An Academy of Islam

[1]

Farrukh Dhondy [1]

"God is light

And we’re paying the electricity bill."

From Sayings by Bachchoo

To

The Rt. Hon. Tony Blair

Ex-PM-in-Waiting

Dear Tony,

I don’t suppose any British paper will give me the space for the following view. The UK media has maintained a conspiracy of misunderstanding, muddle and whistling in the dark when confronted with the most serious threat to British civil society in our times.

There is an Islamic question in the country. It is not one that can be subsumed in some general consideration of "immigration." Neither can it be entirely tackled by an escalation of intelligence and police functions. It certainly will not be addressed by any semantic dodges such as the insistence by Ziauddin Sardar, the New Statesman’s chief panjandrum on things Islamic, that British and American foreign policy should be labelled "terrorism." Dictionary-framers may be willing to play the game, but I am convinced a redefinition will not stop one nail being added to the payload of a future bomb or deter one suicide-bound fanatic from taking innocent lives.

Your own pampered "minister" Hazel Blears, who is standing for deputy leader of your party, expressed not long ago, the awesomely useful opinion, that calling the Pakistani immigrants of Britain, "British Pakistanis" would make them feel at home and that this would go towards deterring them from acts of terror. She could have gone further and adopted a bit of a "street" stance by recommending that the abuse "Paki" should be altered to "Brit Paki."

That would make me feel so much prouder of being abused, more secure about the maniacs in our midst, or should that be the "British Maniacs"?

Your own dear wife and a few of your ministers have expressed the opinion that Islamic terrorism originates in deprivation and poverty, the corollary being that eliminating the latter will rid us of the menace.

It won’t. You have felt that identifying "moderate Muslims" and inviting them to tea, to talks and to join various quangos will help. It might, but you’ve often got the wrong guys and the right ones won’t speak up in their presence. I can name, but won’t for fear of legal action in which your signature on their chit of respectability will figure, two such scoundrels who are regularly entertained as the voice of British Muslims and are in fact closet supporters of terror and the extreme non-Islamic-but-posing-as-Islam messianic ideologies born in West Asia and in Pakistan in the last century.

The real purpose of writing is to dissuade you from your latest attempt at trying to include a "British-Islamic" rapprochement in your legacy. You say you want to give several universities additional money to study Islam. This sounds tolerant and dandy, but could very easily become part of the problem by giving unsupervisable platforms to the enemy within.

Still, you have identified the problem. It is ideological and coupled with a fanatical faith, it’s fatal. The men who perpetrated 9/11, Madrid, the London underground bombings and the men who have been convicted or held in various murder plots are fellows who have enjoyed the freebie of British education. Among them were economists, techies, teachers and people heading for a profession.

Very few of them were ne’er-do-wells and none of them were ASBO youths. They chose the path of terror because they were in thrall to an Islamic "ideology" arising out of the teachings of Mohammed Wahab, the 18th century Arabic evangelist, of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, of the Caliphate movement of the last century which believes in spreading Islam all over the world under one Muslim ruler, and of the Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islam.

These teachings are political rather than theological. They find adherents among those who like argument and seek an identity beyond "British Pakistaniness." They define themselves as true Muslims, a universal order, God’s people destined to bring about paradise on earth — an "Ummah" free of us kafirs. They don’t necessarily practise the five tenets of Islam. It’s sufficient to live and think in opposition to the values of the society which has nurtured them and their hatred. They disdain the socio-sexual-material hedonism they see around them, though there may be some lurking longings there. They probably know in the heart of hearts that their dream is just that, but they are like the small "Masxist" and anarchist organisations of the Sixties which lived in the hope that the workers would take instruction and rise and that help would come from a world movement elsewhere. That movement failed and, in the person of its redundant demagogues has forgotten the "workers" and now garners anti-American support from Islamists.

The jihadis love argument. They spend a lot of their lives listening to deviant mullahs to learn the techniques of rhetorical contempt, selectively quoting or misquoting the Quran and the Hadith (the ethics drawn from the example of the Prophet).

Despite their dedication, I have seen them defeated even humiliated in this by Muslims who know the Quran and have, with no bias, or with the bias of Sufi Islam, mastered theological and ethical Islamic argument.

And so to my contention that what Britain needs are not several departments of Islamic Studies which could, when they are inaugurated in the mill-to-mosque towns of this green and pleasant land, contribute to the deviant terrorist ideology and give it a platform as every Islamic society in our universities already has.

What is instead required is a single beacon of home-grown intellectual Islamic learning and propagation; a Sandhurst of Islam, well-endowed but refusing all Saudi money. It should be established to study history, theology, ethics, etc., and conduct scholarly debate. It must never be allowed to deteriorate into a seminary for mad mullahs.

The mechanism of its establishment is through an Act of Parliament — a clause in a forthcoming education bill perhaps — licensed under a parliamentary charter, much as the original Channel 4 was. (Even though the deterioration of that institution may not inspire unswerving confidence in the power of charters.)

Nevertheless, there is no alternative. The charter would include checks and balances to see that no missionary teaching and deviant terrorist ideology invaded the portals of such an academy. An appointed "board" could ensure that. Specifying such limits is not tantamount to ideological policing.

After all, would a Catholic seminary appoint a professor who was an advocate of the Church of Satan? Or a Scientologist? You may say that the distinctions in Islam are not that clear. The truth is they are! Only you’ve never been told it and no one in your gaggle of experts, including your New Labour Asian arrivistes, is willing to risk saying it publicly.

Such an academy would wield much more authority among the believers and those who are susceptible to ideological subversion than any department of Islamic studies at, say, Oxford or Cambridge.

It would spawn, as such academies do, off-shoots of itself and a tradition that would be respected throughout the world by doing what academies normally do — studying, publishing, developing a religion whose internal dynamic has always been evident.

Of Cabbages & Kings | Farrukh Dhondy