Who are you calling an Islamist?

"My life and career", by Mehdi Hasan, "part 2"

It was Andy Warhol who remarked that one day we’d all have our fifteen minutes of fame. I’m now into my fifth day of online infamy – thanks to the blog, Harry’s Place (as well as a blog on the Spectator). The former has devoted much time and energy, over five separate posts, to quoting selectively, and out of context, from various informal talks that I have given in recent years, in front of numerous British Muslim (and non-Muslim) audiences.

The end result? Commenters at Harry’s Place have decided that I am an ally of “Andy Choudary” (I assume they mean Anjem Choudary, from the radical Muslim group, al Muhajiroun), that I come from a Hizb ut Tahrir “background” and that I’m a “raving Islamist bigot”. One commenter says, “we are considering a misguided, arrogant, dangerous Muslim shit-head for a form of hate speech in the same genre as a Hitler rally, based on the Koran.”

But consider this:

* How many Islamists or Islamic extremists do you know who have written a piece entitled “There’s nothing Islamic about a state” , as I did for the New Statesman in April, in which I concluded, with the words of secular Muslim professor Abdullahi An-Na’im, that “the Islamic state is a historical misconception, a logical fallacy and a practical impossibility”?

* How many Islamists or Islamic extremists do you know who challenge senior members of Hizb ut Tahrir in public debates, as I did with HT’s Dr Imran Wahid in a debate on the future of European Islam in June 2006?

* How many Islamists or Islamic extremists do you know who believe not simply in parliamentary democracy but who passionately and publicly immerse themselves in the current campaign for the introduction of proportional representation via “AV plus”, as I did earlier this month in the Vote for a Change campaign rally at Methodist Hall, where I shared a platform with Peter Tatchell and Polly Toynbee?

* How many Islamists or Islamic extremists do you know who chair and shape public debates on the future of the social-democratic centre-left, as I did at the annual Compass conference last month?

* How many Islamists or Islamic extremists do you know who tell an audience of Muslims that Islam is a “humanitarian” faith and insist that Muslim nations in the Middle East would be under an Islamic obligation to come to Israel’s help were the Jewish state to suffer, God forbid, from a horrible natural disaster like an earthquake, as I did in a speech in February this year (a speech, incidentally, singled out for praise by former counter-terrorism minister Tony McNulty who was present in the audience that afternoon)?

* How many Islamists or Islamic extremists do you know who publicly denounce “those in our community who decry any collaboration any cooperation between Muslims and non-Muslims, who describe all non-Muslims as kafirs whom we owe nothing to, whom we need not offer any help or charity to” as I did in a speech in February this year (“I want to disassociate myself and all of us here from such extremist Muslims,” I said at the time)?

* How many Islamists or Islamic extremists do you know who chastise Muslim audiences for daring “to criticize the way this country is run…. complaining and whining and moaning about how we’re treated” when “we don’t bother to exercise our basic right to vote”, and who urge British Muslims to be “an engaged and outward-looking community….politically and socially proactive”, as I did in a speech in a north London mosque in October 2007?

* How many Islamists or Islamic extremists do you know who tell a Muslim audience that “nowhere in the Quran, when we read it properly, can we find any justification for violence against civilians, for indiscriminate attacks of terror against noncombatants, against women, against children. Nowhere!”, as I did in a speech in Manchester in September 2007, called “Disconnecting Islam from Violence” (and, again, quoted out of context by my anonymous critics at Harry’s Place)?

I have spent my entire life, from secondary school to university to my professional life as a journalist, encouraging Muslims to be moderate, and to integrate, rather than remain outside the mainstream of British society. And I have had innumerable stand-up rows with extremist Muslims who think I am not Muslim enough; as well as with aggressive atheists who think I am not liberal or secular enough. It is par for the course.

So, what did I say, back in February, prior to joining the New Statesman, that has sent one corner of the blogosphere into such an angry frenzy? In the section from the speech quoted prominently (and, once again, out of context) at Harry’s Place, I seem to refer to atheists as “kafirs”, as “people of no intelligence” and as “cattle”. In fact, I am quoting from the Quran – where the word “kafir” simply means “non-Muslim” or “non-believer” and it is in this sense (in fact, in its atheistic sense), and no other, that I used it. I do, however, acknowledge that in the hands of a few Muslim extremists, the word has taken on more sinister connotations. Perhaps it is a time for a debate on the future of this term – or, alternatively, to reclaim it from the bigots and radical Islamists. The Quranic phrase “people of no intelligence” simply and narrowly refers to the fact that Muslims regard their views on God as the only intellectually tenable position, just as atheists (like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris) regard believers as fundamentally irrational and, even, mentally deficient. As for the metaphorical use of the word “cattle”, that has no more pejorative charge than does the word “sheep” when applied by atheists to religious believers – plus, you will note that I also refer to unthinking Muslims as “cattle” in the same speech, which was addressed primarily as a critique of my co-religionists (as you can see here and here).

Thankfully, many of my closest non-Muslim colleague and friends over the years have recognized that I am neither an Islamist, nor an extremist of any kind – Jonathan Dimbleby, for example, has said: “Mehdi is a devout Muslim but is at all times entirely within the framework of liberal democratic society. He typifies the best of British.”