February 2008 Archives

An article in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, the influentual US magazine, examines how "ethnic nationalism" in Europe - arguably the root cause of countless conflicts over the past century - is far from dead.

Indeed, Jerry Z Muller, the article's author, warns his US readers against assuming that Europe's relative peace over the last 50 years is the result of Europeans abandoning their nationalist outlooks. Instead, he argues, the post-1945 creation of ethnically-homogenous nation-states has simply entrenched nationalism while also allowing Europeans to deny that such primal feelings exist:

The council of the London borough of Tower Hamlets has withdrawn funding for a series of public debates after the group running them refused to drop a prominent Islamist from the speakers list.

150 Muslims in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets voted in agreement with Dr Abdul Wahid, head of the British branch of the worldwide Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, that political participation has failed British Muslims.

Wahid encouraged Muslims to work outside the political system. Joining a mainstream political party was “selling out”, he argued. Referring to Britain’s “moral crisis” he asked: “Why don't we establish those Islamic values in our country as an example for people to look up to?”

A 2006 study by the think-tank Policy Exchange found that 84 percent of British Muslims felt they had fared well in British society.

Asim Siddiqui, the chairman of the City Circle, has written an insightful article, "Who needs a caliphate?", on how the failure of Islamism to bring tangible social or economic benefits to Islamic societies may mean that Muslims will increasingly reject such ideologies in favour of greater democracy and individual freedom. He writes:

"Much of the last 100 years has been spent politicising Islam rather than working for a just polity: the rule of law, equal citizenship and democratically accountable governments. The 21st century will see Islamist ideas dismantled by Muslims and western political models incorporated."

The article is available here.

Today's Times reports that 20,000 Muslim leaders have just issued a declaration condemning terrorism as un-Islamic. Their declaration was made at a conference held yesterday at the Dar Uloom madrassa in Deoband, northern India. It runs:

"Islam is a religion of mercy for all humanity. Islam sternly condemns all kinds of oppression, violence and terrorism."

The Department of Communities and Local Government has published an in-depth study of social cohesion based on the 2005 Citizenship Survey.

The report (available in full here, or in summary here) found that while ethnic diversity in an area can often increase feelings of community cohesion, such cohesion was often undermined by poverty and economic deprivation.

Today the French author Caroline Fourest visited the Centre to talk to a collection of journalists and opinion-formers about her book 'Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan.'

The book has been available in French for several years and has now finally appeared in an English translation. The UK version (published by the Social Affairs Unit) with a foreword by Denis MacShane MP can be purchased here. The US version (published by Encounter Books) can be purchased here.

Britain's politicians have been feeling gutsy of late, with the air in Westminster thick with views on various sensitive minority issues.

This week, it's forced marriages.

Today Conservative party leader David Cameron announced that a future Tory government would criminalise forcing someone into marriage.

Boudicca. Ambrosius. Hereward the Wake.

What do these three British characters have in common?

According to legend, all three put up stiff, if doomed, fights against foreign aggressors – the Romans, Saxons and Normans respectively.

Yet none was of “native” British stock: Hereward was an Anglo-Saxon, Ambrosius a Roman, and even Boudicca’s Celtic ancestors had displaced the Neolithic builders of Stonehenge.

Their story is that of Britain: a nation of incomers, each wave resisting the next before finally mingling with it.

Now we’re at it again. The government has announced plans for a new citizenship test, which hopeful immigrants must overcome before becoming British.

Who is it that can keep London safe in the run-up to the Olympic Games?

If you have been tempted to answer either the ‘Metropolitan Police’ or the ‘Special Branch’, then you would have been wrong.

That is the view of the recently retired head of the Special Branch’s Muslim Contact Unit.

Muslim groups staged a vigil outside Downing Street Saturday 16th February, protesting what they call a week of ‘appalling displays of prejudice and contempt towards Islam and Muslims’.

The protest was co-ordinated by the British Muslim Initiative (BMI), and backed by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and the British Muslim Forum (BMF).

Even Aitzaz Zafar’s lawyer concedes that the material his client and four companions had amassed on their computers was “unpleasant.”

There was a film showing atrocities against Muslims around the world. There were pamphlets exhorting Muslims to fight back. There was a suicide-bombing manual.

Three of the boys’ faces had been digitally grafted into a montage of the 9/11 hijackers. In another photo, two of them posed as mujihadeen – bearded fierce-eyed young men in combat fatigues.

But on Wednesday a London appeals court overturned the five students’ conviction last year under the 2000 Terrorism Act, deciding there was no proof that they had planned to commit violence.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband has questioned the fairness of US military tribunals for six Guantanamo Bay detainees charged with involvement in 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.

The men – including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks – were charged by the US Department of Defense on Monday with a raft of terrorism-related crimes including murder, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.

Former senior members of al-Muhajiroun, formerly one of the most extreme Islamist groups in the UK, have siezed on the controversy over the Archbishop of Canterbury's remarks on Sharia law to rally their followers. A press release issued by Anjem Choudary on Friday 8 February said that a partial implementation of Sharia law cannot work and that true Sharia law can only be implemented through a Caliphate:

"The two systems of secularism and Islam are diametrically opposed, you cannot say that sovereignty and supremacy is for man on the one hand and also that sovereignty belongs to Allah on the other. One must take precedence, and that is Islam."

Archbishop Rowan Williams' extraordinary defence of the implemention of sharia law in the UK has rightly received a battering from the British press. The Sun's reply - 'What a burkha' - being perhaps the most succinct.

But it appears to have passed by that even the element of sharia which Rowan Williams has defended - marital disputes etc - are an exercise in inequality. In sharia law the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. Does the Archbishop now believe that it is acceptable that in place of equal rights and all the other advantages of the rule of law, girls born to Muslim families in the UK should be afforded half the rights of those enjoyed by every other girl in the land?

The British government has said that it will not let Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, into the UK to seek medical treatment.

"The UK will not tolerate the presence of those who seek to justify acts of terrorist violence or disburse views that could foster inter-community violence," a Home Office spokeswoman said.

On Monday, the Centre for Social Cohesion published its latest report, Crimes of the Community, which examines honour-based violence in the UK.

The report is available to download as a PDF or to purchase in hard copy.

A timely article by Terry Fitzpatrick, the renowed anti-racism campaigner, and Abbas Uddin, a Tower Hamlets councillor, in the East London Advertiser draws attention to the very real danger that the British National Party (BNP) will make significant gains in the coming elections for the London assembly.

The article warns that the BNP have achieved 16 and 28 percent in elections held in London in the last six months and argues that the openly racist party could gain an even larger share of the vote if there is a low turnout in the May elections.

After very depressing news, a ray of hope: the upper house of Afghanistan's parliament has dropped its support for a death sentence issued last week against a young journalist found guilty of blasphemy.

A little-picked-up story from Luton Today shows how at risk the memory of the Holocaust is from people who think they're supporting the cause of the Palestinian people.

As if to re-iterate the fact that the Holocaust can barely be mentioned today without the most crass equivalences being made with the situation of the Palestinians, just read some of the comments which Guardian readers voiced in response to a perfectly anodyne article about the Holocaust a few days ago.