Define “mainstream”
They’re still doing it…
The Independent’s first paragraph:
Britain’s largest mainstream Muslim organisation will today call for “robust action” to combat Islamophobic attacks amid fears of growing violence and under-reporting of hate crimes.
You already know what that organization is, right? And it is: it’s the MCB. But what is “mainstream” about the MCB? It is, notoriously, reactionary and male-dominated. More genuinely “mainstream” Muslims don’t consider it mainstream at all, and fume at the media habit of calling it mainstream and treating it as mainstream.
Taji Mustafa, spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain, said: “Xenophobic attacks on Muslims have increased under successive governments. In a manipulative alliance with some sections of the media, they have demonised Islam as part of their foreign policy propaganda.”
Ah well if someone from Hizb ut-Tahrir says so, it must be true.
This is particularly troubling, when read in connexion with what Edmund Standing writes about the MCB characterising the government position regarding human rights, equality before the law etc. as the outpourings of neoconservative think tanks. In other words, the MCB will define what constitutes an extremist, not the government. One thing that is underemphasised when things like this come into the light is the fact that it only takes a few extremists to terrorise a society. What the “majority” of Muslims think is unimportant, if there is an extremist fringe that is prepared to to demand respect for its extremism. And do we know what is the Muslim mainstream in Britain? Where do most Muslims in Britain stand on demands for respect for their religion and its divisive practices, including inequality before the law in the shape of Sharia courts? Does anyone know? If universities have become centres of Islamic extremism, as was reported recently, where do ordinary Muslims stand on their place in British society? I suspect, though I do not know, that defining mainstream Muslim in Britain (and perhaps other Western countries) is very difficult indeed, and may turn up a few surprises.
It also depends on what one means by “mainstream”. Does it mean “a set of beliefs and values common to most Muslims in Britain”? Or does it mean “a set of beliefs and values common to most Britons”? Very different concepts, both describable as “mainstream”.
Isn’t Islam “reactionary and male-dominated”? Where are all these ‘moderate’ Moslems? If the majority of Moslems were indeed moderate, majority Moslem nations wouldn’t be theocratic,chaotic.misogynistic and oppressive,but they are. So organizations such as the MCB, probably, do indeed, represent ‘mainstream’ Islam.
As to ‘xenophobia’, we could ask Moslems if they would favor being treated in the same way as non-Moslems are treated in majority moslem nations.
Now why on earth would anyone be threatened by the idea of Islamification across Europe?
I was just going to say bullshit on this. But then I saw that attacks on muslims in the UK have decreased over the last few years. So now Summer-the-little-stripey-cat and I together call double bullshit on this nonsense.
BTW:can someone explain to me how a country (nation) as small and overcrowded as the UK has any kind of immigration policy? It makes absolutely no sense to me….
In the pre-PC days in Canada it was common to tell complaining immigrants “if you don’t like it here you can go back where you came from.” Maybe we’ve lost something along the way?
After reading Edmund Standing’s article on the MCB’s reaction to the UK government’s Prevent strategy, I got interested in what this strategy was really all about. From the foreword of the original policy paper (the first PDF file):
I searched the entire document for the words “legitimate” and “religious”, but was unable to find a definition of what constitutes “legitimate religious belief”. Perhaps it just means “nonviolent”, or maybe the definition is to be left for Rowan Williams to decide.
I think this document should have been a little more explicit about what constitutes “universal human rights, equality before the law, democracy and full participation in our society.” In particular, even (or perhaps especially) in a brief summary of this sort, it should be stated unequivocally that notions of equality must not be limited by gender, religious belief or non-belief, sexual orientation, etc. Perhaps the word “universal” is supposed to cover this, but I would not take it for granted that the target audience necessarily includes women and non-Muslims in the category of “human”.
I want to interject that I’m a Quilliam Foundation fan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BrueU4xd2w
and I maybe perhaps consider Maajid Nawaz my imaginary boyfriend. :) (Obviously for his intellectual journey; no objectification intended :) )
I was interested to see the reference to “xenophobia”, because I think what is called “Islamophobia” is in most cases just xenophobia. I say “just”, but not to deny that we do have a problem with xenophobia.
Whatever you think about US/UK foreign policy, I think one of the remarkable things about the current wars is precisely that Muslims are not subject to official abuse. Much of the fighting in recent years has been against dictators who happen to be Muslims, or against groups who adhere to a particular Islamic ideology.
But unlike, say, the internment of Japanese people in the US in the second world war (there are lots of other examples of collective punishment of this type), there has been no government-led attack on, or defamation of, Muslim citizens as a whole. Western governments remain friendly with Muslim countries and regimes, which is itself controversial – and after all, if you wanted to “demonise” Muslims, why pass up the opportunity to have a go at Saudi Arabia? But Saudi Arabia are officially allies.
War being war, innocents have also suffered, about which there is justifiable anger. And no doubt Muslims also generally feel under pressure because of what is being done in the name of their religion, and what the social and policing consequences of that are (and about which there are also good arguments to have).
But if anything, government has been putting out consistently positive messages about the “real” peace-loving Islam, and has not in fact been justifying war/imperialism by demonising Muslims.
Dan
Islam truly is all fringe, no center. Even if you talk to the “good guys”, that is, Muslims who genuinely have some belief in human rights and compassion for others, they almost invariably hold stong views that are at odds with any notion of universal human rights and that ultimately skew to religious dictatorship. There are a couple of small exceptions, the Qu’ranists for example or a couple very westernized Sufi orders, but they’re generally not even considered true believers by mainstream Sunnis and Shia. There is also the odd religiously conservative Muslim who believes in secularism as policy, but their number is so small as to be insignificant. And whatever some Muslim leaders say in public, antisemitism and misogyny are the norm, not the exception, among “mainstream” Muslims.
I’m not talking about nominal Muslims here, that is, people who were raised Muslim and just never bothered to officially leave, or who were raised in the west and have such a gooey, watered-down view of Islam that it’s basically unitarianism. But they are not the mainstream either.