Muslim Voices

Here are two very different points of view about the terrible murder in Woolwich - from Ali Miraj writing in The Independent newspaper and Mehdi Hasan whose comment piece appears in today's Telegraph. 

Now I have written about Mehdi Hasan on the blog site previously - see post dated 23 April 2013 on 'Winged Horses' - and I have little time for Mehdi's political posturing and supposedly left-wing political credentials which I regard as a sham.

But even allowing for my dislike of his politics, I think that Mehdi loses this particular argument hands down - in fact I think he must be deliberately pushing his own head into the sand, if he cannot see that Islam has a real problem with violence.

Religious fanatics down the centuries have invoked the name of their God as a justification for killing their enemies - but Islam is the only religion where murderous violence continues to be practised on such a vast scale.

Whether is Iraq where different branches of the Muslim faith attack and kill each other on a regular basis - or in Pakistan where murder is the fate that often awaits people who are brave enough to stand up to that country's offensive 'blashphemy' laws. 

Or in Islam's response to the rogue American pastor who threatened to burn copies of the Koran - which became an excuse for religious leaders to incite murderous violence around the world - and that's without going into the 'fatwa' issued against Salman Rushdie for daring to publish his book, The Satanic Verses.

Now I have been very encouraged by the response of the Muslim community in the UK to the terrible events in Woolwich - its leaders have all condemned without any  equivocation the murder of a young British soldier.

But, as Ali Miraj says, there is much more to do - for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Woolwich is only the latest act of barbarism: Muslims, we must take on this cancer in our midst

By Ali Miraj

There is a disconnect between community ‘elders’ and a younger generation

Woolwich is a seminal moment. In a speech to the Conservative Party conference in 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, I referred to the perpetrators as “knife-wielding nutters”. We now have “cleaver-brandishing maniacs” on the streets of London. The horrific attack on an off-duty soldier and the blood-curdling justification of it was designed to shock and instill fear.

The usual round of condemnation from Muslim leaders has begun and Muslim members of parliament will be rolled out to proclaim that this is nothing to do with Islam. That is not good enough. Violent extremism is a cancer in the midst of Muslims and it must be excised.

There are two key issues here. First, the historic failure to clamp down on those inciting hatred. I remember going to see my local MP in leafy Ruislip/Northwood in 1993 when I was a student at the London School of Economics to show him literature being handed out by a radical Muslim group on university campuses. I told him that the Government had to crack down on this fast. He smiled and nodded politely.

Twelve years later, in 2005, when I was standing as a parliamentary candidate in the marginal constituency of Watford, I again encountered this group handing out flyers outside the local mosque. They asked to interview me and I was probed for my views on homosexuals. I responded that if elected, I would seek to represent homosexuals, just like every other constituent, to the best of my ability. They responded by proclaiming that homosexuals should be killed. That such views are allowed to be peddled is unacceptable and dangerous.

Second, and more important, is the ineptitude and utter failure of self-proclaimed Muslim leaders to tackle these extremists head-on with intellectual argument. There is a complete disconnect between the community “elders” looking back starry-eyed on the motherland they left behind decades ago, and a younger, much better-educated, British-born generation with totally different priorities.

Foreign policy is an issue that was cited at Woolwich as a justification for the killing. But there are millions of people in Britain, Muslim and non-Muslim, who vent disagreement and anger by protesting, writing letters to their MPs and blogging. They do not hack people to death in the street.

My message to Muslims in this country is to wake up. It may be the case that the perpetrators of this attack were mentally ill and used religion to justify their acts – but there remains a deeper problem. It is simply not good enough to hide behind the argument that there will always be extremists as an excuse for failing to confront these people head-on. There have been too many cases of Muslims wanting to kill their fellow citizens in cold blood to be palmed off as isolated incidents. The gauntlet has yet again been thrown down. Muslims must rise to the challenge.

The writer is founder of the Contrarian Prize

The Muslim faith does not turn men to terror

By Mehdi Hasan

The two suspects in the Woolwich killing were violating the doctrine of their own holy book

On TV news channels, on newspaper comment pages, on social networks, everyone seems to be either a terrorism expert, an Islam expert, or both 

'Whosoever killeth a human being…” says the Koran, in the 32nd verse of its fifth chapter, “it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.”

Thus, the two supposedly Muslim men suspected of killing and mutilating an unarmed, off-duty soldier in the middle of a London street, while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Great”), were violating the injunction of their own holy book. Perversely, it was the non-Muslim Cub Scout leader who, in trying to save the soldier’s life, and standing up to his alleged attackers, was acting in accordance with Koranic principles. Let’s be clear: Islam doesn’t permit the killing of innocents. Jihad is permissible only in self-defence and if sanctioned by a legitimate government. To quote from our Prime Minister’s pitch-perfect statement outside No 10, Wednesday’s barbarism was “a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country”.

Thankfully, British Muslims no longer have to wait for the much-maligned Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), or self-appointed “community leaders”, to take a public stand, nor do they need to compete with clowns like Anjem Choudary for media attention; they have been empowered by Twitter and Facebook, where in great numbers they have expressed disgust at the invoking of Islam to support such an appalling crime. (Commendably, the MCB has issued a press release “unreservedly” condemning the murder as “a barbaric act that has no basis in Islam”.)

Yet conventional wisdom still says the religion of Islam is behind violent extremism and radicalisation; that Muslims don’t do enough to denounce terror; that imams and mosques incite hate and holy war. As is so often the case, the conventional wisdom is wrong. I have been a Muslim all my life and visited mosques across Europe, North America and the UK. Never, not once, have I come across an imam preaching violence against the West or justifying the murder of innocents.

Remember: the Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was thrown out of his local mosque after lashing out at the imam for praising Martin Luther King in his Friday sermon. The Muslim father of the “underwear bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, approached US officials to warn them about his son several months before the latter tried to blow up a US-bound flight in December 2009. And the car bomb planted by Faisal Shahzad in Times Square in 2010 was brought to police attention by a Senegalese Muslim street vendor who spotted smoke coming out of the vehicle.

Many of my fellow Muslims want consistency from politicians and the press. When Anders Breivik, self-styled member of an “international Christian military order”, massacred 77 innocent Norwegians, most them children, in July 2011, did we indict Christianity? Sadly, we hold Islam and Muslims to a separate standard – despite the fact that, nowadays, (self-) radicalisation tends to be an online phenomenon; what the experts call the “third wave” of al-Qaeda-inspired extremism has no need for either UK mosques or Pakistani training camps.

“Is it even possible to stop two nutjobs going online and radicalising themselves and then going out to kill someone on the street with kitchen knives?” an exasperated official asked me yesterday morning. “How do you prevent that?” Demonising Islam or Muslims won’t help.

Listen to Olivier Roy, one of Europe’s pre-eminent experts on extremism: “The process of violent radicalisation has little to do with religious practice.” Read the classified briefing note prepared by MI5’s Behavioural Science Unit in June 2008. “Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly,” reported The Guardian’s Alan Travis, who obtained a copy of the document. “Very few have been brought up in strongly religious households... there is evidence that a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation.”

Yet on TV news channels, on newspaper comment pages, on social networks, everyone is either a terrorism expert, an Islam expert, or both. Some cut and paste verses from the Koran out of context; others unthinkingly demand “reform” of Islam. Few want to discuss the role of British foreign policy in helping to radicalise these young, disaffected individuals.

Meanwhile, former CIA official Marc Sageman says that “11-and-a-half years after 9/11, we still don’t know” what turns young men towards terror.

I’ll tell you this, though: it isn’t my faith or the faith of 1.6 billion other Muslims. For once, I’m with David Cameron.

Mehdi Hasan is political director of the Huffington Post UK