Fiyaz Mughal in the Times – Liberal institutions show a blindness to Islamist extremism:
The Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent interfaith award (now withdrawn) to a Pakistani imam, Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, is testament to how our institutions’ blindness to extremism and intolerance is glaringly obvious. As a former liberal, I am well aware of the Achilles’ heel of the liberalist tradition for “inclusion” and its inability to recognise the Trojan horses such as Ashrafi that turn up at our institutions.
Over the past few years, the laudable desire for diversity and inclusion has opened the doors to people whose true values and beliefs should make us shudder. Ashrafi is just one in a long list of people who support the concept of blasphemy (as though my religion should be above critique), and who have made supportive comments about Islamist “mujahidin”, or fighters for God.
We are at a historic juncture in the struggle for Islam’s soul and such people are part of the problem. Will our institutions choose to support those who fundamentally believe in the core defence and values of our country, or will they pander to those religious bigots who spin a yarn that they “speak for most Muslims”? You can also be sure that many of the latter believe Islam should be beyond scrutiny, that there is only one legitimate “Islamic way”, that the niqab is a religious obligation, that Ahmadi Muslims are heretics and that Israel has no right to exist.
Well yes, but for a supposed “historic juncture for Islam’s soul”, it has to be said that the liberal faction, as represented here by Mughal, gets very little space in the debate – and I suspect that this is largely because there really isn’t a liberal faction worth speaking of. All manner of outrages continue to flow from the “Muslim community”, and the pushback from Muslims themselves – with the odd exception like this – seems to be somewhere round zero. Do many individuals leave Islam because of, say, its institutional misogyny, or its hatred of Jews? Not really. They may be discouraged, perhaps, by the fact that the punishment for apostasy is death.
But yes, if we want to encourage liberal Muslims, then our continued appeasement of the most illiberal factions, as demonstrated by Sarah Mullally, is certainly not helping.
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