Ed West Ed West

Hampstead and Kilburn – it would be a disgrace if the Lib Dems don’t back Maajid Nawaz to the hilt

In the past 30 years British English has received a number of loan words from Arabic, words which would have meant very little to our young grandparents but are now familiar enough to be used metaphorically: jihad, fatwa, taliban, dhimmi. Almost all refer to religion and religious conflict, and have a slightly unwelcome ear to most people. (It wasn’t always like this, of course; Arabic has in the past given us a number of terms, from zero to orange to racket and nadir, not to mention countless scientific phrases).

One word I would like to see imported, however, is asabiyyah, a term which is best translated as ‘cohesion’, but more specifically refers to a historical cycle; as societies grow richer and more cultured their sense of cohesion diminishes until they are overrun by less advanced but more cohesive groups from abroad, who in turn lose their asabiyyah.

One could say that Islam invented the concept of ‘social cohesion’. I’m sure that Mo Ansar, the social commentator who is so unaccountably exercised by a drawing of Mohammed and Jesus, would say that. But then he also apparently believes that Muslims were trading with South American tribes centuries before Columbus.

Ansar was on Newsnight this week debating with Maajid Nawaz, the Lib Dem candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn, who posted images of the ‘Jesus and Mo’ cartoon on his Facebook account to make a point about the over-sensitive nature of some religious leaders. Ansar thereafter raised a petition calling on the Lib Dems to drop Nawaz.

I used to think that Ansar was a rather harmless, slightly humorous figure; apparently he’s worked in diversity for 17 years, whatever that means. But this struck me as hugely irresponsible, seeing as such protests in the past have escalated.

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