So, this evening, BBC North West Tonight cameras rock up at a mosque in Blackburn where an imam has decided to use Friday prayers to condemn ISIS's practice of beheading people, and to try and dissuade young British Muslims from going out to join them.
I'll leave aside the fact that this is viewed as so unusual it's actually considered to be "news"....
The real story is that, following the imam's comments, the reporter interviews a few of the worshippers outside the mosque. One says he's worried that his kids will want to become jihadists when they grow up. Another says he "sees no evidence" that young British men have gone to join ISIS and that it's all a pack of "media lies". A third complains that Muslims are being killed every day in Gaza, but that the media are now obsessing about the death of "just one Christian" instead. He goes on to say that he expects this from the BBC because "it's owned by Jews".
Interesting times ahead, eh?
This isn't unusual at all. As a Muslim who has attended countless Friday prayers across the UK and elsewhere, this type of condemnation is a standard thing whenever there is an unfortunate Muslim extremism-related event in the news.
Let's be clear, while a lot of Muslims unfortunately do fall prey to conspiracy theories - by the way, scepticism of the media is not entirely unwarranted, although it ought to be done with some sophistication - most of these people do not support the extremism either! To draw an analogy, there are conspiracy theorists in the world who believe that global warming is just a myth that is intended to control people, but that doesn't mean that such people are all guilty of the crimes of producing industrial waste and creating climate change.
Oughtn't the 1.6 billion Muslims we've heard so much about in this thread be at the head of the queue for dealing with an organisation that's debasing their religion?
1. What makes you think that these 1.6 billion Muslims aren't doing anything? Firstly, the no. of Muslims in this country is less than 5% of the population, and the majority is not well-educated and cannot be expected to be writing or speaking publicly in those platforms that you are familiar with. Start visiting some mosques and reading Muslim academic journals etcetera, and you're views might change. Also, you presumably don't know Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Malay, Turkish and the other languages that most of the Muslim world speaks and writes in, in which languages and countries you'll find plenty of condemnation, of efforts to deradicalise ands on. I know this as someone who is studying two of those languages.
2. While it's true that Muslims could be doing more, it's also true that Muslim world is in such disarray, politically, intellectually, spiritually, that it's quite hard for it to respond to these things. It needs time to build the institutions and the infrastructure.
People also need to realise that ISIS is attacking
Muslims as well! Anyone who doesn't swear allegiance to them - i.e. 99% of the world's Muslims - according to their crude non-ideology, is an apostate, and apparently therefore deserves the death penalty, without even having atrial , which is a basic right according to the earliest Islamic sources! They destroy mosques that don't swear allegiance to them - in fact, even when Mr Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gave that pronouncement that he is the self-acclaimed 'Caliph' of his 'Islamic state' (by the way the legal grounds for either one of those claims are nonexistent in any of the four legal schools of Sunni thought, and they claim to be Sunni, although I've no idea about Shi'a thought), ISIS actually had murdered the real Imam of that mosque only moments beforehand. That shows you that they've no respect for Muslims or Islam. These guys are, in their behaviour, more like the Mongol invaders of the Islamic empire and parts of Eastern Europe in the 13th century.
Are they really debasing it? From the little I have read from the Koran, they [IS] have made an interpretation and are living by it. They believe in their version of the Koran, why give more importance to other takes on God's words? Islam is for everyman, no one interpretation is better than another. They justify their actions with verses from the Koran. As an athiest, their take on Islam is just as valid for me as Doc Red's. The key thing is that they are following, in whatever aspect, ability, God's words. I expect all Muslims past and present will have much more in common with IS than me. I'm an unbeliever, IS and the other 1.6 billion peaceful Muslims might disagree on what aspect of God's words they choose practice, but they certainly believe in the same God. God, sadly, trumps everything, nature of the beast.
While there has been a multiplicity of thought within Islam, it's also the case that, from its very inception - and you can study the tradition if you like, as I am doing, from both the Orientalist and from the traditional perspectives - Islam developed rather sophisticated interpretative methodologies that relied on the mastery of a particular register of the Arabic language, of the most arcane elements of Arabic grammar, of formal logic, of Arabic rhetoric, of methodologies in historical source analysis, in theology and philosophy, and so on. In doing so, the Islamic world did manage, like many other traditions, to establish consensus and orthodoxy on the major principles of the religion and the worldview that it outlines.
Thanks to this, it is possible to say with firm conviction that ISIS's activities and political positions have no grounding in the Islamic tradition at all. Let us look at the letter written by Ali Ibn Abi Talib, the cousin of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), who became one of the Righteous Caliphs, who is venerated unequivocally by both Sunni and Shi'a Muslims, and who is considered to be a Saint and as authentic a Muslim, and as close to the Prophetic teachings, as it gets. These were his instructions to a man who was to become a governor in the emerging Caliphate:
Develop in your heart the feeling of love for your people and let it be the source of kindliness and blessing to them. Do not behave with them like a barbarian, and do not appropriate to yourself that which belongs to them. Remember that the citizens of the state are of two categories. They are either your brethren in religion or your brethren in kind. They are subject to infirmities and liable to commit mistakes. Some indeed do commit mistakes. But forgive them even as you would like God to forgive you. Bear in mind that you are placed over them, even as I am placed over you. And then there is God even above him who has given you the position of a Governor in order that you may look after those under you and to be sufficient unto them. And you will be judged by what you do for them.
Link to full letter, in English translationMay I point out that the translation, 'kind', is usually 'humanity' or 'manhood'. And this sort of statement was
the norm throughout most of Islamic history. Bar the odd, near-unanimously hated tyrant who has ruled in every place in the world, this attitude stayed until the 19th century when certain Muslim thinkers in the Islamic heartland whose exposure to non-Muslims, in some cases, had been non-existent except with the arrival of Napoleon's armies to Egypt and those of the British a little bit later, and who were deeply troubled by the political and social free fall of the Islamic world, developed rather puritanical and/or revivalist political ideas. These ideas reached their intellectual climax with the Syed Qutb, who is said to be the intellectual inspiration for the Muslim Brotherhood (although he would most likely have disagreed with a great deal of its organisation).
ISIS, to place it into context, are the self-unaware, lowest-register manifestation or excess of those ideologies which spawned from Syed Qutb and his predecessors who formulated what is referred to as 'political Islam', in today's vernacular. They recruit psychologically fragile individuals who have either grown up in war torn lands or who have grown up in semi-ghetto conditions in places like the UK (this is
usually the case), who lack a sense of purpose in their lives and a sense of contribution to society/Islam, and who, in their frustration, imagine that being on the battlefront in physical combat is the best way. Often, these people are by no means religious or 'practising'. Their own inner frustration leads to their being utterly unscrupulous and uncritical about the best way to actually help Muslims, about which military organisation - if they insist on joining one - that they should join, and so on. And once they are in, of course, once they've joined the crazy people, in their psychological states, it's easy to get brainwashed.
If you want to understand best the types of people who fight for ISIS aside from warlords and their mercenaries who make up a large part of it, go and read Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevski. His is a pretty accurate portrayal of the isolated, psychologically disturbed modern/postmodern youth.
What's sad to see, but understandable, is that a lot of non-Muslims don't always accept that Muslims talk amongst each other a lot about the sorry state of world politics, including of the Muslim world, and condemn these groups to no end. Muslims are always and everywhere condemning ISIS. It's possible that most Muslims actually hate ISIS more than non-Muslims generally do, in this country. After all, ISIS is primarily destroying
Muslim-majority lands,
Muslim mosques,
Muslim lives, and the lives and lands of those with whom Muslims lived peacefully, by and large, for over 1000 years. And tons and tons of imams, religious scholars, spiritual teachers (these are all different categories, by the way), Muslim politicians and others have condemned ISIS. One respect in which I think that non-Muslims looking into the Muslim world can be unreasonable, I think, is that they, due to their relative lack of knowledge of Muslim opinion, expect assurances from 99% of Muslims or their representatives that 99% of Muslims really and truly aren't extremists or don't support them. But you can't expect it to always come to you, you often have to search for it. Travel to Morocco, travel to Saudi Arabia, travel to Indonesia, travel to India, and see what opinion is. Also, even in Britain, a lot of Muslims like myself just don't expect to have to declare their lack of fondness for ISIS. In my daily life and routine, I, as a regular, peace-loving person, don't feel the need to hold up signposts saying that I agree that ISIS is a bad thing. Now I'm not saying that all non-Muslims are like that, but it always happens that I have to defend myself and mainstream Islam, sadly often even to people who know me reasonably well, against associations with Al-Qaeda style ideologies. (Note that even Al Qaeda condemns ISIS.)
