British Muslims slow to Addressing their Negative Image©
Majority of Britons think Islam is unfair to women, lacks justice and is linked in their minds with extremism and terrorism, according to a recent opinion poll. The poll, conducted by You Gov on behalf of Explore Islam Foundation, a moderate Islamic organisation trying to promote Islam as a faith for peace and self discipline, found that 58% of Britons linked Islam with extremism while half of those asked associated the faith with terrorism. Last week’s poll also discovered that 69% of Britons believe Islam encourages the oppression of women while less than four of out ten asked thought Islam was having a positive impact on society. Only 13% believed it was a religion based on peace, while a mere six percent associated Islam with justice.
The finding came as a mega disappointment for the foundation as they were preparing for ‘Mohammed Project,’ a campaign to promote Islam. But other findings might give them a bit of hope that their campaign might win some minds and hearts. Sixty percent admitted their ignorance of most details of Islam, while a third of those polled said they wanted to know more about Islam as a religion.
A Foundation spokesman said the figures might be disappointing, but it would help them redesign their ‘Mohammed project’ aiming at providing individual Britons with Islam as a philosophy for peace with oneself. The main drive of the project relies on posters and leaflets explaining ‘the positive aspects of Islam’. However, as a journalist with four decades of experience, I am sceptical of the effect of campaigns relying solely on posters or public addresses in large meetings.
Foundations like Exploring Islam need to wake up to reality. The fact of the matter is that Muslims themselves, and no one else, are responsible for giving the rest of the British population a negative impression about Islam; and only them, as Muslims, can gradually change their fellow Britons’ perception.
Various terror groups have politicised Islam, turning the faith from what started as a spiritual experience enjoyed by the individual or a traditional rituals practiced by congregations in worshipping places, into a political ideology.
Evil minded and psychologically damaged preachers selected Quarnic verses, out of their historic or symbolic context, to literary translate into texts justifying murder and violence against the ‘other’. Such interpretation manifested by deeds or loud demonstrations linked Islam with violence and terrorism in the minds of Britons.
Take other non Islamic 20th century violent groups like the Basque separatist ETA in Spain, or the Irish Republican Army (IRA), they never linked themselves to a faith, nor did they adopt God, names or images of prophets or saints on their banners.
On the contrary, perpetrators of massacres against tourists in upper Egypt have declared their names gamaat Islamiyah (Islamic Group) and Islamic Jihad (Islamic Crusade); in Gaza, Hamas is short for Islamic Resistance Movement ( And consider the contrast between Britons’ sympathy towards the Palestinian people with televised scenes of Hamas’s armed gangs pushing their former coalition partners from Fateh over roof-tops and sending suicide bombers to blow up civilians in restaurants and buses ). Those who put bombs in cinemas and theatres, beat up unveiled-women and assassinated judges who tried their fellow terrorists in Egypt call themselves ‘Muslim Brotherhood’, a group from its very womb more violent groups like al Qaeda were born, with leaders like Ayman El- Zawahiri proudly declaring himself as an MB disciple. The ‘Army of Mohammed,’ group claimed responsibility for blowing up Shia mosques in Baghdad. The group, which invented blowing up embassies by suicide-explosive trucks and organised several air-hijacks, has topped all groups in hijacking the most prominent name for all Muslims calling themselves Hezbollah, (Hezb-o-Allah) literary the party of god. So if responsibilities of such acts are claimed by groups whose very names are associated with Islam, what would Muslims expect a British public to think of Islam?
If you count all members of these parties and groups together, they wouldn’t count for more than 1000.0% of Muslims within the area of their activities; yet they managed to have a huge impact focusing the minds and attention of media consumers on their evil actions as ‘ Islamic activity’, through operations deliberately designed as mass murder for a maximum impact. The 9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda were a deliberate genocide, so was the attack on tourists in Hatshepsut Temple in Luxor, or exploding two bombs during a wedding party killing scores in a hotel in Amman, or several attacks by hand grenades and machine guns against residential compounds in Saudi Arabia. All designed for maximum murder, terrorising impact and to reach the front pages of press worldwide.
Meanwhile Muslims in Britain never marched en-mass to protest against such atrocities, or at lease to distance themselves from those murderers who claimed to be defending Islam; yet you see hundreds of angry British Muslims on the streets burning books they haven’t bothered to read, or stone embassies in protest against publications in other countries they assumed to have believe insulted Islam.
To make matters worse, many Muslims in Britain, when talking privately with their non-Muslim neighbours or colleagues, try to justify such insane acts of violence as ‘a frustrated Muslims’ response to the occupation’ of Palestine or Iraq, as if one immoral act would justify an equally immoral response. Two wrongs never can make one ‘ right’.
These justifications are totally unconvincing to a British public brought up on a Christian moral foundation of turning the other cheek.
Another disastrous reason for a negative impression of Islam, is Muslim’s apparent resistance to a full integration into British society while continue to reject the culture and the way of life of the majority. The irony is the Muslims, mainly from the Indian sub-continent chose to emigrate to Britain (and some paid bribes to human traffickers, told lies and used other methods, forbidden by Islam, to secure a visa or sneak to Britain or sought asylum). I haven’t come across a single Muslim who was forced to come to Britain or to stay against his or her will, unlike majority of African Americans who were sold as slaves in the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Muslims here openly attack the British way of life in public, describing the way British and secular women dress as ”sinful”, while hardly any of them used the term ‘ sinful’ to refer to murdering fellow human beings. Other Muslims deliberately provoke disgust ( Like killing sheep in Adha festival out in the open scaring children in a society where keeping pets is a way of life, while they could simply ask a butcher to perform the rites in a specially designated slaughter houses ).
Muslims lead by ignorant Imams who neither speak English nor read Arabic (the original language of Quran) into self isolated cultural, and sometimes geographical, ghettos, refusing to mix with indigenous whites.
In my view, Exploring Islam Foundation money and effort are likely to be wasted without having the slightest impact on British population. The view will only change when British Muslims change their own view of Britain as a home they chose for themselves and their children. White Britons’ impression of Islam will only began to change when mainstream British Muslims take the initiative to condemn violence and terror committed by other Muslims from the lunatic fringe, by coming out of their ghetto into the main British street in support of British values of justice, fairness and championing the underdog.
However, the picture is not all gloomy. There are, so far, successful attempts by enlightened Muslims. The most successful in its efforts to fully integrate in British society, is a group made of Muslims and other followers of Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic faiths, is the Conservative Arab Network CAN. Chaired by Egyptian born British GP Dr Wafik Moustafa and its Parliamentary Chairman the Conservative MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham Daniel Kawczynski, himself a polish immigrant.
Dr Moustafa insists on CAN being inclusive, hence its members consist of several generations of immigrants from the 22 nations of the Arab League, they include Muslims, Jews, Yazidi, Baha’i’s and many others, Arabs and non Arabs like Kurds, Assyrians, Nubians, Copts and Berber. They are proud of their eastern heritage and their British nationality and culture.
A few weeks ago, a group, of mainly Muslim Arabs, led by Dr. Moustafa went to Wooten Bassett in south-west England, where coffins of British soldiers died in Afghanistan pass on their way from the RAF base nearby. CAN members, stood alongside the villagers, paying respect, and each praying to his/her own god for the souls of young men and women, who made the ultimate sacrifice defending British way of life and British principles of liberty and democracy, to which the Muslims of Afghanistan aspire.
This positive action was recounted by Dr. Moustafa at the reception held by CAN for the newly elected members of Parliament in Westminster last week, and was attended by more than a hundred MPs and Lords, all gave a standing applaud to this patriotic gesture by British Muslims.
CAN positive feature is its integration into British life, and resisting separation. I wish CAN every successful and I hope the group resist attempts to politicise its activities by radical Arabs who turn any Arab or Islamic grouping into a propaganda platform for radical Palestinian causes. The integration of British Arabs into their British society where they vote, and pay taxes is, for them, as crucial as a future independent state is for the Palestinians.
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© Copyrights Adel Darwish 2010, not to be quoted, lifted or reprinted in part or as whole without prior permission from Adel Darwish
