What do we do about Islam?

I know we have plenty to worry about, Wokism, Climate Alarmists, the People’s Republic of China. When I ask the question, I’m not talking about Islam across the world, Islam in Muslim countries. And don’t worry, I’m not about to stand in the marketplace, holding up a crucifix in one hand, sword in the other, preaching Crusade and shouting “Deus Vult!”.

What I am talking about is Islam in western countries, especially the USA and UK. Unlike the other worries, which do not come wrapped up in a demographic bomb, Islam does. We have become used to news reports of minor (and not so minor) conflicts between the sensibilities of Muslims living in Dar al Harb (the place of war) as they call the non-Muslim world, and various bodies and individuals. We have also become used to these conflicts being resolved to the satisfaction of the Muslims.

One egregious case came up just this week. At a university (of course), in Minnesota (are you surprised?) a professor was teaching a class on religious imagery. The teacher, Erika López Prater (right), had warned the class in advance that the nature of the class meant that they would be seeing historic images of various figures, such as Christ, Buddha and Mohamed. She also gave them a heads up before actually showing the 14^th century painting of Big Mo. Very sensitive of her.

Nevertheless, a senior in the class, Aram Wedatalla, a lass from Sudan, and apparently a devout Muslim, was deeply shocked and offended by seeing Big Mo in all his glory. She complained to the university, Hamline in St Paul. Did they say, “Sorry Ms. Wedatalla, you were warned, and it is a class on religious imagery after all. Unbunch your panties and get back to class.”? No, they did not. They apologised profusely and went as far as to refuse to renew Prater’s contract, not sacking her exactly, but the next best thing.

It’s been said before, but it bears repeating, when you can cause someone to lose their job because they’ve hurt your feelings, you’re not the oppressed, you’re the oppressor.

I’ll deal with the vexed question of images of Big Mo in Islam in another post, this one’s going to be too long already. For our purposes here it is enough to say that certainly in our day most Muslims do regard images of the big man to be utterly blasphemous, not just cartoons sending him up, any images, from any time. Let’s assume her faith is genuine and she shares this view. The class were warned, twice. They were given the opportunity to leave the room and avoid seeing the image. Wedatalla was either so inattentive as to miss two warnings, or she deliberately chose to stay and provoke the incident. Either way, it is her fault she was offended. Showing an historic image of Mohamed from 14^th century Persia in a class on religious imagery is perfectly legitimate, indeed should be perfectly normal and unremarkable.

I’m not going to go as far as to say Ms Wedatalla is faking her distress, faith is, by its nature, a nebulous thing and I have no wish, like Elizabeth I, to “make windows into men’s souls”. I would draw your attention, however, to the picture of the young lady (below), and the artfully applied makeup, including weapons grade eyelashes. This chimes oddly with her keeping her hair covered, in line with Islamic modesty. I would bet five whole English pounds that I know more about the history and practice of Islam than she does.

This case combines two virulent elements, the demanding and unbending, yet highly fragile, attitude of many modern Muslims, and the spineless wokery of modern university authorities, who feel that students must never ever be confronted with things that they don’t already agree with, or that make them think. God forbid students should learn to think while at Uni. Hopefully Prof. López Parter will lawyer up and strip Hamline U down to their financial undergarments. As for the University Authorities themselves, I’ve designed a new seal for them, now they’ve dumped Methodism for dhimmitude. 

It is a far from isolated case, and places of learning are not the only ones affected. In many places, in many ways, changes are made, demands are acquiesced to, in order to appease the religion of Peace. Here are just a few examples.

Last summer there was the pulling of a Shia Muslim biopic about Fatima, Big Mo’s daughter, due to protests by Sunni Muslims across northern England.

There were the Danish and Charlie Hebdo cartoons and the violence they were met with across the world.

In 2021 a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, had to go into hiding hiding after showing cartoons of Big Mo in a religious Education lesson on blasphemy.

At Heathrow Airport in 2015 Chabad Rabbi Shmuli Brown was returning from a trip to New York and went to pray in the multi faith prayer room. He was told he had to take his shoes off by a Muslim worker at the airport as it was “the custom in Mosques”. Heathrow Airport later apologised, but the airport’s Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Hershi Vogel, told  Brown it wasn’t the first time it had happened. There have been many similar instances of “multi faith” rooms being turned into de facto Mosques.

To this day, you cannot see the South Park episode “200”, the 5^th of the 14^th season unless you have it on DVD. It includes Big Mo and so…you get the picture, or rather, you don’t.

Back in 2014 the sandwich chain Subway made 185 of their outlets halal only in “Muslim areas” in the UK. Of course, there are halal options in all their shops, but in these there is only halal meat, no BLT for you!

A rather darker multifaith phenomenon, little spoken of but which I know from the experience of friends, is that in NHS hospitals in certain areas, it is policy not to divulge the sex of unborn children, as unborn girls of a particular religious demographic were not making it to term in statistically significant and worryingly high numbers.

And of course, there is the great granddaddy of them all, Salman Rushdie and his Satanic Verses. Way back in 1988, when Margaret Thatcher walked the land, Muslims were dreadfully upset by a book they’d never read, and tens of thousands of them demonstrated on the streets of London, and many other cities (left is Derby, 1989) calling for the death of Mr Rushdie, an actual named individual. The police arrested no one. The Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death. Mr Rushdie was given protection for many years. Several translators of book were attacked, and the Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was murdered. It seemed things had calmed down until last August Mr Rushdie found out that Big Mo and his acolytes have long memories, when he was stabbed four times in New York. He survived but has lost the use of one hand and the sight in one eye.

Notice that the bad cop and the good cop work hand in hand. Genuine, sometimes fatal violence in some cases, underwrites and gives sinister weight to “peaceful” demonstrations and complaints in others. In the Lady of Heaven film case last summer, the chain Cineworld cited concerns for the safety of staff and customers in their decision to pull the film, despite the fact that all of the demonstrations had been non-violent, and relatively calm, no doubt they had Igarashi and Rushdie in mind. How many cases do we never hear of? How many people quietly make pre-emptive changes to accommodate Islamic fragility? Bit by bit, the cultural landscape shifts.

I don’t have a problem Muslims as people. I have grown up with and worked with Muslims. I am writing this in a café run by very pleasant Turks, who greet each other with “Salam alaikum”, and yet happily serve up a full English breakfast with the non halal trinity of sausage, bacon, and black pudding.  They take great care of all their customers, of all faiths and none. I have no problem with decent, ordinary, Muslims. I won’t say moderate, because I’m not sure that term can be applied to Islam, but those who practice their faith to whatever degree they feel to be right in their own lives, but who realise their faith is a matter for them, not their neighbours.

I do have a problem with Islam itself. As full of holes as a fishnet stocking, rigid and brittle, unable to take even the mildest criticism. Its good bits are no different to other major faiths, its bad bits are bad indeed. Sadly, and worryingly, the difficulties we face come not from “misinterpretations” of Islamic scripture, as is so often said, but from people acting on perfectly valid interpretations of those scriptures, according to their own rules. It is an uncomfortable fact that Islam’s definition of toleration in an Islamic society is that the “People of the Book”, Jews, Christians, and (in some interpretations) Zoroastrians, Jains, Hindus, and Buddhists, get to live as dhimmi , so long as they obey the rules and pay the jizya (tax). 

It is also true that the Quran contains peaceful passages and instructions to live in peace and tolerate others. However, these passages come from the early days when Big Mo was not so big, and he and his followers were a weak minority in the pagan city of Mecca. He left and fled to Medina (The Hijrah). There he prospered and became strong. He ended up running the place and went back and took over Mecca too. The violent and intolerant passages come from this time. The problem is, when two parts of the Quran contradict each other, the later passage overwrites the earlier one (the Doctrine of Abrogation). This doctrine is itself from the Quran, which is, of course, to Muslims the direct, literal, and unalterable word of God. It’s a closed circuit.

So, those Muslims who do genuinely want to live in peace and “just get along” are in a bind. They pretty much have to ignore parts of the Quran. I have yet to see a “moderate” Muslim come up with any effective scriptural arguments against the hardliners. I don’t see how they can.

To this  we must add the toxic doctrine of taqiyya, the idea that it is permissible to lie and deceive when Muslims are under threat. As many Muslims consider the West to be a threat in and of itself, this gives great leeway to use deceit to “protect” Islam in the West. This in turn makes it hard to trust some of the self-proclaimed “moderates”, are they the real deal, or are they merely practising taqiyya and playing good cop to the violent Islamist bad cops?

This brings me to the Ahmadi sect. I’ve noticed here in the UK an increase in media pieces about “Muslims” being generally lovely. Last week there was an article about young Muslim men cleaning up the streets after the New Year’s celebrations. There was another piece by a young Muslim imam, proclaiming the peaceful nature of Islam, saying the actions of terrorists have no Quranic justification and condemning them, while also condemning Islamophobia. He also condemned not only the showing of the film Lady of Heaven, but also the public protests against it, saying that the proper Muslim response was prayer. All good clean wholesome stuff and just what worried westerners want to hear. However, in both these cases (and in plenty of others) the Muslims in question were Ahmadi. Now, as far as the Ahmadi are concerned, they’re Muslims, but most other Muslims (and certainly Islamic authorities) regard them as heretics at best.

They were founded in Punjab, India in the 1880s by their first Caliph, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. The Ahmadiyya are unique as the only Muslim school of thought to formally reject the Doctrine of Abrogation and the Lesser Jihad (Jihad al-Ashgar), sometimes called the jihad of the sword/violent jihad. This makes them popular with Westerners desperate to prove the lovely, cuddly nature of Islam. However, speaking purely from an objective academic point of view, I’d have to say the mainstream Muslims do have a point.

There are Ahmadi beliefs that put them outside the bounds of the basics of Islam, and not just the rejecting of the bits we don’t like. For example, Mirza Ghulum Ahmed claimed he was the Mahdi, the Guided One, who will come in the end times, and rid the world of evil and injustice, shortly before the Second Coming of the Prophet Īsā (Jesus), which he also claimed to be. There are other things, but you get the picture. The Ahmadiyya are led today by Ghulum’s great grandson, Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the fifth caliph. They were officially decreed to be non-Muslims by the Pakistani Parliament in 1974, and they are not permitted to enter Mecca by the Saudi authorities (although many secretly do).

In any case, they are tiny, today they number no more than 20 million worldwide. The greatest number (maybe 4 million) are in Pakistan, with about 30,000 in the UK, where their HQ is a compound called Islamabad, in Tilford, Surrey, (below right). They moved both the caliph and the HQ from Pakistan in the 1980s due to persecution. There are between 15 and 20,000 in the US. I have had dealings with a number of Ahmadis, and they’re good folk, and I don’t think they’re practicing taqiyya, but in effect they can be just as much the “good cops” as deceitful bad actors.

So, what does all this mean? How does an open tolerant society deal with a group that soaks up concessions as their rightful due and then looks around for more? A group for whom tolerance is a one-way street. A group, moreover, that is growing from a small but vocal minority to a significant body. In the US, as far as I can find out, the Muslim population is still only around 1%, but it is concentrated in places like Dearborn, Michigan. Look to see that double at least in the next decade. Expect more Dearborns too. Here in the UK, we’re further down the road.

According to the 2021 census the UK is 6.5% Muslim. Again, this is not evenly spread. London is 14.99%, with a Muslim mayor and three boroughs more than 30% Muslim, including Newham, where the Mayor moved City Hall to a year or so ago. Birmingham is 29.9%, Bradford 30.5%, Manchester 22.3%. Of the ten biggest cities in England, only Liverpool and Wakefield are below the average.

That’s a LOT of parliamentary constituencies where the Muslim vote is crucial. Islam is becoming a real factor in politics here, yet one that the MSM tend to be coy about. The London borough of Tower Hamlets, just east of the City of London, is currently run by an independent party called Aspire, all of its councillors are Muslim, mostly ex-Labour, under Lutfur Rahman. Rahman was a Labour councillor who was barred from holding public office for five years in 2014 for various counts of electoral fraud, including “religious intimidation through local imams and vote-rigging”. He was directly elected as Mayor in 2022 with 54.9% of the vote. Why was he only barred for five years? Don’t know. I’m guessing the authorities naïvely thought any ban would be effectively a life ban, as no one would vote for someone who’d been barred from public office for electoral fraud, would they? Also, having been caught once, no one would be so naughty as to practice intimidation and vote rigging again, would they? We’re really not in Kansas anymore Toto.

What to do? Well, in the US, I would say limiting immigration from Muslim countries as much as possible, if it is possible. Given the reaction to The Donald enacting a temporary ban on people from a list based on terrorism that just happened be mostly Muslim counties that will be easier said than done. Here in the UK, we can’t even get a slowdown of immigration generally from a government elected on that very thing.

Local opposition to big building projects, concessions to Islamic sensibilities and the like is also important. As well as real and radical action against the worst extremists. When Muslim crowds take to the streets actually calling for people’s deaths then police need to make arrests. The activities of radicals in gaols also need to be curtailed. All of this requires more people to be better informed.

Information really is key. Hopefully this has given you more ammo to use in debates with dhimmi and with deluded Muslims. I certainly never lose an opportunity to correct people repeating the usual bien pensent narrative about Islam.

Long term there really needs to be some sort of Islamic Reformation. Only Muslims can do that, but people of goodwill can support genuine attempts to reform. That said, beware the “good cops”.

Given the greater local control in the US, the less advanced stage of the situation, and the much greater self confidence of the American right, and American society as a whole, this could have some success. Here in dear old Blighty, I’m not so sure. More folk are waking up to the situation, and the figures from the 2021 census have been a dash of cold water to the face for some, but there is still a lot of naivety about, even on the right.

At the start I jokingly said I wasn’t going to preach Crusade, having got this far I’m not so sure. It might well come to something brutal and nasty here. The British are gentle, polite, measured people…until they’re not. The longer the establishment ignore, or even encourage, the further dhimmification of our country, the worse the eventual reaction is likely to be.