My Lords:
“But there is a problem within Islam—from the adherents of an ideology that is a strain within Islam. And we have to put it on the table and be honest about it.
Of course there are Christian extremists and Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu ones. But I am afraid this strain is not the province of a few extremists. It has at its heart a view about religion and about the interaction between religion and politics that is not compatible with pluralistic, liberal, open-minded societies.
At the extreme end of the spectrum are terrorists, but the world view goes deeper and wider than it is comfortable for us to admit. So by and large we don’t admit it. This has two effects. First, those with that view think we are weak and that gives them strength.
Second, those within Islam—and the good news is there are many—who actually know this problem exists and want to do something about it, lose heart”.
Those are not my words but those of Tony Blair, after the Islamist murder last summer of Drummer Rigby—the same Tony Blair who, as Prime Minister, dismantled our borders to,
“rub the noses of the right in diversity”.
We must be grateful that his subsequent experience as our Middle East envoy has taught him something about the reality of modern Islam, and that he had the courage to say what he did. In these few minutes, I want to talk about some of that reality.
Islam does not enjoy the separation of powers that we take for granted in our liberal, western democracies. Islam’s Sharia law is a legal, political and religious system all in one, which takes its authority solely from the Koran, the Hadith and the Sunnah, as interpreted by its religious clerics, collectively known as the ulema.
Our Muslim friends tell us that the jihadists are a misguided minority who misinterpret the Koran and the holy texts. They point to verses such as Surah 2, verse 256, in which Muhammad commands that there shall be no compulsion in religion, and to other verses
of peace. There are millions of Muslims who live their lives guided by those verses, and many thousands who have been murdered by their violent co-religionists.
Here we come up against part of Islam’s problem, which is the widely held Muslim tenet of abrogation. This holds that, when verses in the Koran contradict each other, it is the later verses which cancel out or abrogate the earlier ones. This is unfortunate because, as Muhammad went through life, he became steadily more of a conquering warrior, and the messages that he received and what he said and did became progressively more bellicose and violent. If abrogation is accepted, the later verses of the sword, of which there are many, outweigh the earlier verses of peace, and it is from these later verses that the jihadists take their inspiration and authority. I have time to touch on just two of them. Surah 9, verse 5, commands the faithful to kill the unbelievers wherever they find them, and Surah 9, verse 14, says:
“Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands, and give you victory over them”.
“Them” means non-Muslims. The Hadith and the Sunnah, examples of the sayings and doings of Muhammad, which all Muslims are bound to follow, are even more antagonistic to non-believers, or Kaffirs, as they call us.
I am not pretending that Christianity has done all that well over the centuries. Even if the Crusades were a response to 400 years of Muslim aggression, we still have the Hundred Years War and the facts that Soviet communism emerged from Christian Russia, and the two world wars and the Holocaust from Christian Germany and Europe.
As a Manichaean, I see good and evil as balanced in the eternal dimension, beyond and above all the world’s religions. It seems to me that good and evil are present in each one of us, and that they can work only through the agency of our humanity. Evil is at its most destructive when it passes from the individual to the collective, as we saw with the Holocaust and Soviet communism. It is no respecter of any religion, nor of the humanists—the Soviets were a fine example of humanism gone wrong.
However, we must consider how our world stands now, today, and I fear that the dark side is moving strongly within Islam. I understand the defence that Islamist terror against the West is a reaction to Palestine, Srebrenica, Iraq and Libya. The kaleidoscope of Islamic internal violence is being shaken hard in north Africa with the tragic conflict between Sunni and Shia, and we cannot yet see how it will settle. However, it is not encouraging that the Sandhurst-educated Sultan of Brunei has just introduced strict Sharia law in his country.
If we come home to the United Kingdom, we see large and growing Muslim communities which are set against integration with the rest of us; we see thousands of home-grown potential terrorists; we see Sharia law running de facto in our land; and we see a birth rate several times higher than ours, to which our democracy is already exposed. Noble Lords have just to look at the recent Bradford by-election if they doubt that.
To me, most worryingly of all, we are not allowed to talk about any of it. As soon as we do, we are condemned by our useless political class as racist
Islamophobes. The “racist” tag is clearly nonsense—Islam is present in almost every race on earth, including of course our own. A phobia is an unreasonable fear of something, but is it unreasonable to fear a religion which has recently given us 9/11 and 200,000 dead, most of them Muslims, in 18,000 attacks since then; which has given us the London bombings, Mumbai, the Spanish train, Bali, Drummer Rigby, Nairobi and Boko Haram; which, in 15 of its current regimes, employs stoning to death, amputation and death for apostasy?
What baffles me completely is that when we do speak against these things and when we dare to mention that they come from within Islam, we are told that we are the guilty ones—that it is us who are stirring up hate—and our politicians invent “hate crime” to shut us up. However, the hate lies in the heart of the Islamist. We can stir it up only because it is already there, red hot and seething against us. These people hate us with frightening religious fervour, and we are right to fear them.
What can we do? I suggest that we must stop being afraid to talk about it. We must do much more to encourage and support our many brave Muslims and apostates who take on their violent co-religionists publicly and thus risk the death penalty.
As an example of our present weakness, I give you the BBC, which was happy to air “Jerry Springer: The Opera”, with its offensive treatment of our Judaeo-Christian heritage, but which refused to air that brilliant play “Can We Talk About This?”, a factual critique of Islam, which ran last summer to packed audiences at the National Theatre. It was helpful of Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director-general, to confess that the BBC would not air “Can We Talk About This?” because he did not want to look down the barrel of an AK47.
In that respect, and in closing, I congratulate the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, who is to reply to this debate, for the great courage that she showed in her speech at Georgetown University last Friday. I regret her support for UN Resolution 16/18, put forward by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which seeks to criminalise Islamophobia or “defaming Islam” worldwide. She certainly highlighted, however, the current plight of Christians in the present world at the hands of what she calls a new sectarianism. As a Muslim she was particularly brave to say that Muslims should be free to change their faith.
I conclude by asking the Minister only two questions. First, does she agree that nearly all the present violence against Christians is coming from within Islam—from the jihadists? We have the suffering of Muslims themselves in Burma and we have the Hindu massacre of Christians at Orissa, but is not the rest of it almost entirely jihadist?
The second question is one I have asked the Minister before. If it is true that the jihadists are such a small minority in Islam, who misinterpret the Koran and the holy texts, why does not the great majority do more to stand up against them? Why for instance do not the leaders of Islam, the grand muftis and righteous ulema call a massive conference, a sort of combination of the councils of Nicea and Trent, to issue a fatwa against the jihadists and to cast them out of Islam?
Could it be because they dare not? Are things as bad as that? I hope not and I look forward to the noble Baroness’s reply.
I am also grateful to all noble Lords who are to speak. Looking down the list I fear that none of them may agree with what I have said. At least, however, we are talking about it. I trust that it is just a start.
4.46 pm