For Britain’s increasingly assertive Muslim community, this year has got off to a rather turbulent start, for at least two reasons. First, there have been some hard arguments in the wake of a parliamentary vote on gay marriage, in which five out of the eight Muslim members of parliament defied many of their co-religionists by supporting a bill that will make it possible for same-sex couples to wed. The only Muslim to vote against the bill was Rehman Chishti, a Conservative; like many other Tories from the provinces, he felt the government had ignored a big segment of traditional and religious-minded voters. The most senior Muslim to vote in favour was Labour’s Sadiq Khan, a member of the shadow cabinet who told his south London voters that the law was an important step forward for the principle of equality, and stressed that there were rock-solid guarantees against religious groups being forced to celebrate same-sex weddings.
Not only has Mr Khan received death threats, which must be a familiar occupational hazard for anybody in his ultra-sensitive position; both he and the four other Muslims who voted with him have been told publicly by an imam in Bradford, Muhammad Aslam Naqshbandi, that they have virtually stepped outside the ranks of the faithful and must renew their vows as Muslims. The language used was somewhat reminiscent of the scoldings dished out by Catholic bishops to politicians who vote in favour of abortion. The south Asian Muslim strongholds of northern England (Bradford, Bolton, Birmingham) have historically been staunch in their support for the Labour party, and it is Labour that has most to lose from an Islamically inspired backlash against gay rights. That may be one of the reasons why Labour leader Ed Miliband paid a pre-emptive visit to the prestigious Regent’s Park Mosque in January.
The second thing causing ferment among British Muslims is the death sentence passed by a Bangladeshi court last week on Delwar Hossain Sayeedi (pictured above), one of the leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, the Bangladeshi Islamist party. This was the third verdict handed down by a “war crimes trial” which is looking into the bloody events that led to the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent country in 1971. The verdict has caused a wave of violent protest in Bangladesh and it will certainly raise the temperature in east London, a Bangladeshi stronghold where the relative influence of Jamaat is stronger than it is in Bangladesh itself, and where Bangladeshi Islamism is a big and controversial factor in local politics. Mr Sayeedi has in the past been an honoured guest at the East London Mosque, which is probably the city’s most powerful Muslim institution. As journalist Martin Bright disclosed in a study for Policy Exchange, a right-of-centre think-tank, the admission of Mr Sayeedi to Britain once provoked some hard internal arguments in the Foreign Office, with the office’s adviser on Muslim affairs, Mockbul Ali, maintaining that Mr Sayeedi’s exclusion would alienate many British Muslims. Presumably his execution will not leave them indifferent either.
Muhammad Abdul Bari, the honorary chairman of the East London Mosque, told me that he recalled Mr Sayeedi as a charismatic preacher whose sermons had made a huge impact on London Muslims, Bengali and otherwise. Asked about the death sentence, Mr Bari said the trial had been denounced as unfair by many international human-rights bodies; he would support the idea of a fair, internationally approved probe into the events of 1971, but not the current flawed proceedings.
As the British authorities consider how to handle community tensions in the aftermath of the Sayeedi verdict, they should perhaps bear in mind the danger of any over-simplified formula for distinguishing (from the authorities’ viewpoint) good Muslims from not-so-good ones. One striking feature of the backlash against Mr Khan and his gay-marriage vote is that it was led by a mosque representing the Sufi and Barelvi strains of Pakistani Islam, whose religious practices include the veneration of saints and shrines. That is rather awkward for some of the Islam-watchers in the British establishment who went through a phase, starting around 2007, of celebrating and encouraging Barelvi mosques as a counterweight to the more purist Deobandi school which (both in Britain and Pakistan) tends to dominate Islamic education; and as a counterweight to the political Islam (whether Arab, Pakistani or Bangladeshi) which was perceived as the main influence in the Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella group that used to enjoy official favour but has recently been frozen out.
The Muslim Council of Britain did campaign against the gay-marriage vote, but its leaders have steered clear of making personal attacks on Mr Khan or the other Muslim politicians who voted in favour. That could just be because during Labour’s time in office, the MCB leaders had to do a lot of everyday horse-trading with people like Mr Khan (a former communities minister) and they expect to engage in similar dealmaking in future. One of the striking features of Islamism as a political movement in Britain is its pragmatism; it believes in engaging with political institutions and personalities as they are, without ever losing sight of the dream of an Islamic society.