FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - The Islamist

Rant Number 359 16 August 2009

Once the priest stood outside a West London mosque, enjoying a bit of a spat with a moon-faced, zestful young man. All about his notion of a resurgent Islamic caliphate. ‘Pie in the sky’ I told him, insensitively. ‘Just as likely as bringing back Byzantium.’ After calling me a ‘kafir’ he turned away, to harangue someone else. ‘Go with God’, I wished him, and quickly forgot the meeting. Until one day in April 2003 when I recognised the boy’s chubby face in the papers. His name was Asif Hanif. He had blown himself up in a bar in Israel. Huh! I thought. ‘I have met Britain’s very first suicide bomber. Fancy that.’ I even felt impelled to write a letter to The Times, reflecting on the boy’s motivation. It got me a few irate messages from readers who thought the poor priest was condoning suicide bombing. Wot! Me? Too much of a pussycat for anything remotely resembling that, believe you me.

Now once again I have been reminded of wretched Asif. Thanks to Ed Husain’s The Islamist, purchased second-hand in a Chiswick Oxfam bookshop. A book rather fascinating for me to peruse, as I happen to know quite a few of the characters in it, Asif being one of them. (I myself am conspicuous by my absence: dommage!) It is a critique of radical Islamic & Islamist bodies in Britain and elsewhere. Hizb UtTahrir – the party of liberation – being the chief among them. A story based on the writer’s personal experience. Meaty stuff. And not without its entertaining bits, like the one about the fiery Muslim activist who boasts of his preference for Balkan blonde concubines. Anyway, I trust the author means well. Still, I have a bone to pick with him.

‘This book is a protest against political Islam’, the preface boldly states. Which immediately caused me to wonder what Ayatollah Khomeini would have thought. You see, while visiting Iran recently I learnt of an instructive anecdote about the father of the Islamic revolution there. Many years before the Shah’s overthrow, the head of Savak, the feared secret police, had paid Khomeini a visit. Aware of the Imam’s high religious status, as well as of his influence with the masses, in order to deter him from attacking the regime, the shrewd Savak boss tried an unusually insidious argument. ‘You are a man of God. A spiritual person. Why do you want to soil yourself by meddling into politics? Politics is dirty. Politics is devious. Politics is corrupt. Politics is mendacity. Lies. Badness. Imam, leave politics to us. We can dirty our hands. But you should keep yourself clean from political filth. So, it is best for you if you leave politics to us.’

Khomeini’s terse response however was not quite what the secret policeman expected: ‘All of Islam is politics.’ Indeed, in another context Khomeini noted how the Qur’an contains a hundred times more verses concerned with social and economic matters than with matters of ritual, prayer, diet and so on. And that cannot be gainsaid. Of course, tafsir, interpretation, is the next, obligatory step when it comes to sacred texts. Whether the meaning of any contentious verse can be explained away is another matter. But Khomeini’s general point seems irrefutable.

Whilst roundly rejecting political Islam, Ed Husain embraces the more inward, Sufi tradition, which he personally finds congenial. No doubt such approach has won him a good number of friends in Britain. Although we have a state church and a state religion, the influence of Christianity in the public realm is virtually nil. That delights our rulers. Jesus Christ, who triumphantly rose from the grave and redeemed the whole world, is strictly confined to the one hour slot on Sunday morning, followed by coffee and chat with the vicar. They love ‘Churchianity’, an exclusively private, harmless, emasculated and frankly useless type of religion. Islam too will be quite acceptable, providing it turns itself into the Friday, mosque equivalent of the Church of England. In sum, good Muslims are those who underwrite the secularist paradigm – religion as a private affair. Bad Muslims, all the others. Diggit?

Our Ed wields Sufism as a kind of stick to beat Islamists with. However, not all Sufis have been and are quite as quietist and as apolitical as he assumes. In 1453 Sufi dervishes egged on the Turkish armies to conquer Constantinople and the Mevlevi order in Ottoman times took full part in the Turkish military campaigns in Europe. The famed Safavid dynasty in Iran took its name from a Sufi brotherhood which captured Tabriz in 1501. In Sudan, Somalia and Libya Senussi Sufis fought against French and Italian colonialists. In such fraternities, you cannot easily distinguish between religious and political affiliations. Which rather drives a four coach and horses through Ed’s argument. I am glad he found his peace through ‘nice’, spiritual Sufis but he might as well have joined more combative ones.

I shouldn’t be too tough on the author of The Islamist. He strikes me as a decent, civilised and courageous kind of human being. One not afraid of telling the truth about Arab racism, for example, as he found himself in Saudi Arabia seen ‘as an inferior hindi, or Indian. In the racist Arab psyche, hindi is as pejorative as kuffar. In countless gatherings I silently sat and listened to racist caricatures of a billion people by Saudi bigots’, he writes. Having myself lived in the neighbouring, putatively happy state of Qatar, I can aver Ed is right. Racism towards brown-skinned people from the Indian subcontinent and other third world people is rampant in the Gulf. Of course, that is not the teaching of Islam. Just another example how neither Christianity, nor Communism nor Islam can change what I would call fallen human nature.

Shabab is a word Islamists apparently use about themselves. It’s Arabic for ‘the young’. In this case, the lads. Lads who, forgive me, are intrinsically silly, as all youth. Lads who in other times would have found an outlet for their ardours in the Foreign Legion or in monasteries or the Army. Today, in the moral and spiritual wasteland which is present-day Britain, Islamic radicalism, sometimes of the violent variety, offers itself as maybe the main opportunity for silly shabab to inject some daring meaning into their lives.

The solution? Honestly, only philosopher Benedetto Croce’s advice comes to mind: ‘Ya shabab! O youth! Grow older as quickly as you can.’

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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