This is a guest post which has also been posted on the Viva Charlie website. Ms Hobbs is the author of ‘The Gori’s Daughter’ (ISBN-13: 978-1901514124 ) which is available from Amazon and many other good bookshops. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Goris-Daughter-Shazia-Hobbs/dp/1901514129/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1462351061&sr=1-1&keywords=the+goris+daughter
Islam – submission to the will of Allah
I was raised in a Muslim home although home life was more about the Pakistani cultures and traditions of my father than the specific teachings of Islam. Nevertheless I was sent to mosque every day after school to read the Quran and to learn namaz – prayers. I never prayed five times a day I never even prayed once a day. I did think it strange having to read and pray in Arabic, a language I could not speak or understand, and which therefore meant I had no idea what I was reading. But I was not allowed to question this, or anything to do with Islam. I went to mosque until I was about 14 years old and not once do I recall being taught any hatred towards the West, or a distrust or dislike of ‘kaffirs.’ I, like many other, Pakistani Muslims, went to mosque simply to read the Quran.
Like so many other Muslims, my family was not a religious family. We were not forced to wear hijab and music was not forbidden. Family gatherings were not segregated (well, unless my father had white friends visiting, in which case the men would sit separately from the women). A hatred of Jews was also not passed onto us.
However, in other aspects my family was backwards in their ways. For example, they saw nothing wrong with forced marriage, and integrating with the Scottish community was not allowed. Even though my father welcomed Scottish neighbours and his Scottish friends into our home, we were discouraged from visiting white friends, or any other friends unless they were Muslim.
I was forced into a marriage with a much older man when I was eighteen years old. Three years of misery was more than enough and I walked out on my so called ‘marriage.’ For that my family and the Pakistani community disowned me.
I still described myself as Muslim, when people asked what religion I was, as people generally do, thanks to my Muslim name. My reply was ‘I am a Muslim, just not practising.’ I still prayed no times a day, I smoked and drank alcohol, I had relationships of my own choosing and none of these ‘haram’ activities bothered me in the slightest. I knew many other Muslims who also behaved like me without the fear of hell fire.
The only thing, and still to this day that I struggle to do without fear is eating the meat from a pig. I do occasionally have a bacon roll and when I do, I have to fight the inner voice telling me I will be sent to the fires of hell, the inner voice telling me how dirty and disgusting the pig is, even though the taste of bacon is heaven. I eat no other meat from the pig, just the bacon. Silly I know, when I do more ‘haram’ things than eat bacon. Sex before marriage is up there with the top three sins you can commit in Islam yet that never worried me, or millions of other Muslims. I was raised to avoid the pig at all costs whereas I think my parents took for granted that alcohol, drugs and sex would not feature in my life. Ha! The pig indoctrination runs deeper than the other forbidden things.
Other silly things, like an upturned shoe continue to have a powerful, irrational effect on me: I have to turn it back over. I remember as a child being told it is a sin to leave a shoe like that as the dirty sole is facing Allah and is an insult to him. All these years and still I need to turn the shoe over. Crazy what stays with us and continues to influence us. What bothers me may not bother other Muslims and vice versa.
Islam is the number one talked about topic nowadays. Muslims argue with other Muslims for not being the ‘true’ Muslim, non-Muslims argue with Muslims over whether Islam is the religion of peace. Muslims are killing each other yet we still argue over how peaceful the religion is. I remember asking my father what sect of Muslims we belonged to and his reply was ‘We are Muslims.’ He believed we were just all one, which I suppose is a better approach than what is going on in the world today. Sunnis killing Shi’ites, Shi’ites killing Sunnis and ISIS killing anyone – all for the pure sake of killing, it seems. Saudi Arabia killing the innocents in Yemen, the Taliban killing in Pakistan. It never ends. Every day, it seems, brings more misery, and that is even before we start talking about Muslims killing non-Muslims.
Only God can judge me – that is what Judgment Day is for, after all. The day when Allah/God decides who is going to heaven and who is going to hell. Yet here on Earth we have all these crazy lunatics deciding they are God and that their God will be so pleased with them for killing innocent people, in his name.
The drawing of Mohammed also causes many people to lose their minds and want to behead those who have drawn the picture or insulted the prophet. Many have been killed and many have gone into hiding for fear of being killed. Is this peaceful? As someone who was born into a Muslim family, does it bother me when I see pictures of Mohammed, or insults aimed at him? No, I ignore it and move on. If you are a pious Muslim and praying five times a day, then there should be no anger, no rage, in you that makes you to want to kill. There should be no time in your life for you to even think about these things. But when you have hate preachers, preaching at the mosque you attend, about the infidels, the kaffirs, and the “corrupt West” in which you are living and making a life or claiming benefits, then you can see where the hate and resentment can start to grow. These radical hate preachers brainwashing the minds of young Muslims attending their prayer classes, still continue to live in the “corrupt society” they preach is the worst of the worst. They brainwash the minds of the young to not have any fun, everything is deemed haram, for females especially. Covered from head to toe these women are allowed only to see through a slit in the niqab they have been forced to wear.
Even though many women will argue it is their choice to cover up, you know it is the religious interpretation of the Quran and Hadiths that the males in the family have chosen to follow. When I was growing up as a Muslim, in the 70s and 80s, the hijab was nowhere to be seen and the niqab rarer still. Very few Pakistani Muslim families made the females feel ashamed and dirty for not being covered and thus “tempting” to all the males around them. We were more relaxed back then. Today the hijab is a popular choice for many females, young and old, and the niqab is also fashionable in some town and cities across the UK. It is a political statement for many and for many others they have been brainwashed by the likes of Zakir Naik, preaching his hate via Muslim channels, viewed in many homes in the UK.
There are also those that negatively judge a woman who may choose to wear a hijab yet continue to wear Western clothes with it; they’ll say her clothes are too tight or that it’s pointless wearing a hijab, Astaghfirullah – God forgive her and many other catty comments. Many strong Pakistani Muslim women have been speaking out against the hate preached in their communities, they have been vocal about forced marriage and honour violence too. The males in the Muslim communities, the males that dictate how everyone should live, have shut out their voices. This in turn has led to non-Muslim men and women being “de-programmed” so as not to express concern or solidarity with women of a Muslim heritage. Otherwise decent people have been silenced for fear of offending the Muslim men who are responsible for the suffering of Muslim women.
Islam does not mean peace; it means submission to the will of Allah and it is supposed to be a way of living your life. If only it would evolve with the times, as other religions have done, and not be stuck 1400 years ago.
Muslims boast about Islam being the first to give women rights yet are silent at the treatment of women in Muslim majority countries today, and are trying to silence women in Western society from speaking out against the atrocities carried out in the name of Islam. Many of those who view Islam as the religion of hate and war only need to point out the endless and senseless fighting that is occurring amongst Muslims in Middle Eastern countries, and those that argue back that Islam is a religion of peace need to stop with the denial and silence. Denial and silence is what causes extremism to flourish in communities. Denial and silence is what causes evil in places like Rotherham. Silencers and deniers will resort to any diversionary tactics they can: when you talk about the serious issues that are occurring in Pakistani communities, especially the raping of young underage white girls, you are accused of somehow implying all non-Muslim men are perfect and commit no crimes. It doesn’t take long for someone to shut down discussion of thousands of rapes in Rotherham and other English towns with the words “Jimmy Savile.”
Until we can have honest discussions, involving both Muslim men and Muslim women, the elephant in the room will never be named and terrible harms will continue to take place. Young children have been brainwashed into thinking that beheading someone for insulting their religion, or killing someone for being gay or an apostate or lashing and stoning to death those that commit adultery, or daring to question Islam in any way, are reasonable responses and a way of life to aspire to. Some of these young children have maybe married and have children of their own and so another generation is being raised in hate.
The time for women to be involved in the debate of Islam has never been so important. Mothers send their children to mosques, sometimes but certainly not always, blissfully unaware of what is being taught, glad of the few hours of peace every night and for some weekend visits to mosque are a must also because of community pressure. It has been proven that mosques are a breeding ground for hatred. There is no need to link to articles and references just listen to the Pakistani women in the community who have been shouting for long enough about this abuse and still the Government allowed molvis and mullahs to enter the country and preach a version of Islam that belongs in the 7th century and helped create a society that lives in fear and hatred of each other. People are fearful of Muslims because they think they want to behead them, or blow them up and Muslims hate the non-Muslims because Muslims consider themselves superior to them and their kaffir ways.
Where as this taken us? It’s created a society in which young and old, those born Muslims and those who have converted to Islam, have left the safety and prosperity of Britain to join ISIS, a cult that is the most barbaric of Islamic terrorist organisations I have seen in my lifetime – against some stiff competition.
Muslim heritage is my identity and nothing will ever change that for me. But unfortunately it is the actions of many in my community, and not just a few as we are often told, that is the problem: credible polls regularly show that support for Sharia law is sadly very high amongst British Muslims.
However, there are many Muslims who are against Sharia, especially women, and we must do everything we can to amplify their voices. At the same time, though, the obligation isn’t simply on people to listen to these women: there is a firm obligation on these women to speak up and do much more. If they won’t speak up in the relative safety of the secular West, where Muslim populations are still relatively low and Islam has no formal state power, then there is little hope these problems will ever be solved from within the community. If Muslim women in the West won’t loudly speak up now, and in large numbers, the question of whether Islam is at all compatible with the West is an entirely legitimate one to ask.
