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. 

What do they have in common?

As posted by Anon on the open thread earlier today, here's a funny skit from 2007 (though not, of course, from the BBC). 

Less funnily, it suggests that what was satire then is reality now:

Coming to a street near you and me?

A bouquet for Newsnight follows.

There was a shocking report on last night's programme from Secunder Kermani about the brutal lynching of a left-wing student, Mashal Khan, by a large mob of fellow Muslim students in Pakistan. Those students believed him to be guilty of blasphemy. 

Kirsty Wark said the case "puts pressure on British imams to distance themselves from the country's blasphemy laws", though the report didn't expand on that side of the story and there were no follow-up interviews with British imams. 

According to Secunder Kermani: 

Most Pakistanis, religious or not, are sympathetic to Mashal's case, believing he was wrongly accused [which, if true, is good news]. But none of the political parties are seriously talking about reforming the blasphemy law because of the resistance they would face. Unlike extremist groups such as the Taliban, the law does have deep support in many quarters. 

Of course, such violent tensions within Pakistan are mirrored here now as a result of mass Muslim immigration to this country over the past few decades. As a result we in the UK need to keep up to speed with such stories now, alas.

What James Delingpole And I Think Muslims Really Think

Having written about the reviewers’ reaction to the programme What Muslims Really Think I might as well say something about my own reaction.

James Delingpole says most of it for me, here, in his Spectator review of the programme on Channel 4.. 

Of course, like us, and no doubt many of our readers, James Delingpole is already familiar with the issues raised by Trevor Phillips.   

We’ve been on about it for ages, lamenting the fact that the mainstream press are too timid to risk throwing off the political correctness that binds them. Binds them and blinds them.

The fact that Trevor Phillips was once a notorious proponent of political correctness gives his awakening added value. The non-Jew that defends Israel gets double points for objectivity, by way of his/her/their non-tribal status. Trev gets his for being black and a Guardian reader. (Not that we know which papers he reads, but ‘Guardian reader’ is a code word these days.)

James delingpole says:

Normally the PC response to these surveys is to shoot the messenger, as the BBC and the Guardian and the usual dhimmi apologists did last year, when the Sun revealed that one in four British Muslims sympathised with the motives of the Charlie Hebdo killers. 

They’ll find it harder this time, not just because Phillips is black and probably reads the Guardian, but also because the survey was so thorough. It was conducted, face to face, by people of the same religion. And when it came to the really tricky question — the one about terrorism — a blank envelope was provided for the answer, so that respondents felt freer to say what they really thought.

I forgot to mention that. The survey was face to face, Muslim-to-Muslim. An envelope was provided for discretion and privacy when the terrorism question came up.

Back on my particular hobby horse, I have a slight quibble with James Delingpole when he says:

 “There wasn’t much to disagree with in this brave and honest programme, except for the odd momentary lapse, as when Phillips said, of Islamophobia, ‘I’ve no doubt that most of it emanates from sheer blind prejudice.’ 

That wasn’t the only lapse. What about the talking head - apparently a comedian of some sort - who tried to make the point that you mustn’t hold Israel’s malevolence against every Jew. Now I’m sure he meant well, but it’s very annoying when people get away with saying that. It amounts to saying not all Jews are bad - there are good Jews - the ones who denounce Israel. 

There are several forthright comments below the line of James Delingpole's piece. Worth a read.

Maybe the tide is slowly turning. The case against Tommy Robinson has been thrown out by a sensible judge. 

What Muslims Don’t Really think

Well, after all the hype, how did Trevor Phillips do? If polled, I’d be inclined to say that after all that hype, the programme itself was an anticlimax. 

Did you think Trevor Phillips’s programme was truly representative of what Muslims think? 

• Strongly agree, 
• Agree, 
• Neither agree nor disagree, 
• Disagree, 
• Strongly disagree. 

I’d tick ‘neither agree nor disagree’  

I’m a terribly bad liar. I hardly ever lie in real life, but when I’m polled I lie all the time. Not that I’ve ever been polled about anything interesting. Just market research, which I deeply regretted as soon as I realised I was being bombarded with junk mail purely because of my gullibility.

The programme itself was always going to be an anticlimax, these things always are when all the juicy bits have already been cherry-picked and disseminated all over the place.

I thought it was a good plan to begin with a reassuring preamble about the methodology of the ICM poll. Insurance against the kind of criticism Trevor Phillips correctly anticipated he would face. The last thing a programme like this needs is doubts about its veracity. However it didn’t convince me. 

I mean, the decision to select interviewees from heavily Muslim-populated areas threw up more questions than it answered. The logic of that decision was missing. Surely including areas populated more sparsely (by Muslims) would show up a different set of results with a different set of questions, eg., would these Muslims absorb western culture or resist it more fiercely if they weren’t cushioned by or influenced by the like-minded? 

I was more interested in some of the press reviews of the programme than my own reaction to it. 

Andrew Billen’s review in the Times included this passage: 

“Phillips, knowing that his programme would be controversial and that the pollsters are not riding high on credibility, took admirable care to explain the methodology of his documentary’s professional question posers. I have no quarrel with how ICM found the 1,081 Muslims it talked to face-to-face. Quarrels with the programme’s interpretation of their answers I do have.

However, the Telegraph’s Emma Barnett questions the methodology.:

I don’t have a problem with such surveys being done per se, although there are some serious questions about the methodology used – one being that the only Muslims polled lived in areas where they made up more than 20 per cent of the local population. 

Allison Pearson, also in the Telegraph, takes a different approach. She takes the methodology at face value because she’s much more interested in the fact that at last someone has decided to investigate this topic, and even better, that a mainstream channel has agreed to air it. She takes recent events into account and puts them into context, something which the other journalists cited here seem afraid to do.

Emma Barnett seems angry. She thinks Trevor Phillips has only succeeded in making British Muslims feel more isolated. Jeremy Corbyn’s fans dismissed accusations of his links with terrorists and antisemites as ‘smears’. Is that what Emma Barnett is doing here?

“Having had real conversations with some real Muslims, they are appalled by his handiwork and feel attacked, not “listened to”. 

As one woman said to me: “Even the title of the programme implies Muslims have some sort of collective hidden agenda, which is horrifying.” 

Reactions online have been predictably hysterical, with people seizing upon the data to support their creeping Islamophobia.”

This response goes to show that some people are resistant to any interpretation of any kind of poll if the findings indicate something disagreeable.

Andrew Billen seems to be echoing Polly Toynbee. He compares the conservative attitudes of pre-enlightened non-Muslim Britain with current Muslim attitudes towards, say, same-sex marriage or the ethics of including the word ‘obey’ in the marriage vow. 

With a little wishful thinking one can equate and conflate some conservative attitudes in the hope they’ll eventually liberalise. That might be a plausible theory, but the attitude to terrorism was not quite so easy to dismiss. He admitted it was worrying, but he disputed the presentation, i.e., the way the question was phrased.

Well, it’s a poll. The wording’s subtle affect on the outcome is one of the built-in shortcomings of polls. Nuance there is not. 

The issue both the programme and the reviewers skirted round - or ignored - concerned the attitude to Jews. 

Many Muslims said they thought Jews had too much power. That’s a view that is embedded in their religion. That’s where Andrew Billen is wrong. The softening of hard-line views necessitates a softening of the religion itself. The views we fear are part and parcel of the religion. If Muslims are unable to relinquish some of their religiosity (which their religion does not permit) no amount of wishful thinking will help.