Frat fundo fireworks
Rehan Latif
thefridaytimes.com
The rise of extremism in United Kingdom universities is born of the alienation and confused identity of British Muslims
''The Hizbul Tahrir is the Muslim version of the Nazi party, if that is not too crude a way of putting it. They are barred from forming a society in most British universities because of their racist stance, so they have remodelled themselves into a 'Pakistani society' with the same message''
I recently attended a meeting of the ‘Pakistani society’ at my university in London, intrigued by the topic ‘Is democracy the solution to Pakistan’s woes?’ The lecture hall was full, though I was slightly surprised by the break-up of the audience. First off, the conspicuous absence of the fairer sex was a major disappointment. There was only a single (fully veiled) girl who promptly isolated herself from the rest of the audience by taking a seat in the last row. There was also a surprising number of beards around the room, which would not have been out of place in Peshawar but are not what one expects to find at a London lecture. Then there was the overtly religious conversation that enveloped the room, mixed with the usual babble about Zionist conspiracies, the great American takeover, and Arab puppet leaders. These simmering views came to poisonous expression in the second speaker who took to the podium.
To summarise his lengthy rant, he started with a harangue against the internal dynamics of Pakistan. This I accepted with perfect ease since it is our national trait to incessantly whine about the state of affairs in the Land of the Pure. From there he launched into a categorical rejection of President Musharraf and of our democratic parties. Affirming his arguments with selected statistics and quotes, he portrayed Pakistan under Musharraf as bending to the will of the American-Jewish lobby. Finally he reached his conclusion: democracy is a failure and all systems of government are incomplete as they stem from the law of man. Ipso facto the only valid system of governance is the Islamic Shariah since it is divine in origin.
I was beginning to get irritated with this sort of flimsy reasoning and when the speaker yielded the floor to questions I really wanted to get a rise out of the learned bigot I had just heard and perhaps, if I hit the right note, some of the other religious fundos in the crowd. I don’t remember the exact phrasing of my question, so I cannot reproduce it here, but I do remember that it went something along the lines of: “Retrograde, Islam, dictatorship, Shariah, totalitarianism, Hadith, inconsistency, Muslim, irrationality, Western civilization beacon of light, emulation of America required for progress”. By the time I came to the end of my lengthy discourse, which I finished by calling the Taliban “a bunch of opium-induced fanatics” and Osama bin Laden “a raving loony” everyone immediately turned back to see who I was and I was pretty sure I was in for a fatwa. I also highlighted the obvious paradox that if the West was indeed so hostile, why were we all studying at a British university?
In any case the mediator stopped me in my tracks (no surprises there since his beard was longer than the speaker’s) and directed questions elsewhere. Promptly, a young Muslim gentleman felt “that his obligation as a Muslim made it incumbent upon him to comment on what he heard in the recent exchange”. In direct reference to my previous statements he replied that my epithet to America as the “beacon of light” was inherently flawed since I was measuring its greatness in terms of technology. He went on to state that by my standard of values even Hitler’s Germany could be considered a ‘great state’ since it was materially advanced. He made an even greater leap of logic with his following statement, wait for it, “even non-Muslims would consider Hitler’s Germany to be an Evil Empire”. Even non-Muslims!
When he finally finished his ramble I was about to remind him of the historical facts of World War II when I lost the will to do so. There was so much hostility within the room, there seemed little point in fighting it. The kufar (the endearing term used by these people to denote all non-Muslims) had done all the injustices, and the solution of this crowd was to regress back towards an uncompromising khalifah, focused on perpetual jihad.
There is truth in the claim that the world has become a more divisive place since 9/11 and indeed, the ongoing Israel-Palestine issue and the controversial invasion of Iraq has created strong rifts between the Islamic and Western civilisations. This has had serious consequences for a number of young British-born-Asian-confused- desis. Born and raised in Britain, the “innit” Asians look for belonging which they find in religion. In university, idealism can cloud rationality; the mind is at its most vulnerable and can easily be moulded. Chuck in the fact that these are young kids with confused identities, bitterness towards their adopted homeland and alienation from their parents’ country, and it becomes a breeding ground for a number of Muslim fundamentalist groups.
Speeches like the one discussed above delivered by the ‘Pakistani society’ are given by representatives from these extremist groups. I found out after the event that the speaker (who was, admittedly, highly persuasive) was a member of the Hizbul Tahrir group and, even more interestingly, the chairman and secretary general of the ‘Pakistan’ society were “studying with the group”. I have had several unfortunate encounters with members of this party and it is in no way wrong to say that they are racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic. The Muslim version of the Nazis, if that is not too crude a way of putting it. In 1996, their campaign of hatred and intimidation on university campuses culminated in an unsuccessful attempt to close down the ‘Jewish society’ in Manchester. They are barred from actually forming a society in most British universities because of their racist stance, so they have remodelled themselves into a ‘Pakistani society’ with the same message (new name, old faces – sound familiar?). Their website is a rambling discourse on the “imperialistic designs of the kafir colonialistic states” and the need to focus on perpetual jihad for eternity. In one of their party journals, they claim all methods of force are justified in the struggle against non-believers and give an implied example of a pilot diving a plane hit by enemy fire into a crowd of unbelievers without bailing out with a parachute as a legitimate form of armed struggle.
These shadowy fundamentalist organisations, if left unchecked and to their own devices, may ultimately look to push forward their message of global Islamic radicalisation forcefully. They have tried to expand their base by reaching out to a significant segment of British Muslim students at universities across the country. There is a niche in the market, exploited by charismatic Islamic radicals, which if unchecked could portend a stronger fundamentalist presence in both the United Kingdom and further afield. |
