A form of stealth jihad and faked assimilation have powered the rise of sharia-supremacist Muslims in the U.K.
A form of stealth jihad and faked assimilation have powered the rise of sharia-supremacist Muslims in the U.K.
R ead Maddy Kearns’s superb and alarming column on the surrender of British police to pro-Hamas mobs. With it, effectively and inexorably, we find the enforcement of Islamic sharia strictures at the expense of British liberties.
This put me in mind (as many things have over the past month) of the late Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood jurisprudent who, when he died a year ago at 96, was the most influential Sunni Islamic scholar in modern history and, for Hamas (the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), the polestar. Qaradawi, whose weekly Al Jazeera program Sharia and Life routinely drew an audience of tens of millions, was notorious for many things — not least fatwas approving Hamas suicide bombings as well as the killings of American soldiers and support personnel in Iraq.
His most lasting mark, however, is the vision that sharia-supremacist Muslims could “conquer” Europe and America, not by violence — or, at least, by violence alone — but by dawa, fundamentalist Islam’s extortionate form of proselytism.
I described this strategy in The Grand Jihad (2010). It was a profound threat to the West even then. A few years later, we found ourselves asking how the Tsarnaev brothers could ostensibly assimilate in the United States, yet maintain their sharia-supremacist convictions and, when they decided the time was right, execute a barbaric jihadist attack at the Boston Marathon. As I tried to explain, they were just following the plan, which was to resist real assimilation. That was a decade ago. As Maddy illustrates, the challenge is now far more daunting, so I’ll repeat what I said in 2013 about the strategy and its Brotherhood roots:
The Tsarnaevs seemed well assimilated, at least until recent years. Thus the pressing question: How did this happen? The answer begins with that simple, chilling admonition from Muslim leaders: Integrate but do not assimilate. For those Muslims who have begun assimilating, there is this corollary: Turn away from Western wickedness and embrace the cloister of Islamic piety — as construed by Islamic-supremacist leaders, whose ideology glorifies violent jihad even as it pretends to moderation.
The strategy has been called “voluntary apartheid.” The idea is to provide Muslim immigrants in the West — particularly, energetic young Muslims like the Tsarnaevs — with cultural, psychological, and even physical insulation from Western mores, traditions, and institutions. It was the bedrock of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna’s framework for ground-up revolution. In every city and town, the Egyptian academic taught, Muslim leaders must establish a mosque–cum–community center. These, he explained, would become “the axis of our movement,” serving as the “House of Dawa” — that is, of Islam’s particularly aggressive form of proselytism — and providing “the base for our rise . . . to educate us, prepare us, and supply our battalions.”
“Our battalions,” indeed. “Battalions of Islam” was the honorific applied by Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian intellectual, Banna admirer, and convicted terrorist better known as “the blind sheikh,” to the jihadists who answered his summons to savagery in Cairo and New York. That these battalions will emerge from the dawa mission stressed by Muslim leaders is inevitable. It is why atrocities such as the rampage in Boston are bound to happen.
Robert Spencer, a sharp critic of Islamic supremacism, fittingly describes dawa as “stealth jihad.” Dawa can include charitable fundraising (part of which is, under sharia guidelines, quite intentionally diverted to jihadist groups), intimidation of detractors, cultivation of sympathizers in the media and the universities, exploitation of legal systems and religious liberty, infiltration of political systems, and the portrayal of any scrutiny of Islamic doctrine as “Islamophobia.” The defining feature of dawa in the West, though, is resistance to assimilation.
“One cannot expect you to assimilate,” Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told a throng of Muslim immigrants to Germany in 2008. “Assimilation,” he exclaimed, “is a crime against humanity!” The Brotherhood’s leading sharia jurist, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who boldly promises that it is through dawa that “we will conquer Europe, we will conquer America,” is perhaps the most influential champion of the “integrate but never assimilate” principle. The key to “our quest for an Islamic state,” he instructs, is to “convince Western leaders and decision-makers of our right to live according to our faith.”
Of course, the right to live according to one’s faith is a fundamental guarantee in the United States. When Qaradawi and other Islamic supremacists say “faith,” however, they are not talking merely about what we would understand as religious tenets; they are talking about sharia’s socio-political strictures, its suffocating regulation of human life’s every detail. What the supremacists demand is something quite the opposite of an Islamic seat at America’s ecumenical table. It is the establishment of autonomous Muslim enclaves within a society to which they are irrevocably hostile.
The supremacist’s interpretation of sharia rejects liberty and equality, casting women as chattel and non-Muslims as contemptible. It thus instills in young Muslims the animating belief that Western culture is not just to be resisted as corruptive but disdained as beneath human dignity. It is true enough that most adherents to this ideology will not become terrorists; but it is equally certain that some will — and many have.
Though Brotherhood leaders and Islamist intellectuals in the West purport to renounce violence except in self-defense, they concurrently beatify violence and preach that Islam is always under attack. The Hamas terrorist organization, one should never forget, is the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch; raising global alarms about supposed tidal waves of anti-Muslim bias and aggression is the supremacist’s stock in trade. The young Muslim who hears terrorism occasionally condemned also hears it constantly rationalized, excused, and endorsed — by revered role models.
For Banna, there was no contradiction in this. Combat, including terrorism, was something young Muslims had to train and be prepared for. The revolution, he taught, could not ultimately succeed without it. But though violence had its place, that place was not necessarily central. Like strategic deception, it was one option on a very extensive dawa menu, resorted to only when its benefit to the movement outweighed its drawbacks.
Decades later, it has become the fashion to abide, even to admire, Muslim leaders who temper their effusive praise for jihadist violence in the Middle East with vague denunciations of attacks in the West. This explains Sheikh Qaradawi. With a huge international television following courtesy of his weekly sharia program on Al Jazeera, Qaradawi is probably the most influential Islamic scholar alive today. Consequently, despite his infamous fatwas endorsing suicide bombings against Israel, terror war against American troops in Iraq, and the death penalty for homosexuals, he is a darling of Western chancelleries and academics, who present him as a leading “moderate” intellectual.
In practice, the dawa “voluntary apartheid” strategy has worked as follows. Muslims from more-fundamentalist regions emigrate to the West, at first in modest numbers and often to attend universities. Their immigration is championed by a network of Islamist organizations that the Muslim Brotherhood has built for over half a century — beginning with the Muslim Students Associations that first sprang up in the 1960s and now have multiple chapters at most American and Canadian universities. At first, everyone — particularly in the progressive political elites — maintains that Islam is “the religion of peace” and that the immigrants, just like the Islamist organizations, are unfailingly moderate. (Just don’t ask them about Israel and Jews — a blind eye has always been turned to unabashed antisemitism.)
The immigrants gravitate to local mosques and Islamic centers, where they are annealed in the “do not assimilate” spirit even as they effect the outward signs of assimilation. When the immigrant numbers reach critical mass, non-assimilating Muslims put pressure on the host jurisdiction to be permitted to live under sharia standards, and they become gradually more aggressive in challenging the police and other authorities of the state when they attempt to enforce the laws. (Some areas in and around European metropolises have thus become “no-go zones” for state authorities.) In Qaradawi’s vision, as the Western governments appeased Muslim activists, the local areas under de facto sharia jurisdiction would expand and knit together, eventually overwhelming the Western nation-state.
In 2016, Londoners elected a Qaradawi admirer, Sadiq Khan, as their mayor (which he remains to this day). At the time, I noted the observations of the insightful British journalist Daniel Johnson:
Indeed, what has emerged before our eyes in Britain is a kind of Islamist state within a state. . . . A new survey by ICM with the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, for Channel Four and the Sunday Times confirms that Salafists are fast becoming the dominant influence on British Islam. Nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of a sample of 1,081 adult Muslims want to see “areas of Britain in which sharia law is introduced instead of British law”. Nearly a third (31 per cent) of them think “it is acceptable for a British Muslim to keep more than one wife”, even though polygamy is in theory punishable by up to five years imprisonment. Wives should “always obey their husbands”, according to 39 per cent; the survey did not ask about the Koran’s injunction to husbands to “chastise” their wives, but Trevor Phillips sees it as “a clear invitation to legitimise domestic violence”. About 5 per cent of British Muslims sympathise with stoning adulterers. That may seem a small percentage, but only 66 per cent completely condemn such executions. This suggests that about a third would go along with such punishments under certain circumstances.
The most striking of all the ICM statistics concern homosexuality. Only 18 per cent of Muslims think it should be legal in Britain, while more than half (52 per cent) would ban it. Up to half of the latter group, it is fair to assume, also support sharia law, which prescribes the death penalty for homosexuality. If most British Muslims hold such hostile attitudes towards same-sex attraction, it is not surprising that — to take one example — a recent gay participant on the TV reality show First Dates explained how he had been beaten up by other Muslims so badly that he was in hospital for months. . . .
. . . Like many other Londoners, I have Muslim friends and neighbours who have embraced Western values. Often, they have married non-Muslims. But that makes them untypical: fewer than 10 per cent of Muslims live in mixed relationships and just 3 per cent of Muslim children grow up in mixed households. While more than half of Muslims do mix with non-Muslims at work or in college, friendships do not always result: a fifth of them never enter a non-Muslim home. Many have hostile attitudes to non-Muslims. A Pew survey in 2006, for example, found that 47 per cent of British Muslims held unfavourable views of Jews; unfortunately, the ICM poll shows that up to 44 per cent are still anti-Semitic. . . . The ICM poll shows that eight out of 10 Muslims here do feel British. But with mass immigration from more illiberal Muslim cultures, higher birthrates in more segregated communities and a growing number of non-Muslims who are converted to Salafism [a sharia-supremacist construction of Islam], liberal Muslims are a shrinking minority.
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Here in London, which is home to about a third of British Muslims (including thousands of migrants who live below the radar of the authorities), we have already seen the assertion of power by political Islam. The takeover of Tower Hamlets by a corrupt Islamist politician, Lutfur Rahman, may be a harbinger of things to come. Last year he was removed from office by special commissioners, but for five years Rahman and his cronies ran a borough of nearly 300,000 people, distributing a budget of more than £1 billion. It is worth noting that after being ousted from the Labour Party, he was able to replace it with a notionally “independent” but in practice sectarian group, even though Muslims officially make up only a third of the population. The Muslim “block vote” is such a formidable electoral force that for Islamists to dominate a city it does not need to have a Muslim majority.
Johnson pointed out that the Muslim vote is crucial to Britain’s Labour Party because, for example, “at least ten London boroughs have large, mainly conservative Muslim communities, where children grow up in an Islamic monoculture and women are covered or veiled.” About the prospects of London under Khan, he added:
We now know that in the past Sadiq Khan, who as a left-wing human rights solicitor represented Muslim extremists, was happy to make compromises with the Salafist attitudes that prevail in many London mosques. In 2004, he supported incorporating sharia law into the British legal system: “There are some . . . uncontroversial areas of Islamic law which could easily be applied to the legal system . . . in the UK.” What Khan had in mind by “uncontroversial” was the legitimisation of polygamy, by altering inheritance tax law to allow husbands to divide their estates between several wives while enjoying the tax exemption normally applicable to a single spouse. He called this “applying common sense”, but it was yet another step towards de facto recognition of polygamy by the law. Muslims have long been claiming welfare benefits for multiple wives; the only condition is that they must have married them abroad.
In 2007, Khan questioned the need for the criminal law to be used to stop forced marriages, claiming that such “ghetto” legislation would stereotype Muslims. Of course, he glossed over the fact that forced marriage was almost exclusively a Muslim problem in Britain. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Khan is a typical left-wing cultural relativist — and they are a big part of London’s problem. Despite having made his career as a human rights lawyer, Khan has never challenged the conspiracy of silence about certain offences — such as forced marriage and abduction, female gentile [sic] mutilation and “honour crimes” — that are committed mainly by Salafist and other fundamentalist Muslims on a huge scale, yet are rarely or never prosecuted in Britain. Nor did he expose grooming by Muslim gangs.
Under Mayor Khan, London will undoubtedly deserve more than ever the ironical nickname it earned a decade ago among European intelligence services: “Londonistan”. It is hard to imagine Khan taking the tough measures to root out Isis cells hidden inside Muslim ghettos that have been forced on French and Belgian police forces since the attacks on Paris and Brussels. Even in the aftermath of a similar attack on London, it is inconceivable that Khan would risk the accusation that he had turned his back on his Muslim heritage. His opinions change according to need; his allegiance doesn’t.
That was seven years ago. Since then, immigration has increased and dawa has become predictably more aggressive. Muslims now make up approximately 7 percent of Britain’s population — about 4 million. But the population is not evenly dispersed; about 1.3 million Muslims live in London, about 15 percent of the city’s population of 8.1 million. If the police appear overmatched, it’s because they are. As Maddy says, all eyes ought to be on November 11, as traditional England seeks to honor its war dead and contemporary London champions Hamas.