Author: Ed Husain
Publication: The Times
Date: February 24, 2009
URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5792445.ece
Sectarian, conservative leadership is driving confused young Muslims into
the arms of radicals
As a child, I was unsure if I belonged to
Britain, India - or both, or neither. In the day I went to a multifaith, multi-ethnic
state school in the East End of London. At school I was taught to question,
think and see all religions equally. In the evenings, I attended Koran schools
at a mosque on Brick Lane where I was forced to learn to read Arabic, but
not to understand meanings of words. I was not allowed to question, but simply
to bob to and fro and learn Arabic prayers without understanding. All our
teachers were elderly Asian immigrant men, and we were not allowed to mix
with girls. At school, our teachers were mostly English women and we were
encouraged to mix with everybody.
I developed two personalities, two worlds,
two allegiances: one at "English school" and another at the mosque.
I was torn, confused and full of questions. But what now? Two decades on,
surely Britain's Muslims are in a better place.
Today, there are between 1,200 and 1,600 mosques
in Britain - no definite figure exists. Yesterday, the Charity Commission
sought to gloss over the malaise in them by publishing figures on attendance,
but not inquiring into difficult areas. At Quilliam, Britain's first counter-
extremism think-tank, we commissioned a poll
of more than 1,000 mosques in 2008, during Ramadan when mosques are busiest.
Despite employing Urdu and Bengali-speaking researchers, we could poll only
just over 500. Most British mosques don't maintain a reception or service
to answer questions, and not every one we did reach was willing to answer.
Quilliam's report, Mosques Made in Britain,
reveals the true extent of the mess. We found that 97 per cent of imams, or
leaders, were from overseas and 92 per cent were educated abroad, mostly in
Pakistan or Bangladesh. Almost all mosques are controlled by first-generation
immigrant men, leaving most British Muslims - women and young people - out
of the management structure.
This is not new. Quilliam has merely found
evidence of a problem that has been known among Muslims for more than two
decades.
Most British Muslims are under 25. When, like
me, they have questions about identity, belonging, values, and religion, their
local mosque leadership is futile. Britain's mosques are run by men who are
physically in Britain, but psychologically in Pakistan. They retain their
village rituals and sectarianism, and prevent the growth of an indigenous
British Islam. And for as long as young Muslims are confused about whether
they belong in Britain or elsewhere, we risk handing them over to preying
extremists in our midst.
By importing cheap imams from poor, intellectually
deprived and theologically conservative places mosques put young Britons in
the hands of men who do not have the linguistic or cultural backgrounds to
deal with modern Britain. Little wonder, then, that many young Muslims turn
to radical university Islamic societies, extremist websites, and Hamas-supporting
groups in Britain for "religious guidance".
Mosques Made in Britain also found that nearly
half of mosques do not make provisions for women. And those that do provide
disgraceful, unhygienic quarters for them to pray and ensure that women maintain
no real presence at mosques. With very few exceptions, most mosque management
committees are dominated by older men who have successfully kept out women.
As this generation of imams and elders eventually
move aside, who will take their place? Of the 27 or so Muslim seminaries or
dar ul uloom in Britain, 25 come from the austere, Deobandi tradition - the
preferred school of the Taleban. So while British soldiers risk their lives
in Afghanistan, in British Muslim seminaries we allow the teaching of intolerance,
unequal treatment of women, religious rigidity, the banning of music and theatre,
and an end to free mixing of the sexes.
At these seminaries, medieval textbooks are
still taught without any reference to context. Graduates of these highly conservative
madrassas have taken up nearly 100 posts as chaplains in our prisons. Soon,
they will move into mosques as English-speaking imams, without any understanding
of British values of liberty, tolerance and pluralism.
How long will we tolerate this underworld
in Britain?
Two years ago the Government established a
Mosques and Imam National Advisory Board and included Hamas supporters to
win over radicals. What has it achieved? Large numbers of British mosques
are not properly registered with the Charity Commission, imams work with children
without Criminal Record Bureau checks, and mosque buildings flout health and
safety regulations. Would other schools or churches get away with this?
More than three years after the July 7 bombings,
where are the citizenship classes in mosques? Or the English-language teaching
for foreign imams? With such problems on our doorstep, as a community we are
still focused on British policy in Palestine and Iraq at the expense of our
children's education, gender apartheid at mosques, and inadequacies in language,
safety and leadership. Labour politicians are only too keen to campaign for
the Muslim vote in mosques in Blackburn, Manchester and Bradford while turning
a blind eye to the failure that surrounds their constituents. For how much
longer?
- Ed Husain is co-director of Quilliam, and
author of The Islamist
