Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP):...I have been encouraged by what
the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury said in two
speeches last autumn. He said that in order to defeat terrorism, we
need to understand the mindset of those who perpetrate it; that if
we treat religiously motivated violence solely as a security or
political issue, it may prove impossible to overcome it; that it is
wrong to say that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam; and that until
religious leaders stand up and...Request free trial
(UKIP):...I have been encouraged by what the most
reverend Primate the said in two speeches
last autumn. He said that in order to defeat terrorism, we need to
understand the mindset of those who perpetrate it; that if we treat
religiously motivated violence solely as a security or political
issue, it may prove impossible to overcome it; that it is wrong to
say that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam; and that until
religious leaders stand up and take responsibility for the actions
of those who do things in the name of their religions, we will see
no resolution. I make it clear that the most reverend Primate was
speaking not only about the darkness which is erupting within
Islam, but about the Christian militia in the Central Africa
Republic and the Hindu treatment of Christians in
south India. No doubt he would now add the
Buddhist persecution of the Rohingya Muslims...
(Lab):...I
take up a technical issue with the noble Lord, Lord Pearson,
concerning the caliphate. As noble Lords know, a continuous caliph
was established soon after the Prophet died. The caliph was a
spiritual leader and, very often, the ruling emperor in the Islamic
world. Muslims used to offer prayers to the caliph at Friday
prayers until the last caliph disappeared. In India, there was a movement called the
Khilafat movement because it was suspected that the British might
either abolish the caliphate or replace it with one of their own
infidel appointees. As it happened, Kemal Atatürk abolished the
caliphate. However, its abolition has created a huge vacuum which
we ought to take very seriously. It is as if the papacy had been
abolished while the Catholic Church had been kept. We cannot
imagine that but that is precisely what the effect is. After 1921,
for the first time in the 1,200-year history of Islam, there was no
caliph. That psychological shock has not been taken on board. If I
were to suggest a policy that we ought to follow, it would insist
on there being a caliph approved by the entire Sunni community, not
some upstart like Baghdadi who made himself a caliph with
absolutely no qualification or pedigree. There are rules regarding
who can become a caliph. We have missed a trick here. The collapse
of the Ottoman Empire has not been resolved and we have not
understood the politics involved here...
(Lab):...The
third idea is the idea of Al Hijra, which refers to Muhammad and
his companions migrating from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE to set up
the first Islamic state. The Muslim calendar counts dates from the
Hijra, and Muslim dates have the suffix AH, which means “After
Hijra”. In recent times, the concept of Al Hijra or Muhammad’s move
from Mecca to Medina is taken to mean that Muslims have an
obligation to move from a secular society to one that allows you to
practise religion or be suffused with the religious spirit—or to
oppose colonial rule. That is what happened, as the noble Lord,
, suggested,
in India during the time of British
rule, when several Muslims on religious grounds said that they
would rather move to Afghanistan from India rather than stay on because
they suspected that colonial rule was not going to give them
freedom...
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