Salman Rushdie’s recent knighthood has once again led to protests across Pakistan and Iran, yet British Muslims have refused to be provoked. Salma Yaqoob explains why.
Category Archives: UK
London mayor defends Muslims as bomb plot foiled
London Mayor Ken Livingstone called on Britons Saturday not to demonize Muslims after a double car bomb plot was foiled in the capital, amid fears of a Islamist terror threat. “In this city, Muslims are more likely to be law-abiding than non-Muslims and less likely to support the use of violence to achieve political ends than non-Muslims,” he told BBC Radio. “They have played a good and active and growing role in creating a multi-cultural society,” he added.
He noted that terrorist acts had been carried out in London over the years by various groups including for example far-right groups. For years the British capital was wracked by violence by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). It was crucial to understand “that that doesn’t mean that all white men are potentially a threat to society any more than all Muslims are,” he added.
Fascists blame Glasgow car bomb on local Muslims
“Glasgow is Scotland’s largest city and home to an estimated 25,000 Muslims. We can expect the usual knee-jerk reaction from the establishment liberals that the alleged high levels of poverty found in the Muslim community is a factor driving young male Muslims to extremism. This is of course nonsense as high levels of poverty in Glasgow does not turn native Scots youths into suicide bombers. In reality the fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran, the Islamic holy book is the compelling factor behind these kinds of attacks; commanding as it does a holy war against non-believers to spread the word of Islam by any means necessary, including murder and mayhem. Suicide bombers are held in esteem by their immediate families and the wider Muslim community and those who die for Islam are promised ‘unlimited sex with 72 virgins in heaven’ … ‘beautiful like rubies, with complexions like diamonds and pearls’.”
BNP news article, 30 June 2007
Update: Never a model of consistency, the BNP now argues that the terrorists were not in fact homegrown at all. Utilising a police report that “none of the suspects is British in origin”, the fascists demand: “Doesn’t common sense suggest that we should refuse entry into Britain to all would-be immigrants and ‘asylum-seekers’ either known, or suspected, to be adherents of a certain religion?”
Magistrate walks out over Muslim woman’s veil
A magistrate is facing an inquiry after refusing to deal with a defendant wearing a full Muslim veil, the Judiciary of England and Wales said yesterday.
Ian Murray walked out of the case at Manchester magistrates’ court yesterday because Zoobia Hussain, 32, of Crumpsall, Manchester, was covered by a hijab. Hussain’s lawyer, Judith Hawkins, said her client was “shocked and distressed” and found Mr Murray’s treatment of her “insensitive and unacceptable”.
Miss Hawkins said she would submit a formal written complaint to the court on Monday. When the complaint is received, the judiciary will launch an internal investigation into Mr Murray’s behaviour, a spokesman said.
A spokesman for the Ramadhan Foundation said: “It is despicable that the judiciary is ignoring the guidelines about the wearing of the hijab set out only in February by the Judicial Studies Board. They require that magistrates and judges be ‘sensitive’ to a woman’s religious requirement to wear the hijab and work around it when possible.”
Mr Murray does however receive the support of the BNP who opine: “Those pushy Muslims never let up trying to change the way we have done things in this country for centuries.”
Update: See “Veil row magistrate reprimanded”, BBC News, 8 January 2008
‘Muslims hate dogs’ – shock revelation
“Recently, your paper carried an article about dogs being sent to Turkey by an animal charity in the Borders. I read the item with a sinking heart and it is still worrying me. Surely, everyone must know that Muslims hate dogs.
“Respect and compassion, let alone kindness, towards animals is not part of Islamic culture and the wicked cruelty to animals that is commonplace in Islamic countries has never been a secret from the rest of the world.
“Turkey is an Islamic country. Expats living there do what they can to help the numerous abused animals. Why on earth would anyone think to send dogs from the UK, and ones that have already been unlucky enough to end up in a shelter, to an Islamic country?”
Letter in the Southern Reporter, 27 June 2007
We’re of course familiar with Islamophobia being packaged as a defence of women’s rights or LGBT rights, but the use of animal rights as a cover for anti-Muslim bigotry is now gaining ground. See for example the BNP’s attempt to win support by opposing halal slaughter as “the most barbaric and primitive method of killing animals imaginable”
Tutu calls for better media reporting of religion
LONDON – Archbishop Desmond Tutu called on the media on Wednesday to be more careful in their choice of words when reporting on religious conflict.
“I would hope that you in the media would be passionate about letting people judge for themselves, that you would be careful about some of the language that you do actually use,” he said. “‘Muslim terrorism’ – have you ever read anywhere ‘Christian terrorism’? – as if Islam propagates violence, but you have never spoken about what happened in Northern Ireland as Christian terrorism,” he said.
Tutu added that understanding different religions required peoples of all faiths to understand different perspectives. “We Christians ought to get off our high horse and learn to be a great deal more humble, when you look at our history, the bloody things that we did in the name of religion,” he said.
SANE Works for US: coming to a Masjid near you!
“So you’re at prayers at your local mosque, and a pasty white guy in a pantomime Arab costume and fake beard comes up to you. He says, ‘Asalaamun alaykum, dear brother! You can speak freely in front of me. Would you like to discuss violent jihad against the kaafirs?’ You look around. Is your cousin Mustafa setting you up? Is there a hidden camera in the mihrab? Because when anything this patently ridiculous happens, there’s got to be an angle. And there is. Congrats! You’ve just been selected by the Mapping Shari’a Project for inclusion in their latest study.”
MCB speaks out on ‘honour’ killings
The Muslim Council of Britain insisted yesterday that “honour” violence was a cultural practice and nothing to do with faith. The council spoke out after a BBC investigation claimed that there were links between some cases of honour violence in Britain and islamist extremist groups abroad. Victims of such attacks are alleged by their families to have disgraced them.
The Crown Prosecution Service pointed to the death five years ago of Heshu Yones, 16, who was stabbed to death by her father, and claimed that Islamist terror groups were behind it. Crown Prosecution Service national lead on honour crime Nazir Afzal told Radio 4 that the threats to kill another woman, who is known as Miss B, came from her family but originated from an Egyptian terrorist group. He said: “They told her husband that, if he didn’t put his wife in her place, then they would do it themselves.”
However, Muslim Council of Britain spokeswoman Reefat Drabu disagreed with Mr Afzal’s comments. “First and foremost, there has to be clarity that this is nothing to do with any faith, in particular Islam,” she said. “It is a cultural practice and there is nothing in any faith that would condone it or say that it is the right thing do it. This is to do with misguided notions of family honour. It has nothing to do with radicalism or terrorism.”
Morning Star, 27 June 2007
Over at Butterflies and Wheels Ophelia Benson expresses indignation that the MCB should even be asked their opinion on the issue. After all, they’re only the most representative Muslim organisation in the UK, with some 500 affiliates. Who cares what they think? Ms Benson would no doubt regard it as much more appropriate for the BBC to ask Maryam Namazie and the “Council of Ex-Muslims” for a quote instead.
And David T of Harry’s Place comments: “The Muslim Council of Britain’s eccentric stance on this issue illustrates why it is no longer invited to the Home Office to participate in the process of public policy formation.” Whereas some of us might have thought that the government’s cold-shouldering of the MCB was perhaps rather more closely connected with their refusal to keep quiet about the role of UK foreign policy in fuelling terrorism.
Muslim leaders deplore Rushdie knighthood
We strongly deplore the recent conferring of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie (Letters, June 21). We see this as a deliberate provocation and insult to the 1.5 billion Muslims around the world. The “honouring” of Rushdie at a time when the British government claims to be trying to build bridges with the Muslim community can only be seen as duplicitous. We regard this as a conscious effort not only to offend Muslim sensibilities but also to sow seeds of division. In honouring Rushdie, the prime minister has demonstrated how little regard he has for Islam.
Ali al-Hadithi Federation Of Student Islamic Societies, Bashir Mann Muslim Council of Scotland, Dr Abdul Wahid Hizb ut-Tahrir, Dr Ahmad ar-Rawi Muslim Association of Britain, Dr Mamoun Mobayad Northern Ireland Muslim Family Association, Dr Muhammad Abdul-Bari Muslim Council of Britain, Massoud Shadjareh Islamic Human Rights Commission, Maulana Faiz Siddiqui Muslim Action Committee, Muhammad Sawalha British Muslim Initiative, Saleem Qidwai Muslim Council of Wales, Sheikh Abdulhossein Moezi Islamic Centre of England, Sheikh Shafiq-ur-Rahman United Kingdom Islamic Mission
Letter in Guardian, 26 June 2007
See also the Times, 26 June 2007
Evening Standard feeds fascist propaganda
“Muslims called for the Queen to ‘Go to Hell’ as they burnt the flag of St George on the streets of London on Friday”, the British National Party reports. They refer their supporters to this article from Friday’s This Is London (the Evening Standard ‘s website) which, typically, gave completely disproportionate coverage to the provocative activities of a tiny and completely unrepresentative group of nutters around Omar Bakri’s former lieutenant Anjem Choudary.
In a caption accompanying a picture of Choudary’s supporters demonstrating against the decision to give a knighthood to Salman Rushdie, This Is London informed its readers that “the protest has drawn hundreds of angry British muslims to Regents Park Mosque in North London”. The Guardian, by contrast, put the figure at “about 20” while the Telegraph estimated “two dozen“.
Needless to say, This Is London didn’t see fit to quote this letter from Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain. They prefer to falsely associate British Muslims with a self-publicising idiot like Anjem Choudary and feed the racist propaganda of the BNP.