Deobandis in the UK

This feels like a traditional Sunday of years gone by here at ITBB, with me getting hung up on Radio 4's Sunday and posting piece after piece about it and having little time left for anything else. So on I go...

To do it credit, this morning's programme also featured a fascinating survey of opinion by the BBC itself of British Muslim opinion regarding the Taliban victory in Afghanistan.

They talked to imams and worshippers at Deobandi mosques - for understandable reasons, as Deobandis are the main group of Muslims living here in the UK, and the Taliban are also Deobandis. So it's important to know what such a large swathe of British Muslim opinion thinks.

The message couldn't have been clearer from every voice featured. The UK's Deobandis are feeling positive about/hopeful for the incoming Taliban government in Afghanistan. They are hoping for the best. And they are glad that The West [i.e. us] have been kicked out.

Curiously, every one of the British Deobandis they spoke to was a man - which might have pleased any passing Taliban Radio 4 listeners tuning in for The Archers.

This section of the programme did feature one woman though. The programme also interviewed the UK's small Shia community in the form of a female human rights campaigner. She, in contrast to the abounding Deobandis, was fearful.

My main thought here though is that the BBC will surely take note of the main mood among the UK's Muslims, as found here by Radio 4's Sunday. 

As the UK's mass of Deobandis are apparently intensely relaxed and happy about the Taliban's triumph, the BBC might very well adjust its reporting to reflect that sentiment on 'social cohesion' grounds.

And I think we're already beginning to see evidence of that. 

And that makes me feel deeply queasy, because I fear we've brought foreign wars and foreign warriors ready to fight those wars to our shores and, alas, as a result, we'll inevitably pay a very heavy price for that in the long run.

And the BBC should be doing everything in its power as a Charter-bound protector of British democracy to prevent that. 

And the last thing it should be doing is to pander to the apparently huge pool of extremist Muslim opinion now dwelling in our midst, as per the BBC's Sunday. 

Desperately seeking moderate Muslims

I’ve been trying to think of something to say about the second and final instalment of Owen Bennett-Jones’s programme about the Deobandis.

While the first episode focused on their isolationist attitude and suggested that their religious ideas  were less moderate as we had been led to believe, the broadcast aired yesterday on radio 4 was concerned with ... well, I’ll paste in the blurb:

“In part two of The Deobandis, the BBC's former Pakistan correspondent Owen Bennett Jones reveals a secret history of Jihadist propagation in Britain. 

This follows the BBC's discovery of an archive of Pakistani Jihadist publications, which report in detail the links some British Deobandi scholars have with militant organisations in Pakistan. Among the revelations are details of a lecture tour of Britain by Masood Azhar - a prominent Pakistani militant operating in Kashmir. He toured the UK in the early 1990s, spreading the word of Jihad to recruit fighters, raise funds and build links which would aid young Britons going abroad to fight Jihad decades later. 

The programme also explores intra-Muslim sectarianism in Britain, and discovers how some senior Deobandi leaders have links to the proscribed organisation Sipah-e-Sahaba, a militant anti-Shia political party formed in Pakistan in the 1980s. 

But how widespread and representative is this sympathy with militancy? 

The programme explores the current battle for control in some British mosques, speaking to British Deobandi Muslims pushing back against the infiltration of Pakistani religious politics in British life. 

As one campaigner says, this is 'the battle for the soul of Islam' and the 'silent majority' must speak out - but can moderate Muslims build the institutional power they need to really enforce change?”

More details are available here on Harry’s Place, entitled ‘Toaha Qureshi meets Auntie’. 

The trustee of the mosque in Stockwell, Toaha Qureshi, squirmed when Owen Bennett-Jones asked him about the mosque’s links to the anti-Ahmadi group Khatm-e-Nubuwwat and a lecture tour on the ‘duty of Jihad’by Masood Azhar .

Qureshi’s comical protests that he was on holiday during the Khatm-e-Nubuwwat conference, and that the Ahmadis themselves (possibly in cahoots with the BBC) had planted those notorious “kill the Ahmadi” leaflets were almost gratifyingly revealing and self-incriminating. Almost, but not completely.

But, and it’s a big but, as someone probably said to Diane Abbott, the whole premise of Owen Bennett-Jones' exposé seemed to be that Deobandi mosques are disseminating far more conservative Islamic values (that’s ‘extremist’ to you and me) than had previously been believed to be the case.

As the Deobandis are thought represent the largest number of UK Muslims, this was concerning, particularly because of the movement’s association with a murderous campaign against the Ahmadis, whom they regard as non-Muslims. (But that doesn’t quite explain why they need to be killed)

It was suggested that this feud amounted to importing tribal hatreds from Pakistan, recently demonstrated by the murder of Asad Shah in Glasgow. That senseless killing was brought to our attention by the BBC, where it was initially reported as ‘religiously prejudiced’ and the suspect Tanveer Ahmed's religion was not revealed till later. 

It seems that excessive caution is still being exercised by the BBC in case criticising what, to some, are mainstream Islamic matters is seen as racist. This principle holds good up to the point when violence is openly and specifically advocated. 

I’m not sure what Owen Bennett-Jones set out to do when he conceived these programmes, but  alongside some of the other revelations that are making their way into the public’s consciousness, it’s got to be a move in the right direction. 

Simon Schama, actually

I watched the Munk debate, which is featured in Douglas Murray’s piece in the Spectator  entitled 

“No, Simon Schama, people worried about gang rape and FGM aren’t ‘obsessed with sex’”

It was an interesting debate with some fine highlights, what with Nigel Farage and Mark Steyn on the one side and Simon Schama and Louise Arbour (whom I was not familiar with) on the other.

It’s the immigration thing, and they stuck to the topic. Oddly enough, Rod Liddle crops up again in this piece from last year by Douglas Murray in which he clearly expresses his views on Simon Schama.

Rod Liddle must be like a bus. Nothing for ages, then several come along all at once.  Maybe I should do a poetic riff about that and submit it to the BBC. 

On QT, Simon Schama had called Rod 'a hack' in a most dismissive fashion (though he steered clear of the food particles) and now Douglas was hoping he’d have ‘his arse handed to him on a plate’ by Mark Steyn in this debate. 

In fact I didn’t think the two sides were all that far apart. They seemed to be talking about two separate things. A) Naturally occurring immigration in general, which is beneficial to the ‘host culture’, and B) Mass, unmonitored immigration which is detrimental to it. 

If they’d clarified that there is a distinction between gradual, culturally enriching immigration and a sudden, overwhelming invasion of culturally alien refugees and economic migrants  in the first place, it might have been a shorter debate.

The most remarkable moment (for me) came when Simon Schama asked, rhetorically, if there was anything within Islam that causes the problems we’re seeing in Cologne and Sweden etc.

  

His mannerisms were bad enough, and his habit of saying the word “actually” every few seconds was weirdly reminiscent of our friend Abdel Bari Atwan.

“It’s an appalling slander to the Muslim religion to imply, actually, that if you’ve got a Muslim immigrant that he’s bound to commit a  sexual crime sooner or later. That seems to me to be a monstrous and grotesque falsehood about Muslim communities that have been settled for a long time...”

That’s the kind of twisting of reality that we’re accustomed to. But when he went on to say:

“What is it about Islam that you’re saying that actually is about actually Islam that is designed to make men brutal animals?”

That could have opened up a very interesting strand of the discussion, but not on this occasion. 

That brings me to the first of two programmes on radio 4 about Deobandi Muslims in the UK. They’re being ‘investigated’ by Owen Bennett-Jones. 

This episode concentrated on the isolationist principle of this movement, and it looks as though Owen B-J is heading towards re-evaluating the current concept that the Deobandis are ‘moderate’.

The Deobandis certainly seem to have some extreme ideas and a genuine fear of letting their young people be corrupted by our debauchery and beastliness. 

Owen Bennett-Jones

Many years ago, before the carcinogenic properties of cigarette smoking were officially recognised, other negative implications of the habit included an implied permissiveness and possible sexual promiscuity on the part of the smoker.  Long cigarette holders; naughty, sophisticated and seductive. 

Never mind the cough. Parents would impose an outright ban on their children taking up fags on pain of disinheritance or the threat of a good whipping. More progressive parents might invite their offspring to have a puff, in the hope that it would make them cough, hopefully vomit, and thus put them off the habit for life.

Risky. It took a long time for the smoking fashion to subside, and cost many lives in the meantime. But it seems to have more or less come right in the end..

There was a similarly risky theory I once read in a 60s or 70s Dr. Spock manual on child rearing. A child knows what’s good for it, said the good doc, therefore fussy and faddy eaters would be perfectly fine if left entirely to their own devices. The infant’s body would tell it what it needs. All well and good if you're a native of some godforsaken jungle or if you live amongst the Kalahari Bushmen miles away from civilisation, but if you’re surrounded by junk food and sweet stuff, what hope is there of a good outcome? Next to nil, I think; so not worth the risk.

where did we go wrong

Something similar seems to be behind the isolationist practices of the Deobandis. Keep them on the straight and narrow, away from the Kafir’s debauchery and everything will be ok. If they let their children taste a speck of our over-indulgent, ungodly lifestyle, they’ll be hooked. Hooked and lost. You can almost understand it. But why, one must wonder, do they even want to live amongst such temptation?

Which brings me back to Simon Schama’s question. Yes, there really is something within Islam that makes some men into brutal animals. It’s a tinder-box combination of sexual repression and the concept of the superior/inferior relationship between the Muslim and the nonMuslim.

Isn’t it odd how gay men can have such a blinkered view of a cult that openly despises them?