On Friday night a number of us from the Centre went down to an event in London organised by City Circle. The event was the first public opportunity for the former Hizb ut-Tahrir organiser Maajid Nawaz to face some of his fiercest critics from the Muslim community.
City Circle is an organisation which organises many useful and progressive events for a young professional Muslim crowd in London.
Friday’s meeting, held under heavy security, had perhaps more representatives of Hizb ut-Tahrir and other extremist organisations than City Circle would normally attract, but the spirit of debate and exchange was heartening.
The day hadn’t got off to a great start when the head of City Circle, Yahya Birt, attacked this very blog for criticising the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB). Mr Birt claimed that ‘One suspects that an aim of the Centre for Social Cohesion is to leave government with no-one to talk to at all.’ No Yahya, that is not the aim of the Centre. But it is our aim to raise awareness of organisations and movements – even large movements like the Deobandis – which, to put it mildly, fail to promote cohesion in Britain.
Anyway – the event on Friday night was an important occasion, with Nawaz both speaking and answering questions with skill and care. On a couple of occasions the thrill of broken taboos went through the hall as when, for instance, Nawaz tried to explain how something could be wrong in the eyes of some Muslims (drinking, say) without having to be illegal. In other words, that there is a difference between something that is haram and something which is illegal. This is one of the many crucial distinctions which you could see people in the hall on Friday grappling with. And a very good thing it was too. There has to be a difference between the public and the private sphere, a distance between what one chooses to believe oneself and what one expects others to believe.
To this debate on crucial questions of theology and interpretation, Nawaz made a hugely important contribution.
Perhaps the only really sore note of the night (other than the occasional nutter shouting to be heard, or - in the case of one HT member at the end - mumbling to be heard) was to do with the chairman of the event. The occasion was very mistakenly chaired by Rashad Yaqoob (brother of Salma Yaqoob - one of those still in what is left of the ‘Respect’ party). Aside from his past and present associations, Rashad Yaqoob made two egregious errors as chairman. One was to abuse the chair at the end when the guest speaker had left, and treat the audience to his own opinions. The other was to cause the only genuinely concerning point of the evening.
Mr Yaqoob was critical of the workings of Hizb ut-Tahrir, and like many people in the hall that night appeared to feel that they are not a force for good. But Mr Yaqoob’s wording on this left room for considerable doubt. The transcript may contradict me, but I was left under the very clear impression that Yaqoob’s objection to Hizb ut-Tahrir is that they, as it were, ‘queer the pitch’ for other Islamists. It appeared that he felt that the public objections and loud-mouthed attitudes of HT were not bad in and of themselves, but because they ruined the chances of other people hoping to Islamize Britain through other means.
On this I and many other non-Muslim British people might justifiably take exception. Whether by violence or non-violence, any group or individual aiming at the conversion of Britain to Islam is not, I would submit, a force for progress and cohesion. I hope it was a mis-hearing, but in a meeting with many positive angles, Mr Yaqoob’s final intervention raised more concerning issues even than those which had filled up the rest of the evening.