Yahya Birt

Diana Appleyard, a features writer at the Daily Mail, sent out the following appeal on 16th February (HT: BBRC, Recess Monkey, CiF):

—–Original Message—–
From: rsreply@—–.com [mailto:rsreply@----.com]
Sent: 13 February 2008 15:57
To:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Response Source - Diana Appleyard , Daily Mail (Request for personal case study)

PUBLICATION: Daily Mail (Request for personal case study)
JOURNALIST: Diana Appleyard (staff)
DEADLINE: 14-February-2008 16:00
QUERY: I am urgently looking for anonymous horror stories of people who have employed Eastern European staff, only for them to steal from them, disappear, or have lied about their resident status. We can pay you £100 for taking part, and I promise it will be anonymous, just a quick phone call. Could you email me asap? Many thanks, Diana

HOW TO REPLY:
Email: mailto:dianaappleyard@—.com
Phone: not provided for use
Fax: 01296 —– (preferred)

What an absolute disgrace! What a shameless display of xenophobia and cynical abuse of press power! If the Press Complaints Commission doesn’t do anything about this, it will confirm its status as an ineffectual internal watchdog.

Wardman Wire has done a forensic job in pointing out that the BBC, both online and in news headlines, trailed the interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury on the World at One in sensationalist and misleading terms, i.e. his giving assent to the view that accepting the rule of Shariah law in some parts of Britain was “inevitable”. This was a complete distortion of what the ABC actually said on Thursday, 7th February, either in his interview or his speech later on that evening. There is good evidence that the BBC therefore set the tone for the tabs, the Sundays and the broadsheets. (Of which more, hopefully, later.) It also tells us something about the need for responsible reporting in the light of the 17,000 complaints the Beeb received in the subsequent twenty-four hours that were hostile to its original misrepresentation.

Sunny Hundal of Pickled Politics has rightly written to the Corporation to complain. Perhaps we ought to write too.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent intervention on the recognition of Shariah in English law has sent the country into a spin. His address on “Civil and Religious Law in England”, which calls for “interactive pluralism” in law, is far from being a call for legal and cultural separatism. [1] However alarmed the reaction has been, there is simply no question of separate or independent courts; rather, the aim, it seems, is to bring existing informal Shariah courts under the purview of English law.

The main reason for the adverse and fearful reaction is that Shariah is popularly used as a synonym for penal law with its fixed penalties that can involve capital punishment. However, there is no Muslim representative body advocating Islamic penal law in Britain. Furthermore, the term “Shariah” itself is an umbrella concept that includes criminal and civil law, ethics, personal morality and conduct and matters of worship. Thus, due to this semantic confusion, attacks on the Shariah can often be misconstrued by Muslims as an attack upon their core values. More clarity about what Shariah actually means is essential to moving this debate forward constructively.

The campaign for the importation of the hybrid Anglo-Muhammadan law or “Muslim Personal Law” developed in British India and retained after independence, [2] that would be applied separately and uniformly on all British Muslims, has never been a popular option, despite the long drive on this score by the Union of Muslim Organisations, one of the British Muslim umbrella bodies, since 1970. None of the other umbrella bodies has supported the UMO’s campaign for legal dualism.

However, the picture on the ground is more complex and offers more creative possibilities. For some decades now under English civil law, marital and inheritance law and the arbitration of disputes have been judged under Shariah if both parties have freely consented to adjudication on that basis. This has required the civil courts to provide guidance for judges on ethnic minority law and to call upon a roster of Islamic legal specialists, many of them ulema. Where such claims have fallen foul of English law or contravened basic human rights legislation, they have been rejected by the courts. [3] Conversely, we can also note the recent recognition of some aspects of Islamic finance in English law to enable the development of a competitive Islamic finance sector. [4]

Therefore, the question is how much should these cases of arbitration be dealt with by the civil courts and how much by minority courts regulated under English civil law?

Under existing English law, two aggrieved parties are given the flexibility to resolve disputes in innovative ways under the aegis of a third party. The settlement of such disputes must be reasonable and based on the consent of both parties. In this space, minority tribunals like the Jewish Orthodox Beth Din, Somalian customary law and indeed Shariah courts are developing, as well as in business, with commercial arbitration becoming an established practice. In order to ease the burden on the civil courts in settling small claims and disputes, this trend, suitably regulated, has been encouraged in the past. [5]

Some Muslim scholars like Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqui [6] argue that informal Shariah courts should now follow the example of the Beth Din courts. The main Beth Din in Finchley, North London, only deals with cases on the basis of mutual consent. Once agreement is achieved, both parties are obliged under English law to follow the court’s ruling. The Beth Din deals with small claims, neighbourhood, business, tenancy and other such disputes, as well as divorce cases. It has no remit for criminal law, nor does it seek one. The best established Muslim equivalent, the Muslim Law Shariah Council in West London, mostly deals with cases of limping marriages, granting dissolution of the nikah on behalf of wives whose husbands have refused to divorce them under Islamic law. [7]

A further objection raised is that Shariah courts would, even in adopting the Beth Din model, be fundamentally iniquitous, as the state would be viewed as abdicating its responsibility to protect the rights of vulnerable members of the Muslim community. Particular concerns centre on Muslim women. Maleiha Malik has therefore rightly argued that the state should seek to apply all human rights and anti-discrimination legislation rigorously to avoid structural discrimination in the operation of these minority courts of arbitration. [8]

However the Archbishop’s “interactive pluralism” suggests further internal Muslim reflection too. Muhammad Khalid Masud argues that a jurisprudence for minorities (fiqh al-aqalliyat) that still works from a dhimmi template and therefore calls for the application of “differential equality and protection” for Muslim minorities is inadequate. Rather the challenge is to look more widely for a “Muslim jurisprudence of citizenship in the framework of pluralism”, even if Shariah courts are successfully incorporated as tribunals of arbitration. [9]

A version of this article will appear in Emel Magazine’s March 2008 issue.

Notes

[1] The text of the Archbishop’s speech, delivered at the Royal Courts of Justice on Thursday, 7th February, is reproduced at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1575, accessed 8th February 2008.
[2] Michael R. Anderson, “Islamic Law and the Colonial Encounter in British India” in D. Arnold and P. Robb (eds.), Institutions and Ideologies: A SOAS South Asian Reader (London: Curzon, 1993), 165-185.
[3] For instance in the case of Khan v. UK (1986), the court rejected the argument, on the basis of a ruling of the European Commission of Human Rights, that setting the legal age of marriage under British law at sixteen was a violation of religious freedom – in this particular instance of the “right” to marry a young women aged fourteen. It was rejected on the ground that the marriage could not be considered as “merely” a religious practice. See S. Poulter, “Muslims: Separate System of Personal Law”, Ethnicity, Law and Human Rights: The English Experience (Oxford: University Press, 1998), 195-236, example given at 218.
[4] Sunday Times, 12th March 2006.
[5] Innes Bowen, “The End of One Law for All?”, BBC News Online, 28th November 2006, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6190080.stm, accessed 9th February 2008.
[6] Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqui is currently the Rector of the Hijaz College, an Islamic seminary in Warwickshire, and a commercial law barrister.
[7] See the detailed study by Nurin Shah-Kazemi, Untying the Knot: Muslim Women, Divorce and the Sharia (London: Nuffield Foundation, 2001).
[8] See Maleiha Malik’s contribution in Madeleine Bunting (ed.), Islam, Race and Being British (London: Guardian and Barrow Cadbury, 2005). Maleiha Malik is a leading specialist on discrimination law at King’s College, University of London, and has written on issues relating to minority protection in Europe.
[9] Muhammad Khalid Masud, “Islamic Law and Muslim Minorities”, ISIM Newsletter, 11/02, 17. Masud is currently the Chairman of the Islamic Council of Ideology, an official body that advises the Pakistani government on Islamic issues, and was previously the Academic Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in Leiden, the Netherlands.

What was the status of the Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles? Evidentially there is no definitive answer to this and my tentative conclusions are provisional as I do not have the immediate means to get to the bottom of what most would probably regard as an “historical footnote”.

The office has only had one incumbent: Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932). The Ottoman caliph, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, granted Quilliam the position in 1894 and Quilliam effectively had to relinquish the post when he left Britain in 1908 and could only return a few years later pseudononymously. (Yaqub Zaki dates Quilliam’s return as early as 1910. [1]) This probably means that we have to distinguish between how the Ottomans saw the role and how Quilliam himself viewed it.

The Ottoman View

Whatever has thus so far been retrieved from the Ottoman archives [2] concerning Quilliam tells us three things:

(i) The Ottoman bureaucracy valued Quilliam as a source of information about the reporting of Ottoman affairs in the British press.
(ii) Sultan Abdul Hamid II trusted Quilliam as a competent and impartial figure given the fact that the caliph sent him on a fact-finding mission to Macedonia to report back objectively given his detachment from the internal politics of the administration there.
(iii) The granting of the title Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles in 1894 (the addition “and Dominions” appears very late towards the end of the Liverpool period and may not have been an official caliphal designation) was seen in the context of supporting minority Muslim populations outside of Ottoman control. The key example of this was the earlier deal struck between the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs over Bosnia in 1878.

The Bosnian Parallel

This third and most important point justifies more elaboration. Bosnian Muslim elites in the nineteenth century were part and parcel of centralised Ottoman power and furnished it with significant military and administrative personnel. However these elites also resisted the tanzimat reforms that compromised their independence, e.g. the uprising against Mahmud II in 1831 by Kapetan Gradascevic. Between 1878-1909, the deal with the Hapsburgs left Ottoman-style institutions in Bosnia under Austro-Hungarian control, even though legally Bosnia was still part of the Ottoman state until 1908. After 1909, the Bosniaks (or “Bosnian Muslims”) achieved an autonomous millet-style status, with their links restored to the Sheikh-ul-Islam in Istanbul, even though between 1908 and 1918, Bosnia was legally part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Of course, the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 rendered all such ties to whatever vestigal Ottoman structures remained completely moot. [3]

In any case, after 1878, the sovereign writ of the Sultan in Bosnia was an unexecuted right (nudum jus): imperial prerogatives became merely symbolic in a manner redolent of the later Abbasids when they no longer controlled the more distant provinces. Firstly the khutba in Bosnia would be read out in the caliph’s name and secondly Ottoman currency would remain in circulation there (like the late Abbasid claim to sikka, or to have their name stamped on the coinage of those distant provinces no longer under their control). Thus the Bosniaks were effectively to deal with the Hapsburgs alone. [4]

In the Ottoman state, religious administration came to be intertwined with the state, and within this a complex hierarchy of ulema developed, at the top of which stood the Sheikh-ul-Islam. Originally the mufti of Istanbul, the holder of this post came to be regarded as the most senior Sunni authority by the nineteenth century. However, under the Dual Monarchy, as religious and political authority was separate, the Bosniaks sought a creative institutional solution “in the views of Hanafi jurists regarding the position of Muslims under non-Muslim rule, the Osmanli hierarchy of ulema, practical demands and the interests of new rulers.” [5]

The main change was to keep religious institutions in place but under the formal control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; after 1909, the Bosniaks administered their religious, waqf and educational affairs autonomously. The Sharia courts were, however, largely separate from this arrangement and were considered part of the state judiciary.

The primary interest here lies in the post-Ottoman office of Ra’is-ul-Ulema, for this is more likely to reveal how the Ottomans might have considered the post of Shiekh-ul-Islam of the British Isles than would any quick association with the Sheikh-ul-Islam of the Ottoman caliphate in a spirit of Osmanli nostalgia. Why? The main supposition is a chronological one. The example of Bosnia from the previous decade might have been in the minds of the Ottomans when granting Quilliam his title. It was only later on after the war of 1912-1913 that a more uniform solution to the post-Ottoman status of Balkan Muslims (in Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Romania) suggested itself in the form of national religious administrations headed by chief muftis whose role went beyond the giving of ifta’.

In early Ottoman times, Ra’is-ul-Ulema “was an honorific title (`unwan), not an office.” [6] Later the title was given to military judges in the European part of the caliphate, and over time it came to be divorced from the requirement for scholarly competence and therefore, in loosing prestige, came to be seen as a subordinate role to the Sheikh-ul-Islam. It also came to be associated with Bosnia during this period. After 1882 under the Hapsburgs, the rights and prerogatives of the office came to be fixed, and the Ra’is-ul-Ulema became the highest (and independent) post among the Bosniaks. Baş Mufti or Grand Mufti was now used interchangeably with Ra’is-ul-Ulema.

As was not the case with Albania at the time, the Bosniaks insisted upon the continued authorization of the post of Ra’is-ul-Ulema between 1882 and 1924 by the Sheikh-ul-Islam in Istanbul by a letter of appointment known as a manshur. A manshur, in this instance, is a formal legal document that confirms that a certain person is authorised as Ra’is and who is granted authority to issue similar letters of appointment to subordinate religious officials. These letters of appointment had been issued to the provincial muftis of Bosnia during the period of direct Ottoman control, who were then the highest religious officials in the region.

However, this manshur appears to have been a symbolic formality in the case of the Ra’is. After 1882, any candidate for the post once it had fallen vacant was selected and appointed by the Austrian monarch from a shortlist of three, drawn up by a special electoral body (curia) of Bosnian ulema. Only after the appointment of the Ra’is did the curia request that a manshur be issued by the Sheikh-ul-Islam in Istanbul confirming the new appointee. From 1930 until present times, a special body comprised of national Muslim dignitaries is now charged with issuing the letter of appointment to the Ra’is-ul-Ulema until a legal caliphate is re-established. A similar use of the manshur after a national appointment process for the head Mufti was also adopted by other Balkan Muslim minority groups after 1913.

Does any of this shed much light on the case of Quilliam’s investiture as Sheikh-ul-Islam in 1894? Well it does tell us that in the final years of the Ottoman caliphate, the Ottomans were prepared at least to expend whatever symbolic authority they still possessed to allow Muslim minorities in Europe to organise themselves better institutionally in ways that were inspired by a vision of Muslim minorities according to the jurisprudential principle al-muslim bi-dhimmati l-kafir, or essentially a millet in reverse. Perhaps Quilliam’s role was technically granted through a manshur, and so was thus allowed to read the khutba in the Caliph’s name, to organise and lead his community, to offer it religious guidance and so on as he best saw fit. Clearly the Ra’is-ul-Ulema inherited established religious institutions that had come out of the Ottoman period; Quilliam, however, even if his models of religious institionalisation and authority were Ottoman by inspiration, had to create such facts on the ground from scratch. Furthermore, there is a lack of official and primary evidence of any formal agreement (as has yet to come to light at any rate) between the Sultan and Queen Victoria to formalise the role of Sheikh-ul-Islam in a manner similar to the Ra’is-ul-Ulema. [7] The position of Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles had honorary and symbolic significance but no historical continuity to draw upon — unlike the Ra’is-ul-Ulema — and in the context of the Balkan experience generally, the honorary appointment of the Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles appears to have been a one-off in terms of the Ottoman practice of recognising Muslim minorities outside of its formal control during this period.

The View from Liverpool

Leaving aside the Ottoman view, there is also the separate question of what Quilliam made of the position of Sheikh-ul-Islam, and how he saw his mission and his role. As far as can be ascertained, the main points are as follows:

(i) Authorisation to read the khutba in the name of the caliph Sultan Abdul Hamid, and, as mentioned above, this was an honorary and symbolic act when agreed for lands under which the caliph no longer had jurisdiction, a practice dating back to the late Abbasids. The Liverpool Muslim Institute under Quilliam held services according to the Hanafi School, another indication of Ottoman allegiance, and made prayers for the Sultan as “Head of the Muslim Church” regularly during the English-language prayers held in the evenings. [8] Quilliam’s own description of the post to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool in 1903 reads: “I do not officially represent Turkey in Liverpool, but I do represent the Muslim Faith, and am the Sheikh of the Mussulmans in the British Isles. I do not receive one penny from the Turkish government.” (The Crescent, XXII, No. 565, 11th November 1903, 309.)
(ii) The role included the duty to issue fatwas. In the case of his 1896 ruling on the British invasion of the Sudan, Quilliam uses the terms “Fetva”, “proclamation” and “declaration” interchangeably. [9] Quilliam saw himself as competent to give fatwas: he was fluent in several languages, including Arabic and Persian, had studied Islam in Morocco for two years and in 1893 the Sultan of Morocco had “conferred on him an honorary `alimiyya (of Fez). The title came accompanied by a robe and a turban.” [10]
(iii) The role included the mission to preach Islam. Quilliam kept meticulous records of the number of converts and worked through several channels — like the temperance movement, which was strong in Liverpool, the Unitarians and other such avenues — to spread Islam in what was often a hostile environment. His real success in this regard was in Liverpool itself and less so outside of it.
(iv) The role included the duty to speak out on the current affairs of the day but from a sense of religious conviction, this much is clear from Quilliam’s commentary on his own “Fetva” of 1896, allowing for the essential proviso that he did not separate politics from the purview of religion. [11]
(v) The role was non-stipendiary. [12]
(vi) The role was an office that would be passed on to a successor. [13]

It seems evident enough then that Quilliam did see the honorary title of Sheikh-ul-Islam as a serious means by which to found Islam in Britain and to create a permanent office. This non-stipendiary office, as Quilliam saw it, included the duties of legal guidance, preaching and the mobilisation of the Muslim diaspora in support of the Ottoman caliph. In that sense the Ottomans not only bestowed Quilliam with symbolic legitimacy but with a model of religious institutionalisation in Britain and a pan-Islamism [14] defined by a last-ditch defence of the caliphate in its final years.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank the following for their helpful comments and assistance: Batool Al-Toma, Humeyra Ceylan, Prof. Ron Geaves, Muhammad Akram Khan-Cheema, Dr H. A. Hellyer, Daoud Rosser-Owen, Dr Muhammad Isa Waley and Dr T. J. Winter. Special thanks go to Dr Yaqub Zaki who most generously lent me a draft version of Chapter 23, “The Apostle of Merseyside”, from his forthcoming work, The Shadow of the Cresent: Islam in Britain, 1770-1918, which has been essential in casting some light on this obscure issue. All errors of fact or judgement are of course my own.

Notes

[1] Yaqub Zaki, The Shadow of the Crescent: Islam in Britain, 1770-1918, Ch. 23, forthcoming. Nineteen hundred and ten is four years earlier than the previous estimate of 1914, see my earlier blog entry here.

[2] Personal email communication from Dr T. J. Winter, 28th January 2008.

[3] Xavier Bougarel, “From Young Muslims to Party of Democratic Action: The Emergence of a Pan-Islamist Trend in Bosnia-Herzegovina”, Islamic Studies (Islamabad), 36/2, 3 (1997), 533-549; Fikret Karčić, The Bosniaks and the Challenges of Modernity: Late Ottoman and Hapsburg Times (Sarajevo: El-Kalem, 1991), 111.

[4] Fikret Karčić, The Bosniaks, 81.

[5] Fikret Karčić, “The Office of Ra’is al-`Ulama’ Among the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims)”, Intellectual Discourse, 5/2 (1997), 109-120, citation at 110.

[6] Fikret Karčić, “The Office”, 111.

[7] The website of the Association for British Muslims argues for this official recongition:

“The ABM is the oldest extant organisation of British Muslims. Founded originally in Liverpool in 1889 as The English Islamic Association by HE Shaykhu-l Islam Abdullah Quilliam Bey, Shaykhu-l Islam of the British Isles by appointment of the Caliph, HIM Sultan Abdul Hamid II, jannat makan, (which appointment was endorsed by the Queen-Empress, HM Queen Victoria, and also by HE the Emir of Morocco, HM the King of Afghanistan, and HIM the Qajar Shah of Iran). The organisation was revived in London’s Notting Hill in 1927 as The Western Islamic Association, with HE Khalid Sheldrake, sometime Emir of Kashgar, Eastern Turkestan, as Amir. It was reconstituted at the London Central Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre in Regent’s Park in 1974 as The Association Of British Muslims with Imam Daoud Rosser-Owen as Amir, and again in 1978 as The Association For British Muslims with Imam Hajji Abdul Rasjid Skinner as Amir. [my italics]” Available online at: http://members.tripod.com/~british_muslims_assn/contents.html, accessed 4th February 2008.

In a conversation in late January 2008, Sheikh Daoud Rosser-Owen mentioned that the late Professor Safa al-Khulusi (1917-1995) had been his source for this information. However, the reference is not a literary one: in the first edition of Islam: Our Choice (Woking, Surrey: Woking Muslim Mission & Literary Trust, 1961), the first unabridged edition, edited by Professor Khulusi, there is no separate entry for either Quilliam or under his pseudonym of Professor Haroun Mustafa Leon, and thus no light is shed on the matter at all. Quilliam did, however, write the entry on the life of Marmaduke Pickthall, and oddly a photograph of Prof. Leon (102) is included as part of the entry, unrecognisable here as the Sheikh-ul-Islam and looking appropriately, given his pseudonym, more like a well-decorated continental professor, complete with handlebar moustache. The second version of Islam: Our Choice (Karachi: Begum Aisha Bawany Waqf, 1961), abridged by Ebrahim Ahmad Bawany, does have an entry on Leon (18-21), but not on Quilliam, and there is certainly no mention of the Sheikh-ul-Islam, let alone Queen Victoria, but only the vague mention of receiving “many decorations from Sultan Abdul Hamid Khan , the late Shah, and the Emperor of Austria” (21).

[8] Yaqub Zaki, Shadow, Ch. 23, catalogues several architectural allusions and gifted features (from the Sultan himself) of the Liverpool Muslim Institute that emphasized the Ottoman connection, the source of Quilliam’s status as Sheikh-ul-Islam. Solid silver candelabras from the Sultan flanked the mihrab (Zaki, Shadow, citing The Crescent, XI (1898), 391); he also donated eight calligraphic roundels. There was also a gilt Osmanli crescent and star on the facade of the Institute, a motif repeated in the main lecture hall. Bunting, including the Ottoman flag, was put out annually for the mawlid al-Nabi, the two Eids and the Sultan’s birthday.

[9] Abdullah Quilliam, “The Union of Islam”, The Islamic World, IV, 39, July 1896, 84-90; “proclamation” (86), “declaration” (87) and “Fetva” (88) are used respectively to describe the same document.

[10] Yaqub Zaki, Shadow, Ch. 23.

[11] Quilliam, “Union”, 89:

“… and only one [Indian Muslim critic] … advised me ‘to leave politics alone and confine myself simply to preaching Islam.’ This is not and has never been a question of politics with me. It is purely and solely a question of religion. I decline to stand dumb and see Muslim set against Muslim in fratricidal strife, embroiled in a quarrel for which there is no cause, at the bidding of any Giaour [misbeliever] or nation of Giaours. The person who would cowardly hold his peace on such an occasion I regard as unworthy of the name of a man and a True-Believer. I believe in the complete union of Islam, and of all Muslim peoples; for this I pray, for this I work, and this I believe will yet be accomplished. In England we enjoy the blessed privilege of a free press, with liberty to express our thoughts in a reasonable way, and this advantageous position can be used for the purpose of promoting the entire re-union of Muslim peoples.”

As the work of Eric Germain indicates, Quilliam used Liverpool as the hub of a transnational network linking disaporic Indian Muslim communities with supporters in British India that promoted pan-Islamism and the Caliphate and heavily criticised British and European imperial action against the independent Muslim states, see Germain’s ‘Southern Hemisphere Diasporic Communities in the Building of International Muslim Public Opinion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27/1, 2007, 126-138.

[12] The Crescent, XXII, No. 565, 11th November 1903, 309, with thanks to Yaqub Zaki for forwarding this reference to me which comes in the context of an account of a public debate in Liverpool about the Macedonian question.

[13] Quilliam groomed one of his sons, Ahmed, as his successor, taking him to Istanbul on a number of occassions. He also had plans to build a grand jami` mosque in Liverpool which came to naught due to a lack of financial support from the caliph. In the first and grander version of the planned mosque, Yaqub Zaki notes the inclusion of a detached Turkish Ottoman-style türbe (tomb) for Quilliam: “…it is intended to have a tomb on the terraced courtyard in front of the projected Mosque for the last resting-place of the mortal remains of Shiekh W.H. Abdullah Quillliam, the first Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles, and founder of Islam in this country, a dome will be built in connection with the mosque.” (Yaqub, Shadow, Ch. 23, citing The Islamic World, III, no. 36, Apr. 1896, 367.) Zaki notes too that the proposed tomb was large enough to hold his progeny and indeed successors to the office of Sheikh-ul-Islam. One of the final notices (The Crescent, 13th May 1908, 313) informs us that Quilliam and his son were “summoned” to the Sultan’s private residence at Yildiz and could expect a warm welcome and further honours, even as “the Sultan’s first secretary”. This optimism would shortly prove to be unfounded.

[14] Liverpool, as the cosmopolitan imperial entrepôt, the gateway for trade with Eygpt and India, handling forty per cent of worldwide maritime trade, was an amenable milieu for pan-Islamism and as strange a phenomenon as an English Muslim community. See Diane Robinson-Dunne, “Lascar Sailors and English Converts: The Imperial Port and Islam in late 19th-Century England”, Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges. 12-15 Feb. 2003. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., 29 Jan. 2008 <http://www.historycooperative.org/proceedings/seascapes/dunn.html>. Quilliam echoes this view of Liverpool is his 1896 speech on “The Union of Islam”, 89-90, that:

“The True-Believers are scattered all over the world, in the ice-bound land of the white Czar, as well as under the burning sun at the Equator. In the Islands of the West Indies and in British Guiana, in the sandy desserts of Western Australia or the fertile valley of the Nile, the Negro, the Arab, the Indian, the warlike African, brave Turk, polite Persian, and the Moor all join in the Fatheha and turn their face Meccawards five times each twenty four hours. From Liverpool our steamers and trading vessels journey to each part of the world, and here within the walls of this Institution who knows but that the scattered cords may not be able to be gathered together and woven into a strong rope, Al-Hablul-mateen, of fraternal union.

“There’s a light about to glow,
There’s a fount about to flow,
There’s a midnight blackness changing into grey:
Men of thought and men of action clear the way.”

This is no idle dream on my part; it is a feasible project, which only requires unity of purpose and effort on the part of True Muslims to be made an accomplished effort. Here in Liverpool, brethren, let us do our part to bring about this glorious consumation of our hopes. ‘Tis true that it is not in mortals to command success, but all can work to deserve it (applause).”

According to officialdom, 37% of working Muslim men are employed in distribution, hotel and the restaurant trades (and one in ten work as taxi drivers) — much more than any other group. What are the implications of such bare statistics, which are hardly ever the matter of sustained reflection among British Muslims? The key issues here are anti-social hours, stressful conditions, poor pay and overly-competitive and saturated markets (and saturated fats).

Hasan, originally from Istanbul, helps to run a takeaway pizza place near De Monfort University in Leicester. He works six days a week from 4pm to 4am or 72 hours a week. Over Christmas, he told me that he had a week off. I asked him if he was going to Turkey to see family and friends and he told me he would take the chance to catch up on lost sleep as he was exhausted. Unsurprisingly, Hasan finds the work dull and repetitive: “each day is different but the work stays the same”. As the evening wears on, the customers tend to be drunker and more abusive. Once I saw him get sworn at gratuitously for no fault of his own and on this occasion he stood up to the abuse. But immediately afterwards he was concerned that he had been rude to do so, and, doubtlessly, there is always the pressure in the background not to lose future custom. Thus the need for personal dignity gets squashed in a competitive business.

Hasan is unmarried but one can imagine how frustrating it would be for a husband and father to be asleep during the day and out of the house all evening and thus largely miss his children growing up. The adverse impact on a good quality of family life seems clear enough. How are spouses and offspring to cope with a virtually absent father? This is a common factor in too many Muslim households.

Then there is huge competition for not much business. On my local high street, there are a high-dozen kebab shops, five “Dallas Chicken”-style joints and a few pizza places - all run by Muslims. Only a few do well and the rest are just ticking over. How many Indian restaurants can you walk past on a weekday evening and see one lonely couple having a curry? How many Muslim taxi drivers wait over half an hour to pick up a ride? In Leicester the Muslim taxi drivers in their black hansom cabs snake back from the train station to the Central Mosque two hundred metres down the road, waiting forlornly for their fares. And then how many sons are going into the family trade with not much chance of better prospects?

Over the last ten years, we’ve had an explosion of chillified halal fried chicken outlets - Dixy Chicken, Dallas Chicken, Maryland Chicken, New Jersey Chicken, Chicken Cottage, Southern Fried Chicken, Halal Fried Chicken, Perfect Fried Chicken etc. The combinations of battery chicken, red chilli powder, breadcrumbs and American federal states seem endless. Even if KFC have had to bring out a zinger burger, behind this success story is the same tale of job insecurity and market saturation. Attempts at creating a franchise model in the halal fried chicken business has failed to consolidate this sector.

Back in 2003, Taflan Dikec set up the National Association of Kebab Shops which aimed to promote a better image of the donner kebab. However it doesn’t seem to have lasted very long: the website records that there were only ever two issues of the Association’s newsletter, Kebab and Fried Chicken. One would have hoped however for something other than rebranding a business sector. Tackling the suspect environmental and diet-unfriendly credentials of the donner or the fried battery-farm chicken as well as the low pay and poor conditions for those working in the industry is more urgent.

There is also, perhaps, the bolstering of cynical attitudes in having to do Friday and Saturday nights week in and week out, and seeing the excesses of binge drinking culture, whether as doctors in A&E, taxi drivers outside the clubs or in the takeaways. This cynicism remains in check in large part by Muslim traditions of hospitality and service, yet one cannot but help think that seeing the sharp end of weekend hedonism does little to encourage a rounded “intercultural understanding”, to employ the current jargon.

It is time to address seriously the social and economic impact of these “takeaway lives”, with their profound implications for family life, social cohesion and economic underdevelopment. Without looking at ways to diversify the business sector or avenues for reskilling and encouraging new kinds of Muslim entrepreneurship it is difficult to see how the general social and economic profile of the community can be improved.

Yahya Birt is Commissioning Editor at Kube Publishing and he blogs at www.yahyabirt.com.

This article originally appeared in Emel Magazine, February 2008, Issue No. 41.

The choice of Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932), ennobled as the Sheikh of Islam of the British Isles in 1894 by the Ottoman caliph and by the Emir of Afghanistan, as a symbolic flag-bearer for British Islam is less straightforward than it might appear. One recent appropriation of his legacy presents him as a kind of proto-Brownite patriot, a social entrepreneur working in the third sector (and of course he did great social works like setting up a school, an orphanage and many other institutions in building up his unique community in Liverpool at the end of the nineteenth century), larded with Brownite-style explicit invocations of Britishness. Seen by the new eponymous foundation as a “forebearer” for British Islam, (a retrieval that should not be “blurred” by the complications of the great postwar migrations from the Commonwealth,) Quilliam’s name is invoked “to help foster a genuine British Islam, native to these islands, free from the bitter politics of the Arab and Muslim world”.

But even a cursory glance at Quilliam’s life immediately reveals a more complicated personality than the simpler invocations of British Muslim patriotism will allow.

For instance, Quilliam’s community called the adhan out aloud, which would surely have fallen foul of the Bishop of Rochester, who is not a fan of the amplified call to prayer. We can hear the echoes of the Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali in the complaint of the Liverpool Review of 1891:

To hear the muezzin here it is most incongruous, unusual, silly and unwelcome, and the man who stands howling on the first floor of a balcony in such a fashion is certain to collect a ribald crowd, anxious to offer a copper or two to go into the next street, or even ready to respond to his invitation with something more than jeers. [1]

Quilliam lived during the high noon of European colonialism, and, in particular, of the British Empire. In 1900, eleven (mostly) European empires had 160 million Muslim subjects (or 80% of the umma); the British Empire itself had 100 million Muslims stretching from northern Ghana to Kelantan in SE Asia (so half of all Muslims were subjects of the Crown). By contrast, the independent Muslim states — the Ottoman Empire, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, Morocco and Afghanistan — had a mere 41 million Muslims. [2] After 1870, the European denial of “progress” in Muslim terms (for “progress” could only truly be European in character) fed the growth of the Salafiyya movement, which advocated a return to the ways of the earliest generations of Islam. In some ways, Salafiyya was an analogue of nineteenth-century European classicism, and it tended, at this time, towards nationalism and was critical of what it saw as Ottoman despotism. This general pessimism towards the Ottoman Empire grew with the Balkan Crisis of the 1870s and the loss of Tunisia to the French and Egypt to the British in the 1880s, and much Muslim public opinion turned against it. The idea of the sultanate was still promoted in the independent Muslims states while stressing the religious dimensions of the role as amir al-mu’minin (in some ways close to the European idea of ‘defender of the faith’), while British royalty was also known to invoke caliphal authority at the same time. But generally, Muslim political elites began to detach the idea of sovereignty from the sultan (or empire), and to invest it in the nation-state, expressed in the constitutional movements of the early twentieth century.

Quilliam, based in the colonial metropole, was seen to be an anti-imperial agitator. He was unashamedly pro-Ottoman and a supporter of the Emirate of Afghanistan, a fact naturally reflected in the string of scholarly, religious and diplomatic titles and honours he had acquired by 1908:

His Excellency Abdullah Quilliam Bey Effendi, Faziletlu Hazratlaree, B.A., F.G.S., LL.D., Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles and Dominions, Turkish Consul and Persian Vice-Consul [3]

He opened the pages of his publications to George Rule, the Honourary Ottoman Consul in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and to Enver Bey, the Ottoman Consul in Liverpool. His interventions on foreign policy were generally regarded as “un-British” by the press of the day. He questioned the virtue of Muslim imperial subjects fighting on behalf of the Empire against their fellow brethren in the Sudan (see the original text below). He defended the Ottomans from criticisms he regarded as unbalanced or unfair over the Armenian uprisings in 1895. And as British foreign policy began to move away from support of the Ottomans at the beginning of the twentieth century, Quilliam was seen to be out of step.

After Quilliam left Britain in 1908 for Istanbul, it would have been impossible for him to return to Britain as Sheikh-ul-Islam particularly during the First World War (when the Turks sided with Germany). Yet there is some evidence that he did return under the pseudonym of H. Mustapha Leon or Henri M. Leon, some dating the return as early as December 1914 while others place it after the war in 1922. [4] Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, the famous translator of the Qur’an, before and after his conversion to Islam in 1917, was seen as “a security risk” in official circles. [5] Indeed, in this whole period, according to the leading historian of British Islam,

British Muslims were greatly affected by the First World War. Turkey’s involvement on the side of Germany caused immediate doubts about the loyalties of all classes of Muslims within the empire, which reinforced perceptions that Muslims were essentially “un-British”. [6]

How contemporary that predicament sounds! And it indicates that Quilliam’s experiences are more poignantly pertinent a hundred years later than hasty patriotic appropriations would crudely suggest.

From Liverpool, Quilliam worked alongside Joosub Moulvi Hamid Gool of Cape Town and Hassan Musa Khan of Perth to unite together the diasporic Indian Muslim communities in places as far afield as Australia and South Africa, on the basis of a strong rhetoric of international brotherhood mobilised in support of the Caliphate. His strongest support came from the NW part of the British Raj in Gujrat, the Punjab and the NW Frontier Province, and particularly from the Afghans. However, the elite of the Indian Muslim diaspora couched their pan-Islamism in Anglophilia, claiming their Britishness as they sought to claim their equal status and worth. (And it is the Anglophilia rather than the context or the substance that seems of utility to hasty appropriators.)

In the high tide of Empire, Quilliam wrote his subversive pan-Islamist tracts in favour of defensive jihad, ummatic solidarity and the support and defence of the beleaguered caliphate. At least in the mid-1890s, he seemed to be a staunch Islamist, to use the current terminology, and thus seems an unlikely candidate for the latest fashion in Britslam-makeovers.

Despite the context, Quilliam was certainly unabashed and unapologetic about his loyalties. Here, in the two texts from 1896, he calls upon Muslims not to fight on behalf of the British Empire against fellow Muslims, and argues that supporting the caliphate is the mark of the mu’min (believer) and the only guarantor of Muslim unity. Given the current climate, it seems more than likely that his writing of the period would have fallen foul of current anti-terrorism laws on incitement and propagandising. The Daily Mail might even have seen him as one of those “preachers of hate”!

*****

Text One: Quilliam on Jihad

In the name of God, Most Compassionate, Most Merciful!

Peace be to all True-Believers to whom this shall come!

Know ye, O Muslims, that the British Government has decided to commence military and warlike operations against the Muslims of the Soudan, who have taken up arms to defend their country and their faith. And it is in contemplation to employ Muslim soldiers to fight against these Muslims of the Soudan.

For any True Believer to take up arms and fight against another Muslim is contrary to the Shariat, and against the law of God and his holy prophet.

I warn every True-Believer that if he gives the slightest assistance in this projected expedition against the Muslims of the Soudan, even to the extent of carrying a parcel, or giving a bite of bread to eat or a drink of water to any person taking part in the expedition against these Muslims that he thereby helps the Giaour against the Muslim, and his name will be unworthy to be continued upon the roll of the faithful.

Signed at the Mosque in Liverpool, England, this 10th day of Shawwal, 1313 (which Christians erroneously in their ignorance call the 24th day of March, 1896),

W.H. ABDULLAH QUILLIAM, Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles.

[Source: The Crescent, March 25th 1896, Vol. VII, No. 167, p. 617; original punctuation and spelling retained.]

*****

Text Two: Quilliam on the Caliphate

[681] In the name of God, Most Compassionate, Most Merciful!

Peace be to all the faithful everywhere!

“O True-Believers, fear God with His true fear; and die not unless ye also be True-Believers. And cleave all of you unto the covenant of God, and depart not from it; and remember the favour of God towards you.” Sura 3, “The Family of Imran,” Ayat, 103

All praise be to God Who, in His unlimited goodness, has favoured us with the gift of the True religion of Islam, and Who has ordered the brethren to be united, and declared this to be His law in the before-quoted Ayat of the Holy and Imperishable Koran!

Among Muslims none should be known as Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Ajem, Afghans, Indians or English. They are all Muslims, and verily the True-Believers are brethren. Islam is erected on the Unity of God, the unity of His religion, and the unity of the Muslims. History demonstrates that the True-Believers were never defeated while they remained united, but only when disunion crept into their ranks.

At the present time, union is more than ever necessary among Muslims. The Christian powers are preparing a new crusade in order to shatter the Muslim powers, under the pretext that they desire to civilise the world.

This is nothing but hypocrisy, but armed as they are with the resources of Western civilisation it will be impossible to resist them unless the Muslims stand united in one solid phalanx.

O Muslims, do not be deceived by this hypocrisy. Unite yourselves as one man. Let us no longer be separated. The rendevous of Islam is under the shadow of the Khalifate. The Khebla of the True-Believer who desires happiness for himself and prosperity to Islam is the holy seat of the Khalifate.

It is with the deepest regret that we see [682] some persons seeking to disseminate disunion among Muslims by publications issued in Egypt, Paris and London. “Verily, they are in a manifest error.”

If their object – as they allege it – be the welfare of Islam, then let them reconsider their action and they will perceive that instead of bringing a blessing to Islam their actions will have a contrary effect, and only further disseminate disunion where it is – alas that it should be said – only too apparent.

We fraternally invite these brethren to return their allegiance, and call them to the sacred name of Islam to re-unite with the Faithful.

Muslims all! Arsh is under the standard of the Khalifate. Let us unite there, one and all, and at once!

Given at the Mosque at Liverpool, this 5th day of Dhulkada, 1313, which Christians in their error call the 20th day of April, 1896

W.H. ABDULLAH QUILLIAM, Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles.

[Source: The Crescent, Vol. VII, No. 171, April 22nd 1896, pp. 681-682, original punctuation and spelling retained, pagination indicated in square brackets in the text.]

*****

Far from being “free” of the “bitter politics” of the Muslim world, Quilliam seemed fully engaged, working not only against the British Empire but also the tide of opinion in the Muslim world that had become anti-Ottoman, rallying the Muslims of the diaspora to a defiant defence of the caliphate. In a way, his mixture of local public service and global political concern makes Quilliam an oddly resonant figure for young British Muslims today — a marionette for our anachronistic fears and hopes.

Notes

[1] H. Ansari, The Infidel Within (London: Hurst, 2004), 83.
[2] R. Schulze, A Modern History of the Islamic World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 25.
[3] E. Germain, ‘Southern Hemisphere Diasporic Communities in the Building of International Muslim Public Opinion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27/1, 2007, 126-138, citation at 130, n. 30.
[4] Germain, 134, notes an attestation to 1922, but there is the Islamic Review, January 1915, pp. 4-7, that records a speech by Prof. H. Mustafa Leon in London in December 1914, which was in fact the inaugural address to the newly-formd British Muslim Society, based in London. The speech is reproduced here online: http://www.wokingmuslim.org/work/bm-soc1.htm. Quilliam’s vision for the new Society sounds very similar to how he had envisaged the role of the Liverpool Muslim Institute in the previous decade: “The Society will, I trust, keep us in touch with each, though separated by miles of land; bind us together into one great brotherhood; help us along the Islamic pathway; and strengthen each and all of us to play our part in the battle of life and the defence and exposition of those eternal principles of human conduct and Islamic religion and doctrine for which we are fighting. It. will, I hope, also serve to keep us in touch with the other parts of our world-wide brotherhood. Union is strength. May it be a uniting link not only between every British Muslim but between us and the Muslims everywhere, consolidating and binding the whole into one unbroken and unbreakable chain, stretching through the Orient and Occident, Africa, and the South and North American States. We have now planted the banner of Islam in the heart of the British Empire, its silken folds are fluttering on the breeze, good and noble men and true and gentle women are rallying beneath it. Let us keep it flying on the winds unstained, untarnished, as spotless as when it was first unfurled on Arabia’s burning sands over fourteen hundreds years ago.”

[5] P. Clarke, Marmaduke Pickthall (London: Quartet, 1986), 31.
[6] H. Ansari, 89.

As Atif Imtiaz reminds us, Britain is the land of Hume. So, in response to the Bishop of Rochester, let’s look at some empirical evidence, which shows that self-segregation is a myth.

The most accurate data set around is the decennial national census. There are around 8000 electoral wards in England. In 1991, 57 wards had a minority white population and 15% of all non-white residents lived in them. In 2001, 118 wards had a minority white population and 23% of non-white residents lived in them. In the year before the last census in 2001, more non-white residents moved out of these 118 wards than white ones (14,716 verses 9747 respectively).

So we don’t have self-segregation at all. We have the mundane phenomenon of dispersal.

First, white and non-white residents move out of the inner cities when they can afford better housing and commuting costs. This usually happens in middle age. So if everyone generally moves when they can afford to, it can’t necessarily be put down to cultural tensions.

Second, the number of mixed neighbourhoods (or electoral wards) is increasing. Between 1991 and 2001, they grew from 864 to 1070. Also minority white wards are also still mixed wards: they are not segregated. So we’re getting less not more segregated.

Third, inequalities experienced by non-white residents whether in majority-white, mixed or minority-white wards are broadly similar. This shows that geography and ethnic mix are not salient factors in creating inequality. The employment rate of non-whites is roughly twice as high as whites in all these three sorts of ward. So ethnic differentials in poverty aren’t a function of these mythical ghettos either!

So it seems that if there aren’t really any no-go areas as such, just the ones that people like the Bishop of Rochester like to dream up in their heads.

Source: Ludi Simpson, “The Numerical Liberation of Dark Areas”, Sage Race Relations Abstracts, 31/2: 5-25 (2006).

It’s usually a hopeful sign if an Indian restaurant has a small menu. It’s less likely that a standard masala base has been used to cook all the (fast food) dishes and instead a fresh and distinctive masala has been cooked for each dish — as it should be. But I save my real test to end. Does the restaurant serve proper masala chai or not? All too often the answer is no: we do tea with a teabag, sir. However there are exceptions: I am happy to report that Mumtaz up in Bradford does a wonderful chai, no problem. No wonder the Queen has visited the place.

Help may soon be on the way to solving the general paucity of chai in Indian restaurants. A company in my town of Leicester has started to produce instant chai. (No, I’m not on commission.) What heresy is this, I hear you ask? Out of curiosity we tried some at home just before Eid, and much to our surprise it was really rather good. They are producing it in cardamom, ginger and masala varieties, all with a nice zing to them and all you have to do is to add water (and a bit of milk to get a properly creamy effect). It might not beat the homemade variety but it gets pretty close — and only takes a minute to make. Surely that’s efficient enough to tempt any restaurateur?

The biggest political problem British Muslims have faced since 9/11 has been the division of their glorious multiplicity into the simplistic binary code of “moderates” and “extremists”. This has led to a conflation of the agendas around integration and terrorism. The millions now flowing into what will basically be ‘mainstreaming” Muslim communities only becomes politically palatable if it is also seen to tackle extremism too. Of course the last census in 2001 showed that many British Muslims, on all the major measures of social and economic exclusion, are part of an underclass. Muslim organisations expected to deal with these in the more usual manner now have to find post-9/11 reasons for doing so.

The government, at least according a civil servant I heard last year at a conference in Berlin, also categorises Muslim organisations as either extremist, anti-integrationist or pro-integrationist.

Leaving those that operate outside the law, those dubbed “extremist” but legal organisations are not liaised with by government to avoid lending them credibility, although interaction with other agencies like the police is likely. They are seen to undermine the project of “winning hearts and minds against extremism”, even if they are not directly part of the terrorist problem. They are seen as subversive, rejecting democratic values, and not just as anti-integrationist.

Those organisations judged “anti-integrationist” may represent mainstream community views, but are seen to be too socially conservative. They are the proper subject of participatory and robust dialogue with government, but not of public funding, or of government endorsement or promotion. Finally, integrationist organisations judged to represent mainstream community views and to promote integration are conversely the proper subject of government liaison, funding, endorsement and promotion.

This blending of integration and counter-terrorism has vitiated the political dividends that should have flowed from splitting the communities strand from the Home Office with the creation of the Department for Communities and Local Government in 2006. If one considers the social conservatism to be found in the constituencies that the British Muslim Forum and the Muslim Council of Britain both serve, a range of attitudes to integration can be found. While the boycotting of the MCB in Ruth Kelly’s time at the DCLG may have ended, the rationale that would label a big umbrella body as either pro- or anti-integrationist seems rather ham-fisted. It is the tone and stance on hot-button political issues that has been more salient in ultimately deciding the government’s mode of interaction.

In public debate, a similar confusion can be observed in the twin uses of “extremist” that obscures rather than explains the phenomenon at hand. “Extremist” is used both in a cultural sense to mean “non-liberal” and in a political register to mean “violent”. The ongoing fashion in much journalese, policy jargon or political rhetoric in establishing a binary category: “extremist”/”moderate”, or its analogues, “Islamist”/”non-Islamist”, “jihadist”/”non-jihadist” and so on is depressingly common, rather than attending to the more complex task of understanding the internal dynamics and evolution within British Islam. A rigid ideological or cultural stereotype is preferred to a decent historical and political analysis. This isn’t accidental as “culture talk” not only obviates the need for a more serious multi-causal dissection of extremism and violent radicalisation but effectively sidelines most democratic forms of Muslim political mobilisation. The argument that Muslim identity politics has roots in marginalisation and exclusion is therefore lost from the very beginning.

In the search for the liberal Muslim interlocutor, the most important constituency affected is the large bulk of socially conservative British Muslim opinion. The latest candidate is rejected as too compromised in liberal terms or as too uninfluential among Muslims to have utility. Ayaan Hirsi Ali may endorse Enlightenment anti-clericalism in comforting ways but her rejection of Islam leaves her without influence while Tariq Ramadan, despite a clearly integrationist stance, is rejected too for keeping a dialogue open with conservative Muslim opinion.

Ed Husain has recently attempted to avoid the fate of either Hirsi Ali or Ramadan by promoting liberal Islam. However this has left him with very little influence among British Muslims for two reasons. Firstly his lumping together of conservative Muslims, Islamists, jihadists and terrorists as “extremist” in one way or another, while gaining approval in Westminster, Whitehall and Fleet Street, is merely symptomatic of the current political isolation of British Muslims. Secondly his echoing of the liberal dislike of Muslim conservatism and support for sterner measures reflects a dangerously polarised climate.

Endorsing the new Kulturkampf between Islam and the West instead of more serious politics is not going to do much to tackle either exclusion or extremism in Muslim communities. A new formula for engagement on all sides is the need of the hour.

This article first appeared in Emel Magazine, January 2008, Issue no. 40.

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The October report, “The Hijacking of British Islam“, of Policy Exchange, the right-wing think tank, alleged that a survey of one hundred mosques found that a quarter of them possessed or sold extremist literature on their premises. It was deftly timed to coincide with the state visit of King Abdullah to Britain so that David Cameron could ask some awkward questions about Salafi literature published from Saudi Arabia. On 12th December, Newsnight broadcast a revealing report about the research behind what was hailed at the time as a “landmark” publication. It found, with the help of a forensic examiner, Kate Barr, that a number of the receipts used to tie mosques together with certain books were forged by a Muslim research team employed by Policy Exchange during its year-long study. Some fake receipts had been printed out on ink-jet printers, the addresses or names of mosques were erroneous or signed by individuals unknown to the mosque management or dated on days when no bookstalls were allowed to put books up for sale on mosque premises. On top of that it was also found that in all likelihood one of the researchers had handwritten two of the receipts on top of each other — for two mosques, one in High Wycombe and the other in Parson’s Green, west London, forty miles apart from each other.

While a number of mosques look set to take Policy Exchange to court for defamation, Policy Exchange, at least initially, was considering legal action against Newsnight. Given that Dean Godson, the head of research at Policy Exchange, was prepared to back the findings of the report and the research team 100% on Newsnight, a hint of a climbdown is noticeable in the Chairman of Policy Exchange Charles Moore’s press statement on 15th December saying that:

Although Newsnight’s portentousness was unjustified, the allegations did look serious. It should be said at once that they need proper investigation.

It should also be borne in mind what was said by two prominent community members in the Newsnight report who both refute the charges made against their institutions:

[There is] [n]o problem with the thesis of the report that books promoting or undermining community cohesion should be abhorred, but to go from that to implicate community centres who are trying to promote community cohesion…is very demoralising. Dr Abdulkarim Khalil, Director, Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre

We have never promoted these books at all. If you come to our circles or hear our sermons we are very much involved in precisely interpreting the Quran and understanding it in a modern British context. Dr Usama Hasan of Masjid al-Tawhid in Leytonstone

There is no doubt some obnoxious material in some of the books that were mentioned, and hardly the sort of thing one is going to recommend to one’s child. As Soumaya Gannouchi notes:

Some of the books on sale on djinns, angels, dreams, signs of the day of judgement, and hellfire often make me laugh/ cringe/ both. [...] Just like other religions, Islam boasts a vastly diverse library, covering myriad tendencies, areas, and subjects at all levels of culture high and low. Each has its audience. I may be repelled by some of the volumes on the shelves…

So we can hear prominent Muslim figures saying that there is a problem with some of this literature, but none of them is going to support the creation a new “dodgy dossier” to besmirch community centres and mosques, least of all recommend some kind of draconian policy response or Muslim community witch-hunting. A larger point is the fallacy the report operates under, namely that Muslims are robots: once you find the instruction manual, you can figure out how they think, how they will behave and how they will react. This fallacy of textual determinism is hardly confined to Muslims, but at the same time would such sloppy thinking be so liberally applied to anyone else?

The focus now falls on the Muslim researchers whose identities Policy Exchange say they must protect for fear of reprisal. Of course no one should take the law into their own hands, but there is a very serious question of public accountability here. In an interview with Riz Khan of al-Jazeera English, Dean Godson said (at 12.30) that “”we were approached by several groups of Muslims who expressed concern about what was appearing….”. So firstly, some Muslim groups selected the think-tank, and so did these “groups” play a role in selecting the members of the research team, rather than the “think-tank”select some neutral, professional and objective researchers? Was this approach a first contact or did it come within the context of a pre-existing relationship? Secondly how are we supposed to trust the rest of the report? One must now assume that the “researchers”, eight in total in two-person teams, had a preconceived bias that they set out to confirm and were prepared, in some cases, to forge documentary evidence for. So how was the report framed and constructed, and what definitions applied? How were the mosques and the books selected? Thirdly, the biggest fear is that this bias is sectarian in nature. All the theological tendencies named as “extremist” in the report have a history of anti-Sufi polemic to varying degrees (or of certain forms of Sufism), and, in a strange but revealing aside, Dean Godson said, under cross-examination from Jeremy Paxman, that the eight researchers were unavailable as they were currently “on a spiritual retreat in Mauritania”. The most fearful outcome is that the Muslim research team with be found to have a clear sectarian bias, if not institutional affiliation, that, once uncovered, will do much to harden the fallout from the recent political manipulation of Muslim sectarianism in Britain. If this turns out to be the case, no true Sufi worth the honour of that name would have anything to do with forgery, falsification or the vilification of Muslim institutions, no matter what sectarian disagreements there have been in the past.

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