Links - 28th November 2019 (2) (Islam/'Islamophobia')

To prevent another Christchurch, Islam must confront the attacks in its name that have radicalised the West - "Solidarity across racial, religious, cultural and political lines to address this global crisis is the only answer. But this means resolutely acknowledging the causal factors of the violence that we are seeing in so many parts of the world. As a Muslim, this leads me to questions that require difficult but honest answers... The targeting of Muslims at prayer in Christchurch comes after nearly two decades during which Islamist atrocities have been a pervasive feature of news bulletins around the world. The massacre in New Zealand would likely be inconceivable if divorced from this wider context in which Islam has become synonymous with terror in the minds of many non-Muslims.Sadly, from an Islamist perspective, the Christchurch atrocity is simply part of an ancient cycle of violence. Of course, most Europeans do not view themselves as being “at war” with Islam. But to a significant percentage of Muslims, this is simply because Westerners have been enjoying the peace of the victor, which Islamists seek to challenge. This is why Christchurch is such a dangerous moment. Ending the cycle of violence requires addressing not only the ideology and motivations of someone like Tarrant, but also the historical framework he shares with many Muslims. That is, that Muslims and non-Muslims are and shall remain in a state of permanent conflict, until the end of time (according to Islamists) or the disappearance of Islam (according to advocates of a “counter-jihad”). Among Muslims and non-Muslims, there is an urgent need to address those obsolete and problematic elements of Islamic orthodoxy that underlie the Islamist worldview, fuelling violence on both sides. The world’s largest Muslim organisation, Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, of which I am General Secretary, has begun to do exactly that. The truth, we recognise, is that jihadist doctrine, goals and strategy can be traced to specific tenets of orthodox, authoritative Islam and its historic practice. This includes those portions of Shariah that promote Islamic supremacy, encourage enmity towards non-Muslims and require the establishment of a caliphate. It is these elements – still taught by most Sunni and Shiite institutions – that constitute a summons to perpetual conflict. It is our firm view that, if Muslims do not address the key tenets of Islamic tradition that encourage this violence, anyone – at any time – can harness them to defy what they claim to be illegitimate laws and butcher their fellow citizens, whether they live in the Islamic world or the West. This is what links so many current events, from Syria to the streets of London. There is a desperate need for honest discussion of these matters. This is why it worries me to see Western political and intellectual elites weaponise the term “Islamophobia,” to short-circuit analysis of a complex phenomenon that threatens all humanity... it is vital to challenge the prevailing “Muslim mindset,” which is predicated upon enmity and suspicion towards non-Muslims, and often rationalises perpetrating violence in the name of Islam. Otherwise, non-Muslims will continue to be radicalised by Islamist attacks and by large-scale Muslim migration to the West."

Islamophobia definition will prevent criticism of the 'hateful' ideology of Islam, say leading atheists - "Richard Dawkins and Peter Tatchell - and other authors including a former member of extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir - say attempts to define Islamophobia risk curtailing freedom of speech and work to expose extremism.  In a book of essays published today by the think tank Civitas, Mr Tatchell said he would have fallen foul of the new definition - proposed by leading politicians and backed by Labour - when he attacked Hizb ut-Tahrir over its anti-gay, anti-women comments... “My protest in 1994 could fall within the sweeping definition of Islamophobia proposed by the APPG, since it talks about Muslimness.  “No-one in our society should be discriminated against because of who they are, yet the term Islamophobia downgrades protecting Muslim people and mistakenly puts the focus on protecting ideas. “This has to be challenged. We are, it seems drifting towards a de facto threat to free speech and liberal values.”... Endorsed by Labour, the LibDems, Scottish Conservatives and some prominent Muslim groups, the APPG definition states: "Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness."  Concerns have been raised, including by the chairman of the National Police Chiefs' Council, that the definition was too vague and could undermine efforts to tackle extremism. Ed Husain, an expert on extremist groups after spending time as a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir as a teenager, said the racial and religious hatred act already made inciting hatred against someone on the basis of religion a crime with the caveat that it should not prohibit criticism of religions.“One impact of adopting any definition of “Islamophobia” is that we encourage victimhood rather than responsibility. We burn the bridges of liberty and freedom of expression on which millions of Muslims travelled to the West’”... Lord (Indarjit) Singh of Wimbledon, the crossbench peer and regular presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, described Islamophobia as a “vague catch-all term” that poses a “danger to free speech and legitimate discussion... David Green, Civitas’s director, said: “There is wide public support for freedom of speech, and it is unlikely to be officially ended by an act of parliament, but it can be chipped away bit by bit.“Giving official recognition to the APPG definition of Islamophobia will be a giant step towards an arbitrary police state.”"

A law against Islamophobia is a terrible idea - "A school tries to prevent Muslim girls coming to school with their faces completely covered. It does so, not because it has any view about Islam, but because it wants teachers and fellow pupils to be able to know the girls, and because it shares the modern Western view that boys and girls should be treated equally. It could, under the sort of law proposed, be accused of Islamophobia. The career of the head could be ruined. So could the education of all the pupils, veiled or unveiled. You can imagine similar confrontations breaking out about mixed-sex swimming, dietary issues, dancing or singing classes, science teaching and so on. Such rows are already sadly common.With good will, the great majority of these issues can be managed. If you drag in the law, good will vanishes. You also empower those people who consider themselves the gatekeepers of their communities. This works against the values of an open society. There is a wide range of views within Islam about the “Muslimness” of women’s clothing, and no absolute rule about headwear. But, of course, it is not the moderate believers who make the most noise. If the authorities allow “Islamophobia” to be outlawed, they will have to define what is Islamic. Since they will be incapable of doing so, they will turn to self-appointed authorities, who, given the current worldwide ferment within Islam, will usually be militant. Our daily life will then have to be negotiated with self-appointed Muslim leaders. The freedoms of all will be curtailed. The resentment which breeds extremism will grow... An important problem is the likely fate of Muslims brave enough to challenge such leaders who claim to speak in the name of their faith. I recently had a conversation with a remarkable person, who lives in Berlin. She is called Seyran Ateş, and she is the imam and founder of what she calls an “inclusive” mosque. It has no denomination. It admits both sexes to pray together, “every legal sexuality” and people of all faiths and none. She hopes soon to open a “university of contemporary Islam”. Seyran is fighting the trend by which mosques in Germany are coming under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood, the main engine of militant, political Islam, and are in league with, and funded by, President Erdogan of Turkey. Both are trying
to organise German Muslims against the values of the society in which
they live.Needless to say, Seyran is often threatened with death. She has been under police protection for the past 12 years. How would such a brave woman fare in a country which ceded control of Muslims to their militants? I bet she’d be labelled Islamophobic."

What does the Muslim Council of Britain have against Muslims like me? | The Spectator Australia - "Have you ever wondered why there are so few moderate Muslim voices in the press? It’s not because they don’t exist. There are over a billion of us in the world. In many cases, it’s because of the way we are treated by hardliners. Once again, they have trained their crosshairs on me, this time charging me with ‘misrepresenting Muslim behaviour and belief’ and ‘negating the belief of some Muslims’. If a Muslim speaks up against political Islam – questioning the legitimacy of these self-appointed spokesmen – this is what we can expect. Just look at this week’s report by a group called the Centre for Media Monitoring, which claims that ‘Islamophobia’ is on the march in Britain. In making its case, the group cites one of my Spectator articles in which I defended Boris Johnson’s right to criticise the burqa (a garment which, unlike Boris, I do not think has any place in a tolerant society, nor a basis in Islam)... The term Islamophobia is also used to silence discussion on issues like the niqab – despite the fact that its use is hotly debated by Muslims around the world. Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria have all passed various laws opposing the wearing of garments like the burqa and niqab. These bans are often motivated by security concerns, but they also make it clear that face-covering is not a central practice in Islam. These nations see the niqab as deeply divisive, not only in Western societies, but in their own Muslim-majority societies too.But rather than argue its case, groups like the Muslim Council of Britain seek to shut down debate altogether. By painting arguments like mine as bigoted and beyond-the-pale, they aim to wrest control of the conversation in favour of another view: that Muslims are perennially demonised and objectified by the very same societies, and media outlets, which allow us to freely express our views... The views of the MCB don’t come from a political party or even its alleged links with the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead, these views merely reflect the rise of identity politics in secular liberal democracies. Today, victimhood is valued above all else.But Muslims who indulge in such identity politics should be aware that these views certainly didn’t exist in the time of the Prophet himself. Even as the Prophet and his early followers faced intense persecution, they didn’t claim victimhood. What’s more, with little historical experience of martyrdom within Islam – explained, in part, by the religion’s meteoric expansion and its rapid ascent to dominance until the peak of Islam’s ‘Golden Age’ – being Muslim had never been equated to victimhood until Islamism arrived in Egypt in the 1920s and soon after brought it to post-war Europe... Islamist groups have made it one of their central aims to discount the value of civil and pluralist Muslim groups. Part of this has been the fantastically successful duping of tolerant, secular, liberal democracies into believing that Islamists are a vulnerable and marginalised religious minority, instead of the totalitarian theocrats they really are... Given the track record of the Muslim Council of Britain, it’s laughable that any projects affiliated to it should be taken seriously on issues like bias, prejudice, discrimination and tolerance. Look how the Council has acted towards Ahmadi Muslims, pacifist Muslims who now face persecution in Britain at the hands of other Muslims, as well as further afield (notably in Pakistan, where they are persecuted by lethal, deeply unjust blasphemy laws)... The Centre for Media Monitoring would be better named the Centre for Controlling the Narrative of Islam. Its mission is arguably not to combat bias, xenophobia or even the misappropriated use of the term Islamophobia, but instead to lay sole claim to the narrative of both Islam and Muslims in Britain, and silence Muslims like me."

Boris has a point about Islam - "offence-miners at the Guardian have discovered that Johnson once wrote that Islam has held Muslim countries back by ‘centuries’... We can moralise all day long about the evils of European colonialism. But it was a historical blink of an eye in comparison to the centuries of Arab and Muslim colonialism... We can wring our hands over the influence of literalist Christianity on American politics. But this is a drop in the ocean compared to the cultural and political leverage of Islam across the globe. We can lament the potential harm to Indian democracy posed by militant Hindu nationalism. But there is nothing questionable about entertaining the notion that centuries of Muslim global imperialism – which ended less than 100 years ago – might have left behind a less than a gleaming legacy. Johnson’s allusion to the lack of social and economic development in the Muslim world seems to have offended some people. And yet these same people are usually the first to demand that anyone arriving in Europe from poor Muslim countries should obviously, unquestionably, be accepted as a legitimate refugee. Perhaps, on some level, they recognise that life in Europe is freer, safer and more prosperous than life in the Muslim world. For generations, millions of Muslims have chosen to leave societies dominated by Islamic religious laws and cultural norms, and have thrived instead in the West – benefitting from relative political stability, individual freedom and the rule of law. Unfortunately, thanks to today’s multicultural celebration of difference, any attempt by Muslims to wholeheartedly join the common body of British, European or American citizenry is almost seen as suspect – as if it is some unfortunate dilution of authentic ‘Muslimness’. Both Islamists and their apologists in the liberal-left do not see Muslims as truly belonging to Western societies... This view of Muslims as little more than political props was made clear by US congresswoman Ayanna Pressley at the weekend. She said that ‘we don’t need… Muslims who don’t want to be a Muslim voice’... she confirmed the obvious: that there is a stock victimhood role for Musilms in the Western world – a role that has been hard-won by self-appointed ‘representatives’ like the Muslim Council of Britain, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and other peddlers of the Muslim-victimhood and ‘Islamophobia’ narratives. If, however, you happen to be a Muslim who is unwilling to shuffle obediently into frame, looking suitably put upon, then you are deemed a problem... You even have a thinly disguised racial slur reserved just for you: Native Informant – a word used to smear liberal Muslims, ex-Muslims and critics of Islamism as traitors. Like ‘Uncle Tom’, it’s one of those curious epithets that white (and in this case, non-Muslim) ‘allies’ of identitarian grievance-mongers feel empowered to spit at anyone who steps off the reservation. Anyone genuinely interested in the lives of Muslim citizens (in the West and the Islamic world) should welcome robust discussions about Islam’s history and legacy, instead of responding with outrage. After all, Islamic history is part of human history, and is therefore not beyond critical analysis. Instead, commentators and politicians are obediently trotting out, and seeking to protect by law, a fairytale view of Muslim history and identity that was invented by early 20th-century Islamists, and then foisted on the rest of us. If the identitarians and their allies actually trusted Muslims and treated them as adults, Muslims would not be considered any more likely to overreact to critical discussions of Islam’s legacy than a Catholic would be to someone saying that Europe is ultimately better off following the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire."

Is Boris wrong to claim Islam set the Muslim world back? | Coffee House - "I do love the Guardian. As the years go by almost no publication continues to give me such constant amusement... ‘Unearthed’. Wow, this must be exceptionally secret – as well as strong – stuff. So we have to keep reading to discover that the offence complained of did not occur during a rally in a Bavarian beer-hall, but in ‘An appendix added to a later edition of The Dream of Rome, his [Johnson’s] 2006 book about the Roman empire.’ So in fact when the Guardian’s intrepid correspondent, Frances Perraudin, talks about ‘unearthing’ something, what she really means is that she has read some of a book published a little over a decade ago. You can say many things about reading books, including reading books by prominent politicians, but the turning of research into ‘unearthing’ is the sort of self-glorification and task-inflation that could only occur in a trade that is dying... Perraudin in all likelihood called up the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and ‘Tell Mama’ for comment. The way such organisations work is that journalists of the Perraudin school call them up to ask if they are outraged by something, the organisations then agree that they are outraged at this week’s outrage and thus the journalist gets a story and the group in question gets to continue to hold itself out as a representative body of some kind. Making everyone a winner."

Why Students Protested Event Analyzing Islamism - "I went to Rochester to speak on a panel about the ideas behind ISIS, Al Qaeda and the wider Islamist movement in the Middle East. The panel also included Graeme Wood of The Atlantic magazine; Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, a secular activist and founder of Ideas Beyond Borders; and Adnan Ahmed, a writer and imam in the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. The event was co-sponsored by the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation, the Ayn Rand Institute, and the campus College Republicans.Before any of the speakers even arrived on campus, a petition to cancel the event had circulated among students. When the panel was about to begin, several student groups — Students for a Democratic Society among them — showed up to pressure the administration and the organizers to shut down the event.Fortunately they failed. But they made their presence felt within the hall. Many attended the event, heckling at times; some stood in the back to protest with a sign; and they dominated the question period with mini-speeches and angry objections... After listening further to the students and probing their views, I took away two core objections of a more substantive nature. Neither is defensible, and both reveal the impact of certain destructive views prevalent on college campuses today. The first: the protesting students’ own campus clubs — including the Arab students association and the Muslim Students’ Association — had not been involved or consulted in advance... What issues did they want to see discussed?The event’s agenda, she said, would have to explore “US imperialism” in the Middle East and the consequences of America’s foreign policy, which she and several other students held to be the main, if not the exclusive, causal factor explaining the Islamist phenomenon. By the time she had finished describing her view of what such a hypothetical event would have looked like, it was clear there was little room, if any, for an exploration of the ideas behind ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the rest of the Islamist phenomenon. What she outlined would have been an entirely different event, with the Islamist issue marginalized if not elided, and the focus squarely on her interpretation of America’s role in the Middle East... Essentially, the objection was that because the panel focused on the ideas of the Islamist movement, rather than aligning with the students’ doctrinaire view of American policy, the panel did not belong on campus. (Later, I learned that these student groups had indeed been invited to co-sponsor the event, but refused.) The second core objection turned on the issue of “representation”... Both of these objections reflect aspects of a tribalist mindset. The one treats views opposed to its dogmas as illegitimate; the other stresses collective identity as defining one’s views. Both are fundamentally anti-intellectual. Such an outlook is pernicious, especially so on a college campus, where students come to learn about and explore new ideas. And it is this anti-intellectual outlook that students are encouraged to adopt."

Prescriptive Racialism and Racial Exclusion - "They held a banner that read, “You Do Not Represent Us”... I overheard a student protestor berate one of the panellists and complain, inter alia, that the event had not been organized by an Arab. I interjected to inform her that I was the organizer of the event and that I am indeed an Arab. “You don’t count,” she immediately retorted. “We know your politics”... she is president of the Arab student association. I was already aware of this practice of “Uncle Tom-ing” members of minorities who challenge certain orthodoxies, but this was the first time I had experienced it firsthand... Faisal Saeed Al Mutar—an Iraqi born secular rights advocate and the only Arab on the panel—bore the brunt of these attacks. He was denounced as a puppet and a traitor for discussing the role of religion in motivating groups like ISIS in his native country. Particularly distasteful was the insinuation that race is not simply a descriptive category, but that it is thought to require certain duties of, and impose certain prerogatives upon, the individual. To retain one’s status as an “authentic” Arab (or member of any other “marginalized” demographic), one has to believe certain things. Because I had organized this discussion, I was rendered persona non grata among those who insist we turn a blind eye towards atrocities committed in the name of Islam. Investigating this matter at all apparently constituted a betrayal of my tribe, the punishment for which is excommunication. I’ve come to call this attitude “prescriptive racialism”—the notion that racial identity should determine how people act and what they believe. To be accepted as an Arab, I must adopt the same politics as all other Arabs. This belief dominates the paranoid psychology of white supremacists, who are similarly pre-occupied with the idea of race treachery. Today, it has become central to the worldview of many on the social justice Left... In a free society, we must commit to persuasion if we want to change minds. But how is that possible if the ideas of those who do not belong to a minority group are ignored and critics within that minority group are shamed and summarily expelled? Progressive culture screams platitudes of coexistence, tolerance, and multiculturalism even as it undermines the values that make those things possible... If being outside of a group precludes someone from criticizing its members or its doctrines, then what are we to do when those members commit injustices against outsiders? The dangerous and sectarian practice of prescriptive racialism is an outgrowth of an insistence that we think of people not as individuals but as representatives of groups—we speak of “the Arab experience” as if it were a uniform phenomenon. In a world in which groups are considered more important than people, it was inevitable that we would forfeit the ability to think in terms of unique human beings.. Defeating this rising tide of tribalism requires us to be adamant about the importance of the validity of ideas and criticisms and not their source. When the protestors raised the banner which read “You Do Not Represent Us” what they really meant is “We Do Not Consider You One of Us, So What You Say Is Worthless.” The Islamic philosopher Al Ghazali did the same when he railed against the Greek pagan influence during the Islamic Golden Age, and in doing so he extinguished the brilliant flame of scientific thought of his era. The Middle East has been dark ever since. When someone like Faisal Saeed Al Mutar attempts to reignite it by translating Western works into Arabic, he is met with antagonism and exclusion—not from an intellect like Al Ghazali, but from sanctimonious second-generation Arab students living in upstate New York. These are unworthy opponents of such a magnificent project."