I had decided some time ago that it would be a waste of time to devote a whole JumahPulse to the antics of Ed Husain and his band of merry clappers. They were, themselves, doing a fine job of exposing their abhorrence for Islam and their admiration for those who hated Muslims.
Ed had gone so far as to characterise actions of the Prophet Muhammad (Sallalallahu alaihi wa sallam) as “barbaric” - which, of course, according to the consensus of mainstream Islamic opinion, renders one outside the fold of Islam.
His side-kick, Maajid Nawaz, had befriended the infamous Neocon Douglas Murray with such intimacy that when he found himself forced, in a public discussion, to acknowledge the excesses of Neoconservatism, he apologised to Murray and offered a dichotomy that not even Murray had thought of in his book (”Neoconservatism: Why we need it”, which is an invitation to British politicians to adopt the ideas of Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol et al).
Nawaz, when put on the spot and made to criticise the Neocons in a City Circle discussion, had said to Murray, “I mean American Neoconservatism, but not the British Neoconservatism.” Supposedly, this suggests that Douglas’s version of Neoconservatism is more palatable and Muslim-friendly.
Of course, anyone who reads the actual book would see that, when it comes to hatred for Islam and Muslims, Douglas’s brand of Neoconservatism is no different to that practised in the US, where such ideology was the launchpad for the invasion of Iraq. Douglas sees Islam as the enemy and makes no concessions in his book nor excuses for his venom. He wrote explicitly:
“Islam is a proselytising faith, and one that is incompatible with British history, British law, and British society. With nearly two million Muslims currently living within Britain’s borders, no risk whatsoever should be taken … the Muslim community in Britain is innately hostile to any integration with British society… Britain must start implementing its response. For we have allowed the Straussian-nightmare end point of relativism to arrive… Our only reaction to this situation is not to allow our tolerance to destroy us - we must not allow tolerance to prove the Achilles heel of our freedom. To defend our tolerance we must be intolerant to those who oppose us, even when we express tolerance. We must not tolerate them.” (Douglas Murray, Neoconservatism: Why we need it, 2005, p.160.)
Add to this the newly launched Quilliam Foundation, jointly directed by Ed and Nawaz, and its list of rightwing and Neocon advisers. It has become abundantly clear that the co-directors’ mission coincides with the global Neoconservative agenda with respect to Islam. Having spent years in Hizb al-Tahrir promoting the idea that Islam is nothing more than politics, these two young men now hope to swing Muslim opinion to the opposite extreme where Islam includes everything and anything but politics.
So rather than devote my time and energy to write about them, I had thought it would be a more rewarding exercise to sit back and watch them entangle themselves in the web of Neocon rhetoric they were parroting at every given opportunity. And almost with clockwork precision, this is exactly what began to happen. The project started to implode with the list of Muslim advisers rapidly shrinking before the launch, followed by a spate of articles on the web highlighting the duo’s lack of insight and persistent naivety.
Yesterday, however, the sudden appearance of Ziauddin Sardar with an article criticising the Quilliam Foundation led me to a change of heart. This, I thought, needed urgent clarification, not only because Sardar is himself a failed wannabe reformer of Islam but also because of his own record in using disillusionment with his past as credentials to pronounce on Islam.
Agreement on the Agenda
Those of us who might have been lulled into thinking that Sardar has finally written something useful should note that, as far as the agenda to discredit mainstream scholastic traditions and to reform Islam so as to suit Western sensibilities is concerned, his aims are identical to that of Ed Husain and his colleagues.
This is a fact he almost acknowledges in his article: “I know I am going to upset many of my Muslim friends who are quite ecstatic about the foundation. After all, as its website declares, Quilliam ‘rejects foreign ideologies of Islamism and jihadism’ and upholds ‘Islam as a pluralistic, diverse tradition that can heal the pathology of Islamist extremism’. What could be wrong with such a message?” His objection concerns the “messenger”.
Historically, Zia’s big plan has been for Westernised modernists to take over the intellectual leadership of Islam. He has written: “Unlike the Ulama, modernist scholars do not shun the West. In fact they embrace the West in its totality, warts and all. While the traditional scholars sit on the crest of contemporary times perpetually looking back into history, modernist intellectuals place no real value on Muslim tradition and history.” (Z. Sardar, Islamic Futures, 1985, p.352.)
He also wrote: “…by assuming that ethics and morality reached their apex, indeed an end point, with the Companions of the Prophet, Wahhabism, which became the basis of what later came to be know as ‘Islamism’, negated the very idea of evolution in human thought and morality. Indeed, it set Muslim civilization on a fixed course to perpetual decline. Instead, I suggested that it is not only possible but necessary both for individuals and societies, now and in the future, to rise to higher levels in understanding and realization of Islamic values than those achieved by the Companions of the Prophet or their society. Indeed, the challenge of our time, I argued, was to work out values and norms that were clearly and distinctively better than those worked out by the Companions of the Prophet.” (Ziauddin Sardar, Desperately Seeking Paradise, 2005, p.151.)
In another place he described the emulating of the Prophet (Sallalallahu alaihi wa sallam) (i.e. following the Sunnah) as a “fetish” and the way forward was “to question what now goes under the general rubric of shari’ah and to declare that much of Islamic jurisprudence is now dangerously obsolete. To stand up to the absurd notion of an Islam confined by a geographically bound state. The ‘gates of ijtihad’ have to be thrown wide open so that the basic concepts of Islam can be framed in a broader context. Serious rethinking within Islam is long overdue.” (New Internationalist, May 2002.)
Thus his agenda is identical to that of Ed Husain, and to the Neocons with whom Ed is associated. Ironically, the person who seems most incongruous in this band of “officially approved reformers” is Shaykh Abdullah Quilliam himself, whose name is being exploited to promote “integration” and “engagement with government”.
Not many are aware of the fact that having persisted in his opposition to the British war in the Sudan, Shaykh Quilliam was accused of treason in 1908 in order to discredit him and was framed to appear as if he had employed the services of a prostitute. Upon realising that he was being set up, he left for Turkey and eventually the mosque he had established in Liverpool was closed down. According to some reports, he returned to Britain and worked under a pseudonym, died in 1932 and is buried in Surrey’s Brookwood Cemetry. To suggest that Ed and Nawaz are inheritors of a Quilliam legacy is utterly absurd.
Disillusion With the Past is My Qualification
In his article, Ziauddin builds an argument against Ed and Nawaz on the basis that they were deriving authority to speak about Islam from their mistakes in the past. He wrote that, “we cannot allow former lunatics to take over the asylum”, which I thought was astonishing given that, from the perspective of the worldview to which Zia now subscribes, it is lunacy to have been a member of FOSIS, to have sought and accepted money (£300,000) from the Saudi government for their Road to Madina project, to have assisted Kalim Siddiqui in setting up the Muslim Institute, to have gone to Iran twice in the first year of the Khomeini revolution, and to have been upset over Salman Rushdie’s novel, all of which applies to him!
Of the early years, Zia wrote: “I was so impressed by Kalim Siddiqui: his eloquence, analytical skills and passion were quite overwhelming. Indeed, so influenced was I by his sophistication, graceful general demeanour and the elegance with which he handled himself that I began to copy him unconsciously. He called his wife ‘Begum’ - My Lady - so I started to call my wife ‘Begum’ too.” (Sardar, Desperately Seeking Paradise, 2005, p.158.)
This is the same Kalim Siddiqui who later, together with Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, proceeded to request that Khomeini issue a death sentence on Salman Rushdie. The similarities among this group of individuals are evidenced by the fact that Ghayasuddin is also an advisor to the Quilliam Foundation (QF) and his son Asim Siddiqui welcomed the QF in his latest Guardian CIF piece by suggesting that it is a “corrective mechanism“.
Sardar is no different to the likes of Ed Husain when it comes to using criticism of people he once admired to prove his own liberal credentials. In later years he went on to describe Kalim Siddiqui as a cynic and control-freak.
Questionable Company
I will never forget the day I first saw Sardar in person. His verbal abilities are at such odds with the language and level of thought in his written work that one is almost compelled to speculate about whether he is just a face for another writer in the background.
He was accompanied by his close friend and confidant Merryl Davies at a town hall to speak about Islam and Reform under the auspices of the New Internationalist Magazine (21 May, 2002). The lecture was a poor regurgitation of an article in that magazine and bored everyone, but when it came to the Q&A session the discussion proved to be most informative.
While Merryl Davies tried to argue that homosexuality was part and parcel of Muslim culture, Zia accepted a question from a Muslim who had asked his opinion on the role of da’wah (inviting people to Islam). Zia’s response was both unequivocal and shocking. This is what he said in a loud and authoritative voice: “Look here, there are one billion Muslims in the world today and that means one billion problems! Why would you want to make that one billion and one problems, by inviting others to the Islam?” This, of course explains his “asylum” analogy. He believes, it appears, that Islam is a mad house.
What more can one say for a person who is now probably in the twilight years of his existence, trying desperately to gain the recognition he has sought all his life? His latest attempt - pretending to be an exegete (mufassir) even though his language skills in Arabic are at best rudimentary - seems to have remained relatively unnoticed and irrelevant in the lives of most mainstream Muslims, who are becoming increasingly fed up with peculiar individuals of this sort that elect to offer them postmodern screwdrivers to tinker with their faith.
What governments need to understand is that the hearts of mainstream Muslims will remain connected to their sound traditions long after these charlatans, whom they so like to propagate, are dead and gone. If terrorism really is the target, and not Islam itself, then why be perpetually distracted with the fantastical agendas of dreamers like these?
Next week, yet another group of Zia’s friends will relaunch their organisation (British Muslims for Secular Democracy) in a bid to deconstruct Islam with the tacit support of officialdom. Perhaps Zia’s breaking of rank with the QF boys has something to do with helping out his closer friends (Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, Alibhai-Brown, et al) at BMFSD in the competition between the two organisations for government funding and recognition. When the BMFSD was first launched in 2006, the list of members included one Maha Sardar, daughter of Ziauddin Sardar, but then again Ed Husain is participating in the launch debate (1st May, 2008). I suppose with time the full truth will emerge.
The question now is how many more of these organisations will we have to see fail before someone realises that the only people benefiting from these escapades are the dreamers themselves, who line their pockets at the taxpayer’s expense? We do not need them to combat extremism. In fact, their very presence adds to the sources of anger and despair that can so often evolve into extreme reactions. We also do not need Neocon prescriptions which are rooted in hatred and designed to exacerbate tensions between communities (the Muslims and the West) so as to boost their own strategic advantage. Every time they recruit a confused Muslim dreamer to parrot their rhetoric it ends in disaster - often for the individual Muslims involved with them, which is, indeed, tragic and regrettable.
However, everyone should also remember that for true believers, Allah is not in need of Muslims. It is we, the individual Muslims, who are in need of Islam, especially at the point of leaving this world. The Prophet (Sallalallahu alaihi wa sallam) has said that “the best of sinners are those who repent”. I hope and pray that the likes of Sardar and his co-deconstructionists will come to reflect on the precariousness of their enterprise and repent before it is too late.
Finally, let us return to the person with whom I began this piece. Of all the stories and familiar nonsensical arguments I have found in Ed Husain’s book, “The Islamist”, one story in particular caught my attention and should also have caught his. A certain uncle of Ed, Husam, during a visit to Makkah, had a dream about him. Ed wrote, “That night my mother told me that in Mecca Uncle Husam has dreamt that I was sitting on a branch of a large tree. Suddenly, without cause, I fell down and died.” (p.18.)
In the symbolic realm, true faith in Islam (al-Imaan) is represented in the Quran as a tree with long branches reaching into the heavens.
“Have you not seen how Allah sets forth a parable? A good Word like a good tree, whose root is firmly fixed, and its branches (reach) to the heavens. It brings forth its fruit at all times, by the leave of its Lord. So Allah sets forth parables for men, in order that they may receive admonition.” (Al-Quran, 14:24-25.)
Written by Husain Al-Qadi www.ummahpulse.com
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