Author: Minette Marrin
Publication: The Sunday Times
Date: May 4, 2003
URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-668213,00.html
Every time there is news of a British
Muslim taking part in some Islamist atrocity there is a hectic rush of
the most highly esteemed members of the respectable British Muslim establishment
to camera, microphone and print to reassure the rest of us. I cannot count
the times they have told us that Islam is a peaceful religion, that suicide
is forbidden and that these dreadful acts are committed by a few unhinged
loners, or by a tiny lunatic fringe.
We long to believe them, of course,
but our credulity is beginning to feel stretched.
Last week a young British Muslim
blew himself up near Tel Aviv in an attempt to kill lots of young Israelis
and another tried but failed to murder yet more.
Suddenly the list of such atrocities
by British Muslims is beginning to seem quite long. There was Ahmed Omar
Saeed Sheikh, who organised the kidnap and murder in Pakistan of the journalist
Daniel Pearl. There was Richard Reid, the failed shoe bomber. There are
seven British Muslims imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, captured fighting against
their own country, and there were many more like them who escaped and came
home. And the alarming thing about the people on the list is how different
they are. There is no one common factor, such as poverty or social exclusion,
or anything else of the kind conventionally used to explain away such atrocities.
On the contrary, these terrorists come from a wide range of British backgrounds,
including, in two cases, British public schools.
The truth, I suspect, is that nobody
actually knows how many British Muslims there are who might be inclined
to terrorism. They may be few, but they may not. I imagine the secret services
may have a pretty good idea, though the Israelis have made plain their
bitterness about the ineffectual and liberal approach Britain has for years
taken to Islamic fundamentalist groups.
London has become known as Londonistan
- a haven for terrorists. But even if they do know they are not saying;
the only acceptable line for the authorities to take in public, for obvious
reasons, is that dangerous fundamentalists are only a minuscule minority.
Yet after the conviction this year
of the Jamaican Abdullah el-Faisal for incitement to racial hatred - he
was one of those scary fanatics who go around publicly encouraging Muslims
to kill western infidels - an investigator on the case said the authorities
"simply do not know how many young, impressionable Muslims may have gone
to training camp abroad and returned" well prepared for terrorism. They
simply do not know how many. So there may be a few, but there be more than
a few.
It is not very reassuring for the
ordinary citizen. Nor are the potted lectures on Islam that we get from
well-meaning people at times like this, explaining that the true way of
Islam is enlightened tolerance. I cannot pretend to know enough about Islam
to discuss it with anyone who has studied it. Yet even a child could work
out that the emollient things said by the well-meaning about Islam are
very inconsistent. It may well be that suicide is not permitted, neither
mentioned in the Koran nor allowed by other Islamic teaching. But martyrdom
in the name of jihad is widely praised and encouraged in Islam, even when
it involves suicide bombing. Only this week on the Today programme on Radio
4, Anjem Choudary, the British leader of Al-Muhajiroun, said of the British
suicide bombers in Israel that Muslims should support fellow believers
in jihad and in their great sacrifice.
Of course he was denounced as a
fanatic. Islamic scholars are always telling the British media that jihad,
properly speaking and properly understood, means an inner spiritual struggle,
not terrorist atrocity. Yet there are clearly plenty of Muslims who believe
there is Islamic authority for martyrdom through suicide, for holy war
in literal terms, and very specific rewards in paradise as well. No less
a person than the Saudi ambassador to Britain actually wrote a poem in
praise of some suicide bombers in Israel, which was published not very
long ago in London.
Religious text is not enough. And
it presents its own difficulties anyway. Islam has the embarrassing problem,
common to all ancient religions, of textual disagreement. The famous and
mysterious biblical claim, that "in my Father's house there are many mansions",
which is used to mean all manner of things, is almost certainly a garbling
in translation.
In the same way, the 70-odd houris,
or virgins or angels promised as a reward in Islamic paradise might well
be something rather less exciting. According to Christoph Luxenberg, a
learned German writer on the language of the Koran, it may well be that
the houris are only white raisins, and that the joys of paradise are food
and drink rather than young women. These uncertainties and ambiguities
do nothing to reassure the sceptics who remember that Protestant and Catholic
slaughtered each other in this country in the 16th century over the precise
meaning of transubstantiation.
The point about all major religions,
including Christianity, is that they are used, in the spirit of Humpty
Dumpty, to mean what their adherents want them to mean. Islam, like Christianity,
has been used to justify holy war and any number of atrocities. And religious
adherents want their faith to justify different acts at different times.
Religion is the name in which people have always justified the good and
the evil they intend to do anyway. The tragedy is that religion is usually
at its most tolerant and most beneficent when it is at its emptiest - when
its beliefs have become so feeble that very few people are prepared to
kill and die for them, as with Christianity today. Contrariwise, strong
religious beliefs can be deadly.
In the face of this unknown risk,
and these varying beliefs, the question is what can actually be done to
contain the fanatics. One of the best known and most obvious sources of
the problem is in certain mosques and religious schools, with certain fanatical
imams. Perhaps it would be possible to ask for the help of the great majority
of British Muslims who hate terrorism as much as everyone else. Perhaps
they would agree to make a point of monitoring every place of worship and
teaching.
I am assuming that just as Christians
are free to attend any Christian service, so Muslims are free to go to
any mosque or Islamic school. If so, they could keep an eye on those few
places where trouble might be brewing.
The difficulties are obvious enough.
Worshippers would not like to spy on each other, or to be spied upon. Nor
would they enjoy the dilemma of whether to shop an obvious menace to the
police for incitement to racial hatred or whatever. But if the great majority
of British Muslims were known by everyone else to be doing all they could
to recognise and to control any fanatics, they would not only be doing
a great service to society in general. They would be doing a great deal
for their own public image.
This would be worth any amount of
worthy discussion about religious belief.
minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk
