“As Britain’s culture wars grow in intensity, and abortion and artistic freedom become hot issues, Cristina Odone reveals that Saudi and US funds are behind the devout religious groups that lead the offensive.”

New Statesman, 18 April 2005

The gist of Cristina Odone’s article is that “foreign spiritual empires are moving in on Britain. Increasingly, foreign-inspired and foreign-financed religious conservatives are influencing the UK political agenda, forming what amounts to a spiritual fifth column”. It is notable that the Roman Catholic church escapes her strictures. Opus Dei doesn’t rate a mention.

Odone draws a parallel between US-backed right-wing Protestant evangelism and Islam. Unsurprisingly, she cites Peter Tatchell’s claim that “an insidious alliance has sprung up between ultra-orthodox Christians and Muslims”.

She warns that “the poorly educated imams of Bradford and Tower Hamlets, ministering to believers who are barely a generation away from the village Islam of south Asia, lack the financial, theological and intellectual firepower to stand up to the missionaries for Saudi-style Islam”. Condescending, or what?

Odone makes much of the fact that some Muslim institutions receive Saudi funding. She sees this as an attempt to introduce Wahhabism into Britain, and blames Saudi influence for the fact that some young British Muslims “lap up a rigid, censorious form of Islam, which includes the strict observance of prayer times, learning the Koran by rote, and a wholesale rejection of the habits, attitudes and values of mainstream society”.

This strikes me as largely fantasy. The Saudis certainly stepped up their financial aid to Muslim organisations worldwide after 1979, in order to counter the appeal of radical Shia Islam inspired by the Iranian revolution. However, while their funding is directed to conservative rather than to liberal Muslims, the Saudis don’t have a record of exporting pure Wahhabism.

In any case, I rather doubt that the scale of funding they provide to Islam in Britain is capable of exerting the influence Odone claims. If some young Muslims are drawn towards fundamentalist varieties of their faith, this is surely to be explained by social factors – not by what the Saudi monarchy does with its oil revenues.

Though you might suspect the article is a conscious attempt by the author to whip up Islamophobia while covering her tracks by criticising Protestant fundamentalism as well, I don’t think that’s actually her intention. However, in the present circumstances – with Islam and Muslims (unlike Christian evangelicals) being consistently portrayed as a threat to liberal values, the gains of the Enlightenment and western civilisation in general – that is in fact the practical impact of her arguments.

David T over at Harry’s Place has discovered a Muslim he’s prepared to do business with. It’s Abdel Nour Brado, Secretary of the Islamic Commission of Spain, who wants to open a discussion among Muslims about the possibility of recognising same-sex marriages. Brado and his co-thinkers are the sort of “religious political progressives within Islam” to whom the left can relate, David T argues.

Harry’s Place, 7 April 2005

Unfortunately, by this definition progressives probably amount to somewhat less than 1% of the Muslim world. The remaining 99% who would reject same-sex marriages are all categorised by David T as “religious and political conservatives”, and no distinctions are made between them.

Thus the reformist Yusuf al-Qaradawi is described by David T as a “qutbist”, i.e. a supporter of the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb who was executed by Nasser in 1966. Qutb’s denunciation of the entire Muslim world as “jahiliyya” (pagan ignorance and barbarism), his call for armed struggle against every existing regime in the Islamic world and his condemnation of all those Muslims who decline to participate in this struggle as apostates have nothing in common with Qaradawi’s views whatsoever. Indeed, Qaradawi has accused Qutb of promoting an extremist ideology “which justified the takfir (excommunication) of (whole) societies … and the announcement of a destructive jihad against the whole of mankind”. Some Qutbist!

But this is the method adopted by “left” Islamophobes like those at Harry’s Place. They issue a formal declaration that Islam is not a monolithic bloc and proclaim their support for progressive, reformist Muslims – but they define this category so narrowly that only a minuscule minority of actually existing Muslims qualify, and they then dismiss the remainder as one reactionary, undifferentiated mass.