After the beheading of Alan Henning, a taxi driver from Manchester, was released on the Internet by Isis militants on the eve of Eid al-Adha, leaders of Britain’s Muslim community were united in their message: the Islamic State is not Islamic, nor is it a state.
Isis is a small, violent group of political extremists preying on the instability of the Middle East.
Its attraction for radicalised, lonely, angry souls from places like Britain and Holland is not hard to fathom, though it is sad. These are young people who feel like they don’t fit into their European societies: marginalised, invisible, mocked. Isis provides ample opportunity to unleash their pent-up hatred towards humanity.
In the “Land of Khilafah” they believe they will find some kind of barbaric peace, where young girls are raped and their mothers’ hearts cut out and left on their chests.
One suspects Allah might have a word or two to say to them when they reach Jannah.
Henning was just a normal bloke from a place called Eccles, a town famous in England for having a cake named after it. He left his family to help others in a distant land, Syria. His killers may also have been English.
Harun Khan, of the Muslim Council of Britain, said of the murderers, Isis: “They are not really Islamic: nobody recognises them.”
Suleman Nagdi of the Federation of Muslim Organisations, said, “There is nothing Islamic about these individuals...Who is living closer to the message of the Qu’ran? Isis or Alan Henning?”
Even Al-Qaeda sent a representative to reason with Isis and ask for Henning to be released.
When you’ve managed to alienate Al-Qaeda, the world’s leading terror network, you really are out on a limb.
The media, however, don’t seem to understand something fundamental—killing people is not part of the Islamic faith—quite the opposite.
The media conflate extremism with ordinary Muslim folk. So Ben Affleck, speaking on Bill Maher’s talk show, was correct to call Maher racist for associating violent Jihadists with the kind of ordinary Muslims who “just want to make their kids sandwiches and take them to school”—the kind of Muslims who in fact died in the 9/11, 7/7, Bali and Madrid terror attacks, alongside Christians, Jews and atheists.
Jihadists are crazy people but they make a good story—the modern-day bogeymen—and the general public are ready and willing to believe they represent Islam. By that token, does the KKK represent Christianity, as it claims to?
Meanwhile, the message from moderate, intellectual Muslims, even theologians and scholars, gets trampled down. Author Reza Aslan, appearing on CNN, came under attack from two news anchors and rebutted some claims about Islam.
On the charge of misogyny he countered that Muslim countries have elected seven women heads of state, then asked how many America had elected. He cited two Christian countries with female genital mutilation (FGM) rates of between 75 and 90 per cent (Ethiopia and Eritrea) and informed us that FGM is a Central African problem, not a Muslim problem.
The CNN anchors said women can’t vote or drive in Saudi Arabia—this is true, and extreme and foul. In the short period of Isis’s rise, the Saudi state has also beheaded 19 people in the name of justice, compared with Isis’s three.
And which countries support Saudi militarily and partner with them economically? The USA and Britain.
Which countries helped created the power vacuum in Iraq and Syria which left the territory exposed to extremist forces? The USA and Britain.
It is depressing that radicalised Muslim men from Britain are joining Isis but it isn’t surprising. Global Jihad posters began appearing around mosques with fundamentalist preachers in places like Finsbury Park and Birmingham in the mid-1990s, when the movement was primarily concerned with removing US forces from Saudi land and defending the Palestinians against Israel, rather than converting western democracies.
Today, some British Muslim scholars want the Qu’ran reformed to remove its extreme and outdated shariah elements.
There are London accents on the beheading videos and a Trini voice too. I refuse to watch the videos so I will not be hearing the sing-song accent in that grim context, though there is little doubt in my mind that the Trini was radicalised outside of T&T; quite likely in Britain.
And while the Ministry of National Security has most likely already discovered the man’s identity and may be keeping the Jamaat al-Muslimeen under close surveillance it is worth stating that, just like Isis, Abu Bakr’s group aren’t Islamic either.
Just like Isis they are politically committed to overturning the economic power balance—the religious underpinnings are merely a contextual tool they deploy.
Trinidadians should plainly note the differences between this false Islam and the real thing or injustices will be committed in the name of national and international security, just like in March this year when moderate, ordinary Trini citizens of the Muslim faith were unlawfully detained in Caracas, suspected of terrorism.
The silence from the rest of the country was deafening and appalling. I guess we could all do with a little more religious education.