I have an interesting ‘dual view’ of those involved in reform of Islam. Of course I wish them well, those wishing to reform this death cult should be admired and supported, but I think, unless there is some sort of miracle, that they are on a hiding to nothing. I speak here of the likes of Imam Tawhidi and Ayaan Hirsi Ali who have denounced the violence in Islamic scripture and want reform of Islam.
There are others out there who have taken quite circuitous paths to get to the position where they embrace and promote the idea of reform of Islam and turning it more towards enlightenment and less like the death cult it is at the moment. One such person, the subject of this guest post by Joshua W, is Maajid Nawaz. He came from a back ground of Islamic extremism and was a major player in one of Britain’s nastiest Islamic supremacist groups. Mr Nawaz turned away from the radicalism of his past whilst being held in prison and now advocates for moderation in religion. Well done to Mr Nawaz I say. Those of us who have undergone political attitude changes ourselves can understand to a certain extent the process and the struggles that Mr Nawaz probably went through during this transition.
But, as much as I admire Mr Nawaz’s transition, his journey from the dark to the light so to speak, I don’t think he has as much influence over Britain’s Muslims as the Left wing wine bar chattering classes set may think or even hope that he has. I don’t think that Mr Nawaz is anything like some of the other ‘public Muslims’ that the media seem to fall in love with and which are mentioned below, he’s not a grievance monger or an bullshitter or a closet Islamic supremacist. He is quite likely though to be pretty ineffectual in promoting reform in Britain’s Islamic communities. Maajid Nawaz is not, as far as I can ascertain, a serious wrong’un, but he is not a panacea for Islamic extremism and his sort of reform may be doomed to failure owing to the supremacy in authority of Islamic texts.
So here’s Joshua W’s piece. It’s hard hitting and thought provoking and I hope that you enjoy it.
The Strange Case of Maajid Nawaz, and the Hypocrisy of the UK’s Media.
First of all, let me clearly define my terms – Islamism is terrorism in my mind. Islamism is the political element of Islam which seeks to establish a global caliphate that sees everyone living under sharia. Sharia, as we know, in spite of the lies that are continually espoused by the Muslim darlings of the UK’s media, does not take kindly to gays, women, and people of other faiths.
Maajid Nawaz was once part of what I consider to be a terrorist organization called Hizb ut-Tahrir (for the reasons given above). Hizb ut-Tahrir are banned in all Arab countries with the exception of Yemen, UAE, and Lebanon. They are also banned in some other countries, too – Germany, China, Russia, Egypt, Turkey, etc. Hizb ut-Tahrir still hold demonstrations in Central London to this day. This is a terrorist organization that Mr. Nawaz was part of, promoted, helped grow to its original size today, and one which allegedly saw him spend time in jail because of his participation with it and his other Islamist activities.
Today, Maajid is the darling of the UK’s media. Apparently, being an ex-member of a terrorist organization makes one an expert on how best to spread Islam peacefully across the UK. Maajid is still a fierce promoter of Islam from what I can tell. He is still looking to spread it worldwide, but he’s hoping that he can reform Islam and give us the soft version, the version without all the calls to violence and the need to establish a caliphate. To that I say, good luck, and, further, you can keep it because I’m not buying into it. I do not want Islam in any of its guises.
Why are people like Maajid Nawaz, turned into such media darlings? In this category Maajid joins others who have formerly or currently been placed in such a position. He joins Mo Ansar (controversy over an unpaid bank loan and an alleged degree in Theology), Medhi Hasan (HuffPo and Al Jazeera journalist noted for being caught on hidden camera in a mosque telling the audience that non-Muslims are ‘animals’). Also in the ‘media darlings’ group are Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of the Tell Mama group, who has twice lied about Islamophobic hate crimes in order to keep getting funded by the government, and who now advises London’s Met Police’s CPS unit as to what constitutes Islamophobic hate crimes and who should be punished for them. All four of these men have very questionable pasts.
Maajid seems to be the most intelligent of these four, and that is why I think of him as being a snake-oil salesman. He claims to be a literary man, well-read, and yet he remains a practicing Muslim (so far as I am aware) and stands by the Quran. Any well-read person would surely be aware of all of the tropes that go into the compilation of a text. Texts are like machines – they have component parts and are built and structured in particular and different ways depending on the nature of the text. The Old Testament, for example, is a wonderful example of virtually every kind and form of literature there is. It also makes use of every kind of trope. In the Old Testament we see the use of parable, allegory, symbolism, metaphor, diary, Epic, poetry, romance, genealogy, authorial intent and so forth. Students of the bible take classes in The Bible As Literature, and with this academic study comes the linguistic task of deciphering the meaning of a disputed word (at which point the author will put a footnote as to historical context, and also include a couple of other potentially different meanings for the reader to make up his own mind). We pour over these texts in order to get at any underlying truths. We dispute the authenticity of a text, or the authenticity of the inclusion of a paragraph or sentence. We look at the literacy levels of the days in which these texts were written and of all the mistakes that the one and only semi-literate person in the village might have made when recording them. We also look at the social and political climates of the eras in which these books were written. We don’t, as Muslims do, read them literally and without investigation.
Multiple scholars have poured over the Quran, in all of its versions, and the consensus seems to be that it is unimaginative, boring, and unintelligible in some instances. Why would a literary person such as Maajid overlook all of the irregularities in relation to the Quran and Muhammad? A German university professor and convert to Islam publicly states that it’s very unlikely that Muhammad as a real historical person ever existed. All religions are based on blind faith because there’s no proof for any of their God-heads as being real. With Jesus, we have very late Roman and Jewish notes that a man called Jesus had caused some kind of mayhem. But that in itself does not mean that Jesus was part of a Trinity in which, as God, he made himself human to take on the sins of the world, it simply points to the likelihood of his existence. John Dominic Crossan (author and ex-Catholic priest) says that Jesus is not “history remembered” (in the way we can know about the daily life of a Margaret Thatcher, for example). Instead, John says Jesus is “prophesy historicized”, which means that a group of people used Jesus as the scapegoat to found a new religion. They reached back to all of the prophesies in Isaiah, etc. and made them apply to this man called Jesus.
The Quran and Islam could not exist without Judaism and Christianity. As a text and an idea it is bad and lazy. The Quran is nothing more than an intertextual theft of Judaic/Christian writings. Again, any literary person would be aware of this. Islam took Judaic laws and locations and Christian characters and then mixed them all together into some incredibly unimaginative new ideology and then told us all that everyone else had gotten it wrong and that Muhammad had finally got it right. I would have more respect for Islam if it had been able to come up with something, anything unique. Instead, it takes Lent, a period in which we give up one thing – chocolate or cigarettes, for example – and it gives us Ramadan, a period in which people are doing nothing more than binge-eating. They starve all day, putting us all at risk (especially on the roads or if they’re operating dangerous machinery) because Muslims are light-headed, dehydrated, and their blood-sugar levels are dropping. Then, when the sun goes down, the fast suddenly ends and a Muslim can thrown any and all things down his throat. Islam is heavy-handed at best.
Why do these four people with highly dubious pasts get to be the darlings of the UK’s media while Tommy Robinson languishes in jail for reporting on Muslim misdeeds? Tommy isn’t hosting LBC radio, nor is he writing weekly and regularly for high profile newspapers. He isn’t doing the worldwide debating tours either. He’s being silenced. After the Lee Rigby killing, Fiyaz Mughal was brought out by the media as being the voice of the British community if you can believe that. The one thing that unites these people is that they are brown-skinned and Muslim. Untouchable, in other words in the UK today.
Maajid turned to a terrorist group because he had been called some mean words when he was younger. That terrorist organization still shuts down Central London’s traffic today whenever they want to hold a demonstration. Tommy Robinson’s crime was that his cousin was gang-raped by Muslim men, and he saw his town being taken over by not only the radical element of Islam who spit on our soldiers, but also by the everyday ‘peaceful’ Muslims who would set up religious divides in his town and who would not integrate. Mr. Robinson’s crime was simply wanting everyone to get along and live in peace and for Muslim grooming gangs to be brought to justice. He also wanted our armed forces to be respected, and for this he has been and continues to be punished.
When will white men and women who speak out against atrocities be afforded the same media platforms that their brown Muslim counterparts enjoy? The EDL are no more. Any EDL members that exist today are on the outskirts of society. At the last EDL rally in London, there were no more than perhaps 20 members in attendance and none of the speakers had anything noteworthy to say. Tommy’s baby is dead. Maajid’s former group Hizb ut-Tahrir, however, are very much still alive and growing.
