It all matters

Yesterday was rather varied in activity. I was interviewed on the BBC Russian Service about the last PMQ of this Parliament and about PMQs in general. The aim of all these interviews, I suspect, is to explain to the Russian audience (which is not as big as it used to be since the Russian Service was taken off short wave radio and left solely on the internet) about real Parliaments and real constitutionalism. I also suspect that most Russians know that what they have is a shame but the big question is to what extent and to whom that matters.

As far as I was concerned there was one benefit: for the first time in years I actually watched PMQ and very entertaining it was, too. When they are back, I should do it more often. It must be admitted (says she with gritted teeth) that the Boy-King did rather well and the Leader of the Opposition, one Ed Miliband, did not. It also struck me that the Labour MPs were a little subdued in their reaction to the proceedings. Make of that what you will.

Later on I went to the launch of a joint report by the Bow Group and a new Austrian think-tank, Die Österreichische Gesellschaft für Politikanalyse (ÖGP) on the subject of abuse, much of it physical, that Muslim women face in the UK. A Parallel World - Confronting the abuse of many Muslim women in Britain today was written by that doughty campaigner for human rights, Baroness Cox and is very well worth reading (though I should issue a warning about some of the accounts: they can be horrific). The link will lead you to a PDF version. There is also a very useful analysis of the situation with regards to Sharia courts and the Bill that Baroness Cox has been trying to put through Parliament for some years. (And an explanation of the difference between Sharia courts and Beth Din ones, a subject that I read up on when I was doing some research for the Baroness.)

Moving right along, I come to a few articles that were handed out after the launch. I thought they might interest readers of this blog. One was by another highly admirable and awesome (in the true sense of the word) woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, published in the Wall Street Journal last Saturday but, miraculously, freely available on the internet. It seems to be a summary of her latest book that was due out in the States earlier this week.

Her theme: Islam needs a Reformation very badly and it needs it now. Her arguments are, as ever cogent and I was particularly interested in her division of Muslims across the world into three distinct groups:

The first group is the most problematic. These are the fundamentalists who, when they say the Shahada, mean: “We must live by the strict letter of our creed.” They envision a regime based on Shariah, Islamic religious law. They argue for an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original seventh-century version. What is more, they take it as a requirement of their faith that they impose it on everyone else.

I shall call them Medina Muslims, in that they see the forcible imposition of Shariah as their religious duty. They aim not just to obey Muhammad’s teaching but also to emulate his warlike conduct after his move to Medina. Even if they do not themselves engage in violence, they do not hesitate to condone it.

It is Medina Muslims who call Jews and Christians “pigs and monkeys.” It is Medina Muslims who prescribe death for the crime of apostasy, death by stoning for adultery and hanging for homosexuality. It is Medina Muslims who put women in burqas and beat them if they leave their homes alone or if they are improperly veiled.

The second group—and the clear majority throughout the Muslim world—consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence. I call them Mecca Muslims. Like devout Christians or Jews who attend religious services every day and abide by religious rules in what they eat and wear, Mecca Muslims focus on religious observance. I was born in Somalia and raised as a Mecca Muslim. So were the majority of Muslims from Casablanca to Jakarta.

Yet the Mecca Muslims have a problem: Their religious beliefs exist in an uneasy tension with modernity—the complex of economic, cultural and political innovations that not only reshaped the Western world but also dramatically transformed the developing world as the West exported it. The rational, secular and individualistic values of modernity are fundamentally corrosive of traditional societies, especially hierarchies based on gender, age and inherited status.

Trapped between two worlds of belief and experience, these Muslims are engaged in a daily struggle to adhere to Islam in the context of a society that challenges their values and beliefs at every turn. Many are able to resolve this tension only by withdrawing into self-enclosed (and increasingly self-governing) enclaves. This is called cocooning, a practice whereby Muslim immigrants attempt to wall off outside influences, permitting only an Islamic education for their children and disengaging from the wider non-Muslim community.

It is my hope to engage this second group of Muslims—those closer to Mecca than to Medina—in a dialogue about the meaning and practice of their faith. I recognize that these Muslims are not likely to heed a call for doctrinal reformation from someone they regard as an apostate and infidel. But they may reconsider if I can persuade them to think of me not as an apostate but as a heretic: one of a growing number of people born into Islam who have sought to think critically about the faith we were raised in. It is with this third group—only a few of whom have left Islam altogether—that I would now identify myself.

These are the Muslim dissidents. A few of us have been forced by experience to conclude that we could not continue to be believers; yet we remain deeply engaged in the debate about Islam’s future. The majority of dissidents are reforming believers—among them clerics who have come to realize that their religion must change if its followers are not to be condemned to an interminable cycle of political violence.

Not being an Islamic scholar I cannot pronounce on the theological problems she raises but I have listened to a sufficient number of such people to realize that the article simplifies those problems somewhat. It is obvious even to a non-expert that a closer analysis of the Quran and the Haditha are needed for that Reformation to take place; it is also true that such analyses are taking place despite the fact that the people who are carrying them out are in some danger but, so far, the results are little known.

What we, outsiders, need to do and Ms Hirsi Ali says so in her article (also very well worth reading in full and is considerably less stressful than the pamphlet) is to support people who are willing to risk much to spread ideas of freedom and reform in the Muslim world.

And that brings me to the problem we are facing with our own officials and Ministers who have, on the whole, aligned themselves on the wrong side of this debate though there is some indication that they are beginning to realize that.

Two more articles, one published in the Sunday Telegraph on February 22 and a more recent one on Lapidomedia. The latter, by Dominik Lemanski, may well have taken the former, by Andrew Gilligan as the basis with some extra research added.

Andrew Gilligan's article is entitled Islamic 'radicals' at the heart of Whitehall and puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of Baroness Warsi who allowed entryism by people connected with radical Islamic groups into Whitehall and, particularly, the "cross-Government working group on anti-Muslim hatred".

Baroness Warsi, the first Muslim woman to sit in Cabinet, handed official posts to people linked to Islamist groups, including a man involved in an “unpleasant and bullying” campaign to win planning permission for the controversial London “megamosque” proposed by a fundamentalist Islamic sect.

He sits – alongside other radicals or former radicals and their allies – on a “cross-Government working group on anti-Muslim hatred” set up by Lady Warsi and Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister.

Some members of the group are using their seats at the table to urge that Whitehall work with Islamist and extremist-linked bodies, including one described by the Prime Minister as a “political front for the Muslim Brotherhood”. Some are also pressing to lift bans on foreign hate preachers from entering Britain, including Zakir Naik, who has stated that “every Muslim should be a terrorist”.

Fiyaz Mughal, a former member of the working group, told The Telegraph that he had resigned in protest at its activities. “I was deeply concerned about the kinds of groups some of the members had connections with, and some of the groups they were recommending be brought into government,” he said. “It seemed to me to be a form of entryism, by people with no track record in delivering projects.” Mr Mughal is head of Tell Mama, the national organisation for monitoring anti-Muslim attacks.

Another member said: “The working group was Sayeeda [Warsi]’s personal project and she was responsible for the appointments. There was very little transparency about who was put on.”

The working group, set up in 2012, has continued after Lady Warsi’s resignation last summer in protest at the Government’s “morally indefensible” policy on the Gaza crisis. It is based in Eric Pickles’s Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and includes officials from there, the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, the Department for Education, the Foreign Office and the Crown Prosecution Service.

Among its most prominent non-government members is Muddassar Ahmed, a former senior activist in the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), an extremist and anti-Semitic militant body which is banned from many universities as a hate group.

During Mr Ahmed’s time, MPAC campaigned heavily against “Zionist” MPs, in particular Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, and Lorna Fitzsimons, the former Labour MP for Rochdale. She lost her seat after MPAC sent thousands of leaflets to local Muslim voters saying they should sack her because she was “Jewish”. She is not Jewish. MPAC has stated that Muslims are “at war” and that “every Muslim who does not participate in that war is committing a major sin”.

Mr Ahmed maintains that his MPAC days are long over and he had nothing to do with various unpleasant events that his present PR company is supposed to have been connected and one might believe him. Nevertheless, one has to ask why he and people like him were singled out by Baroness Warsi for various appointments. Unfortunately, the evil that men (and women) do lives after them and the people promoted by the Baroness, herself seriously over-promoted as everyone knew all along, are still there and still active.

Dominik Lemanski raises the question whether it is the influence of Baroness Warsi's appointees that has pushed back the most recent decision on the Megamosque in Newham over which the battle has been going for a considerable number of years. Of course, I do not rule out the possibility that the decision has been pushed back for reasons of political pusillanimity.

Well, something good has come out of it

On another forum somebody said in our discussion, mostly rather gleeful, about Baroness Warsi's resignation that it turned out that the Gaza conflict was in Britain's national interest, after all. That may be a slight exaggeration but, on the whole, there has been little sorrow shown at the resignation (probably just ahead of a final sacking for incompetence) of this government's least capable and most over-promoted Minister. Yes, I know: them are fighting words and I look forward to people challenging me with other names.

Guido Fawkes quotes an unnamed Tory source:

Warsi’s resignation is classic Warsi. Attacks her own team, pure grandstanding, and shows that she is a quitter. Her resignation does nothing to help the innocent civilians on both sides who are suffering. She had a much better chance of helping support the ceasefire if she had stayed inside Government. But instead she has thrown in the towel.

He also quotes a few other people, none of whom are shedding any tears. I understand, also that she has chosen a day when the Chancellor is due to make an important speech. No, I don't care much about those speeches either but I am not a senior Conservative politician. Why eactly did she choose today of all days? And why, since we are talking about crassness and grandstanding, did she announce her resignation on Twitter before actually tendering it? (Sharp-eyed readers will have spotted that she or her minions have mis-spelled the word Islamophobia in paragraph 6 of her letter.)

On the other hand, Labour politicians appear to be pleased but that is unlikely to upset anyone, Tory or not.

Two things I find quite extraordinary: one is that Baroness Warsi actually managed to work out what the government's Gaza policy was and that she did not agree with the Foreign Secretary's rather inane comments I blogged on before. Moving on from there, it is hard to know what she thinks the government's policy should be. Does she think we should have sent our few remaining troops to support Hamas (whose stated policy is to use civilians as human shields is a good idea? (I have seen a comment on another forum to the effect that Warsi resigned on the day when an effective truce, or so it would seem, has been noted for the first time in Gaza.)

Cranmer's blog post is interesting. He seems to have found more admirable qualities in the lady in the past than I have but it is true that she has, on occasion, made negative comments about forced marriages and other nastiness. He, too, finds it hard to understand what it is she dislikes about the government non-existent policy and wonders what she would like to see in its place:

But she has resigned from the Government over its policy on Gaza, which she says in "morally indefensible".

This is curious, not least because Foreign Secretary has not articulated any policy at all on the matter. Still green in the job, one gets the impression that he studiously straddling fences and balancing on pinheads in order to avoid offending anyone, possibly in order to bolster the Muslim vote.

But perhaps that is Baroness Warsi's problem. She clearly believes that HM Government ought to join in the global choruses of condemnation denouncing Israel, accusing the Zionist aggressor of war crimes and demanding sanctions. She insists that all arms exports to Israel must stop. And since the FCO isn't prepared to dance to that tune, she has decided to clear her desk and resign.

Perhaps that is a good thing.

I hope His Grace in correct in his brief analysis of what the FCO is and is not prepared to do.

He seems to have followed the good lady's pronouncements a good deal more closely than I have and this is what he has to say:

For all the praise heaped upon her over the years by this blog, she has, of late, completely lost the plot. She lectures us about "true Islam", and mocks those who expose the paucity of her theological understanding. She tweets and tweets about Sharia finance, seemingly oblivious to the religio-cultural significance of the policy. She convened a committee to propagate global religious liberty, but it met only twice for coffee, said absolutely nothing and achieved even less. And she answered many of her critics with veiled allusions to 'Islamophobia', thereby shutting down any valid criticism of her incompetence and deficiencies.

There was a feeling, if not the perception, that this 'Senior Minister of State' had made something of a hobby out of being in the Cabinet, and was using her position in the FCO more for faddish personal interests than the weighty matter of implementing government policy. William Hague was prepared to indulge her and the Prime Minister humoured her: she was symbolically important for Tory detoxification, modernisation and Cameroon rebranding project. It was important that the first female Muslim in the Cabinet was seen to be happy, fully integrated and successful.

She will be missed, he adds, as the election campaign starts.

Will she? I am not so sure. The Conservatives are not likely to gain any more Muslim votes by pandering to the worst possible versions of it, like sharia law or support for terrorists. At present, most Muslims, if they vote at all, will support Labour (and let us not go into the details of some of the voting practices) unless there is someone like George Galloway is standing. Those Muslims who have actively decided to vote Conservative will do so, regardless of whether Baroness Warsi is in the government or not.

Here are a few other reactions:

Tim Montgomerie reminds us that she was effusive in her support of Hamas in the past.

Isabel Hardman in the Spectator:

There had been a concerted campaign in the Conservative party from senior figures with a great deal of influence to get Warsi moved. They felt she was being deeply unhelpful to Downing Street, particularly by going on ITV’s The Agenda and posing with a front page about Eton Mess. But the judgement that the Prime Minister and others took was that it is far safer to keep Warsi, who is a prolific diary-writer, safely in the tent, rather than outside. That she has gone of her own accord does at least mean she will not be tempted to exact revenge. But it’s by no means safe to bet that she will stay silent. She has resigned because she disagrees with the government position on Gaza, and presumably she will want to elaborate on what precisely she disagrees with, at the very least.

As for whether this has a seriously destabilising effect on the government’s foreign policy, Warsi’s insecure position does not necessarily mean that ministers can simply shrug her criticisms off. They come just a few days after Ed Miliband argued that the Prime Minister was not being sufficiently robust in his dealings with Israel. Then, Downing Street accused the Labour leader of playing politics, and Chris Grayling even went so far as to say he was undermining Britain’s efforts to secure peace. It is one thing to say that of an Opposition leader, but if one of your Conservative colleagues makes the same accusation – and the detail of the gripe leading to her resignation may well turn out to be in the same vein as Miliband’s criticism – it is quite a different matter. It gives credence to Miliband’s line if a Foreign Office minister feels she cannot support the government’s position.

On the whole I tend to go with the line that the government has no real policy in Gaza and has no real power to effect anything there. In which case, Baroness Warsi's resignation will be seen for the empty posturing it is and a general desire not to draw too much attention to the twin facts that her job was largely make-believe and her abilities non-existent.

Douglas Murray argues cogently that

The most over-promoted, incapable and incompetent minister of recent times has finally done the nation one service and resigned.

There is more there but people should read it for themselves. He does enumerate her many political "car crashes", just one of which would have lost anyone else their position. But not Baroness Warsi. This, however, is particularly interesting:

Her time in government was filled with disasters. She repeatedly narrowly avoided being sacked. Her car-crashes mostly came over her attempts to develop what was effectively a parallel set of policies to those of the British government of which she was meant to be part. Word was that she had become increasingly angry after various reshuffles in which it became plain that she would never be given a ministry. She doubtless concocted in her mind various conspiracies as to why this might be, but the reason was single and obvious: she did not have the ability.

Realising that this ambition was to be thwarted, she manoeuvred to turn her position in Cabinet into one which was somehow meant to ‘represent’ Muslims. Purest, as well as dangerous nonsense. Everybody in Cabinet is there to represent everybody in Britain. But Warsi encouraged sectarianism rather than diminishing it. And where she could have used her position to side-line the extremists within Britain’s Muslim communities, she spent more of her time trying to stop people criticising the extremists within Britain’s Muslim communities. She was a notable behind-the-scenes critic of genuine Muslim reformers, in particular.

That she was manipulating behind the scenes in favour of the more extremist Muslim groups in this country, I have heard before from good sources; that she thought she would become Foreign Secretary on William Hague's resignation, is news to me. It shows that the woman is quite seriously delusional as well as everything else.

Word is now that she has been an assiduous diary keeper and is, undoubtedly, already in negotiations to have those screeds published. Sadly, for the lady, living politicians' diaries may have been interesting when Tony Benn's and Barbara Castle's were published in a different political atmosphere. They are no longer so.