That’s correct. But the reality is our society pays enormous respect to minorities – President Bush holds a month-long Ramadan-a-ding-dong at the White House every year; the immediate reaction to the slaughter of 9/11 by the President, the Prince, the Prime Ministers of Britain, Canada and everywhere else was to visit a mosque to demonstrate their great respect for Islam. One party to this dispute is respectful to a fault: after all, to describe the violence perpetrated by Muslims over the Danish cartoons as the “recent ghastly strife” barely passes muster as effete Brit toff understatement.
Unfortunately, what’s “precious and sacred” to Islam is its institutional contempt for others. In his book Islam And The West, Bernard Lewis writes:
The primary duty of the Muslim as set forth not once but many times in the Koran is ‘to command good and forbid evil’. It is not enough to do good and refrain from evil as a personal choice. It is incumbent upon Muslims also to command and forbid.
Or as the shrewd Canadian columnist David Warren put it: “We take it for granted that it is wrong to kill someone for his religious beliefs. Whereas Islam holds it is wrong not to kill him.” In that sense, those blood-curdling imams are right, and Karzai’s attempts to finesse the issue are, sharia-wise, wrong.
I can understand why the President and the Secretary of State would rather deal with this through back-channels, private assurances from their Afghan counterparts, etc. But the public rhetoric is critical, too. At some point we have to face down a culture in which not only the mob in the street but the highest judges and academics talk like crazies.
Abdul Rahman embodies the question at the heart of this struggle: If Islam is a religion one can only convert to not from, then in the long run it is a threat to every free person on the planet. What can we do? Well, for a start governments with troops in Afghanistan could pass joint emergency legislation conferring their citizenship on this poor man and declaring him, as much as Karzai, under their protection.
In my forthcoming book, I recall an incident from a more culturally confident age. In India, the British were faced with the practice of “suttee” – the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multiculturaclass="underline"
You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.
India today is better off without suttee. If we shrink from the logic of that, then in Afghanistan and many places far closer to home the implications are, as the Prince of Wales would say, “ghastly”.
THE MODERATE MOSQUE
A state within
“MOSQUE” IS a term that covers a multitude of architectural sins these days, but the one at Regent’s Park in London is the real deal. Big golden dome above the tree tops, 140-foot minaret. I used to live nearby and I must have strolled past it hundreds of times and, if I ever did give it a second glance in those days, it was only to marveclass="underline" “Wow! That Hindu temple is totally awesome.”
I walked by it the other week for the first time in a long time. How did it get to sit on such a piece of prime London real estate? Well, you can thank His Majesty’s Government for that. In 1940, Lord Lloyd of Dolobran, Secretary of State for the Colonies, former Governor of Bombay and High Commissioner for Egypt, sent a memo to the Prime Minister pointing out that “in our empire which actually contains more Moslems than Christians it was anomalous and inappropriate that there should be no central place of worship for Mussulmans”. So the government allocated a hundred thousand pounds to buy land for a London mosque. The British Empire’s Muslim soldiers had fought and died honorably in the service of the Crown, and the broader community of His Majesty’s Muslim subjects around the globe were on the whole supportive of the war against the Axis powers. It seemed appropriate that this bravery and loyalty should be acknowledged in the heart of the metropolis. King George VI opened the first Islamic Cultural Centre on the site in 1944, and with funding from the Saudi royal family the lavish and splendid mosque proper was completed in 1977. Today, it’s the best attended mosque in Britain. If there is a “moderate” Islam in the west, this is it.
So what goes on there? Well, if you swing by the bookstore, you can pick up DVDs of hot preachers like Sheikh Feiz, who does these hilarious pig noises every time he mentions the Jews – “Oh, Muslim, behind me is the Jew. [snort-snort] Come and kill him. [snort-snort].” You can also buy tapes from Sheikh Yasin, a celebrity American “revert” (ie, convert) to Islam, in which he explains that you should “beat women lightly”, and that a Muslim can never be friends with a non-Muslim, and that Christian missionaries deliberately introduced Aids to Africa by putting it in the vaccines for other diseases. Another “revert”, Jermaine Lindsay, got the jihad fever at the mosque and then went and self-detonated in the July 7th Tube bombings.
If the Regent’s Park mosque has been “radicalized”, then there are no non-radical mosques.
When I lived in the neighborhood, you’d see t-shirted tourists snapping each other with the dome in the background. That’s what it was for most of us: an exotic backdrop. Inside, one assumed, they talked about Allah and Mohammed, and where’s the harm in that? We looked on it in multicultural terms – that’s to say, as a heritage issue: a link for immigrants back to the old country. It never occurred to us that it was an ideological bridgehead. But listen to Dr Ijaz Mian, secretly taped by Britain’s Channel 4 at the Ahl-e-Hadith mosque in Derby:
You cannot accept the rule of the kaffir. We have to rule ourselves and we have to rule the others… King, Queen, House of Commons: if you accept it, you are a part of it. If you don’t accept it, you have to dismantle it. So you being a Muslim, you have to fix a target. There will be no House of Commons. From that White House to this Black House, we know we have to dismantle it. Muslims must grow in strength, then take over… You are in a situation in which you have to live like a state-within-a-state – until you take over.
Where’s the religious content? Where’s the contemplation of the divine? Don’t look for it at the Sparkbrook mosque in Birmingham recently praised by Tony Blair for its contribution to tolerance and diversity. Last June they were celebrating the killer of a British Muslim soldier in Afghanistan:
The hero of Islam is the one who separated his head from his shoulders.
These aren’t sermons and these men aren’t preachers. They’re ideological enforcers on an explicitly political project with branch offices on Main Streets across the western world. Imagine the Second World War with St Adolf’s Parish Church on every English village green, or the Cold War with a Soviet Orthodox Church in every mid-sized town in all 50 states.
Dr Mian trained in Saudi Arabia. The bookstore at the Regent’s Park mosque is run by a company headed by a Saudi diplomat, Dr Ahmad al-Dubayan. The Saudis control mosques, and schools, and think-tanks, and prison chaplaincy programs and much else, too. I’d be calling for a blue-ribbon commission to investigate Saudi subversion of the US but pretty much everyone who’d wind up sitting on it would be on the Saudi gravy train one way or another. As Christopher Hitchens put it: