intolerance preached by the militants, are potentially very helpful. Not only could they help modern Muslims worried by such intolerant preaching and attitudes, and help them to reject and refute them, but they also show that a modern, liberal, western Islam is very possible and emerging, in contradiction to Fascists and Islamophobes like Tommy Robinson.
I’m trying not to blog too much about Ed Hussain’s book, Among the Mosques, as I wish to write a review of the book as a whole when I finish reading it. But this is too important. The report on the Rotherham Pakistani grooming gangs was released last week and has been widely criticised. Although the report acknowledge the massive failure of the police and local authorities to deal with the massive abuse of White girls – there were 1,400 odd victims – no-one responsible has been punished or even named. The report’s and the authorities’ failure to do this has been widely reported and attacked on various right-wing media, such as GB News.
One of the errors the report identifies in the handling of the abuse was that neither the police nor the local authorities attempted to engage with the local community. I’m sure this is correct, but I’m not sure how cooperative the local Asian and Muslim community would have been even if they had. In his book Hussain describes a conversation he had with Imam Hasnain, the pir, or leader of a Sufi biraderi (brotherhood) that acts as a patronage network controlling a large number, if not the majority, of the mosques in Bradford. Hasnain and the other leaders of the brotherhood are so influential that they are courted by local politicians. On page 132, the pir tells Hussain that he won’t let the police come into the mosques to talk about the grooming gangs and their abuse.
”The police want to come into our mosques and speak to the congregations about not grooming white girls. It has been an issue in the past.’
‘And?’ I ask, probing his reticence.
‘I can’t let that happen.’
‘Why not?’ I ask, aghast. ‘Surely you’ve heard the facts about what happened in Rotherham, how Muslim men targeted non-Muslim White girls over decades?’
‘What have these men to do with Islam?’ he asks, with a defensive shrug and the characteristic twist of the hand of Asian elders.
‘There are two factors involved in those cases again and again: drugs and alcohol. Does Islam permit these two things? Of course not. Yes, they have Muslim names and Pakistani backgrounds, but our mosques are not responsible for their criminality. These issues will be with us for a long time in Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Keighley and other cities. But unless the police can prove it is now down to drugs and alcohol, we will not open the mosque doors to them.”
The same pir blames the British and our government for a variety of ills affecting Muslims, from the partition of India to the disappearance of the White community in Bradford. He denies that Whites are absent from the city and recites a list of postcodes to show where they allegedly still reside, despite Hussain telling him he hasn’t seen an White people. And he goes on to blame the massive Islamic presence on the town on the fact that the government sent a great number of Syrian refugees there. It’s all British double standards against Muslims, double standards that are creating Islamophobia. And he defends the demands for Salman Rushdie’s death because of the Satanic Verses.
Now Hasnain is right that the groomers used drugs and alcohol to seduce their victims, and they weren’t connected with the mosques. But the refusal to allow the police in to speak to the mosques’ congregations seems too facile and more than a little suspicious in itself. No-one has claimed that the mosques as organisations were responsible for the abuse. But one the natural places to reach out to particular communities is through their places of worship, regardless of the particular religion. Back in the 90s, for example, the police came to the local church in my part of south Bristol to talk about drugs and the immense harm they cause. This obviously doesn’t mean that the cops thought the local congregation was seething with drug freaks and dealers. It was just a good venue to address the local community. And the same would also be true of the cops talking about the grooming gangs in the mosques in Bradford.
And what comes across to me from Hasnain’s defensive attitude and blank refusal is that he’s motivated by the Asian honour and shame culture. My guess is that he feels that the grooming gangs are deeply shameful and that talking about them will also shame and dishonour the Muslim community in Bradford, and so there’s not just a refusal to accept that the mosques were responsible, which is perfectly right, but a refusal to allow the police to even talk about it in them. And in such a deeply religious community as Muslim Bradford appears to be, it seems to me that this effectively stops the police addressing the community on this issue.
And I wonder whether the cops and local authorities in Rotherham would have met with a similar blank refusal, had they tried to approach them about addressing them in their mosques and community centres about the gangs.
I’ve started reading Ed Hussein’s Among the Mosques, his account of his journey through Muslim Britain looking at its culture, differences, and values. He did so by going to the mosques and other Muslim cultural and religious centres in Dewsbury, Manchester, Blackburn, Bradford, Birmingham, Cardiff, Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow and London. While there, he met and talked to ordinary local people as well as the worshippers at the mosques, hearing their views and concerns. It was met with a storm of controversy when it came out because he talked about the conversations he’d had with Whites,, who’d suffered from racism, bullying and assault from Muslims in their areas. This was angrily denied, and a people went on Twitter to claim that the area he was talking about wasn’t Muslim but a posh White district. But the critics were talking about a different area from that visited by Hussein, and the book states this. The controversy seems to show the inability of some on the left to deal with the reality of anti-White racism by ethnic minorities.
But I don’t think the book does present a biased image of British Islam. Yes, in some areas, such as Dewsbury, the Islam practised – Deobandi – is austere and based on a theology of cultural separatism, in which Muslims are called to create and maintain a separate cultural and religious identity in preparation for the emergence of the caliphate. In other areas and mosques, the preaching and observance is more relaxed. Manchester’s Central Mosque is Barelwi, a sect based on the teachings of a 13th century Indian Sufi preacher. Their worship includes music, song and dance and the imam’s address was about interfaith tolerance as shown by Mohammed’s example.
Hussein writes
‘The imam continues to develop his theme of the need to change and improve ourselves based on our love for the Prophet. He encourages us to study the life of the Prophet Mohammed and how he acted towards people, even his enemies. Each time his name is mentioned the congregation again kiss their thumbs. The imam talks about the Prophet’s compassion, his kindness to his enemies, his message of co-existence with the Jews, Christians and pagans in seventh century Medina.
‘Are we such model citizens? Do we make our Prophet proud? he asks rhetorically, raising his hands with an exaggerated shrug like an Italian.
He quotes:
‘Qad ja’akun nur. Certainly a light has come to you.
That light is the prophet and the Qur’an, asserts the imam. ‘Are we radiating this light? Do our neighbours and friends in this country see us as carriers of love? The Prophet is shifa, he is healing. Has he healed our lives?’ (p. 46.) This isn’t that far from the various Anglican and other Christian clergymen in this country also preaching about the need for tolerance and love to heal ‘broken Britain’.
Earlier in the chapter he meets with a Muslim woman, Faiza, and her husband, who has come to the meeting as a chaperone as Muslim women may not meet strange men unaccompanied. She wears the niqub, and tells Hussein that she has reported three of her work colleagues to the HR department because they think she’s an extremist for doing so. She also talks about how the Muslim community in Manchester has been misrepresented thanks to the wretched suicide bomber at the Ariane Grande concert.
”One of the suicide bombers, Salman Abedi, was from a mosque in Didsbury here in Manchester,’ Faiza explains, adding in exasperation: ‘We have almost seventy mosques in this city. Yes, twenty-nine innocent kids died. And over a hundred were injured. For what crime?’ she shrugs. ‘One suicide bomber – one salafi – caused the incident, but what about the hundreds of Muslim taxi drivers who immediately took the injured to hospital? The drivers didn’t charge for this, but just offered their compassion and help. And why do we forget all the Muslim doctors and nurses at the hospital>’ Faiza is speaking passionately but intelligently.’ (p. 38). Elsewhere in the chapter he describes how all the mosques in the area condemned the bombing, but this wasn’t reported in the press coverage. And other Muslims tell him that they tried to warn the authorities six times about Abedi but were ignored. It’s a familiar story I’ve heard about other Muslim extremists – the congregation at the local mosque were worried, and attempted to alert the authorities only to be ignored.
I haven’t finished the book yet, but it seems to me that Hussein is trying to present a fair picture of British Islam. Islam, like most other religious, isn’t a monolith but composed of a number of sects, which may differ considerably in their theology and practise. Indeed, the title of one book we had in the library at College on Islam was The Sectarian Milieu. There are serious issues and challenges from some of the more austere sects, which reject mainstream cultural values and integration. And Muslims are like everyone else – human beings -, and so may have their own prejudices and biases. And some are no doubt racist thugs and bullies, just like some Whites.
These issues have to be squarely addressed, not denied, or distorted so that all British Muslims become tainted due to the actions of violent extremists. If we don’t do this, then it’ll be left to the real bigots and Islamophobes like Tommy Robinson and the EDL.
Rafida+ is a Muslim YouTuber, and I would guess, a Shia, who’s staunchly behind the British movie Lady of Heaven. This is about the life of Mohammed’s daughter, Fatima, as told to a young girl fleeing from the horrors of ISIS’ regime in Iraq. It was written by Sheikh Habib, a respected Shia cleric, and its executive produce, Malik Shlibak, is also Muslim. Nevertheless, Cineworld were forced to withdraw it from cinemas last week following protests in Bradford, Birmingham and other cities. The protesters ranted that it was blasphemous and causing sectarian hatred. The real issue, it appears, is that it presents the story from the point of view of the Shia. Fatima was married to Ali, who is revered by the Shia as the first Imam and the true leader of the Muslim community after the Prophet’s death. One of the most important works of Shia Muslim theology and jurisprudence it the Kitab al-Irshad, or Book of Guidance. This includes the legal decisions made by Ali. Cineworld pulled the movie because they felt they could not protect their employees. This is the underlying threat presented by such protesters. The teacher at a school in Batley,, who was at the centre of protests after he showed his class the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in a lesson about free speech, is still in hiding. And in Britain these protests can be traced back to the campaign against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in the 1980s. This was accompanied by cynical, opportunistic fatwa demanding Rushdie’s murder by the Ayatollah Khomeini. As a result, the author was forced into hiding for years.
Rafida+’s video presents the opposite case for the showing of the film. In it, a White British woman explains that she wants to see the movie because she works for the oil company, Saudi-Aramco. As a result, she’s been around Muslims, knows something about the religion, and would like to know more. A security guard at the mall or wherever then walks over to her to rant about how it’s blasphemous, ‘there isn’t an inch of truth in it’, and that it shouldn’t be shown. He keeps walking away and coming back. You can see in the background women dressed in the all-enveloping chador, and there are women’s voices off camera reassuring her that she’s right and the security guard most definitely isn’t and should mind his own business. I’m sure that these are Shia women, who also want to see the movie, and who appreciate the White woman’s interest in their religion.
Normally I’m very much in favour of people’s right to protest, but this right ends when there’s a threat to people’s lives. The protesters have a right to voice their opposition to the movie, but not to the extent that the cinema manager and chain feel their lives and those of their employees are at risk. And just as they have a right to protest, so others have the right to see the movie. If the protesters want to show their opposition to the movie, they are free to make their own movie presenting their point of view, just as they are free to produce books, pamphlets and video material doing the same. This is free speech.
What they should not be doing is demanding the suppression of a film that contradicts and challenges their views with masked and tacit threats.
In doing so, they are the ones trying to stop people learning more about Islam and communities coming together through the movie.
I feel I have to comment on this story now going the rounds on the right-wing satellite news shows like GB News and the Murdoch-owned Talk TV, if only to provide some perspective on it. They’ve been discussing Cineworld’s decision to remove a British-made film, in which a young Muslim girl learns about the life of Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima. The film’s directed by Eli King, and was written by a Muslim clergyman, and its executive producer, Malik Shlibak, appeared on GB News talking to Nigel Farage to defend the movie. There were mass protests outside cinemas in Bolton and Birmingham, which led to the cinema chain removing the movie, first from those towns and now across the country. They stated that they were afraid that if they did not do, they could not guarantee the security of their staff.
One of the accusations against the film is that it is blasphemous, because it shows Mohammed’s face. This is frequently omitted in Islamic art, it has to be said. There’s either an oval hole left for the face, or else the face of Mohammed and other leading members of the early Muslim community are hidden behind veils. Shlibak explained to the Fuhrage that Habib, the Islamic scholar who wrote the film, was a highly respected clergyman with a following around the world. They were also very careful to base it on the historical sources. As for blasphemy in portraying the Prophet’s face, Shlibak stated that this wasn’t true, as there is a variety of attitudes towards the portrayal of Mohammed across the Muslim world.
The real issue, it appears, is sectarian. The protesters were all Sunnis, the orthodox branch of Islam, who objected to the film because it was from the Shia perspective. Fatima was married to Ali, whom the Shias revere as the first Imam and the true successor to Mohammed as the leader of the nascent Muslim community. However, he was passed over in favour of three members of the Meccan aristocracy, who had converted to Islam. Ali’s sons, Hassan and Hussein, attempted to seize power but were defeated in battle by the forces of the Caliph Muawiya. They were killed, their forces routed and the women of Ali’s family captured. Shia Muslims commemorate this event annually with processions and a passion play, in which they carry models of the Hassan and Hussein’s mausoleums.
Apart from Shlibak, the Fuhrage also talked to a Muslim who supported the protests. He denied that the film was being accused of blasphemy, because blasphemy doesn’t exist in Islam. The protests were instead against it because it caused sectarian tensions. Now the statement that blasphemy doesn’t exist in Islam is pure taqiyya, a lie to defend the faith. Technically what he said is correct – it doesn’t have quite the same concept, but has a similar idea. This is ‘insulting Islam’. There have been mob lynchings and murders of people accused of blasphemy in Pakistan. The Pakistani legal code also considers it a crime, and there are 200 people on death row in the country on blasphemy charges. When the man defending the protests repeatedly refused to answer Nige’s questions about blasphemy, Nige ended the interview ‘in the interests of free speech’.
I found an other video today in which the protests were being discussed by Leo Kearse, a Conservative comedian, who has appeared with Sargon of Gasbag’s Lotus Eaters, and another man, whom I didn’t recognise. It seems that the protesters were also recorded chanting ‘Allahu akbar’ and ‘Shia kaffir’, Shia unbelievers. Although unremarked by the three discussing the issue, this is particularly chilling. Muslims cannot enslave other Muslims under the explicit dictates of sharia law, although this was frequently violated. In the Middle Ages, however, a number of Sunni theologians and jurists ruled that the Shia were not Muslims, but unbelievers. They could thus be killed and their children enslaved. A few years ago the Grand Mufti of Mecca declared that the Shia were ‘heretics, worthy of death’, which is a call to genocide if ever I heard one. Kearse added that this was a problem of importing thousands, millions of people from other cultures that don’t share our values. He was corrected by the second panellist, who made the point that the people speaking were all born here. The problem was about parallel societies. This is a genuine problem. There have been articles in the press discussing the way White and ethnic minority communities are growing apart. There was one such in the left-wing political magazine, Prospect, a few years ago about one town in which Whites and Muslim lived in separate areas and had nothing to do with each other. The panellists stated that there wasn’t much in the way of British values on display. No, the protesters were following the traditional values of the Sunni Muslim world. They also made the point that it was similar to the teacher, who was hounded of his job at a school in Batley because he dared to show his class the French cartoons of Mohammed. This fellow and his family are still in hiding a year later. And it was for showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that the French teacher, Thomas Pattie, was murdered following similar protests.
Julia Harley-Brewer on Talk TV tried to put it into some kind of perspective by comparing it to Christian protests against Monty Python’s Life of Brian. And a few years before in the ’70s there were also protests against the horror film The Exorcist because of its portrayal of demonic possession. But as far as I know, these protests never included death threats, whether explicit or tacit, against those involved in the movie. The real parallels, and the source of the problem, are the protests in Bradford in the 1980s against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. This was intended as a critique of western racism, and the Mahound character, who was supposed to be a caricature of Mohammed, actually wasn’t at all. People I know who’ve read the book have said it’s not blasphemous. It is, however, incredibly boring. The book was denounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini as a cynical political ploy in order to gain some kind of moral leadership over the Muslim world against Saudi Arabia. In Britain there were mass protests, led in Bradford by Mohammed Akhthar, Kalim Saddiqui and other intolerant hardliners. Akhthar penned a pamphlet, Be Careful With Mohammed, which I had the misfortune to read when I was briefly trying to study Islam at postgraduate level. It’s a staunch defence of traditional Islam, which is held up as everything good and admirable as compared to western society and Christianity, which is everything inferior and wrong. And Akhthar makes very explicit the British Muslim community’s rejection of British culture and values ‘They came to Britain to work, not to become Englishmen’. These protests gave the Muslim radicals in Britain as sense of power, especially as Rushdie was forced to go into hiding for a decade or so. In 1991 or so Kalim Saddiqui was filmed in his mosque in a BBC documentary, The Trouble With Islam, telling his flock that British society was a vast killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to us. When asked about this, he bleated some nonsense about a forthcoming Muslim holocaust.
But to return to the death threats, these are not confined to the leaders of the mass protests. The Muslim evangelist Ali Dawah in one of his videos told one of the ex-Muslim atheist YouTubers that when Britain becomes an Islamic state, he’d be put to death. One of the ex-Muslim atheists, Harris Sultan, appealed for donations a little while ago to pay for protection after a British Muslim put a price on his head.
I feel very strongly that we have to start pushing back against these bigots. One of the criticisms levelled against the handling of these protests is that the police didn’t turn up. I’m not surprised. They were no doubt scared of being accused of racism and Islamophobia, which may have been blown up into mass demonstrations around the globe. But I also despise the way protests like these are being ignored and played down by our politicians. I well appreciate why. They’re afraid of stoking real hatred against ordinary Muslims, who have nothing to do with the protests and who may not share these views. When Akhthar and Saddqui were organising protests in Bradford, there were counter protests against them from liberal Muslims. One of my former college’s lecturers on Islam also went up, and quote the passage in the Quran which condemns religious intolerance. I think it was probably the verse that runs ‘There should be no compulsion in religion’.
And protests carrying real or implied death threats aren’t confined to Muslims. A year or so ago Kathleen Stock, a feminist scholar, was forced out of her job following mass protests by students. She was accused of transphobia because of her stated belief that transwomen aren’t women. The university first tried sacking her for bigotry, which she successfully challenged. But she went anyway because she no longer felt safe.
I think this all needs to be stopped now. People have the right to protest but not to the extent where others fear for their lives. I wonder if it’s time to demand legislation against protests where there is a reasonable fear of threats to life and limb, and to make sure it is properly enforced. And I realise that this is an attack on free speech and the right to protest, but I cannot see any other way of defending free speech against such mobs without it.
Here are the videos I’ve mentioned.
Farage talking to executive producer Malik Shlibak:
I’m still annoyed about the conduct of the counter-protesters nearly three weeks ago, who turned up to demonstrate against Tommy Robinson’s film ‘The Rape of Telford’. Robinson has been exploiting the issue of the Muslim grooming gangs to push his own violent, deceptive and malign islamophobia against Muslims as a whole. But there is a real issue there, as the gangs were enabled to prey on some many extremely vulnerable girls and young women for twenty years and more because the authorities – the police, local councils and social workers – were afraid of being called racist and starting riots if they did anything to stop them. And the grooming gangs were racists – they mainly targeted White girls, and those girls were physically and verbally abused because they were White. But this aspect of the gangs is ignored by mainstream, liberal anti-racism. There are no crowds of people demonstrating against the gangs chanting ‘Black and White, unite and fight’. The crowd, drawn from the trade unions and Stand Up to Racism, who turned up to protest against Robinson did nothing but chant the usual anti-fascist slogans – ‘Fascist scum off our streets!’ and ‘Refugees welcome’, but did nothing to tackle him on the issue he was exploiting. Although they told Callum of the Lotus Eaters that ‘Of course they didn’t support the grooming gangs’, they didn’t denounce them. They could easily have done so without supporting Robinson. Instead they look worse. Because Robinson’s supporters included a Black man wearing a sweatshirt with the slogan ‘Black and White, unite!’ The counter-protesters, by contrast, marched off before the testimony from the abused girls began. They looked at best complacent, at worst anti-White, because anti-White racism is outside the mindset of liberal anti-racism. They don’t know how to handle it, and my guess is that they don’t really believe it exists or is as important as tackling racism against Blacks and ethnic minorities.
I was so angry I wrote to Hope Not Hate about the issue, suggesting that we needed to incorporate marches and demonstrates against anti-White racism into mainstream, liberal anti-racism. I chose Hope Not Hate because in addition to attacking White supremacism and fascism, it also dared to tackle Islamism and religious extremism. It seemed far more open to attacking anti-White racism than some of the other, similar organisations. For example, I also wrote to about this issue to Stand Up To Racism, and didn’t receive a reply. And I don’t expect to get one either. Yes, I know Hope Not Hate has connections to the wretched Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the smear factory accusing decent anti-racists of anti-Semitism because they support Corbyn and the Palestinians. And yes, I’m very aware that Hope Not Hate pushed the anti-Semitism smears against the Labour leader. But sometimes you have to use the materials present, as there’s little alternative. So I sent them this email.
”Dear Sir,
I have always been impressed by the great work Hope Not Hate has done and is doing in uniting people of all races and creeds in this country against the threat of racism and Fascism on the one hand, and Islamist religious extremism on the other. I have read with great interest and pleasure about your organisation’s attempts to combat Tommy Robinson and his very real islamophobia. But I am writing to you in this instance to express my grave concerns that the liberal left’s response to his rally and film, ‘The Rape of Telford’, has been so poor and catastrophically mismanaged that by contrast Robinson and his supporters seemed good.
As you are aware Robinson has been exploiting the very understandable and entirely reasonable public fears about the grooming gangs as part of his wider campaign to sow hate against British Muslims as a whole. A couple of weeks ago he turned up in Birmingham to show his film about the grooming gangs, The Rape of Telford, which included testimony from the abused girls. He was met with a counterdemonstration from Unite the union and Stand Up To Racism. And this is where the problems lie.
The counterdemonstrators seemed not to understand that victims of racism in this instance were White and to tackle this issue while at the same time expressing their disgust at Robinson. Instead they shouted the usual slogans like ‘Fascist scum off our streets’ and ‘Refugees welcome’. These are fine and suitable against the usual anti-immigration and racist demonstrations. But here they miss the point. They give the impression that the established anti-racist organisations are so fixated on anti-Black and Asian racism, that they find the very concept of anti-White racism literally unthinkable and have no response to it. This is not the impression they should give, and I’m sure it’s unintentional. One of the members of the right-wing Lotus Eaters YouTube channel actually asked them if they supported the grooming gangs. They replied that they certainly didn’t, but did not reply to his next question about why they weren’t over there with Robinson protesting against the grooming gangs.
They shouldn’t, of course, but this doesn’t mean that they should stay silent when it comes to anti-White racism and abuse. The real issue behind the grooming gangs is that they were allowed to get away with it for so long by the police, social services and local authorities because the victims were White and the authorities were afraid of being accused of racism. There are concerns about how the inquiry has been managed,, with some of the witnesses complaining that they have been instructed to limit their testimony and some of the evidence being redacted. There is speculation that some very prominent people, going as high as Blair’s government, are being protected.
It wasn’t always the case that anti-White racism was ignored. In the 1990s the CRE published a report, written by Independent and i journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown about Black and Asian anti-White racism as it was found that 60 per cent of the victims of a racist incidents were White. In the first decade of this century Sunny Hidak in the Guardian wrote a piece stating that anti-racism must now include poor Whites and attack religious extremist organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir. But this inclusive message seems to have been forgotten or discarded in the age of Black Lives Matter.
I strongly believe that the way to fight Robinson is to take this issue out of his hands. People should be marching against the Muslim grooming gangs, just as they should and do march against White fascists and racists. Indeed, a few years ago when the Islamic preachers of hate were emerging with the Satanic Verses controversy in Bradford, liberal Muslims organised marches and demonstrations against them. But they complained they were given no support from mainstream society. Blacks, Asians, Muslims, Christians, atheists, Hindus and other faiths need to unite and march together against anti-White racism. I believe this is possible and non-Whites would be willing to join such marches and protests if it were organised by genuine anti-racist organisations. You can protest against anti-White racism without supporting fascists and islamophobes like Robinson or the BNP.
But this is what the established anti-racist organisations are failing to do. And I’m afraid their refusal to engage with this is handing Robinson a terrible weapon. If you watch the video he produced with Voice of Wales and Free Man Media on the ‘Rape of Telford’, one of his supporters is a young Black or mixed race man with the sweatshirt bearing the slogan ‘Black and White unite’. This is what the real anti-racists should be doing, but aren’t.
I would like to see it changed, but I’m afraid it seems that you may be the only organisation that will take this on board. I wrote a similar email to Stand Up to Racism a few weeks ago and have not received a reply. I would be very interested to receive your views about this subject, which I intend to place on my blog. You can contact me wit the email below: ————-
Yours with very best wishes,
David -‘
To be fair, I did get a reply from Hope Not Hate’s head honcho, Nick Lowles, telling me I’d get a reply before the end of the week. But all I got was an invitation to join the Zoom webinar about the current State of Hate, which seems to be entirely about White fascists. It’s good work, but not an answer to my inquiry.
Clearly anti-White racism isn’t an issue mainstream anti-racist organisations want to touch. And so they leave it to be exploited by the real islamophobes and Nazis like Robinson.
According to this week’s Radio Times, this Monday’s (17th May 2021) edition of Parallel Lives on Radio 4 is on the race riots which erupted in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2001. The blurb for the programme on page 125 of the magazine runs
Reporter Barnie Choudhury looks back on the 2001 race riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford. He hears from people who worked to build bridges in the community, employing mediators from Northern Ireland to conduct meetings between BNP supporters and Asian residents. He also hears how the period may have been an early indicator of dissatisfaction in traditional Labour heartlands – asking the then Home Secretary David Blunkett and Baron Khan of Burnley whether we should engage with politicians deemed beyond the pale or pursue a policy of ‘no platform’.
The programme is on at 8.00 pm.
The Financial Times did an investigation of the cause of the riots by one of their Asian reporters. She spoke to the political candidates from the main parties – Labour, Lib Dem and Conservatives – who were all Asian, and seemed more concerned over the Indian possession of Kashmir than local issues. She considered that it was this neglect that was a major cause of the riots. She also met Asian ladies, who had been warned by Whites not to go down certain roads where racist gangs were waiting. They told her that Whites were also against racism too.
I don’t think it’s unconnected to the riots that in that year, Whites constituted the majority of victims of racist attack, though I wonder if the BBC programme will mention this.
I thought I’d mention this programme as a number of the great commenters on this blog lived in those towns at the time and remember the riots.
Zelo Street yesterday posted an article that ‘Hatey’ Katie Hopkins has slithered out from under whatever stone she hides under, and endorsed the Tories. And in doing so made some clearly islamophobic and racist comments directed at the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and Sayeeda Warsi.
Hopkins started off by gloating about the extent of Bozo’s majority. She tweeted
Boris majority on track to be bigger than Thatchers or Blair’s. Incredible turn from Labour to Tory in unthinkable seats like Redcar, jihadi-central-Stoke & Workington … Formally out of the EU in December … Nationalism is back in Britain. Time to put British people first.
Zelo Street points out that Thatcher had a majority of 140 in 1983 and Blair 180 in 1997, both of which were much larger than the Blonde Beast’s 80.
Ignoring the inconvenient fact that the Tories lost half their seats in Scotland, she declared that the ‘Ginger Dwarf from the North’ does not speak for all Scots. Which I’m sure she doesn’t, just as Bozo definitely doesn’t speak for all of Britain. But Sturgeon speaks for the majority of Scots.
As Zelo Street’s article showed, Hatey Katie then posted a meme saying ‘Safer to be in Syria’ and tweeted
We have taken back control of England from leftists & those who wish to see this country fail. Now it is time to take back our capital city. Time to Make London Great Again.
Which she then followed with
Now that nationalists are in control of England, we begin the fight back for London … It’s time to kick Sadiq Khan out of office.
She tried to make this not sound racist by including ‘love to my Indian family’, but the islamophobic and racist subtext is very clear.
She then tweeted at Sayeeda Warsi when she sent a message saying that her party must begin healing its relationship with Muslims
It’s our party now Warsi. Time you stepped down, love. Way down.
This was followed by
Your party? Hold on a minute sister. I think you will find it’s OUR party now. Britain has Boris and a blue collar army. Nationalism is back. British people first.
Zelo Street points out that Warsi is British, because she was born in Dewsbury. But Hopkins doesn’t mean that. Hopkins then went on to post a picture of a letter box, saying that this reminded her to post her Christmas cards. She then sent another tweet in the direction of Sadiq Khan, saying
Don’t think of it as a dark day darling. Think of it as a brilliant awakening. Britain is fighting back for its own.
As Zelo Street points out, the doesn’t consider Khan British either, because he isn’t white.
Tim concludes
‘Bozo’s victory has emboldened the racists. I’ll just leave that one there.’
Absolutely. Yesterday I found that a supporter of Tommy Robinson had posted a series of comments on this blog. One was objecting to my article about Mike Stuchbery suing Robinson for libel after Robinson and his storm troopers turned up at Stuchbery’s house banging on the windows and doors at all hours. In addition to demanding that Stuchbery come out to talk to them, they also accused him of being a paedophile. Stuchbery’s a teacher, and so this has made his job in England very difficult and he’s moved to Germany. But Robinson’s supporters see their leader as absolutely innocent of all wrongdoing, and claim that Stuchbery had doxed Robinson by putting up pictures of his house. Which I don’t believe Stuchbery did.
They also gloated about the extent of the Tory victory, and accused Corbyn of supporting Islamist terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the IRA over here. Which he doesn’t. They also posted this comment
Oh, and if you think Islam is so wonderful, I suggest you move to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or Iran then you can see what life is really like under Sharia Law.
They’re talking to the wrong person here. I’m not a Muslim, but I studied Islam as part of a minor degree in Religious Studies when I was at College in the 1970s. This was during the Satanic Verses controversy, and I am very well aware of the bigotry in certain sections of British Islam, and the problems confronting the Islamic world. These are social, political and economic stagnation, an absence and in some cases complete rejection of democratic government and modern human rights, corruption and religious intolerance. However, none of these are unique to Islam. As I’ve pointed out, Christianity and the West passed through similar crises in the 19th and 20th centuries, and I’ve read works by a French anthropologist arguing that Islamism is the result of a similar crisis in Islam as it grapples with modernity. As reader of this blog will be aware, I also call out and denounce Islamist bigotry as well as other forms of racism, including islamophobia.
Some of the problems facing the Islamic world have been greatly exacerbated by outside, western interference. Saudi Arabia has gained its powerful position in the Middle East through support by the West, who have used it as a bulwark against secular Arab nationalism in the Middle East. The rise of Islamism in Algeria was partly encouraged by the country’s politically Conservative regime. They saw it as a peaceful alternative to the radical socialism preached by intellectuals with a French education. And there are movement for greater political freedom and feminism within the Islamic world.
Also, just ’cause Muslim countries are a mess doesn’t mean that Muslims over here want to turn Britain into an Islamic state or import some of the elements of Islamic politics that have held these countries back. Yes, you can find the intolerant bigots ranting against Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and so on, and there are those, who would like to turn Britain into an Islamic state. But I’ve also seen them challenged by other British Muslims. There have been demonstrations against bigots like Kalam Sadeequi and the rest. And when Akhthar and his crew were burning copies of the Satanic Verses in Bradford, one of the Islam lecturers from my old College went up there to argue with them, quoting chapter and verse from the Qu’ran why this was wrong. And attempts to launch Islamist parties over here have hardly been impressive. I remember back in the 1980s or early ’90s there was a British Islamic party launched. But it seems to have vanished without trace. If it was Hizb ut Tahrir, then this may have been because it was banned as a terrorist organisation. I’m sure you can find some far left morons, who support it and feel it should be given a voice, but they are very few and far between, despite the Islamophobic propaganda. And Hizb ut Tahrir and groups like it, from what I’ve seen, have never commanded a mass membership.
The wider Muslim community in this country thus should not be accused of terrorism or terrorist sympathies, based on the actions of the Islamist radicals. Nor should they be seen as somehow less British than anyone else in the UK.
Taken with Hopkins’ tweets attacking praising the Tories and attacking Warsi and Sadiq Khan for being Muslims, these comments do seem quite ominous. It reinforces Zelo Street’s conclusion that the Tory victory has emboldened the racist right. After Johnson published his noxious comments about Muslim women in burqas, there was an increase in Islamophobic attacks. And certainly racist incidents have been on the rise since the emergence of UKIP and the Brexit party. Brexit does seem to have encouraged racist Whites to believe that they can get away with the abuse and assault of ethnic minorities. I might be wrong – I hope I am – but I won’t be surprise if we can expect a further increase in racist incidents.
The Conservatives have always played on racism, and Johnson’s victory is going to make this worse.Â
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