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In the West, the Arabization of Muslim communities has occurred with government assistance, which, through imposed policies of multiculturalism in the name of diversity, has effected the destruction of South Asian culture.
Britain’s multiculturalism
policies have imposed Islamist leadership upon Britain’s Muslim
communities and brought about the destruction of South Asian culture.
British suicide bomber and
jihadist, Abdul Waheed Majeed, in his last moments before ramming a
truck laden with explosives into a Syrian prison, posed
in a white Islamic tunic and black scarf for the cameras. Asked by the
cameraman to say a few words in Arabic before his “martyrdom,” Majeed
replied: “Sorry? I can’t speak. Everyone asks me that and … I’m not a
very good speaker.”
Abdul
Waheed Majeed (left), of Crawley, England, poses for photographs
moments before driving a truck-bomb into a prison in Aleppo, Syria.
(Image source: Jabhat al-Nusra video)
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Majeed, like a large number of British Muslims, was not an Arabic speaker. He was of Pakistani heritage. About 70% of British Muslims
are, in fact, South Asian. A mere 6.6% are believed to be of Arab
descent. And very few British Muslims can actually speak Arabic.
Nevertheless, British Islam is
firmly focussed on the Middle East. The poet Hamza Beg, writing in the
journal of a taxpayer-funded organization, Asfar, noted:
“Since 1999, Pakistan, for example, has had a military coup, a
purported return to democracy, and the assassination of the leader of
the opposition, Benazir Bhutto. However, an entire generation of
British-born Pakistanis have been more interested in Israeli incursions
into Lebanon, the occupation of Palestine, and the war on Iraq. How has
this occurred and what does it mean?”
British Muslims, Beg continued,
have rejected “their parents’ cultural understanding of Islam as a
religion. British-Pakistani Muslims have become Muslims first, and are
losing patience with the Pakistani practice of the religion embedded in
Sufi traditions.”
“In rejecting a culturally conditioned Islam,” Beg concludes, “Muslims in Britain have given up their equal footing and fallen prey to Arab imperialism.” Indonesian scholar Azyumardi Azra refers to this process as “Arabization.”
In a similar story, one South Asian blogger in the United States writes,
“Why hasn’t South Asian poetry, art and dress impacted any of the large
American Islamic organizations of today? Why are nearly all Muslim
converts distinctly Arabic in appearance, style, and culture? … This
idea of Arabization of tongue and culture, of course, has been
devastatingly successful, and fed right into the weaknesses of the
colonized South-Asian inferiority complex. Hence South Asia began
marginalizing their own culture only a few decades after the Saudi’s
[sic] began the propaganda machine. The rich colors of the South Asian
woman have been discarded…”
Over the past century,
Arab-focussed Islamists have attempted to homogenize Islamic cultures
outside the Middle East. This process initially occurred in South Asia –
Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of India.
The Indian academic Baladas Ghoshal blames
the “Wahhabi creed” of Saudi Arabia, which, he claims, has attempted to
purge South Asian Islam of its cultural practises and emblems, and has
instead imposed a “pure and ideal form of Islam to be followed by
Muslims all over the world.”
Wahhabis, Ghoshal writes,
believe that the “adaptation of other customs, traditions and cultures
in its path toward the expansion of the religion had only led to
aberration and corruption of original and pristine ideas of Islam. It is
only through the practice of mediaeval [sic] Arab traditions and way of
life that the evil eyes of other religions can be kept at bay.”
Islamist movements in South
Asia also adopted these efforts at Arabization. In the 1930s, ideologues
such as Abul Hasan Nadwi – part of the radical Islamic Deobandi sect,
which later gave birth to the Taliban – attempted to establish in India a
single, unique Islamic identity based on “pure Islam.” According to
Nadwi, this meant dressing like Arabs, speaking Arabic and reading the
Arabic language press.[1] Islamic revivalism, Nadwi claimed, required “emphasizing its affinities to his Muslim confreres in the Middle East.”[2]
Islamist groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami have since adopted these ideas; they claim
that culture cannot exist outside of Islam and that Pakistani Muslims
were part of the “Arab nation.” The Jamaat-e-Islami ideologue, Abdul Ala
Mawdudi, has said that culture destroys the “inner vitality” of Islam:
it “blurs its vision, befogs its critical faculties, breeds inferiority
complexes, and gradually but assuredly saps all the springs of culture
and sounds its death-knell.”[3]
Over the past decades, since Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have distributed
vast amounts of money to non-profit groups and schools run by South
Asian Islamist movements, Jamaat-e-Islami, for example, set about
purging Pakistani and Bengali Muslims of their cultural ideas. The
Muslim writer Sazzad Hussain observed the consequences of Islamist-led homogenization of his culture in the Indian state of Assam:
“The Islamist fundamentalist has one very distinctive characteristic—the denial of modern nation-state identity of Muslims to form a uniformed ‘Islamic’ identity at the cost of local tradition and cultural practices. … These days the Muslims of Assam are not identified as Assamese Muslims or Muslim of East Bengali descent. Instead they are merely homogenized as ‘Muslims’ … The use of Burqa and Hijab are alarmingly rising among the Muslim women in Assam. The ankle length Thaub, a Bedouin male dress and the red and white chequered headgear Kaffaiah are now in fashion for many Mollahs and Maulvis [clerics] and Madrassa students in Assam. It has reached to such an extent that this red-white or green-white chequered Kaffaiah is now replacing the Phoolam Gamocha, the symbol of Assamese culture…”
“Arabization and Islamization,” Ghosal writes,
“are inseparable parts of a single cultural ideal.” In the West, and
particularly in Britain, the loss of South Asian identity to the
pervasively unifying label of “Islam” is readily apparent. The change of
Muslim dress, some British Muslims believe, is a telling sign of this
Islamization. Muslim cultures in the West, some claim, became Arabized
before parts of the Muslim world itself. Pakistani writer Bina Shah has written:
“Growing up in Pakistan, I’d never seen anyone wear a hijab …. It was only in the late 1980s that I saw my first hijab, worn by the mother of a Pakistani-American girl from Peoria, Illinois. Saudi-Wahabi social influence filtered to Pakistan and much of the rest of the non-Arab world throughout the next two decades, thanks to a campaign that attempted to export the kingdom’s religio-social values to its would-be satellite states. Slowly, more and more women started to wear the black burqa and the tight hijab.”
The Islamization of Western
Muslim communities has occurred with government assistance, which,
through imposed policies of multiculturalism in the name of diversity,
has effected the destruction of South Asian culture.
British multiculturalism has
encouraged British society to exist as a federation of communities in
which each minority community was not required to adopt the
values of the majority. This inverse segregation only served to chain
particular communities to their self-appointed community groups. Among
Britain’s South Asian community, these groups were Islamist-run.
Consequently, multiculturalist polices served to homogenize a community
whose very diversity it had promised to preserve.
Former Islamic extremist Ed
Husain has referred to the result of “25 years of multiculturalism” as
not “multicultural communities” but plural “monoculturalism.” Husain recalls:
“Many Muslims want to live apart from mainstream British society; official government policy has helped them do so. I grew up without any white friends. My school was almost entirely Muslim. I had almost no direct experience of ‘British life’ or ‘British institutions’. So it was easy for the extremists to say to me: ‘You see? You’re not part of British society. You never will be. You can only be part of an Islamic society.’ The first part of what they said was true. I wasn’t part of British society: nothing in my life overlapped with it.”
Kenan Malik, a British writer
of Asian heritage, noted: “Where once [it was] argued that everyone
should be treated equally, despite their radical, ethnic, religious or
cultural differences, now it pushed the idea that different people
should be treated differently because of such differences.”[4]
The first victim of multiculturalist policies was the individual. The Indian economist, Amartya Sen, has stated:
“The way that British authorities have interpreted multiculturalism has
very much undermined individual freedom. A British Muslim is not asked
to act within the civil society or the political arena but as a Muslim.
His British identity has to be mediated by his community.”
Groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami
have never achieved popular support in South Asia, not even in Pakistan –
despite the best efforts of their Wahhabi patrons. When Hassan Butt, a
former member of the British extremist group, Al Muhajiroun, visited
Pakistan – the home of his parents – he said he was regarded as a
stranger “because he had rejected traditional Islam.” Butt said he felt
similarly isolated in Britain because the establishment treated him “as a
Muslim, not a British citizen.”[5]
The second victim of
multiculturalism was the very cultural expressions that multiculturalism
claimed to preserve. Britain’s multiculturalism policies offered
taxpayer funds and political legitimacy to anyone who claimed to
represent a community. As with all communities, it was the politicized
activists who rose to the top and asserted their authority with little
opposition. In the case of the British Muslim community, these activists
belonged to Jamaat-e-Islami, the Bangladeshi Islamist group responsible
for acts of genocide during the 1971 Independence War in Bangladesh.
Groups such as the Muslim
Council of Britain are mostly run by individuals and groups tied closely
to Jamaat-e-Islami. A 2007 poll by Policy Exchange revealed, however, that 94% of British Muslims do not believe that the Muslim Council of Britain represents their views.
The Italian academic Lorenzo Vidino has observed: [6]
“The British multicultural model has traditionally relied heavily on community leaders who act as trusted intermediaries between the community and the state, to whom the latter can delegate the administration of various services. No such class existed among the masses of poorly educated South Asian immigrants in postwar Britain. The situation created the opportunity for the Mawdudists [Jamaat-e-Islami], thanks to their superior resources, organizational skills and good understanding of the British political system to surpass other groups in the competition for the role of community leaders.”
British Islamists, exploiting
the imposition of multiculturalism, forced their officially recognized
and publicly funded model of Muslim identity upon their conscripted
South Asian constituents. The bright colors and sounds of Pakistani and
Bengali culture were lost to the dark homogeneity of Wahhabi-inspired
Islam.
As Amartya Sen has noted:
“It is … not surprising at all that the champions of Islamic
fundamentalism would like to suppress all other identities of Muslims in
favour of being only Islamic.”
In the 1970s, British Asians
had identified themselves in racial terms. They described themselves as
Pakistani, Indian or Bangladeshi. After the imposition of
multiculturalism, however, these labels became “Muslims” and
“non-Muslims.” The academic Delwar Hussein writes
that in the 1980s, the British establishment embraced the concept of
“Muslim community” and started to fund Jamaat-e-Islami groups such as
the East London Mosque to deliver social welfare programs.
Lorenzo Vidino concluded that,
“the funds received from councils … allowed Mawdudist [Jamaat-e-Islami]
organizations to significantly alter the balance of power in East London
as secular organizations struggled to compete.”[7]
As groups that actually
represented Britain’s South Asian community disappeared under
competition from well-organized, well-funded – and yet unrepresentative –
Islamist groups, the diversity of South Asian identities started to fade:
“At the time of independence Bangladeshis who came here [to Britain] had a very strong sense of Bengali identity. But all that disappeared, because the official government classification ignored language, culture and secular politics, and insisted on viewing all Bangladeshis as Muslims. Suddenly they had lost all identity other than being Islamic. And suddenly Bangladeshis stopped being Bangladeshis and were merged with all other Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia.”
In 1988, the Rushdie affair
helped to consolidate the Islamist hold over Britain’s Muslim community.
Although initial protests against Salmon Rushdie’s Satanic Verses
began in India, it was in Britain where the most significant upheavals
took place. Saudi Arabia encouraged Jamaat-e-Islami organizations in the
UK to establish the United Kingdom Action Committee on Islamic Affairs
(UKACIA) to coordinate the campaign against Rushdie. The Deobandi sect
contributed to the anger – organizing book burnings and mass marches.
Several months later, the Iranian regime issued its infamous fatwa
[religious edict] against Rushdie. An Iranian charitable organization
run by the regime offered $3 million for the Muslim who murdered
Rushdie.
The fatwa served to
unite British Muslims and to isolate them even further from a state that
had already made clear that they were to exist as Muslims and not as
private citizens. Inayat Bunglawala, a British Islamist, recalls the
importance of the fatwa: “I felt a thrill. It was incredibly
uplifting. The fatwa meant that as British Muslims we did not have to
regard ourselves just as a small, vulnerable minority; we were part of a
truly global and powerful movement.”[8]
The establishment’s response to
the Rushdie crisis was, in part, pusillanimous. Although the government
criticized Iran and provided police protection for Rushdie, it did not
break off diplomatic relations with the Tehran regime. Moreover, British
Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe told the BBC: “We can understand why…
[the book] could be criticized.” It was “found deeply offensive by
people of the Muslim faith” and “offensive in other ways as well … The
British Government, the British people have no affection for the book.”[9]
Norman Tebbit, then a cabinet minister, called Rushdie “an outstanding
villain” whose “public life had been a record of despicable acts of
betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality.”[10]
By unprecedentedly attacking
the content of a novel, British policymakers chose to legitimize the
complaints of the Saudi-backed Islamists in Britain as well as the
mullahs in Tehran – and so portrayed these extremists as representative
voices of Britain’s South Asian Muslim community.
Today, some of the key Islamist
figures behind the Rushdie demonstrations are involved with
taxpayer-funded interfaith dialogue work. Manazir Ahsan, for example,
was a key figure within the United Kingdom Action Committee on Islamic
Affairs. During the crisis, Ahsan approved of Ayatollah Khomeini’s
support for the murder of Salman Rushdie. He stated that Khomeini “has
expressed the Islamic legal point of view … We hope other Islamic
governments will confirm this.”[11]
Today, Ahsan, is on the executive committee of the Inter Faith Network
for the United Kingdom (which he co-chaired from 2011-2012) – an
organization that has received 80% of its funding from the taxpayer.
British Interfaith Dialogue is a
natural product of multiculturalist policies: the division of citizens
into pre-approved identities. The Inter Faith Network, in fact, rejects
some religious groups, such as the minority Muslim Ahmadiyya community,
as unsuitable partners for dialogue, apparently for fear of upsetting
the Islamist-led organizations that make up its member bodies. Just as
multiculturalism offered supremacy to particular individuals and groups,
so too, today, taxpayer-funded interfaith dialogue has damaged
relations between different religious communities and has falsely
legitimized Islamist groups as representative of all British Muslims.
Of course, Western governments are not morally responsible for the
hateful ideas and murderous actions of the Islamist networks. That
wickedness lies with the Islamist groups themselves. But by continuing
to promote pernicious policies of multiculturalism while failing to
protect the individual liberties on which the West was built, government
policy does serve to provide ammunition and willing recruits to the
Islamist cause.Against the onslaught of Islamist patronage from the East and the government complicity in the West, the vitality of South Asian music, dress, books, poetry and ideas risks disappearing completely. Multiculturalism has not just failed to bring about a more harmonious society; it has allowed Islamist mobs to purge communities of the very cultural ideas multiculturalism promised to preserve.
[1] James Toth, Sayyid Qutb: The Life and Legacy of a Radical Islamic Intellectual
[2] Ibid.
[3] Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, page 105
[4] Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood, page 136
[5] Malik, page 104
[6] Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood, page 135
[7] Ibid.
[8] Malik, page 18
[9] Malik, page 32
[10] Malik, page 33
[11] ‘Britain: Dilemma Over Rushdie Book Escalates’, John Clements, Inter Press Service, 15 February 1989
[2] Ibid.
[3] Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, page 105
[4] Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood, page 136
[5] Malik, page 104
[6] Lorenzo Vidino, The New Muslim Brotherhood, page 135
[7] Ibid.
[8] Malik, page 18
[9] Malik, page 32
[10] Malik, page 33
[11] ‘Britain: Dilemma Over Rushdie Book Escalates’, John Clements, Inter Press Service, 15 February 1989
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