When one sinner repents, says the biblical adage, there is much joy in heaven. So the UK government, must be rejoicing at the launch of the Quilliam Foundation — the think tank established by two repentant sinners: Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz, ex-members of the extremist Islamic cult Hizb ut-Tahrir.
On earth, however, I would suggest a greater degree of caution. In the here and now, it’s not the repentant sinners we should celebrate but “the 99 righteous persons who need no repentance”, those unmentioned Muslims who refused to be seduced by the dark side. The foundation’s website declares, Quilliam “rejects foreign ideologies of Islamism and jihadism” and upholds “Islam as a pluralistic, diverse tradition that can heal the pathology of Islamist extremism”. What could be wrong with such a message?
The answer is the messenger and the message. When erstwhile sinners gain the limelight, the support of neocon luminaries and the backing of respectable Muslim leaders, sinning acquires a certain cachet. We prove again that radical extremism is the way to get attention. We make flirtation with violent ideology the way to be heard and become acceptable.
The embrace of former extremists is a slap in the face for Muslims who have worked tirelessly to build a British Muslim identity and foster inclusion by constructive community activity. I am troubled by the fact that former extremists are seen as the only people who know how to deal with extremism. Just because you have been an inmate of a mental hospital does not mean you are an expert in clinical psychology.
At every stage of dealing with extremism, the government has made the wrong choice. First, only British-trained imams were to be promoted, though how and what they were trained in was not examined.
Then there were to be road shows at which religious scholars selected for their moderation and tractability, rather than an understanding of the problems of young British Muslims, would explain the error of extremist ways. Then Sufism was touted as the solution, and the Sufi Muslim Council was created as the voice of moderation. Now the way forward is with sinners who were once mouthpieces for jihadi propaganda and advocated the violent rejection of all things Western.
The thing nobody has suggested is engaging the silenced and diverse majority of Muslim communities. If the debate of the mainstream is ignored, there is nowhere for those rescued from extremism to go.
The silent majority is supposed to be groomed to embrace quietism — which explains why Sufi mysticism is in vogue — and, most important, to be put off politics for life.
At the launch of the foundation this week, Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al-Bukhari, a “master” of the Naqshbandi Sufi order in Palestine, said Muslims should love, obey and respect the government. It’s exactly what I would expect of a neocon Sufi order that supported Bush and his war on Iraq. Islam is not an ideology, but it is no more devoid of politics than Christianity. Far from “obeying” this government, Muslims are duty-bound to challenge it. Extremism is not only a religious issue; it is also a product of our politics. And tackling extremism requires changing politics as much as changing religious outlook.
Within the British Muslim community there are pockets of underachievement, underemployment and high unemployment. There are problems of education, health and social provision. All are festering ground for extremism; all are political facts.
Then there are problems, which too few Muslims are prepared to acknowledge, that they share with sections of white British society: Problems of family disintegration and drugs, of an existence devoid of opportunities to share in consumer culture. An escape from this existence is gang membership and drug culture, a kind of glorying in the indignity of one’s existence. These, too, are political problems.
Most of all, British foreign policy has a direct bearing on nurturing extremism. The occupation of Iraq, the byproducts of the “war on terror”, the perpetual suffering of the Palestinians are not amenable to Sufi solutions or deprogramming techniques. So we don’t need neocon ex-extremists to tell us what extremism is about. They are part of the problem, not the solution. But we do need a viable politics that tackles the root cause of extremism. We cannot allow former lunatics to take over the asylum.
