Zafer Iqbal argues that Britain isn’t as “Islamic” as many Muslims like to think.
I was recently told that Britain is in the top five countries where Islam can be practiced. “We have to thank our elders who invested in Islamic facilities in the last 40 years,” the brother said. “The main butchers of Muslims are the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab etc. Look at Iraq, Syria, Pakistan – unless we Muslims accept extremists are the main cause of our problems, we will always have an issue.”
This level of naivety, however, is not that uncommon. I think many Muslims have a “romanticized” view of Britain, one held by many subjects during Britain’s role as a colonial power.
Post-colonial writers like Frantz Fanon analyzed the relationships between oppressors and the oppressed, finding victims often blamed themselves for their oppression, ceasing to notice how they have become accustomed to the oppression over time.
Justifying Britain’s “oppressiveness” by resorting to relative comparisons with other tyrannical states is not only unconvincing, but dishonest. One must use Islam’s criteria to determine how good or bad a nation is – for without God, there are no moral values. As Dostoevsky famously commented, “without God everything is permitted”.
British elite
The British elite hardly comprise a moral class of people. Centuries of criminality across the globe, from the Americas, Africa, India, Australia through to the Middle East, they have been a party of genocide, rape and plunder.
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Citing groups like the Taliban, which the Pakistani government uses to fulfil their regional interests, is not relevant to the discussion, nor are the freedom fighters expelling invaders from their lands. A clear understanding of the socio-economic and political requirements Islam imposes is required so Muslims can live an Islamic way of life.
The brother then said: “There are transmitters which connect directly to mosques for azan, Islamic banks, halal regulated food, imams in hospitals, Shariah courts, Islamic schools, cemeteries, freedom to pray…Britain is Islamic!” So let’s put some of these organizations he cites under critical scrutiny and see if they are as “Islamic” as he claims.
Schools and education
Few if any “Islamic” schools have seriously considered what education is about, let alone published their findings. What they provide is “schooling” rather than education, adopting a specific system conceived by capitalists in the nineteenth century. Schools mirrored and were created in the image of the industrial revolution and the factories that symbolized it.
Their aim was, and remains, the culturing of children into the logic of the dominant ideology, to produce subservient workers for the economy. The state schooling systems, implementing centrally issued “national curriculum“, policed by the government body Ofsted, would help categorize no-hopers, manual workers, professionals and managers. Dumbed down, dependent, subordinated individuals with little, if any, independent ability to think or question social organization – operating within an iron cage.
Teaching the national curriculum supplemented with aspects of Islamic rituals and morals do not make a school “Islamic”. They remain problematic. Many writers (Robinson, Freire, Gato, Holt) have made similar and more scathing critiques. Muslims in Britain have adopted an oppressive system and appended the term “Islamic” – which is why the government has allowed such schools.
Banking
Reviewing the “Islamic” banks that are usually cited wherein one finds similar problems. The jurisprudence underpinning the “Islamic” financial services and products shows they are little more than capitalist products shoe-horned into Islamic constructs, with aspects that are contradictory to the Shariah, hidden away in detailed terms and conditions.
When repayments are delayed or not met, you find all sorts of usurious penalties, fines and fees being imposed to generate a return on capital like interest – something forbidden in Islam. Many of the “scholars” who approve them were “educated” in schools such as those addressed above, and suffer conflicts of interest by sitting on “Shariah boards” of these banks approving their products for which they are paid! I have yet to see one “Islamic” mortgage adhering to Islamic law.
The problem they face is that it is not possible to create debt based instruments from risk sharing instruments – the latter dissipating risk between parties, whilst the former concentrates it with the borrower.
Taking a capitalist model and appending it “Islamic” seems to be the approach to fool the Muslim masses. As a result, academic research reflects deep schisms and conflicts about these products and the abuse of Islamic law. Most Muslims have responded by continuing with usurious loans.
Still unconvinced?
A similar critique can be made of other state institutions. The law does not allow for public azans however church bells on a Sunday are fine. Shariah courts are given no legal force for their decisions, rendering their verdicts all but useless.
Hospitals undertake postmortems to determine the cause of death, harming the corpse in the process and much of what passes as “halal” food is hardly that as recent food scandals have highlighted.
I still remain firmly convinced that we do not and cannot practice Islam here or anywhere in the world. To do so requires a system that allows for communities to openly follow a divine socioeconomic and political way of life – something a secular framework will conflict with.
Muslims need to rethink their perspectives.
