Mick Hartley

A letter to the Telegraph from Dr Taj Hargey, Provost at the Oxford Institute for British Islam:

The politico-military strategy of the West could clearly not match the ideological fervour of the Taliban fanatics. Instead of the Western nations wasting trillions of dollars in a forlorn physical campaign, just a fraction of that money would have been better spent exposing the toxic theology of the Taliban.

Since the new regime in Kabul is a brazen offshoot of Deobandi and Wahhabi sectarianism (reliant on the toxic triad of non-Koranic sources, hadith, sharia and fatwas), these twisted manifestations of Islam could have been neutered over the past 20 years.

Had Britain and America backed them, progressive Muslim intellectuals and scholars could have decisively countered the Taliban’s poisonous propaganda of female servitude, oppression of minorities and other non-Koranic doctrines.

The thousands of manufactured hadith are just the reputed sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, compiled 300 years after his death. The so-called sharia is a concoction of medieval opinion masquerading as divine law. Fatwas are purely the personal views of clerics, not religious rulings.

The pragmatic option for right-thinking Muslims around the world is to promote Koranic Islam through transcendent scriptural theology, highlighting the blatant flaws in the Taliban’s perverted dogmas and their draconian execution.

It's a fond fantasy from Dr Hargey – a man who often seems to be the sole voice for a liberal Islam in the UK. He's gone on record in his opposition to the face veil, calling it an archaic tribal rag, rejects Sharia, welcomes gays, and was a lone Muslim voice in support of the beleaguered Batley teacher. Perhaps a certain lack of perspective on the Muslim world now enables him to maintain his singular position. His courageous optimism is of course to be welcomed, and we could only wish that there were more like him…but there aren't. These progressive Muslim intellectuals and scholars who would have "decisively countered the Taliban’s poisonous propaganda of female servitude, oppression of minorities and other non-Koranic doctrines": where are they? Alas, not in this world, Dr Targey.