Mayor of London Sadiq Khan speaking at the candlelight vigil in Trafalgar Square, London to remember those who lost their lives in the Westminster terrorist attack. Lauren Hurley/Press Association. March 23, 2017. All rights reserved.Islamist extremism is real, and it’s not going away. The Westminster
attack is yet another reminder of that.
But defeating it requires a different approach to what has gone on
before.
After the attack, my friend Muddassar Ahmed mobilised a group of British
Muslims to form Muslims United for London, via the
LaunchGood platform, to raise money for the victims and their families.
Muddassar had been a witness to the attack on the day as he had been inside
parliament when it happened.
Our initial target was £10,000. Within a matter of hours we’d raised
over £5,000. We then hit our target and more, shortly after lunchtime – within
24 hours after the attack. So we upped the target to £20,000. Today, not long
after most businesses start work, we smashed our target of £20,000. So we’ve
upped it again to £30,000.
The general British public has overwhelmingly received the initiative in
the spirit with which it was made: love, compassion and wanting to create
something good in the aftermath of something so horrifying. In an article I wrote promoting the fundraiser, I’ve had
comments from both the left and the right criticising the project.
But not everyone felt this way.
In an article I wrote promoting the fundraiser, I’ve had comments from
both the left and the right criticising the project.
One person complained that we’re ignoring the fact that there is a
problem of radical Islam, illustrated by the grotesque atrocities of groups
like ISIS and the Taliban toward other Muslims, minorities and women. How can
we deny that there’s no problem? I don’t
explain, they began, “why the Taliban/ISIS/Al Qaeda, & other Islamic
terrorist groups kill more fellow muslims than anyone else.”
Another person complained that Muslims are, actually, mostly extremists.
They cited a controversial Channel 4 poll which claimed that 34% of Muslims
would not report to the police someone who sympathised with terrorists in
Syria. Never mind that the poll’s methodology was flawed according to the Runnymede
Trust, which criticised it for a selective sample focusing on segregated
communities – or that as Miqdaad Versi
in The Guardian noted: “…
for the survey’s ‘control’ group – consisting
of randomly selected people from across the country of all or no faiths – the figure
is only 30%. And other polls have found that 94% of
British Muslims would report someone they knew who was planning an act of
violence to the police.”
Others took a totally different approach. “How many people were killed
by US and British bombs yesterday, Nafeez”, asked one. On my Facebook, a
British Muslim whom I promptly unfriended, commented on my update about the
fundraiser reaching its target: “Why are you groveling?”
So let’s tackle this head on. Bad ideas, extremist ideologies, don’t
become prominent without a material infrastructure by which they are
propagated. That takes money. And this is where we confront the deep politics
of terror. A number of Muslim-majority governments have been exposed for consistently
sponsoring Islamist extremist groups through the provision of, collectively,
billions of dollars of financial
and military support. Some of them have done so for decades.
Yet western governments often maintain a range of self-serving alliances
with these regimes. They do so despite significant
intelligence on this sort of regional state-sponsorship of terrorism. The reasons
for this are complex and systemic. At base, we are talking about interlocking
financial interests. The fact that many of these countries, in the Gulf region
for instance, hold much of the world’s oil reserves, also plays a significant
role. And yet another related issue covers geopolitical and strategic concerns
to maintain the stability of these regimes, to keep the oil flowing, to keep
the world economy functioning, regardless of their tyrannical policies at home
and support for terrorists abroad.
In other cases, western interference and alliances with proxy groups
tied to the same terror groups – in places like Afghanistan, Syria and Libya –
has amplified and entrenched their activities. And to compound matters, western
military interventions across the Muslim world have tended to indiscriminately
kill civilians, stoking grievances, driving some locals into the arms of militant recruiters,
and providing fodder for the extremist recruiters who operate in western
homelands.
While vast majorities of Muslims continue to oppose the extremism of
groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, these processes mean that a festering pool of
discontent still fuels the activities of militants in different parts of the
world.
And beneath all of this, we have the deeper, slower but inexorable
biophysical processes of climate change, energy depletion, food crises and
economic contraction which are converging to
weaken and undermine the already largely fragile, autocratic regimes in
the region. As these regimes become weaker, as states begin to fail, the
ongoing influx of money to extremist groups by various powers for geopolitical
purposes is radicalised by the short-sighted (and often self-serving)
reactionary military solutions adopted by the west. The
truth of the matter is that the problem of extremism is a shared reality for
which the western and Muslim worlds are co-responsible. This may be
unpalatable.
Within this complex picture, it’s easy to focus on only one element of
the mosaic of factors and blame the party that suits: we can blame ‘Muslims’,
‘radical Islam’, ‘the West’, ‘foreign policy.’
The truth of the matter is that the problem of extremism is a shared
reality for which the western and Muslim worlds are co-responsible. This may be
unpalatable. Different sides would prefer to blame the other exclusively. But that
is only going to compound the problem.
So let’s be clear. Muslims United for London is about doing something
real. It doesn’t address root causes – it cannot in itself solve the very real
problem of Islamist extremism. And it clearly in no way challenges atrocities
for which British or other western governments are responsible.
What it does is simple. It follows the injunction of the Prophet
Muhammad as follows: “What actions are most excellent? To gladden the heart of human beings, to feed the hungry, to help the afflicted, to
lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful, and to remove the sufferings of the
injured.”
For us, Islam is about
protecting and sanctifying all life, our fellow species on the planet and the
planet itself. ‘Allah’, the Divine Reality, conveys the concept of ‘crazy,
unbounded love’, and the Muslim is
literally ‘one who surrenders’ their ego to this ultimate Reality (Haqq).
Within the world, the Muslim
is tasked to see her or himself as living in sacred trusteeship with our fellow
creatures, and the entire Earth, holding a deep, fundamental responsibility to
care for all, by embodying the ethical categories derived from the Divine Names
(the Compassionate, Ar-Rahman; the
Merciful, Ar-Raheem; the Just, al-Adl).
These are Islamic principles
I and a collective of western Muslims have attempted to elaborate in detail
through our theological project, Perennial, which begins to illuminate an authentic,
trans-sectarian but scripturally grounded exploration of Islam’s real teachings
about human existence.
Muslims United for London is a small, humble, spontaneous gesture of humanity
inspired by our faith. It is an illustration of what is possible when people
come together in times of crisis. It encapsulates the sorts of actions that, in
themselves, put to shame the disgusting atrocities of extremists in our midst.
We can, and will, condemn
and disassociate ourselves from those who abuse the name of Islam to kill,
murder and rape. But we want to show that we can build something beautiful
together too, and we’re doing it because that
is the vision we aspire to.