Just over a week ago I wrote a piece in the Spectator asking if we were on the verge of an anti-Muslim backlash that could spread beyond the strongholds of the aggrieved white working class in Barking and Rochdale and into the home counties. After the gloating videotaped murder of David Haines, a British aid worker, the answer is increasingly likely to be yes.
The Telegraph is carrying a piece by the international affairs analyst Shashank Joshi headed: ‘Where does the Islamic State’s fetish with beheading people come from?’ He begins: ‘Of course, the practice of beheading is invoked in the Koran, but only the most extreme Islamic militants carry it out in the modern day.’
Really? According to Human Rights Watch, Saudi Arabia beheaded 19 people between August 4 and 20 this year. Several of them were drug traffickers; one might argue that there’s no moral distinction between the death penalty in Saudi Arabia and America, which – disgustingly – carried out 39 executions in 2013. But Saudi justice does not offer fair trials: it takes no account of mental illness and hands out the death sentence for ‘sorcery’, whatever that means.
Also, although beheadings are not necessarily more inhumane than America’s botched lethal injections, they are (as Joshi notes in passing, without returning to the point) a Koranic punishment. Muslim scholars say that verse 8:12 – ‘I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them’ – is taken out of context. It is a ‘battlefield commandment’. In which case Isis are, according to their psychotic reasoning, following the letter of the law more accurately than Saudi Arabia. My colleague Douglas Murray (whose views on the Middle East I don’t generally share) is absolutely right to say that Muslims and non-Muslims alike should address the injunction to behead unbelievers in Islam’s foundational documents.
But they won’t: it’s too hazardous. Instead, the murder of Mr Haines will further poison relations between British Muslims and their neighbours in ways that are difficult to measure but whose consequences could be disastrous.
Compared to other European countries, Britain has been well disposed to Muslims: 64 per cent of us have a favourable view of them, according to Pew. In Italy the figure is 28 per cent. But other survey findings are less reassuring. As the Guardian reported, between 2012 and 2013 agreement with the suggestion that there would be ‘a serious clash between British Muslims and white Britons’ rose by nine points to 59 per cent.
Quite what this ‘serious clash’ would be isn’t clear. The survey respondents weren’t asked what they were predicting, but the fact that so many of them assented to this proposition is worrying. (Incidentally, I’m assuming that quite a few of the 59 per cent would have said they were personally well disposed towards Muslims. Let’s see what the next set of Pew figures looks like.)
The emergence of Isis gives ordinary Muslims, including strictly observant ones hostile to Western decadence, the opportunity to demonstrate their abhorrence of the crimes of the ‘Islamic State’. The problem is that no one is very impressed by their denunciations of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s monstrous entity. It’s like saying you’re against shoving Jews into gas ovens. Muslim elders who condemn Isis seem to think that this can easily be reconciled with, say, their support for Hamas.
Now, I don’t believe that Hamas are as wicked as Isis. Nor do most Britons. But we do place Isis at the far end of a spectrum of Islamic extremism on which we also locate Pakistani madrassas and anti-American jihadis. It’s not a tidy spectrum, given the ideological squabbles between Sunni fanatics who look pretty much identical to the casual observer; but it makes more sense than the notion that Isis is unrelated to Islam, a religion founded by a warrior who ordered mass beheadings.
Most British Muslims bear no responsibility for what is happening in Iraq. They’re just unlucky that, over an alarmingly large stretch of territory in its heartland, their religion has been hijacked by murderers inspired by the Koran. And their attempts to distance themselves from Isis are frustrated by representatives of their own community who have supported terrorism.
Another group of people are after ordinary British Muslims, too: Islamophobes, by which I mean racist conspiracy theorists who wish to implicate them in a plot to destroy British society. Just as Isis has used the internet as a means of recruitment, so the angry Right has gone online to popularise a lurid caricature of the average Muslim. They make their presence felt BTL – ‘below the line’, colonising discussion threads and displaying a level of intolerance to dissent that wouldn’t be out of place in the new Mosul.
For some of these folk, any dismay they feel at the murders of James Foley, Stephen Sotloff and David Haines is offset by gleeful satisfaction at the fulfilment of their prophecies, as they see it. ‘The Islamic Caliphate is on it’s [sic] way just as we warned you, how do you feel now, dhimmis?’ (They love that term dhimmi, which extends their knowledge of Arabic to at least four words.) Etc.
The audience for this rhetoric is likely to grow after the killing of the first Briton by Isis. Muslim ‘community leaders’ can’t stop it spreading any more than they could stop young morons from running off to take part in a real-life computer game in the wastelands of Iraq.
Where this is all heading I don’t know. But what a lousy time to be a Pakistani shopkeeper.
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