A Muslim who advised the Government following the July 7 London bombings has been arrested after an alleged stabbing. Inayat Bunglawala, 39, was held on suspicion of attacking another man at his £300,000 home.
Category Archives: Analysis & comment
Another defence of ‘Enlightenment values’
Writing at Comment is Free, Faisal Gazi (aka “Sid”, David Toube’s alter ego who posts at Pickled Politics) reviews From Fatwa to Jihad by Kenan Malik (a supporter of the former ultraleftists turned right-wing libertarians who once traded under the name of the Revolutionary Communist Party). Gazi writes:
“… the grievance culture of radical Islam is winning the battle against Enlightenment values, helped along, Malik believes, by multicultural policy and laws like the Racial and Religious Hatred Act (2006), which has made it an offence to incite hatred against a person on grounds of their religion. Its aim was to protect the faith and dignity of minority communities. But the paradox is that these laws are now exploited to undermine the civil liberties of those very same communities they were meant to protect.”
Well, we haven’t read Malik’s book, so we can’t comment on the accuracy of this summary of his argument. But if Gazi thinks that the Racial and Religious Hatred Act set a precedent for undermining civil liberties he obviously hasn’t bothered to study the subject. The legislation was in fact sabotaged by the “Lester amendment”, which produced a completely toothless law that can never be used to mount a successful prosecution of anyone.
As those who have had the misfortune to read his incoherent Harry’s-Place-inspired posts at Pickled Politics will have observed, Gazi combines an endorsement of “Enlightenment values” with a total inability to respect empirical evidence or rational argument.
Brian Whitaker on Islamism
I’m generally an admirer of former Guardian Middle East editor Brian Whitaker – he recently wrote an effective demolition of the government’s stupid decision to bar Ibrahim Moussawi from entering the UK, and anyone who is prepared to have a go at MEMRI and Yigal Carmon is OK by me. But Whitaker’s latest post at Comment is Free (“Should faith override the will of the people?“) is an ill-informed piece that repeats and reinforces misleading cliches about political Islam.
Whitaker’s article is written in response to an earlier CiF piece by Bob Lambert and Jonathan Githens-Mazer (“The demonisation of British Islamism“) which criticised the government for its hostility towards, and current refusal to work with, mainstream Islamists like Daud Abdullah of the Muslim Council of Britain.
Whitaker takes exception to the definition of Islamists, cited by Lambert and Githens-Mazer from the Oxford Dictionary of Islam, as Islamic political or social activists. Whitaker dismisses this as “the broadest possible definition”. He prefers a much narrower one: “Islamists are not simply politicised Muslims but Muslims who view their religion as the basis for a political system – as an ‘ideology that guides society as a whole’ where ‘law must be in conformity with the Islamic sharia’.”
The fact is that a broad definition is used by analysts of Islamism because they need a term that embraces a highly diverse movement. For example, in The Future of Political Islam, Graham E. Fuller writes:
“In my view an Islamist is one who believes that Islam as a body of faith has something important to say about how politics and society should be ordered in the contemporary Muslim World and who seeks to implement this idea in some fashion. The term ‘political Islam’ should be neutral in character, neither pejorative nor judgmental in itself; only upon further definition of the specific views, means and goals of an Islamist movement in each case can we be critical of the process.”
Fuller continues: “I prefer this definition because it is broad enough to capture the full spectum of Islamist expression that runs the gamut from radical to moderate, violent to peaceful, democratic to authoritarian, traditionalist to modernist.”
Whitaker rejects this approach because he wants define Islamism as an ideology that is incompatible with democracy, on the grounds that it seeks to establish a state based on religious principles. He writes:
“One of the basic requirements for freedom in politics is that sovereignty belongs to the people. Power may be delegated to representatives but the people should remain the ultimate arbiters. Islamists, no matter how they try to dress up their ideology, do not accept this key point…. Some aspire to a full-blooded theocracy while others envisage a degree of popular decision-making – at least up to the point where it conflicts with the ‘principles of Islam’.”
Quilliam Foundation links up with Harry’s Place
Well, it had to happen eventually, didn’t it? Today the pro-war, frothing-at-the-mouth, anti-Muslim blog Harry’s Place features a guest post by James Brandon, Senior Research Fellow and Head of Communications at the Quilliam Foundation.
If Ed Husain’s project wasn’t sufficiently discredited already among the UK’s Muslim communities, this surely sets the seal on it. Yet the government pours hundreds of thousands of pounds into the Quilliam Foundation, while severing relations with the genuinely representative Muslim Council of Britain.
Policy Exchange forced to apologise, takes report off website
The right-wing thinktank Policy Exchange has been forced into a humiliating climbdown over its report, “The Hijacking of British Islam”, for making allegations in the report that it now admits were unsubstantiated.
In late 2007 Policy Exchange published the report, reported in the right-wing press without any further fact-checking, that around a quarter of Mosques and Muslim centres of the 100 they visited, were carrying “hate literature”.
Only BBC Newsnight bothered looking further and found that some of the allegations made in the report were refuted by the very organisations accused of selling hate literature.
Policy Exchange has withdrawn the entire report from its website. It has also published this humiliating apology:
The Hijacking of British Islam:
Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage CentreIn this report we state that Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre is one of the Centres where extremist literature was found. Policy Exchange accepts the Centre’s assurances that none of the literature cited in the Report has ever been sold or distributed at the Centre with the knowledge or consent of the Centre’s trustees or staff, who condemn the extremist and intolerant views set out in such literature. We are happy to set the record straight.
Sunny Hundal reports, at Pickled Politics, 30 March 2009
Can we expect that Hazel Blears who addressed a Policy Exchange seminar last July, or Ruth Kelly who provided a foreword to the latest anti-Muslim “report” by Policy Exchange, will now break all links with this discredited right-wing organisation that does so much damage to community cohesion? On balance, probably not.
Where will we find the perfect Muslim for monocultural Britain?
Labour’s anti-terror strategy depends on mythical figures as elusive as WMD, argues Gary Younge.
Well, not entirely mythical. The Quilliam Foundation and the Sufi Muslim Council have done their best to fill the role demanded of Muslims by the government.
Blears severs links with MINAB
A second leading Muslim group bankrolled by the taxpayer is poised to have its Government links severed in a bitter row over extremism. The Mosques and Imams National Advisory Body, a central plank of Labour’s anti-extremism strategy, has been dragged into the dispute.
Yesterday, the Mail told how the Muslim Council of Britain’s links with ministers had been suspended over its refusal to condemn Daud Abdullah for signing a declaration which advocated attacks on the Navy if it tried to stop arms intended for Hamas being smuggled into Gaza.
Now it has emerged that Dr Abdullah is also a member of MINAB’s steering group. Communities Secretary Hazel Blears has ruled ministers will have no further contact with MINAB – which has received £174,000 of public money – until action is taken against Dr Abdullah, who is also deputy secretary-general of the MCB.
Mrs Blears’ stance against both the MCB and MINAB, which is supposed to ensure there are moderate voices in Britain’s mosques, is part of a determination in Government to take a tougher position against those who advocate extremist views.
But last night, Paul Goodman, Tory spokesman on communities, said: “It’s deeply worrying that a body set up to promote moderation has been penetrated by a man who doesn’t deny support for attacks on British troops. There must be zero tolerance of attacks on our armed forces.”
Mail on Sunday continues to smear Inayat Bunglawala
An influential Muslim who advises the Government on combating terrorism will not face charges, despite stabbing a man at his home.
Prosecutors have decided that Inayat Bunglawala acted in self-defence when a drunk turned up at his £300,000 house in Luton, Bedfordshire, in the early hours of the morning.
After a scuffle, the 25-year-old man was left bleeding from six knife wounds to his back, requiring emergency surgery that confined him to hospital for four days.
But the Crown Prosecution Service has accepted Mr Bunglawala’s version of events and has dropped the case – to the immense anger of the injured man and his family.
Mail smears Inayat Bunglawala
A Muslim who advised the Government following the July 7 London bombings has been arrested after an alleged stabbing. Inayat Bunglawala, 39, was held on suspicion of attacking another man at his £300,000 home.
Mr Bunglawala, who also briefed former Security Minister Tony McNulty on the threat posed by Islamic radicals in the UK, was arrested two weeks before Christmas last year. The identity of the alleged victim is unknown and it is not clear what circumstances led to the alleged attack in the early hours of December 13 last year.
Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, who worked as a security adviser to Mr Brown, said of the alleged incident: “This calls into question the Government’s vetting of its Islamic advisers.”
As is the way with this type of smear article, buried right at the end of it we find a quote from Inayat’s lawyers that he “vigorously denies having committed any criminal act whatsoever in relation to this incident”. So who could possibly accuse the Mail of unbalanced reporting?
On the face of it, this sounds like a possible altercation with a burglar. In which case, you’d have thought Inayat would have the full support of the Mail. After all, this is a paper that treated Tony Martin as some sort of hero after he murdered a fleeing would-be burglar by shooting him in the back. But then, Martin was a white BNP supporter, so that was different.
Update: See MPACUK who report:
“Today, the CPS said they would not take any action against Inayat. There was simply no case at all…. What actually happened for those who do not know, is an intruder tried to break into the house of Inayat in the middle of the night. Inayat’s 3 year old child was sleeping as was his pregnant wife, woken by the noise of a man who at first tried to kick in the front door and then failing that, smashed the downstairs window. Inayat confronted the intruder and in the scuffle the intruder was stabbed.”
‘We must stop appeasing Islamist extremism’ says Ed Husain
“We can expect Luton-style protests and worse in the years to come unless the Government gets a grip on Islamism, says Ed Husain.”
Sunday Telegraph, 15 March 2009
What Ed really means, of course, is that the government should stop working with organisations that represent real forces in the Muslim communities, and instead restrict their links to stooge groups like Ed’s own Quilliam Foundation, which represents virtually nothing and is regarded with general contempt.
Meanwhile, over at the Observer, Ed and his self-serving prescriptions for combating extremism are treated to a puff piece by liberal warmonger Nick Cohen, who has never forgiven mainstream Muslim organisations for mobilising opposition to the invasion of Iraq.
Cohen directs his attack on the East London Mosque. This has a mass base in the local Muslim community, for whom it provides a vital resource, with a library, conference rooms, classrooms, a gym and space for 10,000 worshippers, but Cohen says the governent should have nothing to do with anyone associated with it.
He claims this is because of the mosque’s links to the Bangladeshi political party Jamaat-e-Islami, though some of us might suspect that Cohen’s hostility is not unconnected with the fact that the East London Mosque played a crucial role in organising support for the mass demonstration against the Iraq war in February 2003.