Undeclared links
In the Times today – behind a paywall as always, but the free first two paragraphs are of interest all the same.
Britain’s biggest Islamic organisation and its largest Muslim student group have undeclared links to the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist network that has at times incited violence and terror, a government report claimed yesterday.
The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella body of more than 500 Islamic organisations, claims to be non-sectarian, but Brotherhood supporters are said to have “played an important role in establishing and then running” it, according to the review.
Wait, the MCB claims to be non-sectarian? What sense does that make? It’s sectarian right in the name. The issue isn’t sectarian / non-sectarian but theocratic / secular, or tolerant / intolerant, or liberal / illiberal. It’s whether or not you respect human rights. It’s whether or not you think your religion has the right to demand and enforce universal obedience.
It’s also whether or not you exclude women in the name of your organization.
I spent most of today revising my Chinese in preparation for visiting my son in Hong Kong next year. It does funny things to the way you parse language. When I first read the headline I read it as if there were a verb “to undeclare;” i.e. as if there were links that once were declared and now had been undeclared. It wasn’t until I had read the whole extract that I thought “Hang about, I must be going gaga!”
Coming back to the content of the post, in the UK, non-sectarian tends to mean not favouring one sect of a religion over another. In Northern Ireland, for example, there are Christian organisations that claim to be non-sectarian, meaning they don’t favour Catholics over Protestants or vice versa. If the MCB has these undeclared links with the Muslim Brotherhood, then it can hardly claim to be non-sectarian, in this sense.
“Nonsectarian” is sometimes used to mean a religious group of believers of different denominations (sects.)
But the main point stands.
Or, what Bernard Hurley said.
Sure, MCB is nonsectarian. Just like Bob’s Country Bunker has both kinds of music: country and western.
I sort of knew that – that “non-sectarian” could mean not Sunni and not Shi’ite, etc. I was playing dumb a little. But the MCB has always been highly sectarian even if it is neither Sunni nor Shi’ite (and I don’t know whether it is or not). Its “sect” is Islamism. It was born of the Islamist protests against Salman Rushdie in 1989.
That reminds me of a day a lifetime ago when I enjoyed making my Cousins squirm. The had started attending a non-denominational church. After we’d established that Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists were not welcome to their ‘anyone is welcome’ church, we started on the Christian denominations. It narrowed down to Anglican, Presbyterian, Catholic and the Methodists.
Somehow inclusion is seldom as inclusive as you might think.
Amazing, what a revelation. How could any organisation called the ‘Muslim Council of Britain’ be ‘non-sectarian’?
The term is as meaningless as ‘moderate Muslim’.
Whether the MCB has any Shia members should be checkable. Alawi and Ahmadia membership would be good to learn about too.