Mick Hartley

Amir Taheri in another excellent article expands on his earlier insight: that militant Islam is “a global fascist movement masquerading as religion”.

Isn’t Islam supposed to be a religion? Shouldn’t it be concerned with the broader issues of human existence rather than with a set of cartoons, a Dutch television documentary, the head-covers of French schoolgirls or a novel by a British-Indian author? Today the visible Islam, the loudest Islam, is a political movement masquerading as a religion. Many mosques in this country have been transformed into political clubs where Kashmir, Iraq and Palestine and “the misdeeds of Anglo-Saxon imperialism” have replaced issues of religious faith as the principal theme.

Not long ago when I asked an imam in a London mosque why it was that God hardly featured in his sermons, he thought I had lost the plot. “What matters today is the suffering of our brethren under occupation,” he snapped.

In other words: in our Islam we don’t do God, we do Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iraq.

That is not all. This political Islam also has grievances about aspects of British and more broadly European domestic politics. It is unhappy that gays and lesbians are allowed to live without hindrance. It does not like the way women are allowed to “get cheeky” and even argue with their menfolk.

It is scandalised by the West’s “corruption and debauchery” and that there is no “moral force” to set strict limits to individual liberties.

“We have no religious grievances in this country,” said Azam Tamimi, a pro-Hamas British Muslim scholar. “Here we can practise our religion with more freedom than in any Muslim-ruled country. It is therefore natural that we should focus on political rather than religious issues.” […]

Islam cannot have it both ways: pretend to be a religion and demand special respect while operating as a political ideology which, by definition, must be open to criticism and even denigration. […]

Politicised Islam is a form of totalitarianism. Its primary victims are Muslims. In many Muslim countries it has been exposed and can no longer deceive the masses. In the West, however, it has duped media, government and academia into treating it not as a political movement, but as a religion.

Advocates of politicised Islam claim that a call for Islam to return to God, to resuscitate its dead theology and to re-become a religion is nothing but a “Zionist- imperialist plot” to divert “the rage of the Muslim masses”.

More Muslims, however, are beginning to miss God, to feel His absence in their religious discourse and to long for His return where He belongs — at the heart of the faith.