A threat to the world

Stephen Schwartz

16 August 2006

Stephen Schwartz, who has travelled the world studying the faith to which he converted, says that Britain has allowed doctrinal poison imported from Pakistan to flourish here as nowhere else. We must act, or face terrible consequences

Perhaps more dismayingly, a London Metropolitan Police representative spoke exclusively in the idiom of political correctness. He reassured his audience that British law enforcement would go out of its way to avoid ‘stereotyping’ and Islamophobia, which he defined as presuming that suspects in terror conspiracies might be found among Muslims. Not one British Muslim speaker indicated that 7/7 might have created fear of Islam; rather, they argued that an exaggerated British concern about radical Muslims leads to fear, prejudice and oppression that drive Muslim youth to disaffection and violence. Thus does the aggressor assume the costume of the victim.

The Wilton Park meeting in May similarly included British Muslim speakers who, following the uproar over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, tried to blame tensions exclusively on non-Muslims. These included Sir Iqbal Sacranie, former head of the Muslim Council of Britain, who in 1989 suggested that death would be ‘perhaps, a bit too easy’ for the dissident author Salman Rushdie. Also at the conference was the Malaysian leader Dato Abd Aziz Muhammad, who spoke in support of the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas. The concluding entertainment was a rapid-fire discourse by Tariq Ramadan, the Euro-Islamist philosopher employed at Oxford, who is repudiated by many British Muslims for his links with the fundamentalist Egyptian Islamic Brotherhood and his defence of terrorism.

Professor Ramadan spoke in favour of calm in the dialogue about Islam, both from Muslims and non-Muslims, but he also made it clear that he remains eager to condemn the Western democracies. He also figured in the least impressive attempt by the British authorities to address the challenge of Islam after 7/7: the creation by the Blair circle of the grotesquely named ‘Radical Middle Way’. This is a circuit of Muslim Britain by Ramadan and other public figures, some of them mere poseurs, who offer young believers, in place of extreme radicalism, some kind of moderate radicalism, as indicated by the programme’s title.