RUTHFULLY YOURS

Behold Asim Hafeez, the new British Home Office official charged with identifying British jihadists and mobilzing them — no, sorry, diverting them — from the path to jihad. Or something.

According to Martin Bright, who reported on the appointment last month at the Jewish Chronicle, there is “serious concern among more moderate Muslim advisers across Whitehall” about their new colleague, whom one fellow advisor described as a “hardcore Salafi.”

Only among “more moderate Muslim advisors”? How about the suicidal non-Muslims who likely hired him? Of course, if they were concerned they wouldn’t have picked him in the first place. The Islamization of England continues apace.

A guest post at Harry’s Place quite instructively elaborates on Hafeez’s belief in an Islamic state.

A number of Hafeez’s talks are available online which appear to not only back up Bright’s accusations but also to suggest that Hafeez might additionally be a hard-line Islamist who wishes to replace the British constitution with ‘the Quran and the Sunnah’.

One of the most alarming lectures available online is one called ‘Jesus in Islam’ which Hafeez gave in November 2008 to the Islamic Society of the University of Glamorgan.

Although most of the lecture is devoted to attacking Christian beliefs, which is troubling enough in itself, the most alarming part occurs towards the end of the talk (from 05:45 onwards) when he tells his audience:

“Why is it taking such a long time to show the beauty of the message of al-Islam? Because we are not practicing Islam as it is meant to be practiced. In lecture which I gave to a humanist society, which I was mentioning to some brothers earlier, all of them were shocked by this, [they said]: ‘You are giving us this picture of Islam and we don’t see it anywhere in the world’. And I can’t turn around and say, ‘Yes it is prevalent in every Muslim country’ because it’s not, because we’ve drifted from the Quran and the Sunnah. We’ve left our deen [religion] behind us and adopted ’-isms’, communism, capitalism, bengalism, pakistanism, Saudi-ism, whatever-isms’, nationalism. Hizbiya and Asabiyya. We’ve adopted them instead of the Quran and the Sunnah as our constitution. This is the problem.”

Let’s un-pack this and see what Asim Hafeez saying.

Hafeez initially says ‘we are not practicing Islam as it is meant to be practiced’ and that Muslims have drifted ‘from the Quran and Sunnah’. While such phrases are widely used by Muslims of all persuasions in order to give a religious hue to their respective causes, the context that is provided by Hafeez’s following sentences makes this platitude a rather greater matter of concern.

In particularly, Hafeez goes on to say this reliance ‘on the Quran and Sunnah’ has been replaced by belief in a range of different ideologies and specifically Hizbiya which means party-ism and Asabiyya means roughly nationalism or patriotism, such the ‘Bengalism’ and ‘Pakistanism’ which he references.

This raises some important questions.

Why does Hafeez believe that adopting ideas like capitalism equate to leaving ‘our deen behind us? Likewise, why is a person who apparently rejects the concept of nationalism and patriotism, working in a government department which is explicitly aiming to strengthen the identification of British people who are Muslim with the UK and its institutions?

It gets worse, however, when Hafeez says that ‘We’ve adopted them instead of the Quran and the Sunnah as our constitution.’

This phrase is, of course, an exact echo of the Muslim Brotherhood’s famous slogan: ‘The Quran is our constitution’.

What is a British government employee, especially one who is head of a key counter-extremism programme, doing lecturing Muslim students using the words and slogans of the hard-line Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood?

You can say that again. But with no one in responsible positions of power paying attention, short of a revolution, the subversion of a great civilization will continue unimpeded.  

And, most importantly of all, what does a British Muslim like Hafeez mean who he tells other British Muslims that ‘We’ve adopted them instead of the Quran and the Sunnah as our constitution. This is the problem’?

Is Hafeez talking about the British constitution (such as it is)? Does he think that the British constitutional arrangement should be replaced with ‘the Quran and the Sunnah’? If not, then which constitution is he talking about when he says ‘our constitution’?

This all raises a bigger question, however, which is why has a ‘hardcore salafi’ like Asim Hafeez been made head of the Home Office’s ‘Interventions Unit’, a unit which was specifically created to identify Islamist individual and groups and find ways to challenge their Islamist ideology – when he appears to have himself preached the very same ideology on British university campuses?

Good questions. Here’s another: Do good questions arouse sufficient indignation to incite change? So far, the answer is a big fat no. The self-evident answers — that the British government (and other governments) are criminally derelict in their duty to protect their nations and must be thrown out, literally or metaphorically — don’t occur to much of anyone.

Thus, the British Home Office proceeds to empower agents of the Islamic state.