There are those who have
rejected Islam because of the phenomenon of Islamism, an intrusive, political,
all-encompassing supremacist belief that the political and social world must be
delivered in line with Islamic principles and that democratic structures are a
threat to such a guiding social framework. Resurgent because of the failure of
pan-Arab nationalism, military defeats in the Middle East, the Iranian revolution
and the successful ejection of Russia from Afghanistan in the 1980s, Islamism
has created a stifling environment where dissent is rejected and seen as a
threat and where there is little tolerance of dissenters. Algeria in the 1990s,
Morsi’s Egypt, and Iran, stand out as examples of environments where Islamist
movements fared no better in changing the political and social environments they
sought to challenge, in some cases becoming as oppressive as the regimes they
opposed.
Islamist activities in the Middle
East in the 1980s and 1990s quickly spread to the United Kingdom, because of a
range of factors, including Islamist campaigners seeking asylum in the UK as
they fled from Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Maghreb
and the Arabian Peninsula. What they found was many Muslim communities that
were reliant mainly on institutions that were founded on principles of the
Muslim Brotherhood and where Islamism had become synonymous with Islam. This
was even more acute after the Satanic Verses affair of 1989, a
controversy that further polarised Muslims and reinforced the Islamic and
Muslim identity of many at the time. Written by Salman Rushdie and published by
Penguin, The Satanic Verses could be read as the spiritual,
psychological and physical journey of immigrants who find themselves in a
social and cultural limbo, having left the culture that they grew up in and having
to integrate into one with very different social and cultural norms. But it was
a sequence in the book that questioned the revelations by Muhammad and which
cast the Prophet’s wives as being prostitutes, that caused the furore and
demonstrations led by Muslim communities at the time.
The influence of Islamists
deeply affected both the practice of Islam and its politicisation. The Islam
practised by first and second generation Muslim migrants to the United Kingdom
had been transformed into a politically reactionary Islam, at a time when
institutions and organisations representing the views and needs of British
Muslims were growing. The personal had become the political and a
new generation of Muslims was exposed to Islamist views and opinions as though
they were normal; local activities and events by some groups regularly promoted
views that Muslims were ‘under threat’ and that Islam was ‘under attack’. The
peaceful, deeply introspective and reflective nature of Islam was being
overshadowed by angry, politicised and reactive responses of a younger
generation of Muslims who saw Islam not as a personal belief system, but a way
of life that others must follow. Therein lay the problem which was to see third
and fourth generation Muslims berate their parents and relatives for being ‘bad
Muslims’ and for being corrupted by the ‘decadence of the West’. I personally
know of cases post 9/11, where small groups of Islamist extremists, no older
than 20 years of age, would turn up to mosques in the Midlands and humiliate
imams after prayer, including those who could speak fluent English. Islam for
them, had moved from the personal to the political and out to the extreme
fringes.
Islamist victimisation and the
threat of imminent conflict is no different to the poison peddled by far-right
extremist groups. Both groups believe that conflict is inevitable, and that
Muslims and non-Muslims cannot live and co-exist peaceably together. Such
groups believe that they are victimised and wear the badge of victimisation
with pride. They believe in a future where there is no accommodation of the
‘other’. Islamists identify the ‘other’ as non-Muslims and non-believers and
for far-right groups it is anyone who is deemed to be a ‘foreigner’, ‘migrant’
or ‘Muslim’. It is this campaign of victimisation and ‘othering’ that is
turning some young people away from Islam and is why it is necessary to disentangle
Islamism from Islam.
Now some may say that Islam is
all-encompassing, and that Islamism is Islam. Islam is indeed a blueprint for
people to lead their lives, and we are lucky that in the United Kingdom all
that is needed to live as a Muslim is available. Halal food, mosques, Islamic
burials and workplace accommodation for religiosity, are all examples of
opportunities available for someone to follow their faith, and many of these
are not available in Europe. The accommodation of different faiths is one of
the endearing and somewhat unique elements of the culture of the United
Kingdom, a principle that says: you can worship who and how you want as long as
you follow the law and do not fall foul of it. This principle, it has to be
said, was also one that Rome implemented in its colonies and within the heart
of its Empire. However, this personal freedom does not extend to enforcing on
others one’s personal religious beliefs, something which is at the heart of Islamism,
not Islam.
Some of those who have left
Islam also talk about being unable to reconcile the modern world with views and
values that they have come across within their families. Views about the rights
of women, minorities, those who reject faith and the use of force or violence
are clearly laid out within Islam and have been debated for over a thousand
years within Muslim communities and these discussions, like life in general,
have never been static or predictable. The failure of Islamic religious leaders
in the United Kingdom to frame these discussions within a Western context in a
way that is relevant to the country has meant that a gulf has opened up between
some young people and a modern understanding of such issues within Islam. To
date, there are no coherent narratives to have come out from the vast amount of
historical information within Islamic traditions.
A handful of imams have tried to
frame these discussions within the current context, but they have never gained
much traction, and as Imam Mamadou Bocoum1 says, ‘new interpretations’
of the Quran are needed. Bocoum has also repeatedly talked about the need for a
‘Fish and Chips’ form of Islam; in other words, an Islam that is anchored
within a British context. He also has stated that Islamic theologians need to
look within the West, not towards the East to find the roots of Islam that
reflect a human-rights-based culture, which he insists, is within the heart of
the faith. In fact, it is this ‘British Islam’ that Bocoum promotes, that was
the cornerstone of his mentor, the late great Zaki Badawi,2 the
first person to explain and contextualise the importance and the relevance of
it. Badawi went on to found the Muslim College, which was his attempt at
producing a British Islam that reflected the context, norms and values of the
country.
We also should not look away
when the bullying and intimidation by Islamist groups in the UK attempts to try
to stop people discussing and re-interpreting what Islam means to them. WhatsApp,
email and web-based campaigns attempt to delegitimise those who dissent and who
speak out against some practices within Islam that they feel are regressive,
that are associated with cultures that have built up around Islam, or that go
against their natural instincts. This is not to single out Islam as the only
faith in which this happens, though the intimidation and the fear instilled by
such Islamist groups need to be challenged by a chorus of voices which is very
slowly building in strength and numbers over time. If people cannot speak up
and explore faith and what it means to them, and in some cases, how it is irrelevant
to their lives, then there is something fundamentally wrong in our society and
the alarm bells should be ringing loud and clear for us all. Have no doubt that
a suppression of more progressive voices in Islam means that the victim
narrative pushed so hard by Islamist groups will continue to resonate within
the minds of some young people.
Without a doubt, such attacks
against dissenters in Islam show a weakness in those who seek to protect the
faith. A belief system does not need protection, it needs debate, discussion and
dialogue to keep it alive and more importantly, relevant. This idea of protectionism,
as though God requires protection from debate, is no longer persuasive these days,
when people have access to information at the touch of a button. Suppression of
debate and dissent may have had a comforting effect for migrant Muslim
communities when they were first in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, since
migration usually leads populations to hang on more tightly to their personal
identities in a foreign country. However, Muslims have now been in the UK for
more than 50 years, and they are no longer migrants or foreigners. They are
part and parcel of the fabric of the United Kingdom and knee-jerk reflexive
actions to defend the faith are tiresome in an age of mass information, debate
and critique of ideas.
The more defensive a faith
becomes about criticism or dissent, the greater the damage to that religious
ideology in the long term. With such huge global changes afoot – partly driven by
technology and access to information – cultural, social and religious
boundaries are being torn apart, traditions reassessed and faith and belief
coming under significant critique. If these changes cannot be digested and
processed by organised religious communities, then it is only a matter of time
before they fragment under the changes that are taking place at a global level.
~
Islam’s history, like that of
any faith, has been shaped by the political and civic world around it.
Christianity, for example, had to adapt to fit a Greek-influenced Roman world
when souls needed to be saved and when the apostles found themselves preaching
to new audiences beyond Galilee and Jerusalem where Christianity was born. As
did Islam, as it traversed through Arab audiences in the Arabian Peninsula and
across the Maghreb. Its adaptation to local customs and cultures also took
place northwards, eastwards, upwards and outwards across the Middle East, to
the Indian subcontinent and into parts of modern-day China. Faith has therefore
always adapted and been moulded by what it encounters and what surrounds it.
Such changes have also meant
that at certain times in their history, faiths have gone through periods of
enormous change, partly led by internal dissent or by the development of seats
of learning that encouraged critical thinking or that questioned the idea of
intellectual boundaries that could not be crossed. Once again, for all of the
ancient faiths in today’s world, these processes would have taken place time
and time again.
Islam repeatedly went through
such cycles as universities from Cairo to Baghdad encouraged an enlightenment
within Islam that took in exploration of the sciences, debate, critical
thinking and on to translations of volumes of Greek philosophy. The latter were
brought back into public consciousness through Arabic translations of these
volumes and their integration into practical learning.
Such cycles ensured that faiths
remained relevant to the times in which they found themselves, and this was a
natural process, one that renewed or rejected elements within faiths. Yet,
during the last five decades, Islamist movements in the UK have skilfully promoted
the concept of blind faith, thereby suppressing any sense of disentangling the
political from the spiritual, the cultural from the faith of Islam and the
Wahhabi from the Sufi and more open and progressive forms of Islam. These
changes are only taking place now and are mainly driven by Islamist extremism which
has infiltrated and taken cancerous root in some sections of Muslim
communities. It is only within the last decade that the Islamist hegemony is
being pushed back, which is to be warmly welcomed, but there is no natural momentum
building up. Any progress seems to stop and start, but nonetheless, a change is
taking place.
In the end, I contend that
Islamist movements have hijacked the faith of Islam in their desire for
political gain, and, in doing so, have done immeasurable damage to the
reputation of this great faith. They have made it brittle when it was never
meant to be, used force and threats to maintain their hold over the faith and written
into it an intolerance of Christians and Jews that was fundamentally not a part
of the faith. They have also taken the spiritual and made it into a set of
practices which people must undertake, as though merely going through the motions
of faith means that people naturally are happy and fulfilled.
This is an extract written by
Fiyaz Mughal OBE, founder and director of Faith Matters, from Leaving Faith Behind: The journeys and perspectives of people who have chosen to leave Islam edited by Fiyaz and Aliyah Saleem,
co-founder of Faith to Faithless.
1 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mamadou-bobouc-koran-needs-newinterpretation-
to-help-fight-terror-0jfgpmllz
2 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/zaki-badawi-6110603.html
1 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mamadou-bobouc-koran-needs-newinterpretation-
to-help-fight-terror-0jfgpmllz
2 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/zaki-badawi-6110603.html
No comments:
Post a Comment