“Gove’s contention is that a small but determined brigade of Muslims has developed ‘transnational’ loyalties superseding any attachment to Britain…. Understandably the extremist dream of ensnaring everywhere from Catford to California in a caliphate makes this politest of men bristle in his Savile Row suit.”
It’s good to know that the citizens of London SE6 can sleep safely in their beds, secure in the knowledge that Michael Gove is defending them against the threat of Sharia law.
The Observer finds a Muslim it likes (i.e. who denounces mainstream Muslims as extremists):
Beneath a basketball net in a freezing sports hall, a Muslim cleric is waging war on Islamic extremism.
Imam Shaheed Satardien is taking a stand against those Muslims in Ireland whom he claims are too sympathetic to Osama bin Laden and the cult of the suicide bomber. At Friday prayers in the sports hall in north-west Dublin, the South African-born former anti-apartheid activist warns his multinational congregation against blaming other religions and the West in general for all Muslims’ ills.
Cast out by the majority Islamic community in Dublin for his outspokenness, the 50-year-old preacher says he has received death threats. “I am standing firm in my beliefs,” Satardien says. “The truth is more important than being popular or living a quiet life. Extremism has infected Islam in Ireland. It’s time to get back to the spiritual aspect of my religion and stop it being used as a political weapon.”
The imam from Cape Town fled his native country following death threats, he says, from Islamic extremists in South Africa. His younger brother, Ibrahim, was shot dead in 1998 following a row with Islamic radicals in the city. When Satardien was told he would be next, he travelled to Ireland, the birthplace of his maternal grandmother, and pleaded for asylum.
“I never, ever, expected that Muslims would come under the influence of extremists in Ireland when I arrived here with my family. So I was shocked to find support for Osama bin Laden, to discover the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood and even al-Qaeda here in Dublin.”
Satardien fell out with the main Dublin mosque at Clonskeagh, singling out the influence of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian born sheikh who has spoken openly in support of suicide bombers and issued fatwas on gays.
As an example of the sort of bigotry this sort of “liberal” reporting plays to, a right-wing Canadian Christian blogger writes that the Observer story offers “more reasons to halt Muslim immigration to Canada”.
“Muslim worshippers are being urged by radical clerics to ignore British law.” Jamie Doward plugs a forthcoming documentary in the Channel 4 Dispatches slot.
Members of Congress are stoking racism against Muslims and Arabs. And it isn’t only right-wing Republicans – one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate stands guilty of promoting Islamophobia.
“As Channel 4 controversially celebrated women covering their faces and critics are dismissed as Islamophobics, Joan Smith talks to a group of women who fear the consequences of the veil’s acceptance.”
Independent on Sunday, 31 December 2006
Yes, it’s the familiar strategy pursued by Islamophobes of finding some Muslims who agree with them on a particular issue and then using this as a cover for attacks which feed into the wider media campaign being waged against the entire Muslim community. You’d have hoped that people wouldn’t fall for this, but they do. The irony here is that Khadijah Atkinson, the presenter of Channel 4’s “alternative Christmas message”, is a member of Minhaj-ul-Quran, which has aligned itself with an Islamophobic campaign against the proposed so-called “mega-mosque” in Newham. And now some of her fellow Muslims are collaborating with an anti-Islamic bigot like Joan Smith in attacking Khadijah and other veiled women. It’s not really the business of Islamophobia Watch to intervene in these matters, but surely some basic solidarity and an elementary sense of tactics wouldn’t come amiss here?
For the sort of comment Smith’s article has prompted from right-wing bloggers, see here and here.
Hostile coverage is driving Muslims away from the rest of society says Rageh Omaar, a Muslim journalist and former BBC correspondent now with Al-Jazeera. He blames self-proclaimed “liberals” for the negative media coverage: “I think that how you show that you really are liberal is your stance against what you perceive to be the threat of Islam, which journalists see as this monolithic backward looking, extremist threat to your liberal traditions. And I think it is just a knee-jerk reaction amongst a lot of my friends and colleagues in the media.”
See Charlie Beckett’s piece at Comment is Free, 29 December 2006
Both of these pieces confuse the issue by portraying Islamophobic bigots like John Ware and Martin Bright as honest reporters (“tough liberals”) who are only eager to get at the truth.
See also Mukul Devichand’s article at Open Democracy, 29 December 2006
The transcript of the Analysis programme is here.
Joan Smith complains that “we now have a growing minority of the population demanding the right to go about their everyday business in masks, which is what the word ‘niqab’ means in Arabic. This, I think, is where a lot of people discover the limits of tolerance … rightly perceiving that the face-covering is not so much an obligatory religious requirement as a challenge to the values of our largely secular society….
“Of course it upsets people in an open society where we’re used to seeing each other’s faces; our identity is expressed in facial expressions, which ease everyday transactions by indicating whether someone is happy, sad, pleased to see us or lying – an important issue when so many of our dealing with strangers are based on trust. In that sense, it can’t be read as anything other than an assertion of not belonging, of separation from the majority population, a political position some Muslims have begun to take to absurd lengths….
“It’s the worst sort of identity politics, importing ghastly patriarchal values into a country where we already have enough problems with a male political class which believes it knows what’s best for us….”
The reason young Muslim women wear the hijab is not to hide from people’s gaze, but to invite and challenge it, argues Brendan O’Neill of Spiked.
Comment is Free, 21 December 2006
The first comment on O’Neill’s piece nails its arrogance precisely: “Now, now, Mr O’Neill, neither you nor I nor anyone can get away with such sweeping statements. Maybe some muslim women do wear the veil for reasons you have deduced. Maybe not. This is merely what you, a politicised, white male imagines. I will listen with respect to what a woman who wears the hijab produces as her reasons – yours are simply an imposed narrative and interesting as a revelation of your reactions more than anything else.”
Update: See also Dervish, 23 December 2006
“The sharp differences in how the papers reacted to the verdict in the trial of the killers of policewoman Sharon Beshinivsky this week exposed the media’s vicious racism and Islamophobia. After all, it’s tough being a newspaper editor. Should we use page 1 to bash the Muslims, or the asylum seekers? Decisions, decisions…”
Media Workers Against the War examine press coverage of the baseless story about a suspected murderer fleeing the country disguised as a Muslim woman in a veil.
They conclude: “The truth is that the Times, Express, Sun and Guardian seized on the flimsiest of hints of a story in order to fill their pages with anti-Muslim bile.”
Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan dominate British literature – and they’re convinced that Islam threatens civilisation as we know it.
Ziauddin Sardar writes in the New Statesman, 11 December 2006
Over at Harry’s Place Marcus writes that Sardar’s piece “reminds me why I rarely bother reading that journal anymore”.