“What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered more than 3,000 civilians on September 11 and then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate the murders? That we admire them for the cold-blooded killings in Mombasa, Yemen and elsewhere? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women-repressors?”
Robert Kilroy-Silk in the Sunday Express, 4 January 2004
“A 13-year-old girl is an exemplary pupil in every way; she listens carefully to her teachers, does her homework and is a cheerful member of the class. But in one respect, according to President Jacques Chirac yesterday, her behaviour threatens nothing less than the social peace and national cohesion of the French nation – she insists on wearing a headscarf. All around her, pupils are wearing the kind of outlandish clothes and hairstyles one would expect of teenagers anywhere in Europe. But there is one garment that, the president has declared, challenges the secularity of republican France: the square metre or so of material that covers this girl’s hair.”
Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian, 18 December 2003
The reformer to his admirers, Tariq Ramadan is Europe’s leading advocate of liberal Islam. To his detractors, he’s a dangerous theocrat in disguise.
By Laura Secor
From the Boston Globe, 30 November 2003
When Tariq Ramadan delivers a lecture, the room is invariably packed to capacity. Afterwards, dozens of young Muslim men are likely to throng the stage, seeking his definitive guidance on everything from veiling to animal rights to how to live with dignity in a secular society.
“What I am doing with them is at the same time important and dangerous,” Ramadan says of his work with these young men. “It could be dangerous if you let them think you have the answers. I try to tell them, ‘I am not what I’m saying. I’m only trying to be.”‘
At age 41, Ramadan, an elegant, Swiss-born intellectual, imam, and activist, has become a magnet for young Muslims in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. He’s done it partly by making himself personally accessible to the devotees who purchase audiotapes of his lectures and often travel for miles just to hear him speak. And he’s also done it with his unstinting criticism of their community’s inclination toward insularity.
Outside the Muslim community, Ramadan is the object of both admiration and suspicion. He’s the Muslim Martin Luther, the American and French press have sometimes rhapsodized: He advocates that European Muslims use their unique experiences to lead a movement toward reform within Islam. He is “two-faced,” critics reply: He sounds like a moderate, having adopted a vocabulary that he knows will be accepted by secular Westerners, but he is actually herding Francophone Muslims down the path of extremism.
“We have received the news of banning Hijab in schools and universities in France with great enthusiasm and pleasure.”
Nadia Mahmood of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq / Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq writes to the French prime minister applauding the decision to ban the Islamic headscarf in schools.
Rabbi Jeremy Rosen writes: “Islam, the once glorious liberal tradition of the great academic centres of Baghdad and Cairo a thousand years ago that gave ancient culture and civilization to Europe, has now become overwhelmingly a crude expression of disenfranchised fundamentalist rage and the few liberal, open minded, progressive Muslims have almost all been bullied into silence.”
“There is an anti-Muslim wind blowing across the European continent. One factor is a perception that Muslims are making politically exceptional, culturally unreasonable or theologically alien demands upon European states. My contention is that the claims Muslims are making in fact parallel comparable arguments about gender or ethnic equality.”
Tariq Modood at Open Democracy, 15 May 2003
“The pro-immigrationists are effectively trying to abolish nationhood, denying a country the right to sustain its own culture.
“British-born white people, the progeny of the generation who survived the Nazi attempt to obliterate Britain as an independent nation state, now account for only 60% of the population of London. England has for more than 1500 years been a Christian country – its flag is a cross, its head of state is head of the national church – but in its second city Birmingham, Islam is now more worshipped than Christianity. In two boroughs of London, whites are already in the minority, and they are expected to become a minority in several cities in the coming decade.
“If current trends continue, the historically indigenous population of Britain will become a minority by around 2100. Islam is the fastest growing religion, and much immigration to Britain comes from Muslims fleeing Muslim lands – around 75% of intercontinental asylum seekers are Muslim. But where are the limits? In an extreme example, would British Christians have a right not to live in an Islamic majority state?”
Anthony Browne at Open Democracy, 1 May 2003
A £5,000 reward is being offered by police after the body of a Muslim woman was found in a hospital mortuary, covered with rashers of bacon.
The desecration was discovered when the family of the grandmother, aged 65, was waiting to see her body after she lost her fight with cancer.
The Metropolitan Police’s racial crime task force was called in to investigate the incident, at Hillingdon Hospital in west London, and an extensive inquiry was launched.
It is strictly against the Muslim religion to touch or eat pork and the woman’s family, who do not want to be identified, have been left deeply traumatised.
Detective Chief Inspector Tony Hester, of Hillingdon police, said: “This is a particularly grotesque act which has outraged the family as well as the whole community.
“Because of the nature of the incident a criminal investigation was immediately initiated and is still ongoing. DCC4 – Racial and Violent Crime Task Force – was involved in the initial investigation and officers from the Community Safety Unit are in constant liaison with them.”
The backlash from the war on terror on Britain’s non-white population is growing. Applications to visit relatives in Britain from countries with large Muslim populations are twice as likely to be turned down than they were just over a year ago. Families in Britain’s biggest ethnic minority communities are now struggling to have relatives visit them.
An analysis of last year’s statistical reports from British embassies around the world by Citizens Advice, the charity and national body for the bureaux, shows that refusals increased by more than 100% in countries with big Muslim populations.
The biggest rises in refusals were for applications from the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent. In Tehran, refusals jumped 188% between the first and second half of last year. From January to July, 8.5% of applicants were refused, but from August to December, a quarter was turned down. In New Delhi and Mumbai, refusals increased 105% during the same period.
Britain’s biggest non-white communities have been badly affected. There are 1 million people of Indian descent and 500,000 of Bangladeshi origin in the UK. Refusals of applications from families in Calcutta rose by 443%, and in Dhaka more than 60% of applications to visit relatives in Britain were refused in the second half of the year, compared with 38% in the first.
While it is getting harder for some people to visit relatives, it is getting easier for others. Refusals of applications from North America declined by 29% and from South America by 1% during the same period.
This dramatic rise in refusals of applications from one set of countries, many observers say, is driven by the “war on terror”. Decisions may be based less on hard evidence than on the possibility that applicants could be in some way connected to terrorist organisations.
A British academic accused by the US of leading an Islamic terror group has defended himself, saying his only “crime” was to talk about politics to friends on the phone.
Dr Basheer Musa Mohammed Nafi, 50, was one of a total of 16 men charged by the US last week. The father-of-two from Oxford was accused of being the UK head of Islamic Jihad – believed to be responsible for more than 100 killings in and around Israel. The indictment against Mr Nafi was 170-pages long, and listed 50 charges. Its main evidence was years of tapped telephone conversations.
But Dr Nafi denies having anything to do with the militant Palestinian organisation. “As I have repeatedly told reporters: I have never been a member of Islamic Jihad, I have never spoken on behalf of Islamic Jihad and I have never raised funds for Islamic Jihad,” he said.
US intelligence said Dr Nafi had a number of conversations with Florida lecturer Sami al-Arian – arrested in the US, and accused of being the US head of the group – about funding of the Jihad.
But Dr Nafi said: “Of course I have spoken with Sami al-Arian. He is a friend, a good friend of mine. We have spoken hundreds of times and about Palestinian politics. But since when was that a crime?
“I meet people all the time on trains, in shops, on planes, and we talk. Palestine is a very small nation, and everybody talks about politics all their life. The problem with this indictment is that they have just lumped together a group of people who have no connection with each other.”
Some of the total of 16 people indicted had nothing do with political organisations, he said – while others had publicly spoken on their behalf. “How can they all be put together in this one document?”
Dr Nafi, who has lived in Oxfordshire for 20 years, is an Islamic studies lecturer at London’s Birkbeck College.