Moderate Muslims are not particularly moderate

‘What’s in the news this week?’ I asked my wife as she browsed the first newspaper we had seen for a whole week, having hitherto been blissfully disconnected from the rest of the country, without phones or the internet.

‘Muslims, largely,’ she replied, flicking from page to page, ‘a bit on in-and-out, but mainly it’s the Muslims.’ Oh, good. A perpetual optimist, I had rather hoped that during our week away the frequently promised Islamic Reformation might have taken place and peace and enlightenment spread all those many miles from the jungles of Banda Aceh to the dilapidated terraces of Kirklees. But nope, apparently not. They were still up to their stuff, a good few of them.

For a start, there was the fallout from Trevor Phillips’s excellent film about Islam in Britain, in which he reported, via an ICM poll, that two thirds of British Muslims would refuse to grass on a fellow Muslim, no matter how much ricin he was storing in his lock-up. And the added worry that virtually none share our outlook on life, don’t want to integrate and possess views about Jewish people which Ernst Röhm would have thought a bit gamey.

The fallout consisted of Muslims interviewed by the Guardian angrily denouncing the film as ‘divisive’: even those who do not blow things up are still partial to a spot of messenger-shooting, then. And then there was the appalling tale of the Glaswegian shopkeeper Asad Shah, an Ahmadiyya Muslim, stabbed to death by, allegedly, another Muslim for offending his sensibilities. And while the Glasgow Central Mosque expressed ‘shock’ at Mr Shah’s murder, its most senior imam — Maulana Habib Ur Rehman — has previously honoured a Muslim who murdered a blasphemer.

Meanwhile leaflets demanding the liquidation of the peaceable Ahmadiyyas were discovered in various other mosques up and down the country and a Facebook site entitled Anti Qadianiat greeted Mr Shah’s slaughter with a jubilant ‘Congratulations all Muslims!’ and drew approving comments from across the Muslim world.