About this blog

In recent times a plethora of misconceptions, misrepresentation and myths have been forged about Islam
and Muslims. Many western influentials from politicians, policymakers to judges have taken it upon
themselves to undermine the Islamic beliefs, values and rules so to make it palatable to their
egotistic minds and the secular liberal thoughts.

This blog is dedicated:-

1. To argue the point for Islam in its belief and systems and to refute the misconceptions.
2. To expose the weakness and contradictions of all forms of secularism.

23 Dec 2008

British Islam’: The UK Government Policy to manufacture a new religion



The British Government has a current policy to manufacture a new religion. They call it ‘British Islam’. Former Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly talked about a ‘British Version of Islam’. A paper by the Department of Communities and Local Government titled “The Role of Muslim Identity Politics in Radicalisation” mentions how the government would like to use “British Islam as a response to radical Islam”. In July 2008 the Foreign Office boasted how it was sending a delegation on a ‘tabligh’ trip to Egypt to propagate this ‘British Islam’.

This project is consistent with international plans to advance a western form of Islam around the Muslim world, as outlined by reports from the RAND Corporation (who call it ‘Civil Democratic Islam’) the Nixon centre in the USA, and Civitas in the UK. Civitas, in their report ‘The West Islam and Islamism’ said:

“It is not enough for the vast majority of decent, peaceful, law-abiding Muslims to renounce terror in principle, including September 11 and similar events. … If they choose to live in Western liberal democratic societies, they must accept the values of liberal democracy—as Jews, Sikhs, Hindus and others have done for many years.”

Ultimately, this is ‘British Islam’: The acceptance of the values of liberal democracy. Ironically, the Church of England, which went through its reformation hundreds of years ago is still struggling to unite around the values of liberal democracy.

There have been several policies announced to further this aim. The most recent this July was a new Imam’s board and a policy that Madrassahs should teach ‘citizenship’. This board of Imams is sponsored by the British from its Preventing Violent Extremism fund but under the auspices of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. It is said it will pronounce on ‘areas such as wearing the hijab and the treatment of wives’ and ‘rule on interpretation of the Koran’. Doubtless, the government would expect an essential ‘Usuli’ principle of “British Islamic jurisprudence” to be consistency with the values of liberal democracy.

The details of the other policy of citizenship classes in Madrassahs are not known. Certainly, local councils are throwing PVE (“Preventing Violent Extremism”) money around, presumably in the hope of eventually attaching conditions to the funding. However, it is worth looking at some of the examples of citizenship teaching in schools and for immigrants looking to remain in the UK. This is one example from a school curriculum.

What are rights and responsibilities?

Rights and ages:
  • Pubs can apply for a license to enable under 14 year olds to be accompanied by an adult to a bar. At 14 you can legally enter into a bar for soft drinks.
  • At 16 or over you can buy beer, cider, or sherry to drink with a meal in the dining or restaurant area of a pub.
  • A girl must be 16 before she can legally have sex with a boy
  • It is illegal for two people of the same sex to have sex together if either is under 16
  • Tobacco should not be sold to anyone who appears to be under 16 years of age
  • At 18 you can buy alcohol in a bar or a licensed shop
In December 2004, when citizenship was launched for immigrants in the ‘life in the UK handbook’ they mentioned that the test questions would include ‘vital citizenship issues’ such as:
1. What is a round in a pub?
2. What is Guy Fawkes Day?
3. What is Remembrance Day?
4. How does Father Christmas dress?
5. Do you sign a Valentine’s Day card?
6. Where is the centre of politics?

We wait to see what type of citizenship they plan for Madrassahs. They tried one pilot project in Bradford that was roundly rejected by the local community. 90% of this curriculum seemed reasonable, but it was punctuated by examples that talked about Muslims buying fertiliser to make bombs! Far more likely to reinforce a feeling of suspicion and a negative self image than to build a confident and positive mindset amongst Muslim children.

The British government’s interference in matters of Islam is not new. Under their colonial occupation of India they sponsored certain religious brands to maintain hegemonic control and pacific resistance – the most famous being Ghulam Mirza Ahmed of Qadiyaan – who would pronounce in the name of his religion that resistance to the occupier was forbidden. The government would like nothing more than to have credible figures pronounce that opposition to their foreign policy is tantamount to heretical extremism. Their problem hitherto has been to find credible figures to do their work. Those who do follow the line of the evolving established British Islamic clergy have little or no credibility, and so they are little closer in finding an Arch-Mufti of Canterbury.

Such projects of social and religious engineering never ultimately succeed. The texts of Islam are not open to the distortion that occurred in previous religions that were reformed, and it is ironic that politicians in Britain of all places are so convinced of their reformation policies. The present bitter struggle between liberal and traditional Anglicans that threatens to divide the Church of England illustrates that the reformation of the Christian church has been unable to fully persuade its adherents despite centuries of effort. The experiments in Islamic reformation stand precious little chance of success.

However, they all have the potential for creating resentment amongst the Muslim community, heightening alienation as Muslims uniquely are singled out for state interference and reinforce the colonial image of a state that treats certain communities as lesser subjects and not as citizens.

[Article written by Dr Abdul Wahid, August 2008]
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1 comment:

romyjones said...

[Dr Abdul Wahid, August 2008]
"Muslims uniquely are singled out for state interference and reinforce the colonial image of a state that treats certain communities as lesser subjects and not as citizens."


Until British muslims reject/reform the insane barbarity of the Sharia Law 'punishments' of stoning adulterers and hanging homosexuals plus the so-called 'cultural' totalitarian subjugation of women... why on earth should any sane person regard a supporter of such derangement as anything BUT "lesser" and unworthy of citizenship.
Your attack on the Christian reformation is almost irrelevant with the current arguments between liberal and traditional Christians being of concern to a tiny minority. What would you have them do? Go back to burning witches? Or taking an Islamic cue, introduce stoning? Until there is MASSIVE reform, it's difficult to see how Muslims can be viewed as anything but 'other'. To free-thinking/speaking peoples of Western democracies, there is too much about Islam that is plainly fascist to warrant respect and until it stops regarding any move on the parts of government or anyone else to assist its integration into the modern era, it will always be regarded as highly suspicious.

24 January 2009 at 14:21

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What they said...

“Islam represented the greatest military power on earth…It was the foremost economic power in the world…It had achieved the highest level so far in human history, in the arts and sciences of civilization...Islam in contrast created a world civilization, poly-ethnic, multiracial, international, one might even say intercontinental.”





[Bernard Lewis, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Orientalist and Historian, 2001]





"There was once a civilization that was the greatest in the world. It was able to create a continental super-state that stretched from ocean to ocean, and from northern climes to tropics and deserts…the civilization I'm talking about was the Islamic world from the year 800 to 1600… Although we are often unaware of our indebtedness to this other civilization, its gifts are very much a part of our heritage"





[Carly Fiorina, ex-CEO of Hewlett-Packard, 2001]





"For the first three centuries of its existence (circ. A.D 650-1000) the realm of Islam was the most civilized and progressive portion of the world. Studded with splendid cities, gracious mosques and quiet universities where the wisdom of the ancient world was preserved and appreciated, the Moslem world offered a striking contrast to the Christian West, then sunk in the night of the Dark Ages."





[Lothrop Stoddard, Ph.D (Harvard), American political theorist and historian, 1932]





"Medieval Islam was technologically advanced and open to innovation. It achieved far higher literacy rates than in contemporary Europe;it assimilated the legacy of classical Greek civilization to such a degree that many classical books are now known to us only through Arabic copies. It invented windmills ,trigonometry, lateen sails and made major advances in metallurgy, mechanical and chemical engineering and irrigation methods. In the middle-ages the flow of technology was overwhelmingly from Islam to Europe rather from Europe to Islam. Only after the 1500's did the net direction of flow begin to reverse."





[Jared Diamond, UCLA sociologist and Author, 1997]



"No other society has such a record of success in uniting in an equality of status, of opportunity and endeavour so many and so varied races of mankind. The great Muslim communities of Africa, India and Indonesia, perhaps also the small community in Japan, show that Islam has still the power to reconcile apparently irreconcilable elements of race and tradition. If ever the opposition of the great societies of the East and west is to be replaced by cooperation, the mediation of Islam is an indispensable condition."





[Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb, Professor at Harvard University, 1932]





“The Muhammadan Law which is binding on all -- from the crowned head to the meanest subject is a law interwoven with a system of the wisest, the most learned and the most enlightened jurisprudence that ever existed in the world.”





[Edmund Burke, British Statesman and Philosopher, 1789]





"The Exile here is not like in our homeland. The Turks hold respectable Jews in esteem. Here and in Alexandria, Egypt, Jews are the chief officers and administrators of the customs, and the king’s revenues. No injuries are perpetuated against them in all the empire. Only this year, in consequence of the extraordinary expenditure caused by the war against Shah Tahmsap al-Sufi, were the Jews required to make advances of loans to the princes."





[David dei Rossi, Jewish Traveller 17CE, quoted by Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands]





"The notable religious tolerance towards Christians and Jew under Muslim rule had given way to the uncompromising zealotry of Spanish Inquisition. Jews and Muslims thus fled Spain with large numbers of Jews immigrating to the Ottoman Empire which was known for its tolerance to the Jews."





[Graham Fuller, Author and former CIA, 1995]





“If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilization owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure, which stems, I think, from the straightjacket of history, which we have inherited. The medieval Islamic world, from central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and systems of beliefs, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history”





[Charles Philip Arthur George, HRH The Prince of Wales, 1993]





"...Not being subject to the Sharia, Jews and Christians were free to go to their own religious authorities for adjudication of disputes; but in many cases they went instead to the [Muslim] Qadi"





[Richard W. Bulliet, Professor of History and Author, 2004]





"Here in the land of the Turks we have nothing to complain of. We possess great fortunes; much gold and silver are in our hands. We are not oppressed by heavy taxes and our commerce is free and unhindered. Rich are the fruits of the earth. Everything is cheap and each one of us lives in freedom. Here a Jew is not compelled to wear a yellow star as a badge of shame as is the case in Germany where even wealth and great fortune is a curse for a Jew because he therewith arouses jealousy among the Christians and they devise all kinds of slander against him to rob him of his gold. Arise my brethren, gird up your loins, collect up your forces and come to us."





[In his book 'Constantinople', Philip Mansel quotes a rabbi in Turkey writing to his brethren in Europe where they were facing increasing persecution after 1453]





"Praise be to the beneficent God for his mercy towards me! Kings of the earth, to whom his [the Caliph’s] magnificence and power are known, bring gifts to him, conciliating his favour by costly presents, such as the king of the Germans, the king of the Gebalim, the king of Constantinople, and others. All their gifts pass through my hands, and I am charged with making gifts in return. (Let my lips express praise to the God in heaven who so far extends his loving kindness towards me without any merit of my own, but in the fullness of his mercies.) I always ask the ambassadors of these monarchs about our brethren the Jews, the remnant of the captivity, whether they have heard anything concerning the deliverance of those who have pined in bondage and had found no rest."





[Hasdai Ibn Shaprut (915-990 CE) Jewish physician, chief minister of Islamic Caliphate in Cordova, 'The Jewish Caravan']





"In Baghdad there are about forty thousand Jews, and they dwell in security, prosperity, and honour under the great Caliph [al-Mustanjid, 1160-70 CE], and amongst them are great sages, the Heads of the Academies engaged in the study of the Law…’"





[Benjamin of Tudela, Rabbi in Baghdad in the year 1168 CE, 'The Jew in the Medieval World']





"Those Eastern thinkers of the ninth century laid down, on the basis of their theology, the principle of the Rights of Man, in those very terms, comprehending the rights of individual liberty, and of inviolability of person and property; described the supreme power in Islam, or Califate, as based on a contract, implying conditions of capacity and performance, and subject to cancellation if the conditions under the contract were not fulfilled; elaborated a Law of War of which the humane, chivalrous prescriptions would have put to the blush certain belligerents in the Great War; expounded a doctrine of toleration of non-Moslem creeds so liberal that our West had to wait a thousand years before seeing equivalent principles adopted.





[Leon Ostorog, French Jurist]





"The debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist in startling discoveries or revolutionary theories; science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence"





[Robert Briffault, Novelist and Historian, 1928]





"The only effective link between the old and the new science is afforded by the Arabs. The dark ages come as an utter gap in the scientific history of Europe, and for more than a thousand years there was not a scientific man of note except in Arabia"





[Oliver Joseph Lodge, Writer and Professor of Physics, 1893]





“Thus, when Muslims crossed the straits of Gibraltar from North Africa in 711 and invaded the Iberian Peninsula, Jews welcomed them as liberators from Christian Persecution.”





[Zion Zohar, Jewish scholar at Florida International University, 2005]







“Throughout much of the period in question, Arabic served as the global language of scholarship, and learned men of all stripes could travel widely and hold serious and nuanced discussions in this lingua franca. Medieval Western scholars who wanted access to the latest findings also needed to master the Arabic Tongue or work from translations by those who had done so.”





[Jonathan Lyons, Author, Writer and Lecturer, 2009]