Ahmad Musa
On August 24 the British government announced details of new measures to be taken against foreign Muslims living in Britain. Foreign Muslims will be deported from Britain, or not permitted to enter the country in the first place, if they are considered by the government to be “fostering hatred or fomenting, or glorifying terrorist violence”. In the past Britain has not usually deported people to countries where they may be tortured; this may be changed, provided that the countries involved promise not to mistreat deportees. The government also pledged to amend its human-rights legislation in order to prevent people from using it to circumvent the new rules. The British government will also automatically consider deporting any foreigner who is suspected of “seeking to provoke terrorist acts”, fomenting other serious criminal activity or fostering hatred that might lead to inter-community violence.
The British government will also draw up a new database of Muslims anywhere in the world who are thought to have links with terrorism. These will be prevented from entering the UK at all. The database will include those accused of any acts included on a list of “unacceptable behaviour”, including “radical preaching” and publishing websites and articles intended to foment terrorism. The new rules will be retroactive, including statements, speeches and articles published in the past.
Clarke also said, announcing the new measures, that the first deportation orders under them would come very quickly, possibly within days. He had already said that Omar Bakri Muhammad, the former leader of the al-Muharijoun group, would not be allowed back into the country after he left for a visit to Lebanon. Others like to be targeted include Dr Muhammad al-Massari, the Saudi dissident who has been the target of a media campaign, and other Arab Islamic activists in London, some of whom are currently on police bail, having been released from imprisonment without charge on the orders of the high court earlier this year.
The British government’s deportation plans have been criticised by human-rights groups because the government seems to be determined to send Muslims back to countries where the torture and persecution of political dissidents is known to occur. The government has said that it will only deport people after obtaining assurances that they will not be mistreated, but human-rights groups point out that the assurances of governments that routinely use torture are worthless. The government already has an agreement from Jordan not to mistreat deportees, and is seeking similar assurances from other countries, including Algeria and Saudi Arabia.
The measures have also been criticised as being political moves designed to appease public opinion and the rightwing press in Britain in the aftermath of the bombings in July, rather than being genuinely necessary for security reasons. The Islamic Human Rights Commission, the main Muslim community advocacy group in Britain, has issued a statement saying that “The IHRC views the new grounds for deportation as the criminalisation of thought, conscience and belief... The IHRC further notes that much of the reasoning behind the new grounds is based on fallacy rather than fact. The idea that foreign preachers who don’t speak English are radicalising British youth who speak nothing but English is absurd.”
Although the measures, announced by home secretary Charles Clarke, focussed on foreign Muslims, they are expected to be followed by new measures aimed at British Muslims. On August 5, when Tony Blair announced a two-week consultation period for the proposals that became the measures announced on August 24, a number of measures targeting British Muslims were also included. These included expanding the use of control orders against British Muslims suspected of possible involvement in terrorism, and possibly giving the police greater powers to arrest and hold such suspects before having to charge them.
However, the main measure announced by Blair on August 5 totally exposed the reality that these measures are more about being seen to be doing something, because of the public’s anger that Blair’s foreign policy has brought these bombings on London, than about genuinely addressing a real problem. This measure was the decision to ban the Hizb al-Tahrir, an Islamic group that espouses peaceful political change in Muslim countries in order to establish khilafah in the Muslim world.
The Hizb al-Tahrir takes a primarily intellectual and educational approach to political change, and has never been implicated in espousing or justifying violence. However, because of its popularity among university students, and its opposition to Israel, it has been targeted by Jewish groups and accused of anti-semitism. This has made it the target of Britain’s right-wing tabloid media and given it a higher profile than most other Islamic groups in the country. The government’s decision to ban it evidently owes more to its profile, and the government’s need to be seen to be doing something, than anything it says or does. The government’s problem is that the few people and groups who have praised or justified terrorist activities are so small and marginal that measures against them would not be sufficient for its purpose. The result is that a peaceful and respected Islamic group has been targeted for no fault of its own.
The ban on Hizb al-Tahrir reflects the fact that the campaign against Muslims since July 7 goes far beyond security measures, which most Muslims would understand and support. The tone of this campaign was set by Blair on July 16, when he linked the bombings to the “evil ideology” of political Islam, which he grossly misrepresented as aiming for the expulsion of all non-Muslims from Muslim countries, the elimination of Israel, the establishment of Taliban-style states, the imposition of Shari’ah law in the Arab world, and the establishment of one “caliphate” of all Muslim countries.
This is a catch-all description that takes in far more than just terrorism; while no Muslim demands the expulsion of all non-Muslims from Muslim countries, which is a sheer fabrication, many oppose Israel and aspire to the establishment of Shari’ah and a khilafah without meaning violence of any kind, let alone terrorism.
This speech, regarded as a masterpiece by political commentators in the West, and praised also by some “moderate” Muslims who are keen to curry favour with the powers that be, set the tone for the subsequent debate in the British media about the terrorist attacks and their causes. Instead of focusing on the fact of Britain’s unquestioning support for US policies in the Muslim world, including its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which polls show most British people regard as a major reason for the bombings, the media are concentrating on what some have called “the Muslim problem” or “the problem of Islam”, arguing that the bombings happened because British Muslims have failed to integrate properly into British society or adopt British values and ways of life.
Despite the fact that Muslims have a long record of largely peaceful community life in Britain, the entire community is now under attack for its supposed implication in the terrorist acts perpetrated by a few individuals. At the same time, there has been a wave of Islamophobic attacks on Muslim individuals, mosques and institutions. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Blair and his government have deliberately turned the flak onto the Muslim community in order to distract attention from their own policies.
At the same time, they have found many in Britain’s media happy to join in a campaign against Muslims that goes far beyond concern over terrorism. Muslim schools, halal meat, hijab and the fact that many second-generation Muslims in Britain Pakistan or Bangladesh in cricket, rather than England, have all become grounds for attacking Muslims. Even at the serious end of the media spectrum, a deep anti-Islamic bias has been revealed. In a documentary broadcast under its prestigious Panorama title on August 21, the BBC accused the Muslim Council of Britain – usually regarded as a moderate body – of fostering extremism. In the process, the programme attacked many key aspects of Islam, from the aspiration for shari’ah to women’s desire to wear Islamic dress. Among the things characterised as “extremist” in the programme were believing Islam to be superior to other faiths, women wearing hijab and niqab, and support for Palestinians, Chechnyans and Kashmiris.
Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of the IHRC, said after the broadcast of the Panorama documentary that the campaign is in danger of making simply being a Muslim an extremist act. “If this phase in community relations does not pass quickly, irreparable damage may be done,” he warned.
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