UK:
Multiculturalism vs. Islamism
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In the West, the Arabization of
Muslim communities has occurred with government assistance, which, through
imposed policies of multiculturalism in the name of diversity, has effected
the destruction of South Asian culture.
Britain's multiculturalism policies have imposed Islamist leadership
upon Britain's Muslim communities and brought about the destruction of
South Asian culture.
British suicide bomber and jihadist, Abdul Waheed Majeed, in his last
moments before ramming a truck laden with explosives into a Syrian prison, posed
in a white Islamic tunic and black scarf for the cameras. Asked by the
cameraman to say a few words in Arabic before his "martyrdom,"
Majeed replied: "Sorry? I can't speak. Everyone asks me that and ...
I'm not a very good speaker."
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Abdul Waheed
Majeed (left), of Crawley, England, poses for photographs moments before
driving a truck-bomb into a prison in Aleppo, Syria. (Image source:
Jabhat al-Nusra video)
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Majeed, like a large number of British Muslims, was not an Arabic
speaker. He was of Pakistani heritage. About 70%
of British Muslims are, in fact, South Asian. A mere 6.6% are believed
to be of Arab descent. And very few British Muslims can actually speak
Arabic.
Nevertheless, British Islam is firmly focussed on the Middle East. The
poet Hamza Beg, writing in the journal of a taxpayer-funded organization, Asfar,
noted:
"Since 1999, Pakistan, for example, has had a military coup, a
purported return to democracy, and the assassination of the leader of the
opposition, Benazir Bhutto. However, an entire generation of British-born
Pakistanis have been more interested in Israeli incursions into Lebanon,
the occupation of Palestine, and the war on Iraq. How has this occurred and
what does it mean?"
British Muslims, Beg continued, have rejected "their parents'
cultural understanding of Islam as a religion. British-Pakistani Muslims
have become Muslims first, and are losing patience with the Pakistani
practice of the religion embedded in Sufi traditions."
"In rejecting a culturally conditioned Islam," Beg concludes,
"Muslims in Britain have given up their equal footing and fallen prey
to Arab imperialism." Indonesian scholar Azyumardi Azra refers
to this process as "Arabization."
In a similar story, one South Asian blogger in the United States writes,
"Why hasn't South Asian poetry, art and dress impacted any of the
large American Islamic organizations of today? Why are nearly all Muslim
converts distinctly Arabic in appearance, style, and culture? ... This idea
of Arabization of tongue and culture, of course, has been devastatingly successful,
and fed right into the weaknesses of the colonized South-Asian inferiority
complex. Hence South Asia began marginalizing their own culture only a few
decades after the Saudi's [sic] began the propaganda machine. The rich
colors of the South Asian woman have been discarded..."
Over the past century, Arab-focussed Islamists have attempted to
homogenize Islamic cultures outside the Middle East. This process initially
occurred in South Asia – Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of India.
The Indian academic Baladas Ghoshal blames
the "Wahhabi creed" of Saudi Arabia, which, he claims, has
attempted to purge South Asian Islam of its cultural practises and emblems,
and has instead imposed a "pure and ideal form of Islam to be followed
by Muslims all over the world."
Wahhabis, Ghoshal writes,
believe that the "adaptation of other customs, traditions and cultures
in its path toward the expansion of the religion had only led to aberration
and corruption of original and pristine ideas of Islam. It is only through
the practice of mediaeval [sic] Arab traditions and way of life that the evil
eyes of other religions can be kept at bay."
Islamist movements in South Asia also adopted these efforts at
Arabization. In the 1930s, ideologues such as Abul Hasan Nadwi – part of
the radical Islamic Deobandi sect, which later gave birth to the Taliban –
attempted to establish in India a single, unique Islamic identity based on
"pure Islam." According to Nadwi, this meant dressing like Arabs,
speaking Arabic and reading the Arabic language press.[1] Islamic revivalism, Nadwi
claimed, required "emphasizing its affinities to his Muslim confreres
in the Middle East."[2]
Islamist groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami have since adopted these ideas;
they claim
that culture cannot exist outside of Islam and that Pakistani Muslims were
part of the "Arab nation." The Jamaat-e-Islami ideologue, Abdul
Ala Mawdudi, has said that culture destroys the "inner vitality"
of Islam: it "blurs its vision, befogs its critical faculties, breeds
inferiority complexes, and gradually but assuredly saps all the springs of
culture and sounds its death-knell."[3]
Over the past decades, since Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab
Emirates have distributed
vast amounts of money to non-profit groups and schools run by South Asian
Islamist movements, Jamaat-e-Islami, for example, set about purging
Pakistani and Bengali Muslims of their cultural ideas. The Muslim writer
Sazzad Hussain observed
the consequences of Islamist-led homogenization of his culture in the
Indian state of Assam:
"The Islamist fundamentalist has one very distinctive
characteristic—the denial of modern nation-state identity of Muslims to
form a uniformed 'Islamic' identity at the cost of local tradition and
cultural practices. … These days the Muslims of Assam are not identified as
Assamese Muslims or Muslim of East Bengali descent. Instead they are merely
homogenized as 'Muslims' … The use of Burqa and Hijab are alarmingly rising
among the Muslim women in Assam. The ankle length Thaub, a Bedouin male
dress and the red and white chequered headgear Kaffaiah are now in fashion
for many Mollahs and Maulvis [clerics] and Madrassa students in Assam. It
has reached to such an extent that this red-white or green-white chequered
Kaffaiah is now replacing the Phoolam Gamocha, the symbol of Assamese
culture…"
"Arabization and Islamization," Ghosal writes,
"are inseparable parts of a single cultural ideal." In the West,
and particularly in Britain, the loss of South Asian identity to the
pervasively unifying label of "Islam" is readily apparent. The
change of Muslim dress, some British Muslims believe, is a telling sign of
this Islamization. Muslim cultures in the West, some claim, became Arabized
before parts of the Muslim world itself. Pakistani writer Bina Shah has written:
"Growing up in Pakistan, I'd never seen anyone wear a hijab …. It
was only in the late 1980s that I saw my first hijab, worn by the mother of
a Pakistani-American girl from Peoria, Illinois. Saudi-Wahabi social
influence filtered to Pakistan and much of the rest of the non-Arab world
throughout the next two decades, thanks to a campaign that attempted to
export the kingdom's religio-social values to its would-be satellite
states. Slowly, more and more women started to wear the black burqa and the
tight hijab."
The Islamization of Western Muslim communities has occurred with
government assistance, which, through imposed policies of multiculturalism
in the name of diversity, has effected the destruction of South Asian
culture.
British multiculturalism has encouraged British society to exist as a
federation of communities in which each minority community was not
required to adopt the values of the majority. This inverse segregation only
served to chain particular communities to their self-appointed community
groups. Among Britain's South Asian community, these groups were
Islamist-run. Consequently, multiculturalist polices served to homogenize a
community whose very diversity it had promised to preserve.
Former Islamic extremist Ed Husain has referred to the result of
"25 years of multiculturalism" as not "multicultural
communities" but plural "monoculturalism." Husain recalls:
"Many Muslims want to live apart from mainstream British society;
official government policy has helped them do so. I grew up without any
white friends. My school was almost entirely Muslim. I had almost no direct
experience of 'British life' or 'British institutions'. So it was easy for
the extremists to say to me: 'You see? You're not part of British society.
You never will be. You can only be part of an Islamic society.' The first
part of what they said was true. I wasn't part of British society: nothing
in my life overlapped with it."
Kenan Malik, a British writer of Asian heritage, noted: "Where once
[it was] argued that everyone should be treated equally, despite their
radical, ethnic, religious or cultural differences, now it pushed the idea
that different people should be treated differently because of such
differences."[4]
The first victim of multiculturalist policies was the individual. The
Indian economist, Amartya Sen, has stated:
"The way that British authorities have interpreted multiculturalism
has very much undermined individual freedom. A British Muslim is not asked
to act within the civil society or the political arena but as a Muslim. His
British identity has to be mediated by his community."
Groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami have never achieved popular support in
South Asia, not even in Pakistan – despite the best efforts of their
Wahhabi patrons. When Hassan Butt, a former member of the British extremist
group, Al Muhajiroun, visited Pakistan – the home of his parents – he said
he was regarded as a stranger "because he had rejected traditional
Islam." Butt said he felt similarly isolated in Britain because the
establishment treated him "as a Muslim, not a British citizen."[5]
The second victim of multiculturalism was the very cultural expressions
that multiculturalism claimed to preserve. Britain's multiculturalism
policies offered taxpayer funds and political legitimacy to anyone who
claimed to represent a community. As with all communities, it was the
politicized activists who rose to the top and asserted their authority with
little opposition. In the case of the British Muslim community, these
activists belonged to Jamaat-e-Islami, the Bangladeshi Islamist group
responsible for acts of genocide during the 1971 Independence War in
Bangladesh.
Groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain are mostly run by
individuals and groups tied closely to Jamaat-e-Islami. A 2007 poll by Policy
Exchange revealed, however, that 94% of British Muslims do not believe
that the Muslim Council of Britain represents their views.
The Italian academic Lorenzo Vidino has observed: [6]
"The British multicultural model has traditionally relied heavily
on community leaders who act as trusted intermediaries between the
community and the state, to whom the latter can delegate the administration
of various services. No such class existed among the masses of poorly
educated South Asian immigrants in postwar Britain. The situation created
the opportunity for the Mawdudists [Jamaat-e-Islami], thanks to their
superior resources, organizational skills and good understanding of the
British political system to surpass other groups in the competition for the
role of community leaders."
British Islamists, exploiting the imposition of multiculturalism, forced
their officially recognized and publicly funded model of Muslim identity
upon their conscripted South Asian constituents. The bright colors and
sounds of Pakistani and Bengali culture were lost to the dark homogeneity
of Wahhabi-inspired Islam.
As Amartya Sen has noted:
"It is … not surprising at all that the champions of Islamic
fundamentalism would like to suppress all other identities of Muslims in
favour of being only Islamic."
In the 1970s, British Asians had identified themselves in racial terms.
They described themselves as Pakistani, Indian or Bangladeshi. After the
imposition of multiculturalism, however, these labels became
"Muslims" and "non-Muslims." The academic Delwar
Hussein writes
that in the 1980s, the British establishment embraced the concept of
"Muslim community" and started to fund Jamaat-e-Islami groups
such as the East London Mosque to deliver social welfare programs.
Lorenzo Vidino concluded that, "the funds received from councils
... allowed Mawdudist [Jamaat-e-Islami] organizations to significantly
alter the balance of power in East London as secular organizations
struggled to compete."[7]
As groups that actually represented Britain's South Asian community
disappeared under competition from well-organized, well-funded – and yet
unrepresentative – Islamist groups, the diversity of South Asian identities
started to fade:
"At the time of independence Bangladeshis who came here [to
Britain] had a very strong sense of Bengali identity. But all that
disappeared, because the official government classification ignored
language, culture and secular politics, and insisted on viewing all
Bangladeshis as Muslims. Suddenly they had lost all identity other than
being Islamic. And suddenly Bangladeshis stopped being Bangladeshis and
were merged with all other Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia."
In 1988, the Rushdie affair helped to consolidate the Islamist hold over
Britain's Muslim community. Although initial protests against Salmon
Rushdie's Satanic Verses began in India, it was in Britain where the
most significant upheavals took place. Saudi Arabia encouraged
Jamaat-e-Islami organizations in the UK to establish the United Kingdom
Action Committee on Islamic Affairs (UKACIA) to coordinate the campaign
against Rushdie. The Deobandi sect contributed to the anger – organizing
book burnings and mass marches.
Several months later, the Iranian regime issued its infamous fatwa
[religious edict] against Rushdie. An Iranian charitable organization run
by the regime offered $3 million for the Muslim who murdered Rushdie.
The fatwa served to unite British Muslims and to isolate them
even further from a state that had already made clear that they were to
exist as Muslims and not as private citizens. Inayat Bunglawala, a British
Islamist, recalls the importance of the fatwa: "I felt a thrill.
It was incredibly uplifting. The fatwa meant that as British Muslims we did
not have to regard ourselves just as a small, vulnerable minority; we were
part of a truly global and powerful movement."[8]
The establishment's response to the Rushdie crisis was, in part,
pusillanimous. Although the government criticized Iran and provided police
protection for Rushdie, it did not break off diplomatic relations with the
Tehran regime. Moreover, British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe told the
BBC: "We can understand why... [the book] could be criticized."
It was "found deeply offensive by people of the Muslim faith" and
"offensive in other ways as well … The British Government, the British
people have no affection for the book."[9] Norman Tebbit, then a cabinet
minister, called Rushdie "an outstanding villain" whose
"public life had been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his
upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality."[10]
By unprecedentedly attacking the content of a novel, British
policymakers chose to legitimize the complaints of the Saudi-backed
Islamists in Britain as well as the mullahs in Tehran – and so portrayed
these extremists as representative voices of Britain's South Asian Muslim
community.
Today, some of the key Islamist figures behind the Rushdie
demonstrations are involved with taxpayer-funded interfaith dialogue work.
Manazir Ahsan, for example, was a key figure within the United Kingdom
Action Committee on Islamic Affairs. During the crisis, Ahsan approved of
Ayatollah Khomeini's support for the murder of Salman Rushdie. He stated
that Khomeini "has expressed the Islamic legal point of view ... We
hope other Islamic governments will confirm this."[11] Today, Ahsan, is on the
executive committee of the Inter Faith Network for the United Kingdom
(which he co-chaired from 2011-2012) – an organization that has received
80% of its funding from the taxpayer.
British Interfaith Dialogue is a natural product of multiculturalist
policies: the division of citizens into pre-approved identities. The Inter
Faith Network, in fact, rejects
some religious groups, such as the minority Muslim Ahmadiyya community, as
unsuitable partners for dialogue, apparently for fear of upsetting the
Islamist-led organizations that make up its member bodies. Just as
multiculturalism offered supremacy to particular individuals and groups, so
too, today, taxpayer-funded interfaith dialogue has damaged relations
between different religious communities and has falsely legitimized
Islamist groups as representative of all British Muslims.
Of course, Western governments are not morally responsible for the
hateful ideas and murderous actions of the Islamist networks. That
wickedness lies with the Islamist groups themselves. But by continuing to
promote pernicious policies of multiculturalism while failing to protect
the individual liberties on which the West was built, government policy
does serve to provide ammunition and willing recruits to the Islamist
cause.
Against the onslaught of Islamist patronage from the East and the
government complicity in the West, the vitality of South Asian music,
dress, books, poetry and ideas risks disappearing completely.
Multiculturalism has not just failed to bring about a more harmonious
society; it has allowed Islamist mobs to purge communities of the very
cultural ideas multiculturalism promised to preserve.
[1] James Toth, Sayyid Qutb: The Life
and Legacy of a Radical Islamic Intellectual
[2] Ibid.
[3] Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad,
page 105
[4] Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim
Brotherhood, page 136
[5] Malik, page 104
[6] Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim
Brotherhood, page 135
[7] Ibid.
[8] Malik, page 18
[9] Malik, page 32
[10] Malik, page 33
[11] 'Britain: Dilemma Over Rushdie Book
Escalates', John Clements, Inter Press Service, 15 February 1989
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