The African front

Wednesday, 24th October 2007

One of the many notable features of Britain’s state of denial over the true nature and reach of the global jihad is the country’s obsession with the Middle East at the expense of the other theatres of this conflict. Viewing world conflict through a Middle East-centric prism which means it concludes falsely that Israel is the cause of Islamic rage and the reason why the west is under attack, Britain seems to know nothing about the march of the Islamists across south east Asia and Africa which are steadily being radicalised to the cause of holy war. From time to time, Britain wakes from its stupor and waxes indignant from its armchair about Darfur where it dimly perceives a lot of people are being killed. It does not register the fact that a desperate and losing struggle is being waged across Africa against Islamists who are cutting a murderous and enslaving swathe across that continent, persecuting and murdering Christians and other faiths, converting them to Islam at gunpoint and threatening to turn much of Africa into an enormous troop carrier for the armies of the jihad against the free world.

In yesterday’s Telegraph, David Blair recorded this process in the failed states in the Horn of Africa. Somalia in particular threatens to become a base for al Qaeda, with Britain in particular in its sights as a target for Somali-born British terrorists. The idea that the fate of the Palestinians is somehow the motor for all this is demonstrably ludicrous. The fight for control over Africa is a fight being waged in the cause of religious war.

This is spelled out in a book I happened to pick up in an Islamic bookshop in Bradford last week. It was instructive to see that this shop, a large, bright institution staffed by courteous and helpful people, nevertheless stocked on its shelves books by Syed Qutb and Maulana Maududi, the principal ideologues of modern jihadi Islamism and its hatred of the west, and books and pamphlets published by the Islamic Foundation of Leicester, a prime institution for the promulgation of radical Islamist ideas over the past two decades and more, and which has been responsible for the radicalisation of countless British Muslims to the cause of holy war.

One of its titles is Nigeria and Shari’ah by Ghazali Basri, published in 1994. Nigeria is currently the site of a systematic persecution of Christians by Muslims who, as this article by Paul Marshall reported, have imposed a draconian system of sharia law and caused the deaths of more than 10,000 people. In his book, Basri provides the reason. Christianity in Africa, he writes, was linked indissolubly to colonialism, and the aim of both was to stamp out Islam in Nigeria. Islam is presented here as a force of tolerance and civilisation, but which was presented by the Christians and colonialist administration in a bad light:

Islam was portrayed, in text books, popular Christian literature and in churches as well as in classrooms, in terms of conquest and subjugation, while Christianity was portrayed as a liberating and civilising force…the west is entirely dependent on Christians for the protection and promotion of their interests in Nigeria. The survival of western interests today is directly linked with the survival of Christianity in the same way as the spread of Christianity about a century ago depended entirely on the presence of the western imperial army.

Here is what Paul Marshall reported was now going on under tolerant Islamic rule in Nigeria:

Five women have been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, though no punishment has yet been carried out. Thieves have had their hands amputated by court order. One man had his eye removed after accidentally blinding a friend (he could have escaped this by paying 60 camels, but the injured party wasn't interested in the camels).
Under these sharia dictates, women are harshly subjugated. In northern Nigeria, they have been forbidden to rent houses and barred from riding motorbikes or traveling in the same vehicles as men. Taxi drivers have been caned for carrying female passengers. Zamfara requires all high-school girls to wear a hijab and bars them from wearing skirts and other ‘Western’ forms of dress. State officials have advocated public flogging of those violating an ‘Islamic’ dress code. Prostitution charges have been leveled at women merely for the crime of being unmarried after the age of 13. Judges in Bauchi State have told women to get married immediately or be sent to prison.

If this isn’t a war for civilisation, what is?