The miners’ strike and the fight against Islamism

Martin Morrow

"Why did they do so? Not, surely, because they were offered multiculturalism, but "because they felt themselves respected and secure in the self-confident British political culture of that time." That statement is of concern. The Arabs fought against the Turks because the Caliphate ruled over them. They wanted to get the foreigners out of their lands. This, of course, included the English and the French but for short term interests sake they helped the British out. Meanwhile Major Sykes and Monsieur Picot were screwing them royally ( respect? Ask Allenby about respect for the Arabs) from behind, supported by Balfour. Not a good arguement for the case Charles Moore is making but the article, as usual, is well thought through and well written.

Herbert Thornton

Charles Moore writes - "Extremism dies when its lack of legitimacy is revealed." Oh? As an abstract idea that sounds attractive, but when measured against hard realities, how often is it true?

Arthur Scargill was defeated not so much by any revelation of his "lack of legitimacy" but by the fact that Margaret Thatcher's government was prepared for the miners' strike and was determined to break it and acted accordingly.

But in Islam, the western idea of "legitimacy" has no relevance at all. For Muslims, "legitimacy" means only what is legitimate according to the interpretations of the Koran that have been instilled in them. Granted different branches of Islam have different opinions about what is legitimate under the Koran - as for example the differences between Sunni and Shiites demonstrate: but debate among Muslims about what is or is not "legitimate" takes place in a mental straitjacket. The very idea that they would question the legitimacy of Islam itself is anathema to them. This accounts for there being so little condemnation of Islamic terrorism by Muslims in general and even less action by Muslims against it. Their mental straitjackets prevent their opposing or even questioning it in any effective way.

Mr Moore's second assertion - that "Muslim fundamentalism is as brittle as union militancy was in the Eighties" seems to me to be even further off the mark. Muslim fundamentalism is very far from brittle - it is vigorous and thriving. It is western values that are no longer thriving - even the most fundamental of these values have now largely been watered down, or even abandoned.

Charles Moore's article may sound sophisticated and, to some perhaps, penetrating, but I think it is more like wishful thinking.

A Taylor

A good place to start would be withthe Charity Commission. And why are so many Muslim organizations registered as charities when Muslims are bound to contribute to them?

TDK

It's interesting that you pick 1997 as the date the Conservatives were cut off from knowledge of the rise in Islamic extremism. Surely the public demonstrations against Salman Rushdie in 1989 calling for his death, might have been a strong indicator that something was afoot. And who was the government at that time?

Austin Lynch

Were it so. Unfortunately we are locked in a existential struggle with the Islamists which will last until its implied conclusion. Multiculturalism is fine but it was predicated on a benign, not to say patronising, set of conceits epitomised by the "It's a Small World after all" ride at Disneyland. Instead of the paseo, fiesta and dragon races we got a theological cadre which would have us either submitting or dead. To draw an analogy with the befuddled trade union movement is, with respect, absurd. Without wishing to be overly dramatic, I suspect that our masters will only get to grips with this problem when more torn bodies litter the streets and the inevitable tipping point is reached.

ed lancey

I loved the title. I really thought that this article would be great. Sadly, it is just bullshit. Until you/one are prepared to accept that we have a *genuine* problem population of passport-holding citizens of about a MILLION that need to be confronted then cod articles will just disappoint.

Penny Russell

Mr.Moore writes:"Those of us who are not Muslims cannot, ultimately, dethrone the extremists alone. As with the unions and their leaders, that is for Muslims themselves to do." I disagree - as with any cult, there is no room for dissent in Islam. Would Hitler's Germany have 'come round' and healed itself from his and his cohort's madness? It took external force and re-education to 'cure' Germany and Japan of their aspirations. The West's chronic and so far fatal error has been to project our philosophy on to the closed Islamic mind. It must be understood that our enlightened liberal thinking, centred ever more on individualism, serves only to re-inforce the Islamicist belief in our inherent weakness. Which is why it is so easy for them to attack from within by using our hard-won freedoms against us.

Kennybhoy

"It sounds noble, and is indeed the error of a noble mind. But...." It truly saddens me to have to so fundamentally disagree with Mr Moore but alas, this type of thinking is a part, quite probably the greater part, of the problem faced by the West today. Such erroneous analysis is an invitation to the thinking Islamist to persevere. Have a Blessed and a peaceful Easter.

John, Basingstoke

Sir, you burble sweet words of wisdom and conciliation It sounds so like the commentators who supported qppeasement policies towards Nazi Germany, the "soft perfumed kerchief" counter to Extremist Isalmic bombs. It will not work until Muslims in Britian renounce their ridiculous belief they are the oppressed ones in this society by not acknowledging our culture our beliefs, living in self imposed ghetto's but feeding and growing even more alienated on the Governments ethnic-centric policies much to the anger of many native peoples. Your premise is simpy wrong to me, appeasement is so dangerous it just allows the radicals to prosper and despise our craven approach to them, just as Hitler did and look where that led us to.

Dr Nikan Firoozye

I applaud Mr Moore for his brave efforts at dissecting the morass that is Islam in the West. Being an American Muslim, living and working in England for the past five years, I see both the stark contrasts between the US and the UK Muslim communities, but the overwhelmingly similar diversity. There is no single Islam. And, anyone who purports to speak for Muslims is generally speaking only for themselves. In the US, the umbrella organization ISNA is overwhelmingly moderate and prides itself on being American. (The ISNA itself is an outgrowth of MSA, the Muslim Students Association, which tells you that a great many Muslims came to the US to seek university education and thus stand in contrast to their counterparts in the UK). In the UK, Muslims immigrants live largely in their own communities, using their own local interpretations of Islam, and only recently appear to assimilate with each other and with the wider British society. But in both the UK and the US there are Muslims of all shapes and stripes: Poor uneducated inner-city immigrants, well-educated doctors and lawyers, pillars of their societies, bearded robe-wearing radical Salafis, bearded robe-wearing Sufis, strict Mullahs and Imams, lax teens, women with no scarves, head-scarves, or veils. They are all Muslims and the vast majority of them, whether or not they admit to it, have a world-view shaped by their religion and shaped by their nation. (Riazat Butt at the Guardian does an excellent job displaying the diversity in her humorous podcast, Islamophonic). It is this multitude that seeks the law and justice and freedom that the British and the American societies hold to be their ideals, and can at times become dispossessed when the ideal appears to diverge overtly from reality. I would venture to say that there are no leaders in Islam, only consensus builders, braggarts or power-mongers. It seems that here in the UK there are not enough good consensus builders and certainly anything but a single community, being filled with Pakistani Muslims, Bangladeshi Muslims, Turkish Muslims, North African Muslims, etc, all of whom seem to keep almost entirely to themselves, keeping to their own interpretations of Islam. The mainstream organizations do not truly speak for these disparate groups because they do not seem to have much sway over them. Sadly, while I think the Tories and Conservatives in general should hold much appeal to the Muslim voter, there are few conservatives who seem to mirror your views, Mr Moore (as can be seen by most of the comments to your article and just about anything that the reactionary Rod Liddle writes).

Tammy

A brave essay? Yes.

But a dangerously misguided one, too.

Sidney

Moore makes a good effort at understanding a few of the many different streams of Islam to be found in the UK (there are far more in the world). However, he fails to understand that the path to extremism is just one of the many inevitable consequences of the inadequacy of immigrant life in this country. Full integration? Multiculturalism? All failed. What today's young Muslims have in common is alienation. They do not feel part of the attachment to their roots which characterizes their parents, and they do not feel part of "mainstream" British life (whatever that is) because the indigenous community is not comfortable with very foreign people. The contrast with the US could not be stronger. Only the US achieves the correct integration of immigrants (no lack of experience) by allowing them to be wholly Irish, Polish, Vietnamese or whatever, while being and, being considered by all, good citizens of the USA. In Britain, that just does not seem to work. Somehow, not being English does make a difference here. It makes far less a difference (mutatis mutandis) in the USA. I wholly endorse the comments of Dr Firoozye.

John Pennington

I think this article is hopeful but critically flawed. There are huge differences between a client Left built on secularism as a replacement for religious belief, and a deeply held religious belief system in itself removed from any rational introspection.

Muslims are taught from an early age that their religion is superior to others because their "prophet" is the final messenger from God. This is damgerous - it draws it into conflict with other religions.

There may be parallels with trade unionism as a cult of its time, but I don't think that recent memories, now grown cosy, of a forlorn end-Empire Seventies is an appropriate model.

The problem is that we all have a spiritual dimension at our deepest level of being which is all too easily hijacked.

The Sufi traditions are common with transcendental ideas about the nature of what is, accessible through reflection, that can chime with any religion, anywhere, even an exploration of the sciences when our own consciousness starts to be taken into account when we observe things in the world.

It is when religion gets tainted with the chant of football colours and associated terraces violence that we have problems with it.

I meet clever likeable young Muslims every day - often the sons and daughters of diplomats or the rich - in employment in Western multinational companies. So far so good.

However in late night conversations it becomes apparent how disaffected they are with Western values, despite the nice toys they can acquire on the back of technologies that we, the West, have brought into the world.

These technological toys have come on the back of our studies in the Natural Sciences - grown out of religion but which have shed that confining skin in the process. That doesn't mean that truth then disappears, or that these toys, or the materialism that sells them, is an end in itself or a true summation of Western society. We are more than that - some Muslims know that.

Islam is a part of people's identities as any other religion is. Most Muslims appears ignorant about the Muslim conquests and like to phrase jihad in a different context because to do otherwise is painful for them. They also tend to believe in the miraculous and the prayer they indulge in every day moulds and reinforces that group belief.

Islam and the Koran is impenetrable to us Westerners due to the language barrier - a one-way semi-permeable membrane - they have learned our all pervasive culture through our language and have clearly seen our culture's pluses and minuses.

We need to learn Arabic, without necessarily imbibing the Islam. This is difficult because Arabic seems to start and end with the Koran as a set text, spread militarily on the back of religious fervour as the latest word from God. Salafism would have us return to the early days of the jihadist "glory". As ridiculous as Elizabethan Privateering on the high seas reconfirming our Protestantism.

In short this radicalism appears to be a bit of cry for help, but none the less dangerous because of it, as a response to a successful secular materialism that has been half bought into, but that Muslims are troubled by as it leads them away from their own religious identity and sense of self. It needn't do - commerce isn't necessarily a dirty word despite Dr. Williams recent pronouncements. It can be used as a tool for Good.

Quietly however I sense a waiting game. Unfortunately there is something in this religion's past that will need to be confronted.

Salafist Wahabbi Islam and its offshoots, I fear, need to be fought both militarily and intellectually if we are to safeguard the tolerance and freedoms in the West that some in the Muslim world would like to mistake for decadence.

Most of the young people, educated in Western schools, are good people, well liked, and like us in so many ways, but there is an intellectual gulf between expat and local around expression of things into which they cannot venture because the cage of Islam prevents it - even amongst the brightest.

Good will prevail, but this is going to be a long struggle and our own society needs to start being proud of its achievements and values. This is difficult without a religious code to bind it together in a post-religious Britain, but even if we move on from an orthodox religion, we all recognise Good, humour and kindness, and respond to it accordingly.

It really is the way the truth and the life, as some bloke said years ago. I think a later bloke from some other foreign part also acknowledged that earlier bloke, but felt he'd gone one better with his philosophy and had to spread the word to prevent implosion and conflict amongst warring tribes who'd only just been unified on the basis of these ideas. The earlier bloke's ideas got a leg up on the back of a military Roman Empire which adopted those ideas and didn't need a military phase in its own right to spread those ideas. Or somesuch.

Good will prevail - or is that also being too hopeful Mr. Moore?

sebastian

Sufis, we must remember, are barely thought of as "real" muslims at all. That said, Charles Moore makes a generally good point. There's no reason not to talk directly to ordinary muslims who, as he says, may hardly be represented by their lavishly funded "community" organisations that purport to speak for them. We must question some - perhaps most - of the funding they absorb for no obvious advantage except to themselves. At the same time, we must make it crystal clear that Britain won't become a patchwork of muslim territories, each with its own rich vibrant culture of separatism and wahabist medievalism at State expense.
I certainly agree, moreover, that islamic militants' driving creed is brittle and ultimately indefensible. It can be broken. Most of islam can be. But by whom when attempts so to do - Bishop Michael Nazir Ali's, for instance - attract death threats and sneering Guardianista disapproval? Miners' pickets hurled insults then went down the pub or clubhouse. Islamists build, prime and plant bombs or stab at throats and then celebrate death. There's a bit of a difference.

Hassan

"But what we can do is to question their claims and keep their hands off public money — often distributed, laughably, incredibly, in the name of community cohesion."

Just a heads up: this issue will be discussed in tomorrows BBC2 Daily Politics Show

Tuesday 1st April – 12pm to 12.30pm

If you missed it you can probably watch it on iplayer

DaveP

To treat Islam as just some kind of problem that can be managed by the usual management techniques, is foolish.

Has there ever been a group of immigrants, who so quickly have turned against their host?

Has there ever been a group of immigrants, who within a generation, have started bombing the very country that gave them freedom, as well as a healthy standard of living.

Has there ever been a group of immigrants who publicly believe, and openly state, that their goal is to overthrow parliamentary democracy and our sovereign. That is openly believe and practice sedition.

The above, should inform Charles Moore, that we are dealing with an ideology that is an existential threat to us. It cannot be managed by any of the ordinary western methods, which have worked in our own society, as they are not applicable in this case. It is like treating a viral infection with anti-biotics. It won’t work.

amphibious

Is this some sort of joke from arch catholic apologist Mooore?
"In the first (war -WWI), they fought against the Ottoman Empire, to which, in theory, they owed spiritual allegiance. Why did they do so? Not, surely, because they were offered multiculturalism, but because they felt themselves respected and secure in the self-confident British political culture of that time."
What utter drivel! I doubt that he does, which raises the question, why the tendentious mendacity? Does he really think undead Torys, even in the backwood shires, are so ignorant of history?
The Arabs fought the Ottomans because they were promised self determination by Lawrence and the rest is (disgraceful) history.