I won't go over too many of those here, as it's all been covered elsewhere. I also have no comment to make on any of the nit-picking, hysterical accusations of "bigotry", "Islamophobia" or "hate", the general cry-arsing, or outright denial of statistical reality that have emanated from the usual quarters in the wake of the survey and documentary, other than to say that I find none of it remotely surprising.
Instead, what follows is a fairly off-the-cuff, and hopefully relatively concise summary of some of my own reactions to the results of the investigation, some thoughts on what was lacking, and some further questions I would like to have seen asked as part of the survey.
- I'll get the one major negative out of the way first, which is this: I thought the clips showing a reconstruction of the type of face-to-face interview used for the survey conducted by ICM in the programme were ham-fisted, cringeworthy, and potentially unhelpful to the sensible message Trevor Phillips is - belatedly - trying to communicate. For those who haven't seen the documentary, the reconstruction clips featured a female interviewer in her 40s, who, though she looked kindly enough, was clad rather ominously/mournfully (you choose) all in black with a scarf draped loosely over head, and a distinctly shifty looking Asian male interviewee in his late 20s/early 30s, whose demeanour and answers were often more than a little sinister. Add to that the notably bleak, colourless lighting and treatment used, and a particularly depressing-looking setting acting as the interview's subject's home, and it all seemed way over the top to my eye. Is there really any need to try to drive the message home so clumsily and with such melodrama when many of the findings were obviously going to be alarming enough to most viewers anyway? I can't say I've seen any comment on it from detractors, but I'd be surprised if none picked up on it, and in my view, it amounts to putting ammunition right into the hands of the Islam apologists, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, who wish to deflect from the worrying results of the survey, and to question the agenda of those behind it.
- I said I wouldn't really comment too much upon the findings themselves, but this one is so telling it bears repeating: only 34% of Muslims interviewed would notify the authorities if they suspected someone was involved with terrorism. I don't think there's anything I really need to add to that, other than to state the obvious in saying that, if the survey is at least reasonably accurate, it suggests that around two thirds of all Muslims would not report someone they suspected of being involved in terrorism to the authorities.
- Many findings of the survey were being discussed in the media and social media in the days before the resulting documentary was actually broadcast, but two which received relatively little attention were that 78% of the Muslims surveyed felt the media should have no right to show depictions of Muhammad, while 87% said that no one should have the right to "make fun" of Muhammad. The issue here, to me, is that, in a diverse society, Muslims really need to be asking why some in the media and among non-Muslims generally may feel the need to defy the (mainly Sunni) Islamic taboo against depicting Muhammad, and especially, to critique, satirise or mock his claims, and reputed actions and words in his own life. After all, it is the example of Muhammad (at least according to the most trusted sources in Sunni scholarship) which is followed for the most part pretty faithfully by the jihadis whose acts of war, mass murder, and occasional genocide claim several thousand lives a month around the world, including on our doorstep in Western Europe. Add to this the precedents set by the Sunnah (the example of Muhammad as recorded in the Sirat [biographies] and Hadiths [examples of the words and deeds of Muhammad ostensibly handed down by word-of-mouth through generations, then compiled by scholars]) for sexual slavery, child marriage, and the killing of critics, apostates, blasphemers, homosexuals and adulterers, which shape the penal codes of dozens of Muslim-majority nations to varying degrees, and are thus directly responsible for countless state and non-state executions and acts of violence, torture, child abuse, and rape, and it shouldn't be difficult to see why anyone would feel the need to critique or satirise Muhammad. Had Muhammad been some kind of egalitarian arch pacifist, and his followers sandal-wearing, non-judgmental, pacifist vegans, I'd have some sympathy with the hurt feelings arising from the rare instances in which anyone is brave enough to satirise or ridicule the guy. But that could not be further from the truth. To be blunt, Muslims need to just accept all that and fucking suck up whatever questioning or mockery that results from it. And if they don't like it? Well, tough shit. Ours is - or at least ought to be - a free country.
- It may not have been practical from the point of view of time or clarity - especially assuming a relatively uninformed audience - to break up the answers to the survey questions according to the sect (e.g. Sunni, Shia, Ahmadiyya), and branch/school/order (e.g. Deobandi, Barelvi, Wahhabi/Salafi [Sunni], Twelver, Sevener, Zaidi, Ismaili [Shia]) of the interview subjects, but it certainly should have been recorded. I suspect that doing so would have produced some telling patterns and variations in responses to many of the questions, and could also have acted as a way of identifying the branches/schools/orders among which literalist ideas and Islamist sympathies are most prevalent, and which thus present the biggest problems. In particular, I would have been quite interested to know how non-Ismaili Shias responded, in light of the fact that while Shia fiqh (jurisprudence) is largely pretty similar to that of Sunni tradition, in my own admittedly limited experience, Shias often seem to be a little less dogmatic and fanatical, and certainly far less militant and triumphalist than Sunnis. Ismailis, for the record, like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who featured in the documentary, are particularly liberal and relaxed as a whole, and Isma'ilism today is really more of an off-shoot of Islam than part of the orthodoxy. For similar reasons, but perhaps too controversially for those who commissioned the survey and produced the documentary, I would like to have seen the results broken up according to the ethnic/national origin of the interviewees (e.g. Pakistani, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Bangladeshi, Somali, Kurdish, 'reverts' of any non-Muslim religious background etc.), and also by how long they or their families' have been in the UK.
- Given the findings of the survey - shocking to many, clearly, but utterly predictable to those of us who have been paying attention and assessing developments honestly and independently - the documentary really should have discussed the implications of ongoing large-scale immigration from Muslim nations, and the high birth rate among Muslims in Britain. After all, while the negative consequences of Muslim immigration to date - the ghettoisation and colonisation of whole areas of our towns and cities, the mostly Pakistani/Kashmiri epidemic of organised grooming and rape of non-Muslim children, 7/7, Trojan Horse, the murder of Lee Rigby, and the countless foiled terror plots and security threats we live with every day - have been awful enough, the real threat lies in the fact that the Muslim population is growing rapidly, which means both that a great deal more of the above is almost guaranteed in the coming years, and that there is the very real prospect of Muslims eventually coming to dominate our political life and institutions. In light of all that, and given the attention the survey results and the documentary garnered, overlooking the issues of immigration and birth rate was a big opportunity missed.
- One of many things that simply isn't understood by the wider public where the threat of Islam is concerned is the fact that the biggest problem with the religion is arguably the hostility and contempt it encourages its followers to feel toward non-Muslims, and indeed toward any Muslim who abandons the religion. In light of this, I would like to have seen parents who participated in the survey asked how they would feel about any of their children being in a relationship with or marrying a non-Muslim (a breakdown of this according to the gender of the child, and the particular religion or lack thereof of the person they dated/married would also have been interesting), how they'd feel if any of their children were gay, or indeed, how they would feel if any of their children abandoned Islam (i.e. apostasised).
- The issue of apostasy seemed to be overlooked in general, as did the issue of the marriage of under-aged girls. The former in particular really ought to have been addressed, especially since previous reports in this area have yielded some truly alarming results, notably the 2006 Policy Exchange survey in which 36% of Muslims aged 16-24 agreed that Muslims who abandon Islam should be executed.
- My last point is undoubtedly the hardest to assess, but relates to what in my opinion may just be the most important issue of all, particularly as Muslims grow in number, and thus, political and social influence in the coming decades in Britain and Western Europe: Namely, if we see the often Islamist, or at least Islamism-friendly Muslim political lobbying groups gain power and successes in the decades ahead as the Muslim demographic share grows, with whom would most of the roughly 60-80% of Muslims who don't appear to have a conclusively Islamist or staunchly literalist world-view side? Their increasingly influential Islamic supremacist co-religionists, or the rest of us? It's a vitally important question, and having seen Britain's Muslim communities collectively show such scant willingness to compromise, introspect, or empathise with the concerns of wider society to date, my gut instinct is to fear the worst...
No comments:
Post a Comment