This superb video, “The Battle for British Islam,” is a recent BBC Panorama documentary narrated and moderated by John Ware. Unlike the Beeb’s recent cowardice about criticizing Islam, this is an honest and hard-hitting documentary, one that even shows a Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Muhammad. The link was sent to me by reader Malcolm, who added a note that serves as a good summary:
I don’t know whether you’ve had the chance to see this programme of earlier this week but I think you would agree with most of it.It’s the BBC at its best and most serious and it is very different from the normal deferential and respectful stance towards Islam in its news output. It allows moderate Muslims to say that there is a connection between extremist Islam and violent extremist Islam. It says that Foreign Policy is not the problem but rather it is a puritanical, conservative form of Islam that fosters an “us and them” attitude towards the West which opens the door to violence. It also poses the question ”what can be done” and suggests that the solution, if any, is largely the responsibility of muslims.
If you’ve followed the doings of European Muslims, it won’t suprise you that there are a fair number of “extreme nonviolent Muslims” who favor things like killing apostates and stoning adulterers, as well as a replacement of Western democracy by a caliphate under sharia law. (I wonder why they’re called “nonviolent”!). And talk about “Islamophobia”—one talking head,Shaikh Abu Usamah al-Thahabi, an imam from Birmingham, proclaims (at 7:50; see also at 12:48) that “the problem with being a non-Muslim is that they are liars—usually, usually.” Anyone saying something like that about Muslims would be excoriated (and rightly so), for bigotry, or maybe even killed for criticizing the faith. But it’s apparently okay when a Muslim harbors sentiments like this: after all, they’re an oppressed minority.
Note that several Muslims point out that extremism among “nonviolent” Muslims is growing in the UK, with Muslim “faith schools” teaching anti-Semitism, anti-Westernism, and contempt for other faiths. Meanwhile, the president of the Muslim Association of Britain tries to dismiss the “extremist” views as simply “conservative.”
Finally, at 20:50, Adam Deen, president of the Deen Institute, places the blame where it belongs, not on Western oppression but on “this type of puritanical Islam.”
I highly recommend that you take 28 minutes and watch this program. While I advocate calling out the violent, misogynistic, and oppressive aspects of Islam whenever possible, the best thing said in this video occurs at 28:34, when Muhammad Manwar Ali, chief executive of the Muslim charity JIMAS, asserts that “The solution to extremism from Muslims lies with the Muslims, obviously because it is our faith that needs to be moderated or channeled, devised in such a way that it never contributes to harm or injustice.”
I’m not holding my breath.
Islam needs to be “moderated or channeled,” in other words, adherents need to integrate a Western secular values. Good luck with that!
Oh, I think it’s already happening in the US, and no doubt Europe as well. The assimilating, though, like to keep a low profile it seems.
I’ll not hold my breath, either. But maybe we’re beginning to see a crack in false respect being offered to Islam at some news organizations.
No Islam but Aslan. Sounds catchy?
I would say this fellow certainly has a more clear understanding of the problem and who it is that must somehow fix it. Islam has a struggle going on within and that has not changed. For it to survive in modern times will depend on whether the moderate section can control and eliminate the extreme.
So far it is the other way around.
I still don’t see why the aim is to moderate Islam rather than to simply encourage people everywhere to recognize reality for what it is and work together to change it to what we want it to be.
Is it just some sort of “little people” argument that that’s too much to ask of people?
b&
One way to look at it is that the reason we in “western” countries are free to adopt a rational, evidence based system for formulating social policy is that we went through an enlightenment period where christianity was sanitized and detoxified to the point where it is no longer lethal to criticize it (much to the dismay of a certain old man in the Vatican apparently).
While we may not have the luxury of time for a similar process to happen within Islam I still think it behoves us to provide all the support we can to those who are attempting this, such as Irshad Manji and other extremely brave people attempting to moderate Islam from within.
But that still doesn’t make sense.
When we talk about modernizing the economies of the Third World, many areas of which still haven’t even made it to the technological sophistication of the Industrial Revolution, we don’t insist that they themselves must still go through phases of telegraphs and steam power and what-not before they’re ready for full access to wireless phablets and what-not. Indeed, we cut right to the chase, since the most advanced technologies are generally the easiest ones to provide infrastructure for. It’s an awful lot easier and cheaper to plop a cell tower in the middle of a village than it is to run copper to every home, and it’s again cheaper to put PV panels on their rooftops than it is to build multi-megawatt power plants and run even more copper to every home.
I don’t see how it’s any different with modern politics and sociology. Okay, so much of the Islamic world is stuck in the Dark Ages, I get it. But why on Earth should we insist that they must reenact a millennium of sociopolitical advancement when it would be insane to do the same with technology?
Would you do the same with medicine? Insist that, after they get over the demon theory of disease that they’d have to spend some time with bloodletting before you’d tell them how to sterilize equipment?
I can’t think of any other instance where half-measures like that would be embraced.
b&
Religious ideas are harder to shift is the way I see it. All ideas are available to them, but for many it’s easier to wean themselves off slowly than going cold turkey. The fear involved in abandoning a god you’ve been brainwashed since childhood is scrutinizing your every move, and you weren’t aware there was any other way to think, is huge for some. It’s treatment for a mental illness. You gradually have to get people to accept a different world view. You can’t, imo, do it overnight.
We can certainly be sympathetic when people fail to let go of all their superstitions — just as we’d be understanding if an impoverished nation didn’t manage to electrify all its towns or immunize all its citizens. But why should we start out with a goal of less than 100%, or accept anything less as anything other than a failure that still needs to be remedied?
b&
The issue is that for many Muslims Islam is fairly integral to their culture, so we’re in effect asking them to discard most of their cultural heritage as well as their religion. That can be quite painful and I honestly don’t think it reasonable to expect that of people. I hence think that getting Islam to adapt to the 21st century is much more reasonable.
The distinction between culture and religion is pretty much false. Religion is part of culture, just as sport and food recipes are. What we’re “asking” of Muslims is that they abandon those parts of culture that are really bad ideas. We’ve been asking Christians to do this for hundreds of years, and to some extent they have managed to do it. Why this would be “unreasonable” is beyond me.
And “getting Islam to adapt to the 21st century” amounts to the same thing… abandoning some really bad ideas.
I’m in complete agreement with your stated goals however human beings are not rational actors.
On either side.
It’s the prisoner’s dilemma being played out on a global scale.
Even though it is in everyone’s best interests to co-operate, short term thinking results in a zero sum game where there can only be winners and losers.
Western institutions can not be imposed on what are essentially tribal societies.
Look at the pure, unmitigated disaster that is post colonial Africa, where all the institutions imposed by force by colonial powers disintegrated and were replaced by tribal structures.
It doesn’t help that many of these areas are resource rich and the last thing that western powers want is for these people to control these resources.
It is telling for example, that although Saudi Arabia holds a large amount of the worlds oil it has zero infrastructure for the processing of oil. You can only manipulate this commodity via western financial infrastructure, the Middle East has no commodities exchanges that allow them to control their own resources.
Well, no, not with much chance of success.
But, at the same time, neither can tribal society be imposed on Western institutions — and that’s what the Islamic world is attempting to do.
It’s already coming to the point where the Islamists have a choice: they can either abandon Islam and be welcomed into civilization with all the benefits thereof, or they can go rot in their self-made hellholes in the Middle East. The West’s biggest concern should be for the humanitarian crisis the Islamists are precipitating amongst their own populations, and we’ve still to figure out a good way to deal with those sorts of things.
The Islamists are, of course, trying to bring the fight to the West. It does not appear that they have the ability to do so on any sort of meaningful scale, for which we should all be grateful…the guaranteed disproportionate response from the West if they did manage to launch a real attack would cause great harm to humanity.
b&
This is a frightening video. The problem is that there is a critical mass of Muslims who accept the conservative and intolerant strain of Islam in Britain; once a critical mass is attained, the strain is difficult to stop. All religious fundamentalism is dangerous but Islamic fundamentalism is set apart from other types because of its acceptance of violence in the name of establishing its rule everywhere.
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It was indeed excellent. Particularly Adam Deen, who up until now has only shown up on the B.B.C. to trot out philosophical sophistry and Islamic apologetics. He turns up on The Big Questions every now and then.
Although it feels like the left is even more confused now than it was before the Charlie Hebdo incident, I think it(the C.B. incident) has at least ‘sieved’ out those who have a reasonable position on Islam, politically speaking – those who are willing to reject the dogmatic Islamic apologism of many on the left and the nasty bigotry of the conservative right.
The reason I say they’ve been sieved out is because these are people who don’t necessarilly agree with one another about, well, anything else at all, and they don’t necessarily write for the kind of sites or magazines I read, so all of these people pass one another by until something like this happens.
Adam Deen is a good example, although the two people who I thought particularly impressive over the last week and a half were Douglas Murray and Maajid Nawaz. I doubt that they agree about much else, politically or theologically, but they were consistently excellent wherever they popped up. If I can give last Sunday’s The Big Questions on B.B.C.1 another shout out I’d highlight Nawaz and Murray’s brilliant tag-team performance in said programme.
The B.B.C.’s various news and debate programmes have been particularly good in their coverage of the attacks.
I don’t know Murray, but Nawaz is someone I’ve come to admire. Thanks for the recommendations to check out.
Ta very much…
Douglas Murray is a writer for The Spectator among others. He is politically neo-conservative, very critical of multi-culturalism(as opposed to pluralism, a subtle distinction) and Islamic extremism.
I disagree with him about a great deal of things, most things probably(and I can’t stand The Spectator – a right wing political magazine) but he walks the line of conservative criticism of Islam quite beautifully, without ever demonstrating any kind of latent, reactionary bias towards Muslims themselves.
He’s always calm, reasoned and disarmingly polite, which presumably helps when your opponents are looking for the slightest excuse to dismiss you as a neo-con racist.
Maajid Nawaz is simply a walking affirmation of human goodness, and a fabulously dapper chap to boot;) Every time I hear him speak I find it harder and harder to believe that he really believes much of anything in the Quran.
He’s generally dismissed as such anyway by liberals. Which as Bill Maher would say is my tribe. The couple of times I’ve sent video’s by, or cited him to friends they dismiss him out of hand.
Yes, it’s the easiest thing in the world to dismiss someone because you’ve heard they’re a neo-con or whatever but unless you’re one of those political dogmatists who has a list of ‘proscribed thoughts’ and ‘prescribed opinions’ you’re occasionally going to disagree with fellow liberals and agree with conservafives.
If I’d been scared off by warnings of neo-con leanings I’d never have read Sam Harris or Hitchens. Neither of whom resemble neo-cons in any respect besides their attitudes to foreign policy.
The ability to countenance ideas that sit outside the ossified dogma of a lot of modern left-right thought is a defining characteristic of the people I respect. If the right occasionally hit the nail on the head(a stopped clock gets it right twice a day or whatever it is) then I’ll take that on board. I care more about the ideas than the people who thought them up.
I’ve watched The Big Question episode you referred to now, and I’m glad I did – it was definitely worth it. Very interesting. One Muslim speaker in particular was insisting Muslims were being held to a higher standard when, as someone pointed out towards the end, they’re actually being required to meet the same standard as everyone else I.e. don’t murder when you feel aggrieved. He seemed a victim of the ‘them and us’ mindset referred to in the Panorama documentary.
I think I know the guy you mean – he was pretty unpleasant. But I thought he made himself look like an utter plank in the end anyway:)
Glad you liked the programme – it’s generally worth watching I.M.O. and you get interesting people on it on a regular basis. And of course the odd utter lunatic, like the charming Xtian gentleman towards the end, who’s under the impression that humanism is some kind of satanic cult. Which it probably isn’t;)
Excellent documentary – I hope it’s widely viewed.
While I understand the terminology “consrvative nonviolent Islam”, I find it problematic for several reasons. Conservative Islam is not nonviolent as long as it supports and advocates punishments like death by stoning (or any other method) and corporal punishment. Although currently those laws aren’t in place in Britain, and even if no-one ever took the law into their own hands, it is still a form of violence, imo, to advocate for them. Imagine, for example, being an LGBT person growing up in a so-called “conservative nonviolent Muslim” home. Emotionally, that would be an extremely violent scenario, and is probably a reality for at least hundreds of British kids right now.
Even if these people are not currently carrying out acts of physical violence, they long for a world where they are reality. The only thing stopping them is the law of a democratic country. I find that threatening, especially as someone who would be a target of such people under Sharia – an outspoken atheist woman not owned by a husband or in the care of a male relative.
Not that I think marriage means being owned, just that that seems to be the attitude of conservative Islam.
So I’m confused. I’ve been reading both sides of the argument — “the blame rests entirely with the Muslims” and “the blame rests with Western oppression” — for quite some time now.
Is the general feeling here that there is no role whatsoever for “Western oppression” in explaining the current rise in violent Islamic-based acts? That seems to be the implication of what our host writes, unless I’m misreading things.
There is a long history of peoples resorting to violent extremes in the face of perceived or actual oppression. A common thread in all these is the use of some vehicle to demonize the oppressor in some way. Can one not argue that a reaction against “Western oppression” plays some role in recent events, with Islam providing the vehicle to demonize the oppressor and fan the flames?
“Mohammed divided the world into two parts, Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb. Dar al Islam was the land of Islam, which had submitted and was ruled by Sharia Law. Dar al Harb on the other hand was the land of war, which was all other parts of the globe. Nations may not think that they are at war with Islam, but if they are not ruled by Sharia Law, then Islam is in fact at war with them.”
from The Story of Mohammed by Harry Richardson, well worth a read and available online.
Nowadays we have globalisation. For a couple of hundred years we had western colonialism. The two experiences altogether from the two different sides must be vastly, well, different. The religion of the colonialists was Christianity, which has left an unhappy legacy behind in many places.
Now we have to live with the result of all that. Another part of the legacy of has been immigration from ex-colonies as a counterpoint to historical emigration to the colonies.
For me it is obvious that this history is profoundly important to understand and acknowledge. At its heart, however, I do think that it is Islam itself which must decide what its future relationship with the rest of the world is to be about. Which depends on what Islam thinks Islam ought to be. Perhaps great fractures will tear it apert, with the rest of us having to endure great collateral damage.
Then there is the little question of the state of Israel, and non-state of Palestine. That bit of history is one problem and a half.
Sorry, misplaced, I was responding to Adrian.
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I don’t see any real solution as long as faith based reasoning is considered acceptable. If you believe homosexuality is immoral because your holy book says so, and think it should be punishable by death for example, you’re supported by billions who at least agree it’s immoral.
Near the end of this video, a most important and most overlooked aspect of this problem is mentioned by Adam Deen. “We are up against a well-funded machine”, he says. Oil well funded, is more accurate. The rise of Islam to it’s current status in the world seems to be very much related to the large petroleum deposits located, by chance, under most of the middle eastern Islamic counties. Without this immense source of free wealth, Islam, including radical Islam, would probably not have had the economic power to assert itself as it has. A speculation, I admit, but a reasonable one, I think, considering the lack of other natural resources in that region.
If you accept this oil-driven thesis, then the growth of radical Islam, when looked at in terms of cultural evolution, has a simple explanation. The spread of Islam has been powered by free oil. Furthermore, the violent nature of some Islamic memes appears to be mostly incidental and not a requirement for Islam’s spread – violent jihad needn’t have been a part of Islam for Islam to have spread as it has. The enormous wealth from free oil would have benefitted and proliferated most of any culture it happened to belong to.
Thus, finding an inexpensive alternative for oil, or radically reducing the price of oil in some other way, seems to me to be the only realistic long-term solution to the problem of Islamic violence. This is not something that is going to happen overnight, but there may be ways to encourage it. I have always liked the simplistic idea of a “Manhattan Project”-size, government funded program to find a cheap, clean, portable and renewable source of energy. An “enerjihad”.
There’re countless reasons for searching for an inexpensive alternative for oil, with the support of Islamic dreams of hegemony far from the top of the list.
For what it’s worth, the Middle Eastern wells are at or past their peak production capacity and are beginning the slow process of running dry.
The bad news is, thanks to supply and demand, that only means that oil prices are going to skyrocket in the future….
b&
While the oil in the Arabian peninsula is beginning its decline, many of the countries there have significant natural gas reserves that they are only beginning to exploit. There will be cash there for some time to come.
The problem is that natural gas can’t (cheaply) substitute for petroleum. You can’t operate heavy farm machinery on it, you can’t run long-haul trucks on it, you can’t fly jet aircraft on it, you can’t make fertilizers and pesticides and plastics with it, and so on.
We’re facing an energy crisis, yes. But, much, much more urgently, we’re facing a petroleum crisis….
b&
Perhaps, but I’ve seen first hand the infrastructure that ExxonMobil is putting into natural gas in the middle east. There’s profit there yet, and the oil sheiks will be awash in cash for longer than we’d like to see.
Excellent documentary.
Extremist Islam has declared war on the West long ago, the West is only waking up to that fact now (if at all).
Somehow I feel we are on the losing side here.
Stick to our democratic system and free expression, it will be abused and destroyed: we lose.
Crack down on ‘non-violent’ extremist Islam we disown those very values: we lose.
Still, the latter appears somewhat less terrible than the first.
I see no ‘good’ solution, should we give more support, more voice to ex-muslims? (yes of course, but would it help stemming the tide?)
If anyone tried to blame the theocratic behavior of the Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock and occupied Salem, Mass. on the fact that they were heavily persecuted in England, this view would be rightly dismissed as silly.
Imam al- thahabi when he speaks of non- Muslims as being “ liars” neglects to mention dissimulation used by the Muslim faithful, Taqiyya in the case of the Shia and Idtirar by Sunni Muslims contained in their holy books. This kind of absurdity is embraced by all religions, lies in defense of the faith is seen as truth whether one is moderate or fundamentalist.
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I actually met Brian Deen and his wife and kids at a hostel in Yusufeli, Turkey, and had a wonderful and stimulating conversation. We obviously had many points of disagreement, but I felt comfortable speaking my mind about Islam and religion. His is the kind of moderate voice we need now!
This also from BBC (17/01/15) worth listening to.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04xs9m6
“If you have an opinion, you speak among your friends, the ones you trust, you do not say it out loud you do not know who you will offend or who will come after you..”
I came away feeling rather sad to hear of intelligent and decent fellow human beings living in a culture of fear like this.
Islamophobia? None of us will ever fear Islam the way muslims do.
Surah 25:4 “Those who disbelieve say: This is naught but a lie that Mohammad hath invented, and other folk have helped him with it, so that they have produced a slander and a lie.
25:5 And they say: Fables of the men of old which Mohammad hath had written down.”
Yet it seems Mohammad thought the stories of the Christians and Jews were at least partly fables and lies otherwise he wouldn’t have felt at liberty to change the stories to suit himself. It is a great pity that Mohammad didn’t agree with his fellow Arabs and say that the stories of the Christians & Jews were probably fictions since there is so little evidence to support their stories about history and they are unable to work the miracles claimed to have been done by heroes of faith.
Surah 25:4 could have said,”The unbelivers say,’We have heard various accounts from the Christians and Jews about what happened in the past. We notice that your account of history is different again from theirs. What ancient text or newly discovered oral tradition gives you reason to make your changes? Can’t you just accept they were making stuff up? The stories are irrelevant ,ignore & forget them'”
Maybe Mohammed couldn’t believe the gospels and felt threatened by them so he wrote down what he thought was more likely ? Maybe it was clever to rewrite the story with the Arabs as the chosen ones.
Thank you for posting this. I plan to watch it.