Asked by Lord Pearson of Rannoch To ask Her Majesty’s
Government whether, as part of their strategy against Islamist
terrorism, they will encourage UK Muslim leaders to re-examine the
Muslim tenets of abrogation, Taqiyya and Al Hijra and to publish
their conclusions. Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP) My Lords,
this Question is yet another...Request free trial
Asked by
-
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether, as part of their
strategy against Islamist terrorism, they will encourage UK
Muslim leaders to re-examine the Muslim tenets of
abrogation, Taqiyya and Al Hijra and to publish their
conclusions.
-
(UKIP)
My Lords, this Question is yet another attempt to start
some sort of open discussion in this country about the
nature of Islam. You can say what you like about the virgin
birth, the miracles and the resurrection of Jesus Christ,
but you get into serious trouble if you try to touch at all
on the subject of Islam and what it really is. I repeat
that I am in no sense an expert on Islam, but I am advised
by four people who are.
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.
Before coming to the detail of this Question, I suppose I
should repeat some of the absolute basics of the Muslim
religion. Islam does not, as so often averred, mean peace;
it means submission to the will of Allah, the Muslim God.
Islam and its sharia law are an indivisible legal,
religious and political system, taking all authority from
the Koran and from what Muhammad did and said in his
lifetime. So it is a complete way of life, and does not sit
easily with our western liberal democracies and our
separation of powers between legislature, executive,
judiciary and Church. Within this very broad generality
there are a number of very controversial Muslim tenets,
three of which I have put into the Question on the Order
Paper, and two more of which I will mention. I very much
hope that peaceful Muslim leaders do not accept any of them
and that they will say so forcefully. The point is that the
jihadists most definitely do accept them and take their
evil inspiration from them.
The first is abrogation, which holds that the later verses
in the Koran cancel the earlier peaceful verses—the verses
of the sword cancel the verses of peace. So, for example,
the much-quoted early verse, “Let there be no compulsion in
religion”, is nullified many times in later verses. Taqiyya
is more controversial but in its aggressive interpretation
holds that Muslims living outside the Muslim world are
encouraged to deceive their hosts in order to further
Islam. A worrying example of Taqiyya took place on 18
September 2014, when 119 British imams and Muslim leaders
wrote to the Independent newspaper to assure us that the
beheading of the British aid worker David Haines,
“cannot be justified anywhere in the Quran”.
To back this up, they quoted from surah 5, verse 32 of the
Koran as follows:
“Whosoever kills a human being ... it is as if killing the
entire human race; and whosoever saves a life, saves the
entire human race”.
The Taqiyya, or deception, becomes clear when you fill in
the dots. The missing passage reads, “unless it be for
murder or for spreading mischief in the land”. So the Koran
actually says you can be killed for spreading mischief in
the land, which to the jihadist is doing anything that
frustrates his evil purpose.
My third tenet is Al Hijra, which is taken from Muhammad’s
example after he had accepted his multifaith hosts’
hospitality in Medina for five years and had become strong
enough to force them to choose between exile, converting to
his new religion or death. He ordered the death of several
hundred people and Islam went on to conquer most of the
known world. One of our so-called Trojan horse schools in
Birmingham is actually called the Al-Hijrah School, so the
tenet is alive and well in the UK today.
The two other Muslim tenets that I want to mention and ask
our Muslim leaders to address are, first, the ambition to
create a world caliphate and, secondly, the death penalty
for leaving the Muslim religion, or apostasy. As for the
caliphate, I can do no better than recommend a courageous
article in the Daily Telegraph on 19 August this year
entitled:
“Don’t blame the West, the terror won’t stop until Muslims
reject the caliphate”.
The point about that article is that it was written by Mr
Ed Husain, who was a militant Muslim for five years, so he
knows what he is talking about. I will put a copy in your
Lordships’ Library.
Death for apostasy applies in 13 predominantly Muslim
countries but not here, so I trust that our Muslim leaders
will have no difficulty in declaring it to be un-Islamic.
Who are the Muslim leaders who the Government should
encourage to re-examine these tenets? There is no Pope in
Islam and its many sects and divisions make it very
difficult to deal with. Presumably we will not be
consulting the 119 imams who wrote to the Independent.
There was a group of 130 leading Muslims who issued an
unprecedented statement through the Muslim Council of
Britain, refusing to perform the funeral prayers for the
three terrorist attackers at London Bridge last June who
were shot dead after killing seven people and wounding 48
others. Perhaps the Government could try them or the Muslim
Council of Britain itself. I am advised that the Union of
Mosques and Imams should also be approached. However, I do
not have much doubt that the Government will not accept my
suggestion and that, if they do, our Muslim leaders will
not collaborate. This would be a pity because, if these
tenets stand as part of the Muslim religion, Islam cannot
possibly be a religion of peace and we should not go on
pretending and hoping that it is.
We should instead be taking some initiative now which will
help to avoid the eventual Muslim takeover of our society,
at least in our major Muslim conurbations. You have only to
look at the Muslim birth rate to see that that is now a
real possibility. The latest figures I have from the ONS
show that the Muslim population in England rose 10 times
faster between 2001 and 2016 than did the rest of the
population, by 107% compared to 11%. In six of our top
Muslim conurbations, it rose by an average of 130%, and 33%
of our Muslims in England are under the age of 15, compared
to 18% of the rest of us.
The Government continue to tolerate sharia law here,
whereby a Muslim man can have four wives, each of whom he
can divorce by merely saying “I divorce you” three times.
Of course, the Muslim wives cannot do the same.
Written Answers from the Government reveal that they do not
have a clue what is being preached in sermons in our
mosques or what is being taught in our madrassahs, or
Muslim schools. What is more, they do not intend to try to
find out.
Whenever some of us try to raise the issue of Islam, we are
told that it is we who are undermining the Prevent
programme or interfaith dialogue—dialogue with what
faith?—even that we are spreading hate towards the Muslims
and making them feel insecure. Speaking of the Prevent
programme, it seems to me that our Muslim communities could
be doing more to stand up to and expose their violent
co-religionists, because only 8.6% of tip-offs to the
programme or the police come from within those communities.
If they co-operated more, they would be less distrusted by
their non-Muslim neighbours.
In conclusion, as a leading Muslim said to a friend of mine
recently: “We do not need to go on blowing you up. All we
have to do is to wait until we can take you over through
the power of the womb and the ballot box”. I hope he was
not right.
I am very grateful to all noble Lords who are here to
speak. At least we are talking about Islam. That seems to
be a step in the right direction and I look forward to all
other contributions, however much some contributors may
disagree with what I have said.
6.17 pm
-
(Con)
The noble Lord’s exegesis on Islamic theology was
concerning and, in one or two parts, I think confusing. I
do not criticise him for that because I am neither a
theologian nor a philosopher. I therefore cannot judge how
much scholarly water some of his assertions hold, but I
must say that I have previously reflected whether it might
be a good thing if many of our government ministries had a
moral philosopher or two on their staff to advise Ministers
about the rectitude of the course that they were about to
enter into.
I do know that there is no text in the great books of the
three Abrahamic religions that directly promotes or
sanctions terrorism. While the record shows that Judaism
has been pretty restrained over the millennia in the matter
of religious violence within or without its communities,
alas, one cannot say the same about the Christian religion
in England—Catholics and Protestants in particular were
going at each other for hundreds of years, busily burning
and then, to make a change of pace, disembowelling each
other in the interests of religion. I am extremely sorry
that that ever happened.
Right reverend Prelates are extremely busy doing stuff in
their dioceses, but it is a pity that we do not have a
right reverend Prelate on their Bench to listen to what is
going on this afternoon. Perhaps the most reverent Primate
the and his
brother of York might look at this issue, because we really
need their wisdom here. In exactly the same way—there are
not so many formal Jewish rabbis in this place—it would
have been good to have a noble Lord, Lord Sacks, as it
were, to give his views.
Mercifully, the bad habits of the Catholics—and I happen to
be one of those; that is a declaration of interest and
complete transparency—and Protestants in dealing with each
other was dropped a few centuries ago, although sometimes
the theological debate can still be pretty robust between
us. Christians have, in a phrase, grown out of it. Now in
the final long, drawn-out act involving the Islamic world,
we must be equally robust in asserting that terrorism and
religion do not sit together. One is not an excuse for the
other; only perverted minds seek to use religion for their
perverted ends. I wonder how many so-called Islamic
terrorists have actually read the Holy Koran in detail.
What is to be done? We have lots of advice on this. The new
de facto Sunni ruler of Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammad bin
Salman, has just started bouncing around about the issue
with his characteristic vigour, and said on 26 November of
Islamic terrorism:
“We will pursue it until it disappears completely from the
surface of the earth”.
Heigh-ho! That really is hyperbole on stilts at a time when
Saudi Arabia is violently and in the name of religion
pursuing proxy wars against other brands of Islam all over
the Middle East and Africa, from Yemen to Libya and back.
Such terror simply begets other terror.
A very important issue that was not touched on by the noble
Lord in his concerning introductory speech is how much a
debate on Islamic terrorism must begin with a clear
recognition that, all too often, it is a case of Muslim on
Muslim—Sunni on Shia with, for example, that terrible
attack on the innocent Sufis in the Sinai at holy prayers
in their mosque a week or two ago. Then of course, in the
Middle East, Alawites and Ismailis feel a degree of fear,
and feel threatened. However, we in this place and in the
West cannot enforce what we see as reason on the Islamic
world, nor can we be thought to be lecturing it about
deep-seated and sometimes fracturing theological debates
which we do not perhaps understand. I certainly do not
understand some of them. In the end, the Islamic world has
to sort itself out and, just as the Christian world did in
England and elsewhere, grow out of the kind of stuff that
it seeks now to do with us. I do not expect this to happen
very soon. I happen to have a very close Muslim friend, who
I have known for 20 or getting on for 25 years. We were
speaking only yesterday, and I asked him how many decades
it would take for the Muslim world to come out of this
present epoch. He paused and said, “It won’t take
decades—it will take centuries”. That is a very foreboding
thought, grim but realistic. Dealing with Islamic
terrorism, or what claims to be Islamic terrorism, is going
to be how we live for a very long time.
The only approach to this is to treat all terrorism
equally, wherever it comes from. Terrorists are terrorists
by definition, regardless of their purported cause. Our
security services do a very good job in keeping an eye as
much as they can, particularly when things are going quiet.
If you just go across the water to Ireland north and south
of the border, there is that old saying that there is
always a “pike in the thatch” from people on both sides of
the religious divide. I believe that that is the case
there—and sometimes, when things are quiet, we have to be
extremely concerned.
Sometimes defending life means ending life, and that
excellent and experienced Minister from his time in Iraq
onwards, Mr , has reminded us about
that in another place. Our defences must ever be
strengthened, which is why the Sanctions and Anti-Money
Laundering Bill making its way through your Lordships’
House, enabling us to target groups such as Daesh or
al-Qaeda, is so essential to delivering safety at home and
our foreign-policy aims abroad. But it is always where
things seem to be quiet that terrorists will suddenly
appear.
As somebody who works in financial services in the City of
London, I rejoice to see how they have been put at the
service of religion in making it a centre for Islamic
finance in this world. My noble friend knows much more
about this stuff than I ever will. We are very complacently
saying that it is terribly good that we have all this going
on in the City of London, but those people who use terror
look to places like that and businesses like that with
venom, so we must not let our guard drop.
6.24 pm
-
(Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord,
, who has always been
a thoughtful Member of your Lordships’ House. I also
congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, on introducing
this topic. We have sat next to each other for many years
and of course we have often disagreed, but the thing about
the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, is that everyone thinks he is
wrong, but he wins in the end—as he did with Brexit—so we
have to listen to him carefully. Let us hope he does not
this time, but that is another issue.
Ever since 9/11, I have taken the view that Islam will be
used by the terrorists for what they do, but it is not an
Islamic problem; it is a political movement which I and
others have called Islamism. Islamism has a very tenuous
connection with the religion and its religious texts. I do
not read Arabic, so I will not comment on whether
abrogation is a good or a bad thing, but I will say this:
if we are to understand what is happening by way of
jihadist terrorism, we have to understand that it is first
of all a civil war within Islam. A lot of damage is done by
the Islamic terrorists to fellow Muslims. Indeed, ever
since 1973, which was the third and last defeat of the Arab
nations to abolish Israel, it has been clear that the
modernist, socialist alternative in the Arab world had lost
credibility. The Middle East went back to religion; it
thought that the only answer was to go back to religion to
find a solace or a solution.
Ever since then, we have had this schism in the Islamic
world, in which those who want a purer, more fanatical
regime—Wahhabism or Salafism—have wanted to subvert Muslim
majority societies and replace whoever rules them with a
harder version of Sharia law and enforcement of religious
morality and so on. The human cost to Muslim societies has
been much, much bigger than we can calculate compared with
what has happened to our societies. Since 1973—nearly 44
years ago—the Middle East has been in a continuous war-like
situation. I will not cite all the cases, but in Iraq,
Syria and Lebanon, in Nigeria and Sudan in Africa and in
Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt in north Africa, there
have been continuous war-like situations. It is entirely an
internal civil war.
One reason why I believe this civil war has been carrying
on—I wrote about this in a book about 10 years ago—is that
we have not solved the vacuum created by the disappearance
of the Ottoman Empire in 1921. I have recently also written
about how we can think of the last 100 years’ history as
solving the problem caused by the First World War. Each
empire that disappeared—such as the Romanov or the
Hohenzollern empires—caused problems that had to be solved
in the rest of the century. The Romanov problem was solved
finally in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The
Hohenzollern gave us lots of problems but those problems
were tackled by the end of the Second World War. The
Ottoman Empire disappeared in, as you choose, 1918 or 1921,
or whenever it was. We have not resolved that problem. We
drew up the arbitrary Sykes-Picot line and created
countries but we have not resolved the vacuum that that
left.
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.
6.32 pm
-
(LD)
My Lords, as we are aware, the noble Lord, Lord Pearson,
has previously raised the question of Taqiyya and Al Hijra
in the House at Questions, where I thought he had a good
hearing. However, his subsequent attempt at securing this
debate for the same question shows his deeper interest in
the issue.
First, I wish to talk a little about the two main tenets
that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, is concerned about. I am
a Muslim and I attend prayers at a local mosque as
regularly as I can. To my knowledge, the term “Al Hijra”
refers to the migration of the Prophet Mohammed—peace be
upon him—from Mecca to Medina and it is the mark of the
Islamic calendar.
For the benefit of noble Lords’ knowledge, today is the
18th of Rabi al Awal, the ninth month of the Islamic Hijra
calendar year 1438. According to major English
dictionaries, including the Collins English Dictionary, Al
Hijra is an annual Muslim festival marking the beginning of
the Muslim year. It commemorates Mohammed’s move from Mecca
to Medina and involves the exchange of gifts. I have never
met any Muslim who understands any other meaning of the
term “Al Hijra” than the above mentioned internationally
recognised meaning. In the light of this, it makes no sense
for the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, or anyone else to ask
Muslim leaders to re-examine the term.
There are two different opinions within the Muslim faith on
the term “Taqiyya”. I understand from scholars of the Sunni
school of thought, which has the largest following among
British Muslims, that they do not believe this tenet exists
and therefore would never practise it. However, those sects
who do believe in Taqiyya consider it to be an extreme
measure for extreme circumstances. According to them,
Taqiyya is about concealing your own religious beliefs when
confronted with the threat of persecution and death,
comparing it with the Jews who had to conceal their
identity in Nazi Germany or Christians in present-day
Syria. It is a defensive response to a threat of attack,
which cannot be used for other purposes.
However, as many noble Lords are aware, in any debate
relating to Muslims or Islam in this House, the argument of
the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, always finds its way to
somehow link the Islamic faith with violence and terrorism.
Would the Minister not agree with me that the vast majority
of the 2 billion Muslims living around the world, including
the 4 million living in Britain, are peace-loving and
law-abiding citizens?
The small minority of those who get involved in terrorism
in the name of Islam are either misled or do not have basic
knowledge of Islam; nor do they practise it. A report was
recently released by the Oasis Foundation, which is a
Christian group of schools. Having compiled evidence from
the United Nations and MI5, among others, the report found
that religion is not the main cause or motivation of these
individuals. Indeed, high numbers of them do not practise
the faith that they claim to fight for and have little or
no understanding of Islam. Many were found to be engaged in
activities that are strictly forbidden in Islam, such as
the consumption of alcohol and drugs. I encourage noble
Lords to take some time to read this report. I anticipate
that it will make uncomfortable reading for those who seek
to promote the falsehood that Islam is a religion that
leads people into violence. To suggest that these
individuals have any understanding of the type of terms put
forward by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, today is quite
laughable.
Over the past few years, we have seen a huge rise in
Islamophobia, or anti-Muslim racism, as it has been defined
in the recently published Runnymede report. The report
finds that anti-Muslim prejudice has grown further and
wider and Muslims in the UK are increasingly disadvantaged
in all areas of life. Would the Minister not agree that the
way the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, uses his ill-informed
narrative to demonise the great religion of Islam and
blames this religion for all the ills of the world actually
fuels anti-Muslim sentiments that lead to hate crime?
In conclusion, I suggest if the noble Lord, Lord Pearson,
wants to understand the teachings of Islam properly, then I
am happy to host a meeting to introduce him to people who
are able to offer comprehensive teaching of Islamic
doctrine. Finally, I ask the Minister to remind the noble
Lord, Lord Pearson, of our nation’s commitment to protect
and honour the rights of minorities and that freedom of
religion is a core value central to our democracy.
6.38 pm
-
(Con)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, has performed a
useful function in introducing this sensitive and delicate
subject so that we can, at any rate, discuss it. I want to
focus my remarks on political Islam and its links with the
many jihadist organisations that, as we have heard, inflict
terror on other Muslims and on the non-Muslim world.
I have learned a lot from a lecture given on 15 November in
New Haven by Sir John Jenkins. I hope that the Minister has
read it and I certainly recommend it to other noble Lords.
Sir John, an accomplished Arabist and British diplomat, was
consul-general in Jerusalem and subsequently Her Majesty’s
ambassador in Syria, in Iraq and finally in Saudi Arabia
until 2015. He took an active part in the Chilcot Iraq
Inquiry. In March 2014, he was appointed by the then Prime
Minister Cameron to lead a policy review into the Muslim
Brotherhood and political Islamism. Sir John was assisted
by Charles Farr, who since December 2015 has been the chair
of the JIC—the Joint Intelligence Committee—in the Cabinet.
The review was completed in July 2014 but the report was
never published. Only a summary appeared, and that was in
December 2015, 18 months later. However, that summary
concluded with a damning statement:
“Muslim Brotherhood ideology and tactics, in this country
and overseas, are contrary to our values and have been
contrary to our national interests and our national
security”.
Astonishingly, Prime Minister Cameron merely made a Written
Statement to the House of Commons, in which he said that
the Government would,
“keep under review whether the views and activities of the
Muslim Brotherhood meet the legal test for
proscription”.—[Official Report, Commons, 17/12/15; col.
418WS.]
The text of the Jenkins lecture is indeed illuminating to
somebody from outside, like me, and I found it disturbing.
First, Jenkins dismisses as “almost worthless” any attempt
to place the Islamists,
“on some scale of relative extremism or moderation”.
I certainly do not intend to speak of the religion of
Islam. Any analysis of its kaleidoscopic complexity and
didactic variations is well beyond me. The Sufi version of
Sunni Islam seems to me to be closer to what Christians
could recognise as a monotheistic religion of peace and
love. In the atrocity of 24 November this year in Egypt,
for which Daesh has claimed responsibility, 305 Sufi
Muslims—including 28 children—were shot while praying in a
mosque in north Sinai.
Last Friday, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of
al-Azhar, the most ancient mosque in Cairo, and himself a
Sunni, condemned this attack. This is an important step
forward. Hitherto, due to the intimidation to which they
are subject, very few of that great majority of the Muslim
clerics who abhor the violent and cruel terrorism of
political Islam as much as we do have spoken out against
it.
Political Islam and the various Islamist terrorist bodies
affiliated with it can no more claim religious
justification for their horrific acts than could the IRA
for its acts of murder during the Troubles. On 29 September
1979, Pope John Paul II, who was visiting Ireland, appealed
to,
“the moral sense and Christian conviction”,
of the Irish, at his mass in Drogheda, with the words:
“Nobody may ever call murder by any other name than murder
… On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of
violence”.
That it took so long for peace to return did not mean that
the Roman Catholic Church ever endorsed, justified or
excused murders committed by the IRA.
I have long seen the relationship of the Muslim Brotherhood
to the military wings of the Salafist Wahhabi creed, such
as al-Qaeda and Daesh, as rather similar to the
relationship that once existed between Sinn Fein and the
IRA. The Muslim Brotherhood, originally partly based on the
theories of Italian fascism, was founded in 1928 in Egypt
by al-Banna, who promoted ultimate martyrdom through death
in conflict. Its final aim, proclaimed by the Islamic State
in April 2014, is the installation of a worldwide
theocratic state, or caliphate, under Sharia law.
Theocracy is, by definition, the antithesis of democracy
because, once in place, it cannot be removed by the
electorate. This conflict can be most clearly observed in
Iran, where a supreme leader—in this case, Shia—with the
revolutionary guard as enforcers, keeps a careful check on
the semi-democratically elected Government of President
Rouhani. Jenkins points out:
“Links between the Brotherhood and the Khomeinist trend in
Iran go back as far as the 1950s”.
The Muslim Brotherhood operates with much tactical skill.
It assassinated President Sadat in October 1981 after he
had made peace with Israel. It achieved full power in Egypt
through the ballot box in January 2012, only to be ejected
by popular protest, supported by the army, in July 2013
following economic chaos. Jenkins concludes that,
“if Egypt had fallen to the Brotherhood, the whole of North
Africa would have eventually become a bastion of political
Islamism”.
He said that in 2005, after the 7/7 attack on London
transport in which 56 people died, the Brotherhood claimed
to be working to prevent further attacks on Britain. That
is perhaps why HMG have left them alone. It should be noted
that the European leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ibrahim
Munir, has lived in London for many years. I understand
that he is likely soon to become the group’s world leader.
The Anderson report on terrorism, published on Monday,
makes extensive reference to the background of the
Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, but fails to refer to the
fact that his father, Ramadan Abedi, was part of the Libyan
Muslim Brotherhood and a former al-Qaeda operative in
Libya. Last week, 33 members of the US Congress wrote to
Secretary of State Tillerson urging him to designate the
Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organisation. I
believe that the time may have come for us to do the same
here.
6.46 pm
-
(Lab)
My Lords, I begin by complimenting the noble Lord,
, on
securing this debate. His introduction was quite
interesting, although I was a little disappointed that what
began as a calm disquisition on Islam turned, as it moved
on, into a kind of diatribe. That is an inevitable danger.
If one talks about Islam as a whole, rather than
concentrating on a particular aspect of it, there is a
danger of spreading oneself too thinly and covering a lot
of ground. Therefore, as, I hope, a good academic, I want
to concentrate on the Question itself.
The Question that the noble Lord has asked—every word is
carefully chosen, although occasionally mischievous, and
certainly interesting—is whether the Government will
encourage Muslim leaders to re-examine the three Muslim
tenets of abrogation, Taqiyya and Al Hijra, and to publish
their findings. I want to look at those three concepts.
What are the Islamic tenets on these three concepts? Do
they need to be revised or re-examined and, if so, along
what lines?
The first is “abrogation”. I am sorry that the noble Lord
used Arabic for the other two tenets, whereas he left this
one as “abrogation”; in Arabic the word is “Naskh”. Naskh
is simply a theoretical tool to interpret the Koran. Where
the different verses of the Koran—or the verses of the
Koran and the Hadith—do not match, you need a rule for
interpretation. The rule generally is that the later
Koranic verses supersede the earlier ones, as they do in
the Hadith. That is what abrogation means.
Taqiyya is a much trickier concept. It largely means
“covering up” or “dissimulation”. It means that when a
Muslim is in a crisis situation or likely to face intense
persecution, he is allowed to lie about his faith. He can
say, “Look, I’m not a Muslim”, if Muslims are going to be
attacked. At one level, he would seem to be disloyal to
Allah to whom he has agreed to submit, but on another level
he is excused because his life is in danger. As the Oxford
dictionary puts it, it is really a precautionary
dissimulation of religious belief. But again, it has been
reinterpreted, as all these tenets have been. It was
reinterpreted after 9/11 to mean that a Muslim has a
religious obligation, not just a religious permission, to
lie and to lie not only to survive but to proselytise his
own religion.
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.
My point in all this is simply to say, first, that the
re-examination of these concepts is going on and that no
encouragement is required because circumstances compel
Muslim leaders to reinterpret those concepts, just as
Hindus and Christians have been compelled. Secondly,
government intervention in these matters is always
ill-advised because it politicises scholarship. Scholarship
loses its sense of detachment and integrity. More
importantly, the Government have no competence in the
matter. If someone interprets Al Hijra in one way and the
noble Lord, , interprets it in
another and the noble Lord, , in another, how will the
Prime Minister decide which one to encourage and which to
discourage? It is not the Government’s business. To give
the Government religious authority is the worst thing that
any liberal, or even non-liberal, society can aim to do.
The third difficulty is why only these three tenets? These
three are not really crucial. I can think of half a dozen
others, so why just these three? And more importantly, why
only Islam? What about Hinduism? The noble Lord, , wrote a book about
the Bhagavad Gita—a secular reading of a religious text.
Lots of Hindus whom I know are deeply uneasy about it
because they would like it to be seen differently. The
question is why concentrate only on Islam. Even verses in
the Old Testament breed the spirit of violence and hatred.
The New Testament is just as bad in some cases—apart from
the “Sermon on the Mount”, it contains other passages that
can be just as obnoxious. So why concentrate on only one
religion?
The next question that worries me is: will it assist the
cause of anti-terrorism? It will not. Terrorists are not
just guided because of these three tenets. They are guided
by other considerations, such as being unhappy with our
foreign policy or a sense of alienation growing up in our
society. There are all kinds of reasons, and religion is
simply being used as the language of expression, not as the
source from which the inspiration is derived. When religion
is simply being used as the language of expression, the
causes lie elsewhere. If we are looking for a
reinterpretation of the tenets in the hope that that would
stop terrorism, there is no such possibility of that
happening.
The last point that I want to make is that Islam, like any
other religion, has both violent and non-violent traits.
That is just as true of Christianity. How could the
religion of simple peasants lead to the largest empire, of
many different kinds, in human history—the British
colonial, the French and all that? How could it justify
slavery? If we think of Christianity, the enormous amount
of good as well as harm that it has done simply cannot be
explained away. Every religion has the potential for both.
Which potential is being actualised depends on the
circumstances. Muslim countries—it is not Islam as such but
Muslim countries—are passing through a phase of identity
crisis, deep alienation and anger against the West for its
foreign policy or for its support of native tin-pot rulers,
so obviously they are going to take the form of aggression.
The simple point I want to make is that, if we want to have
this sort of discussion as part of an anti-terrorist
strategy, the Government’s strategy—which I would have
loved to discuss—leaves a lot to be desired. The Prevent
strategy is not the answer, and to fit anything into that
mould is not the way to proceed.
-
(Con)
My Lords, perhaps I may say respectfully that we have
limited time in this debate. All noble Lords have prepared
for it incredibly well and have great points to make, but
we need to allow time for the Minister to reply to them. I
would ask noble Lords to honour the time allowed for
speaking.
6.55 pm
-
(Con)
My Lords, I begin by expressing my disquiet and resentment
at the wording of the Question for this debate. The noble
Lord, Lord Pearson, has referred to Islamist terrorism. I
feel that to use “Islamic” or “Islamist” relating to any
form of terrorism is completely wrong. Islam is a religion
of peace and does not allow any form of suicide attack or
terrorist activity. A terrorist should be referred to as a
terrorist without reference to any religion. During the IRA
activities, it was inappropriate to associate terrorism
with a particular religion. It would be greatly appreciated
if one were careful about using appropriate language in
your Lordships’ House, otherwise it may cause offence to
the people of this country.
I received numerous complaints from Muslims when it became
known that this debate had been tabled. Islam is indeed a
religion of peace and I promote this fact in my coat of
arms. Even when we greet somebody, we use the phrase
As-sal?mu ‘alaykum, which means “peace be upon you”. I
would like to emphasise that it is written in the Holy
Koran that Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala has said: “Whoever
kills a human being, it is as though he has killed all
mankind, and whoever saves a human being, it is as though
he has saved all mankind”. This is very similar to what is
written in the Talmud. Islam and Judaism, like other
religions, both value the sanctity of life.
There are more than 3 million Muslims in this country and
nearly all of them are peace-loving people. They have been
successful in every walk of life and have contributed to
the advancement and well-being of this country. I
appreciate and understand that a tiny minority have acted
very badly and committed criminal offences. What they have
said and what they are doing is totally un-Islamic. Islam
teaches us to celebrate the difference and diversity which
God has purposefully created in our world.
The Question of this debate refers also to UK Muslim
leaders. I consider myself to be one of the Muslim leaders.
I am very active in combating extremism and radicalisation
among all communities, and I have attended and spoken at
numerous meetings. I have been involved in initiatives and
have taken positive action to deal with the issues of
radicalisation and extremism. To deal with them requires a
holistic approach and we must all work together. It should
involve the community, local authorities, schools,
universities, prison authorities and the police. Mosques,
Imams and Muslim centres also have a vital role to play. We
must also take steps to combat radicalisation through the
use of the internet, notably through social media, and for
this we must work with organisations that can do so
effectively. Because of the shortage of time, I cannot
enumerate the steps to be taken, although I have prepared
an extended report on these issues.
I am also actively involved in promoting interfaith
dialogue and I am a patron of five Muslim and non-Muslim
organisations which are involved in these activities. In
the Holy Koran, Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala has said: “O
mankind! We have created you from male and female and made
you into nations and tribes, that you may know one
another”. As Muslims, we should get to know one another and
people from other communities, as commanded by Allah
subhanahu wa ta’ala.
Radicalisation and extremism cannot be dealt with by
looking at theological issues, because we need to take
positive steps. I am proud to be a practising Muslim. I
have studied the Holy Koran and the Sunnah. I doubt very
much if the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, has made a deep study
of Islam. I feel that a debate such as this, tabled by him,
can create discord and lead to further problems.
In verse 106, Surah An-Nahl refers to the notion of
Taqiyya—hiding one’s faith in life-threatening
conditions—as only self-defence. Mainstream Islam does not
accept the current situation anywhere in the West as
threatening Muslims to an extent that they would need to
hide their faith identity to survive. This question is
therefore completely irrelevant. In regard to Al Hijra, in
verse 97, Sura An-Nisa refers to Taqiyya in compelling
cases where Muslims cannot practise their faith for fear of
persecution and threat to their life. In such extreme
circumstances, they are advised to leave the land of
hostility for a safer place. Again, no such conditions
exist in the West to compel Muslims to migrate away from
the West. This is again totally irrelevant and taken out of
context.
In Islamic terminology, abrogation means lifting a ruling
indicated by a sharia text, on the basis of evidence from
the Holy Koran or consensus of the Sunnah. In most cases,
the abrogation was to make things easier for Muslims or
increase the rewards. As a Muslim, I say that it is totally
unnecessary to re-examine the three points raised by the
noble Lord, Lord Pearson. I want to emphasise that any act
of terrorism is not in our name.
Finally, I urge everyone in the country to be united and
stand together to combat any form of radicalisation or
extremism, in whatever form it comes.
7.03 pm
-
(Non-Afl)
My Lords, in the name of God, most gracious and most
merciful, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, for giving
me this opportunity. For the last 10 years, I have had
discussions with him on TV channels, as well as in this
House; I do not agree with him, but I thank him for the
opportunity to speak. I want to correct him on a few
things. I wish that he would respect the Prophet Muhammad
as I respect the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ.
There are a number of things that I need to clarify: first,
the caliphate. The noble Lord, , is very
knowledgeable; I do not wish to disagree with him, but in
cases of the Ottoman Empire, Mogul Empire and North African
empire, the caliphate did not exist after Sayedna Umar,
Uthman and Ali—that is it. The deliberate concept of
mischievous Muslims who can have four wives in the United
Kingdom is nonsense. British law is the superior law in
this country. Nobody is allowed to have four wives. Saying
that Muslims are breeding more children and will take over
is using the same language that Nazis used against Jewish
communities before the Second World War. It is done
deliberately when there is hatred against Muslims for their
birth rate. As for someone killing someone who leaves their
religion—in this country, nobody can do anything above the
law. I am a Muslim; I am British. My law is the British
law, which is for everyone. To be mischievous and say,
“These Muslims have some other laws in this country, they
will breed children, they will take over this country”, is
a deliberate attempt to frighten people.
On the secular rule that Muslims are told after Al Hijra to
leave|, I hosted Christian communities from Ethiopia here
last night because of the human rights situation there.
Abyssinia was a place where the Prophet Muhammad, peace be
upon him, asked his companions to go and live under a
Christian ruler because he allowed them to live in peace,
just like the majority of the 20 million to 30 million of
us who are living here in the United Kingdom, in Europe and
in the United States.
Looking at some of the figures, in America the Internal
Revenue Service is quoted as saying that $200 million was
spent by the Islamophobia industry last year, most of it by
groups designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as
hate crime groups. We need to put things into context.
I do not have to preach to anyone what the Holy Bible,
which I respect, says in the Books of Exodus, Deuteronomy,
Joshua and both Books of Kings. They talk about slaughter
and genocide. If these fanatics—ISIS or Daesh—picked up the
Bible and said, “This is why they invaded Iraq and kill
Muslims. because this is the teaching of the Bible”, it
would be complete nonsense. Whatever the religion, whether
Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism—one of the most peaceful
religions on earth, but we see what is happening in Myanmar
to the Rohingya communities—Islam, Judaism or Christianity,
it is the individuals who abuse the texts and the religion
for their own violent, political purposes.
This is a great country. Frankly, we do not need
Islamophobes, because every time we see people from Britain
First and other groups create this hatred, attacks on
Muslim, European and ethnic minority communities go up.
When the Minister replies, will she tell us the figures on
how much hatred and hate crime goes up when these groups
use this bad language? Only last week a Muslim woman was
refused service in McDonald’s because she was wearing a
hijab. Visible Muslims with beards, or even those in the
Sikh community with turbans, are attacked. People who speak
European languages are abused on buses. We have seen the
videos.
In this wonderful, democratic place, we should be talking
about the great contribution communities have made. When my
father came here after the Blitz this country’s industry
had disintegrated. In the steel industry, the textile
industry, the infrastructure, the health service and the
transport industry, ethnic minorities, Muslims, Hindus,
Sikhs from Europe and the Commonwealth came here and made
this country the Great Britain that it is today. During the
Labour Government we had the third largest economy; I used
to go around the world proudly telling people that. Even
today Britain is the fifth largest economy in the world.
Yes, we have criminals, but if we start pointing the finger
at all the Muslims first, then it may be the Jewish
communities after, then maybe the Sikh communities after
that. Then we might say, “All these coloured people,
different people who do not look like us, do not have green
eyes like us, are responsible for our social deprivation,
unemployment and economic crisis”. That is what the Nazis
did. That is what Hitler’s people did.
I just hope that we come to our senses and talk about the
great contribution. This is a great country—Muslims and
non-Muslims, all of us, stand together. Terrorists murdered
37 of our citizens.
7.10 pm
-
(LD)
My Lords, first, I declare my interests as in the register,
in particular my directorship of the Centre for the
Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University.
Having spent a great deal of time thinking about these
things and then listened to the noble Lord, , I do
not know whether the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of
Trafford, will have the same nostalgic feeling that I have
had, because so many of the things that I heard him say
were exactly those that I grew up hearing from Dr about Roman Catholics in
Northern Ireland. “They’re going to breed us out”, was one
of the favourite ones. “They kill people because of
apostasy. Look at the Spanish Inquisition, and poor
Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer burnt at the stake in Oxford
for their Protestant religion”—indeed, he called his church
in Belfast Martyrs Memorial because of all the Protestants
who had been murdered by the Catholic Church. He was not so
strong on mentioning the Catholics who had been murdered by
the Protestants, but there you are: we see it from our own
perspective. There were many other similarities as well.
Then came the demand: if Catholics are actually opposed to
the IRA, why does the leadership of the Catholic Church not
come out and say so in unequivocal terms? It is very much
what the noble Lord has said about the leadership of the
Muslim community. And so, one month after Lord Mountbatten,
then a Member of your Lordships’ House, was murdered by the
IRA, Pope Jean Paul II became the first reigning Pope to
come to Ireland. As the noble Lord, , referred to, he
said:
“I appeal to you, in language of passionate pleading. On my
knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence and
to return to the ways of peace … To Catholics, to
Protestants, my message is peace and love. May no Irish
Protestant think that the Pope is an enemy, a danger or a
threat”.
He appealed to young people to turn away, and so on. Within
days, the IRA gave him his reply: it dismissed it. In that
reply, it pointed out that the problem was a political
problem and not a religious problem: it was not killing
Protestants because they were Protestants, and the
loyalists were not killing Catholics because they believed
in transubstantiation; it was a political problem.
Sometimes, people will say, “Ah, but it is a completely
different thing if you’re dealing with Islamist
terrorists”. I think people sometimes need to explore the
issues that they are talking about rather than simply
presume. I went and spent some time talking to Abu Qatada,
the European leader of al-Qaeda. I started talking to him
in prison, necessarily through an interpreter, about the
fact that, for me, religious faith was very important. He
said, “Look, that’s fine. We can talk about religious faith
if you like, but this is not a religious problem. This is a
political problem. It is a political problem of what is
happening in my part of the world and has been happening
for a very long time”. The more I have looked at it, the
more I have become convinced that he was correct—in fact,
he was actually prepared to do what the IRA had been doing:
to come out and say that violence would not get the
political outcome they wanted. He asked me to take a
personal message to the office of the Prime Minister here
in the United Kingdom—the Prime Minister at the time was
. I took the
message, but there was no interest on the part of the
British Government in exploring whether Abu Qatada was
prepared to come out and say, “This business of the use of
violence is wrong, counterproductive and a mistake”. They
were prepared to do it eventually, after a lot of pressure,
with the IRA, with people like John Hume, and , but they were
not prepared to do it with Abu Qatada.
The noble Lord, , as he very often is,
is absolutely correct to make the connection with the end
of the caliphate, because, as was mentioned by the noble
Lord, , a very short
time after that some young men in Egypt said, “We’re going
to come together”. Was it for the purpose of martyrdom? No.
It was for the purpose of reinstituting the caliphate.
In all our religious and political backgrounds, there is
great variegation. Just a couple of weeks ago, I had
another long conversation, as I have had before, with
Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and
Ennahdha in Tunisia. This man is a democrat. He has
demonstrated clearly that he is committed to democracy. In
fact, I sometimes think he has more understanding of the
basics of democracy than I find with politicians in this
country because, as he says, it is not just about votes and
elections; it is also about having a culture of liberal
democracy that makes sure those elections are used to good
purpose. He is absolutely right, of course. That is not the
same as the Muslim Brotherhood everywhere but, if we paint
everyone with the same brush, we will find that we make the
situation worse rather than better.
That is my appeal: that we do not get mixed up about the
fact that people will see religious faith from many
different perspectives. As the noble Lord, , said, people will
interpret the scriptures written in the past in a very
different way now, if they have made progress, and in the
same way if they see things in a fundamentalist way. We
have to address the fact that there are political problems
and that we in this country have our responsibility to
resolve some of those wider problems. Sadly, the events of
the last 48 hours and the pronouncements from Washington
have made our job much more difficult in addressing the
political problems, when they should have been making them
easier.
7.15 pm
-
(Lab)
I thank the noble Lord, , for
providing the opportunity to discuss government strategy
against terrorism. It is on that issue rather than Islam
and its meaning that my contribution concentrates.
Listening to the general tone and tenor of what the noble
Lord said I do not know whether he regards, for example,
Members of this House and the Commons who are Muslims,
along with as the Mayor of London, as
stealthily working towards a future Muslim takeover of this
country, to which he made reference, or as fellow
law-abiding and peace-loving British citizens—full stop.
The noble Lord, , framed
his Question for Short Debate around one specific area
rather than more generally. As the briefing from the House
of Lords Library for this debate reminded us he raised
almost the same Question, only orally, at the beginning of
this year. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford,
replied then that:
“The Government’s strategy for tackling Islamist terrorism
is firmly based on strengthening our partnership with
communities, civil society groups and faith organisations
across the country”.—[Official Report, 24/1/17; col. 552.]
I assume that when she comes to reply, the Minister will
indicate not simply what actions the Government may have
taken this year in pursuit of that strategy, but what the
hard evidence is to show that whatever the Government have
done since the beginning of this year, it has had a
positive impact on strengthening partnerships, civil
society groups and faith organisations across the country.
Actions are not the same as impact; it is the impact of
their actions on which I seek a government answer.
I presume that the Minister will also indicate in her
response that the Government are seeking to tackle
terrorism across the board, including from supporters of
the kind of organisations in this country that now appear
to have a surprising degree of unwelcome support from the
President of the United States of America.
It has been helpful to have it confirmed in the recent
report by QC that our
security and intelligence agencies seek to ensure,
“consistent assessment and investigation of all terrorist
threats, regardless of ideology”.
Questions have been raised in a number of quarters about
the effectiveness of the Government’s Prevent strategy.
Home Office statistics apparently show that only 5% of the
7,631 people referred to the Prevent counterextremism
programme in 2015-16 ended up with specialist support to
turn them away from terrorism. What lessons do the
Government draw about the effectiveness or otherwise of the
Prevent strategy, and the way it is being applied and
implemented, from that figure of just 5%? The Government
must have a clear answer to that question, since the
Minister told this House last January that “we regularly
review Prevent”.
Are the Government really satisfied that they are
allocating sufficient resources to combat the threat of
terrorism, whether through preventive programmes or through
the work of our security and intelligence agencies,
including the police? In his report this month on the
attacks in London and Manchester, QC quoted the
director-general of MI5 as saying in describing the work of
his staff that:
“They are constantly making tough professional judgments
based on fragments of intelligence”.
Mr Anderson then went on to say:
“The reason why the judgements can be ‘tough’ is that they
are made against a background of imperfect information, and
yet frequently require staff to choose which of a number of
current and potentially deadly threats is most deserving of
scarce investigative resource”.
What do the Government read into the use of the word
“scarce” by Mr Anderson? Is it that sufficient resources
have been made available or that sufficient resources have
not in reality been made available? In that context, let us
remind ourselves that we are talking about national
security and the safety of our citizens.
One of the three considerations that Mr Anderson chose to
mention in his report in saying,
“no responsible person could offer a copper-bottomed
assurance that terrorists will always be stopped”
was,
“current CT resourcing of around £3 billion per year”.
In her Statement to Parliament on Tuesday the Home
Secretary said,
“We will shortly be announcing the budgets for policing for
2018-19, and I am clear that we must ensure that
counter-terrorism policing has the resources needed to deal
with the threats we face”.—[Official Report, Commons,
5/12/17; col. 915.]
In his report Mr Anderson, referring to CT policing, says,
“the indicative profile of their grant allocation over the
next three years sees a reduction of 7.2% in their
budgets”.
What parts of policing activity and what numbers of
officers and staff do the Government include in their
definition of counterterrorism policing, in respect of
which the Home Secretary has said the Government will
ensure they have the resources needed? Which police
activities do the Government not consider to have a role in
countering terrorism and are therefore not covered by the
Home Secretary’s statement about ensuring the provision of
the necessary resources? Does the Home Secretary’s
commitment about resources, which she gave on Tuesday,
cover, for example, community policing, or is community
policing not considered by this Government to play an
important role in countering terrorism?
I would appreciate clear answers from the Government to
these questions, not least because the executive summary of
the Anderson report states that MI5 and CT policing
recommendations,
“include commitments to better data exploitation, to wider
sharing of information derived from MI5 intelligence
(including with neighbourhood policing) and to the
consistent assessment and investigation of all terrorist
threats, regardless of ideology”,
which some might not unreasonably conclude means that
community and neighbourhood policing have an important role
to play in countering terrorism.
I conclude by again thanking the noble Lord, , for
providing me with the opportunity to raise the points and
questions I have raised.
7.22 pm
-
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of
Trafford) (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this
debate, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, for
securing it. There have been some very interesting
contributions this evening and quite varied views, which is
always the case in a debate. First, I thank noble Lords,
such as my noble friend , who play an active
part in communities and in promoting interfaith
understanding, because that work is so valuable. I also
thank the noble Lord, , for what he said at
the start of his contribution. I am not nostalgic for those
days; I look back with sadness. Noble Lords will detect
that I have no hint of an Irish accent, and that is because
I came to this country in the 1970s as an Irish Catholic.
Those were unpleasant times for Irish Catholics in this
country. The noble Lord, , and I have many
interesting discussions on that dichotomy. I join noble
Lords who stated that terrorism has no place in Islam: it
does not. It has no place in Islam, Buddhism, Catholicism,
Hinduism or any religion, and to conflate the two is quite
dangerous to society.
Over generations, we have built something quite incredible
in this country: a successful multiracial, multifaith
democracy. That success is underpinned by British values,
which the mainstream majority share and celebrate,
including freedom of speech, the rule of law, individual
liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different
faiths and beliefs. As the noble Lord, , said, Britain is
home to diverse communities who are free to practise their
religion in accordance with the law. The noble Lord also
talked about the 2 billion law-abiding Muslim citizens
across the globe. He is absolutely correct. There are also
people within our Parliament such as the noble Lords in
this Chamber and of course the Mayor of London, .
I thank the noble Lord, , and my noble friend
for describing the
various tenets of the Muslims religion in the Question for
debate, and the dangers of government asking Muslim
leaders, or indeed any other religious leaders, to
re-examine the tenets of their religion, because they are
quite free to practise it.
The noble Lords, and , and my noble
friend talked about
Muslim-on-Muslim terrorism. I saw that in Manchester, and
of course we see it in every attack: these attacks are
indiscriminate and Muslims suffer in them. The noble Lords,
and , talked about the
aftermath of such attacks and how Muslim communities suffer
further in the spikes in anti-Muslim hatred that we see
afterwards. Those points were well made.
The noble Lord, Lord Pearson, made a point about sharia law
which the noble Lord, , corrected him on. Sharia
law is not promoted by government. It has no jurisdiction
in England and Wales, and the Government have no intention
of changing that position. Regardless of religious beliefs,
we are all equal before the law. That is a really important
point. The Government do not prevent people from seeking to
regulate their lives through religious beliefs, and nothing
in law prevents people doing that.
-
My Lords—
-
The noble Lord will encroach on my response time.
-
Is the noble Baroness therefore saying that sharia law is
not running de facto in our land through the 87 Muslim
tribunals? This is all very well documented.
-
I am saying to the noble Lord that people in this country
abide by British law. It is as simple as that. Sharia law
has no jurisdiction in England and Wales. I think I made it
very clear that we do not prevent people from regulating
their lives through religious belief—for example, in the
sense that a Catholic might. I hope I have made that point
clear.
The noble Lord, , touched on what the
Government are doing to tackle Islamist terrorism. We are
absolutely committed to tackling it, and our strategy is
firmly based on strengthening our partnership with
communities, civil society groups and faith organisations
across the United Kingdom. As the noble Lord said, the most
effective way to counter the poisonous narratives of
terrorists and extremists is to give the community the
capacity to resist those narratives.
In the small amount of time I have, I will touch on the
various questions that the noble Lord, , posed. The first
was on Prevent, and its outcomes rather than its aims. We
have undertaken 169 community-based projects, delivered in
2016-17, reaching more than 53,000 participants; 44% of
those were delivered in schools and were aimed at
increasing young people’s resilience to terrorist and
extremist ideologies.
Around one-third of the people who are supported by Channel
are linked to far-right extremism; it is very important
that the noble Lord brought up that point. He asked why so
few Prevent referrals become Channel cases. As I have said,
one-third of the people supported by Channel are linked to
far-right extremism, and the Channel process is provided
only to those who genuinely need it. About 14%, and he
might think that figure is low, were discussed at Channel
panels in 2015-16. A further 50% of the referrals, over
3,700 people, were referred on by the assessment process to
other support services. Without that rigorous assessment,
the vulnerabilities that many of these individuals might
have might go unsupported. Around 36% of referrals require
no further action, and that is broadly similar to those
found in other safeguarding mechanisms. For example, out of
the 621,000 children referred to social services in 2015,
35% required no action either before or after assessment.
The noble Lord questions whether Prevent is working. We
believe it is. Apart from the statistics that I have just
given him, since February 2010 300,000 pieces of illegal
terrorist material have been removed from the internet. The
Prevent statutory duty has prompted a significant step
change in the delivery of Prevent work in sectors. The
number of front-line staff who have received training has
increased significantly, with over 850,000 front-line
staff, including NHS staff and teachers, trained in
spotting signs of radicalisation, while since 2012 over
1,000 people have received support through Channel.
More than 150 attempted journeys to the Syria/Iraq conflict
area were disrupted in 2015. This includes action by the
family courts. The courts protected approximately 50
children from around 20 families from being taken to the
conflict areas in 2015.
The noble Lord asked about the Anderson report. The Home
Secretary has asked to provide an
independent stock-take of progress in a year’s time.
However, as the noble Lord said, implementation is linked
to resources. We will shortly be announcing the budgets for
policing in 2018-19, and the Home Secretary is clear that
we must ensure that counterterrorism policing has the
resources needed to deal with the threats that we face.
The noble Lord asked about providing more resources to MI5.
The Government have actually increased funding for MI5. In
the 2015 spending review a 30% uplift on counterterrorism
spending was announced. This is equivalent to over £3
billion over the period to 2020. The additional funding was
to meet the increased threat from Daesh and of marauding
firearms attacks.
The noble Lord, , asked me about
the Muslim Brotherhood review. He is correct to say that a
review was conducted. Having taken advice, Ministers
decided against publishing the report for national security
reasons, given the sources of some of the data in it. The
UK has taken and will continue to take concerns about the
Muslim Brotherhood very seriously. We have published a
summary of the main findings of the report, and they
support the conclusion that membership of, association with
or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered
as a possible indicator of extremism.
We will keep under review what is promoted and activities
undertaken by the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK in Arabic as
well as in English. We will challenge extremists’ poisonous
narratives, promote positive alternatives that steer
vulnerable people to better ways to get on in life and
continue to refuse visas to members and associates of the
Muslim Brotherhood who are on record as having made extreme
comments, where that will be conducive to the public good.
In line with our existing policy guidelines and approach to
extremism in all forms, we will seek to ensure that
charities with links to the Muslim Brotherhood do not give
support or finance to the Muslim Brotherhood instead of
undertaking their lawful charitable purpose. We will
strengthen liaison arrangements with international partners
to ensure that allegations of illicit funding or other
abuse of charities are robustly investigated and
appropriate action taken. We will enforce the EU asset
freeze on Hamas, and keep under review whether the views
and activities of the Muslim Brotherhood meet the legal
test for proscription.
I have gone over my time and missed out half my speech, but
I think that I have addressed noble Lords’ points, which
are important ones to address. I finish by thanking all
noble Lords for taking part in the debate.
House adjourned at 7.35 pm.
|
