Ep.73 - Jordan Peterson, White Supremacy and the Perils of Engagement - with Yahya Birt
Is there a problem with Muslim public intellectuals and scholars that engage with the political right? My guest this week, Yayha Birt, believes that white convert scholars that interact with the likes of Jordan Peterson should evaluate whether they risk confirming their anti-Islam prejudices and a distasteful pro-white ideology that today undergirds the populist white nativist backlash. In a recent piece he penned, Birt, a Muslim convert, is critical of those that belong to the neo-traditionalist school, an Islamic persuasion he shares, who need to ask more profound questions about their outreach activities with the right-wing and whether by doing so they undermine second and third generation Muslims who face racial and religious hatred in the mainstream. Yahya believes that although one needs to show due respect to scholars this does not mean we must show them deference when they show political naivety or confirm problematic political causes.
Yahya Birt is a research director at the Ayaan Institute in London and is a community historian who has taught at the University of Leeds. He has published over a dozen peer-reviewed articles on Islam in Britain and co-edited British Secularism and Religion (2016), Islam in Victorian Liverpool (2021) and The Collected Poems of Abdullah Quilliam (2021).
His most recent book on Abdullah Quilliam can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Islam-Victorian-Liverpool-Britains-Community/dp/1800119828/
More about Yahya Birt here https://ayaaninstitute.com/yahya-birt/
Thanks to the team: Riaz Hasan, Musab Muhammad, Reem Walid, Adeel Alam, Ahaz Atif and Umar Abdul Salam.
You can donate to the show here: https://www.thinkingmuslim.com/contribute
Follow us on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/jalalayn and https://twitter.com/thinking_muslim
Website: thinkingmuslim.com
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This is a largely accurate clean verbatim transcript. Please refer to the original programme where incomplete or unclear.
“As for his place within white nativism I see Peterson as the gateway drug to its harder forms to those who call for direct discrimination against Muslims in the west, who champion Islamophobia, do sanction wars and bombing against Muslims abroad. He soft sells his political agenda through personal morality issues that shine with orthodox Muslim men”
i have always been very critical of muslim engagement with the progressive left because this has often led to silence over repugnant social positions in some parts of the muslim community the right wing is treated very differently possibly because there may be overlaps with current social concerns
the same criticism of those scholars that engage with the left can equally be applied to those that engage with the right this new white nativist trend is fiercely anti-migrant oozes Islamophobia and believes in a white chauvinism that resurrects ideas of ethnic and cultural hierarchy i've noticed that some mainly Muslim men it must be said who are captivated by the likes of Jordan Peterson and give too much credibility to their superficial prescriptions that do not reflect the depth and detail of the Qur’an and the prophetic Sunnah
Is there a problem with Muslim public intellectuals and scholars that engage with the political right?
My guest this week Yahya Birt believes that white convert scholars that interact with the likes of Jordan
Peterson or Roger Scruton should evaluate whether they risk confirming
the anti-Islam prejudices and a distasteful pro-white ideology that
today undergirds the populist white nativist backlash in a recent piece he penned Yahya Birt a
Muslim convert is critical of those who belong to the neo traditionalist school
an Islamic persuasion he shares who need to ask more profound questions
about their outreach activities with the right and whether by doing so they undermine second and third generation
Muslims sons and daughters of migrants who face racial and religious hatred in the
mainstream Yahya believes that although one needs to show due respect to scholars this
does not mean we must show them deference when they exhibit political naivety or confirm problematic political
causes Yahya Birt is a research director at the Ayaan Institute in London and is a
community historian who has taught at the University of Leeds. He has published over a dozen peer-reviewed articles on
Islam in Britain and co-edited British Secularism and Religion
Islam in Victorian Liverpool and The Collected Poems of Abdullah Quilliam.
Welcome to the thinking Muslim podcast um thank you so much for having me it's
great pleasure to be on and um I do appreciate the work that you do
in raising the level of public Islamic discourse jazakallah khan and really the pleasure
is all mine and um uh i'm today going to focus primarily on an article i read
that you published a few days back and I’ll put the uh the link in the show notes and I
think in the article you very eloquently and persuasively argue that there is a white nativist
undercurrent developing in the west and Muslims particularly white converts are
not immune to its extremes can you please spell out for our listeners what white nativism is first of all because
many i suppose deny its significance that's fair enough um let me try and run
through some of the main features of white nativism both in terms of its ideas
and white nativism as a movement so the first ideological feature really
is a fear of demographic change and it's the idea that there will be a great
replacement of white culture and white peoples by black and brown
cultures or black and brown peoples who are seen in this world view as intellectually
morally inferior so this white nativist ideology it tends to provide whites with a way to
legitimise a shared past and a national identity that ignores and minimises its
history of colonialism slavery and racial violence and discrimination
it is also used as a superglue to overcome class antagonisms among whites
themselves and replaces them with racial antagonisms instead we should sort of caution that whiteness
itself is not a biological fact it's a constructed identity and therefore it's a malleable or changeable legal and
political category let me give you an example of Anglo-American whiteness at one point it
was exclusively Anglo-Saxon but over the centuries it brought in to include Nordic and Germanic peoples then
the Irish then the Mediterranean Europeans the Italians the Spanish the Greeks
and at this very moment has been extended to Ukrainians it's at earlier points of history these
white people were stigmatised as foreigners and as inferior in ways similar to the racialization of brown
and black peoples current white nativism is influenced by a theory which came out
of France a decade ago called great replacement theory which plays on this idea that white culture or even white
populations will be displaced or dominated by by non-white cultures and populations
um and this this theory that came out of France has gone global and has been found in the manifestos written by the
Christchurch mosque attacker or heard in the chance of the American alt-right at the rally in Charlottesville a few years
ago in Europe great replacement theory has become increasingly mainstream
with tightening immigration and refugee controls and also in citizenship especially after
what was described as a Syrian refugee crisis every Muslim in the west contrasts that
the panic and the lurch towards the right with the Syrian refugee crisis with the current war reception of
Ukrainian refugees if anything defines white nativism it is a recourse to law to formally exclude
non-whites in Britain now citizenship for non-white protectant is being chipped away out as
The Windrush scandal and the stripping of Shamima Begum’s citizenship shows white nativism has developed a youth
movement wing especially among young men the Identitarian movement in Europe and
the Alt-Right in North America white nativism or white nationalism or
supremacy has manifested in right-wing populism of recent years in the elections of Trump and Johnson
the Brexit vote in the emergence of quasi fascist figures like Viktor Orbán in Hungary
and white nativism is instituting a wide range of powers that western governments use the surveillance and
securitization of Muslim communities turning them into suspect communities
and seniors as risky citizens seen as a threat or a danger and that is racialized and Muslims are
profiled on the basis of appearance so given all of this i don't see how
it's possible empirically speaking to return to your question to deny the significance of white nativism
given all of these developments i suppose you know the arguments there are some who who argue that um
white nativism is a political tool created by the progressive left
uh to undermine um mainstream conservative positions this is this i guess is what i would
describe as a kind of daily mail or fox talking point um
uh it's I don't know really if it's worth answering that question um
I think you know every serious Muslim intellectual Muslim activist acutely
aware of the lurch to the right because Muslim Muslims have been sort of the in the west have sort of been canaries in
the coal mine as far as um you know this kind of rising nationalism has it has been
concerned because Muslims have been the internal and external enemies of this of
this project um you know particularly since and uh
i really don't see how it's unless we're going to put our heads in the sand i don't think that's critical arguments i
I want to come to your central argument about what you see as your responsibility as a white convert
but it seems to me that you're very uneasy about some Muslim public intellectuals and scholars
and their close proximity to this white nativist trend who are we talking about here and what
makes you uneasy about their outreach programs let me see first of all that in the essay
I take care to say that this is a general issue not a convert-only issue yeah
in other words the appeal of white nativism is quite widespread now among some second and third generation Muslim
men in the west of different ethnic backgrounds i don't want to suggest at all
that this is uniquely attractive to white converts um although some are attracted to it
so the real problem is our confusion about the relationship of religious orthodoxy to cultural change
Islam is universal message and so all cultures come within its purview and our
culture and our differences is a sign of Allah’s creative power the means by which we recognize each
other's humanity through mutual recognition so in our context what does that mean
well it means a couple of things that no one should have to give up their culture per se to become an orthodox Muslim
although certain practices or customs may not be in harmony with Islamic principles but certainly conversion to
Islam should not mean acculturation or adoption of another culture
equally migrants should not be expected to assimilate and give up their cultures entirely to belong
they have cultural rights to maintain and pass on their history language culture and Islamicate values to their
children even as newcomers in a foreign land practically speaking migrants will be
bicultural in that they will be able to migrate to navigate the private and public spheres
um using whatever cultural register that they they have mastered
and i think the final point is that obviously cultures are never bounded so there will be integration and creativity
and mixing over time but what i am objecting to specifically here is the
white native assumption that immigrants or refugees must assimilate that is
one-way traffic and that is a nativist demand it's not an Islamic one
you know this confusion over culture and religion is apparent in them in a number of ways first there's the expectation
that the first migrants had cultural Islam where their children were rediscovering
pristine deculturated Islam which is a myth actually they were re-culturing their
relationship to Islam in their own unique and hybrid terms
secondly among white converts in particular there has been a tendency over the decades and let me stress
that's just one tendency among many to do the very same
in other words to claim that they have converted to pristine classical Islam while the immigrants are trapped in
forms of cultural Islam by this move they claim undue authority
in the question of how a new culture fit into a universal tradition and they deny the struggles and
sacrifices of pioneer generations that came to the west you know simply to say they migrated for
worldly reasons alone to completely leave out consideration of the colonial context out of which they came the
racist rejection violence and discrimination they endured is for me a travesty of history
a viable multi-ethnic multicultural Muslim community cannot ride roughshod over each other's
histories in this way we should be compassionate we should be careful and good listeners and we should be willing
to be open to the experiences of others only through understanding and acceptance that we
will come together as one community over time with all of that said i would observe that some key convert
leaders act as conduits provide legitimacy towards some figures
attached to white nativism or we could say that they work to soften up
resistance to some not all of its ideas this is true even if if these
convert leaders decisively reject a lot of what like white nativism is about at
the same time and uh who are we talking about here yeah here okay so in the Anglophone Islamic world of the West you
know two key figures here are Sheikh Hamza Yusuf in America and Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad in the UK
as they have the most credibility and are the most mainstream there are converts who are much more extreme
advocate white's only marriage and openly support forms of white ethnocentrism but they are also much
more marginal and we shouldn't overstate their size reach or influence but they do exist what makes me uneasy
to return to your question more so in the case of Sheikh Hamza Yusuf is that his engagement with populist recruiters
for the radical right like Jordan Peterson or with an intellectual leader of it like the late Sir Roger Scruton
who died in 2020 provide no intellectual challenge on either their own track record of
Islamophobia their own critical boosting of Islamophobes like Douglas Murray or Ayaan Hirsi Ali who are advocating for direct discrimination against Muslims in the west whom they paint as an enemy within
but i would also say that here comes the use of working directly with the Trump presidency on the Committee of
Unalienable rights which was which essentially wanted to take the cultural wars into US
constitutional law and this necessitated she comes the use of taking a back seat
and protesting all the other things that Trump was doing during his tenure like his Muslim travel ban his cruel
separation of migrant children from their parents at the southern US border and his support for an insurrectionist
attempt to take over the Capitol once he had lost the election in 2020 . in my reading Trump was no ordinary president
but was the opportunistic face of a white nationalist insurgency he is the only
American president to have been impeached twice he was not someone in whose administration the respected
religious your disagreement with Sheikh Hamza
Yusuf and Abdul Hakim in some more detail i mean i suppose their argument would be that what is
wrong with that were an outreach when i watched the Hamza Yusuf and Jordan Peterson interview and yes i found it
to be lacking clarity and challenge but i suppose we meet and engage with non-Muslims all the time and if they can
reach people in positions of influence then in a sense this is emulating the
best of the Prophetic Sunnah the Messenger sallallahu alayhi wa sallam met with the leaders of Quraysh and the tribal
chiefs around Makkah i mean one can argue even his meeting at Taif led to what some may argue to be a
humiliating outcome isn't their activity very much part of an age-old tradition
of reaching out to people of influence let me say that the discussion between Jordan Peterson and um should come to
use for such a private chat this was a staged event with tens of thousands of
viewers so i'm quite sure on both sides it was a strategic decision and it was not an ad
hoc one and the approach taken by Hamza Yusuf was a soft one which allowed Peterson you know to set the
agenda she comes off at no challenge and doing this knowing that it could be read
by numerous Muslim followers as validation and affirmation of all of his content
but as i said before uh Peterson has promoted some of the most notorious Islamophobes in the
Anglophone cultural sphere today and that cannot be left da’wa
is often used as a sort of catch-all rationale for all kinds of outreach and
interaction with non-Muslims all i'm suggesting here is that we tread with caution before labelling all interactions
da’wa willy-nilly in this way especially given that the whole approach of Hamza Yusuf
since 2001 particularly in the years after the Arab Spring has been to get closer to the
Republicans so my in my reading it's mostly a political exercise not one of da’wa per
se i mean his approach has mostly been political outreach to the Republicans but clearly with the Republicans out of
office uh he's gone towards a cultural approach to the i guess the the radical rights the
American radical right and this interview is part of that yeah i've come across Muslims who pay a lot of
attention to Jordan Peterson and those on the right especially when it comes to
social issues like abortion and LGBTQ
they argue there is an overlap with Islam and those who
are socially more conservative Jordan Peterson for example for many years has
spoken to young Muslims but generally young men who feel that feminism and the liberal
left have uh diluted their sense of masculinity isn't there an argument to say that
these characters Roger Scruton as another example a traditional conservative in the in the berkian mode
isn't there an argument to say that these figures uh have more connection with Muslim
causes than those on the progressive left i'm not an expert on Peterson in the sense
that i've not made a thorough study of his output to an academic standard and that's difficult because he's got
thousands of hours of youtube videos so i don't know how anybody could really get their heads
around that i followed his career and his influence on Muslim men from a distance since he came to prominence
and as you've just said there is a separate question of gender dynamics at play here gender identity
issues in his appeal to Muslim men and men in general to become
real men as he defines it and clearly chimes with Muslim
but i'm going to pass over your question here not because it is unimportant but because i want to look further into it
before commenting and writing or writing about it or taking it up in
serious platforms like this but but you do imply in your article that Peterson
is part of this white nativism trend well i mean you know before my piece was written and had gone to press um
Peterson released his message to Muslims and obviously it was received badly by
nearly all Muslims and even by some of those who previously looked up to him they were they repented and left
following him uh i think we need to ask at this point what is the point of doubt with a person who thinks Muslims are
barbarians who are always in fighting who must make peace with the country that is colonizing Muslim land and
dispossessing its people if you want to hear the echo of dehumanising language Israel uses about Palestinians you find
all the same language in American history and its ethnically cleansed indigenous peoples the same talk of peace or
breaking promises and dispossessing them of land and killing them and discriminate indiscriminately or calling
them barbarians and asserting the superiority of the west the same language of settler colonialism the same
language that Peterson uses unabashedly in his message to Muslims
as for his place within white nativism i see Peterson as the gateway drug to its harder forms to those who call for
direct discrimination against Muslims in the west who champion Islamophobia do
sanction wars and bombing against Muslims abroad he soft sells his political agenda through personal
morality issues that chime with orthodox Muslim men so i do think i would say one thing i do
think there is an instrumentalization of personal morality issues to sell a hard a hard Islamophobic
political agenda and we can't divorce the two issues easily in my book and i guess that's
where them could be disagreement people say well you could affect a separation but i see it as all one package in
your article and it's it's a brilliant piece and i really advise uh my listeners to to to have a read
uh you also make reference to an ex-Dutch MP Joram Van Klaveren
he's a former colleague of Islam hater Geert Wilders and a former member of his right wing
PVV party uh Joram Van Klaveren converted to Islam partly i think uh
at the hands of uh Abdal Hakim Murad and i remember some Muslims at the time
hailing this as almost like an Umar Bin Al-Khattab moment here's an influential
right-wing individual who after seeing
the truth of Islam he converts and his racism his his anti-immigration er
becomes a thing of the past isn't this a sign of an example actually
of the victory of engagement well look you know let me start off by saying of course i'm happy that someone anyone
embraces Islam i mean how could i not be so let's leave that to one side
um that's not that's not that's not on the table here what i would question is a logic that allows one to say that this
is an instant of Umari conversion i.e that someone who is hostile to Islam who
is a doughty enemy to Muslims who converts and becomes the doubted protector of Muslims and later one of
their greatest leaders you know does this conversion of Joram Van Klaveren and is it an Umari conversion in this sense
so in researching this article i talked to a number of Muslim activists and Muslim intellectuals in Holland
about the conversion and its impact locally and my research drew two conclusions
Joram Van Klaveren’s public records and i'm happy to be corrected on this score on immigration and refugee policies
post-conversion is mixed or confusing at best so on immigration he said that he left
the PVV because it had become too hard line which sounds promising right but in
another interview indicated that refugees should not be brought to Europe but kept in their regions of origin this
sounds a lot like a lot like a more hardline approach and he's also a fan of Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad’s
Travelling Home which I criticise in my essay for promoting the white nativist logic of the assimilation of
migrants and blaming migrants and their children for creating their own problems in a way that runs
counter to the spirit of mutual cultural recognition in Surat al-Hujurat.
Van Klaveren is being lauded abroad in America and Britain and so i am told being
funded by money from the Gulf for his dollar project but within Holland itself
he is this is as a result of my conversations he's still seen as having been disconnected as having a few
connections to a largely working class with some community and its immediate concerns around structural Islamophobia
and racism he sits precise nowhere precisely nowhere in their struggle
and thus unsurprising given his background he remains a cultural conservative by conviction
so i do not see in this a doubting defense of a beleaguered Muslim community as omar
even may god be pleased with him was the early Muslims you can convert to Islam yet still carry
some of the prejudices that may be brought over from your former life well it's not just that is it is that what is
the call to Islam that's been given to them you know in other words we have to be unambiguous about
Islam's anti-racist foundations yeah i suppose when Umar Bin Khattab
and when he converted the first act he did was to publicly rebuke the leaders of Quraysh
and and i suppose that was an act of of uh separating himself from his past
uh ideas um and and maybe that's that's part of the problem here that uh those many who
convert to Islam still retain some of those uh some of those as i call them
prejudices but again i think we have to look at what what call to Islam is being made to them um as well i mean i'm not
going to i'm not going to say that they are um they have no responsibility
in the matter but i'm also suggesting we look at how are we calling them to Islam
what are we saying and not saying i think that's a critical part of the discussion let's look at for example Abdul Hakim Murad
and Sheikh Hamza Yusuf these two public intellectual scholars are part of a greater
grassroots movement or projects of seminaries and institutes that are culturally and ethnically very diverse i
mean if you visit the Cambridge Mosque it strikes me to be a project that involves all Muslims
how much do you think their individual mindsets reflect this cultural and ethnic superiority i suppose or or can
we be more charitable and say at most there may be acting naively politically
naively when engaging with the likes of Jordan Peterson or Roger Scruton well i
agree with you that the Zaytuna College and the Cambridge Muslim College are inclusive institutions not just
culturally but also ideologically um i should have made that point clearer about Zaytuna in the piece in the essay
that i wrote which i did for the CMC but I didn't do it for the Zaytuna but
my view is that this this political or my assessment is a this political and cultural outreach that to white nativist
radical right it undermines that very ethos of these institutions and given
that these shakes are the heads of these admirable educational initiatives and mosques
and are their primary founding figures they are tied up with the branding of these institutions
so ultimately that is a question for them not for me they may think the risk can be defrayed
but as an outside observer that's not my assessment but as i've been arguing with you today the risks go much wider than
managing the reputation of of this two or three Islamic institutions in the west i mean isn't there a difference
between Abdul Hakim and Hamza Yusuf in in the sense that
Abdul Hakim Murad he engages with these people in a private capacity i've not seen
again i you know i may not have followed it so closely but i've not seen uh any public engagement with
members of the white nativist trend whereas um Hamza Yusuf he engages as you
said with the republican party in fact he sits on their forums uh he is very happy to share platforms
with people like Roger Scruton who as you know i mean you know in Britain we know him to be a an out and right
Islamophobe um and recently he of course uh was was ready to
uh to to engage with Jordan Peterson in a very public way i mean i suppose what i'm saying is that there is a difference
here between private engagement and very public engagement which borders on endorsement of some of
these ideas i mean I take care in the piece i mean i think we're covering ground i already
covered in in talking about Van Klaveren um so let me just restate that i mean obviously in the essay i make it very
clear that um Hamza Yusuf’s engagement is political and cultural okay whereas
Abdul Hakim just cultural and has mostly been private um but has become public
knowledge with the conversion of Van Klaveren so
i'm not saying that that we shouldn't give da’wah to people but what i what I
focus on here is that it isn't the Umari possibility is being invoked here
that the conversion of a few prominent leaders of the nativist right will
create a transformation in the political situation of Muslims in in Europe or
America and on that score i'm much more sceptical for the reasons that i
outlined earlier yeah this this is what i'm saying that the the the idea is that there is a kind of a political benefit
for an Umar of the modern age converting and that white nationalism somehow being magically diffused
what i think that that is obscuring is the fact that what is the call to Islam that's being made to them in the first
place that makes them still feel comfortable to remain outside of any committed anti-racism
um effort as you referred earlier to Umar’s (ra)
sort of you know immediate denunciation of the Kurdish we don't see this kind of political activism on on the part of
these converts who they still seem to remain comfortably in the conservative
political um arena in terms of um you know
some of the white nativist assumptions about migrants and the like and i would suggest that part of that rests with the
call that's been given to them right and so the call does not sufficiently engage
with address Islam as a as a as a theory of justice which is which
stands against racism which stands against xenophobia which stands against um
uh some of the the trends we see uh across the west yeah in a nutshell now i
may be reading too much into your article but do you think that some white Muslim converts look upon non-white
Muslim cultures with a level of disdain i think that the the matter is subtler
than you suggest within neo-traditionalism and i want to speak about this movement in particular
although i don't want to suggest that there aren't similar problems with white converts in other movements
but let me speak about the movement that i know best because i've been part of it for for
nearly three decades you know there is within neo-traditionalism there is a hierarchy of of non-white traditional
Muslim cultures that within the movement that the movement sees as having been
least affected adversely by western modernity so there's a romance if you
like of the authentic sage of the east you know who imparts timeless undisturbed tradition
accessed by an accomplished translator who is only a simple mediator of this timeless tradition to the Anglophone
west so the translator in this instance is positioned as
somebody who has no agency by which i mean they have no interpretive power or
political agency but are merely acting like a relay station changing Morse code into Latin
characters but what i'm saying to you sort of three decades into this movement
we should be more self-reflective we shouldn't be naive and we should accept that translation is
always an interpretive act and therefore it's always a political act uh in my book
um i'm not saying that translations could have more fidelity or less fidelity but there are always choices
involved in translations so to return to your question the top tier of non-white
Muslim cultures reflects the educational histories of the of the main figures
of neo-traditional in the west so the ottoman world the Maghrib the Yemen Egypt
Syria as a result there was a lack of engagement with other with forms of traditional Sunnis in other parts of the
Muslim world most significantly South Asia so there has been disparagement of
South Asian Muslim cultures and Islamic scholarship in South Asia as well as
appreciation and pragmatic engagement so it's a mixed picture
but let us say that neo-traditionalism like Salafism or Deobandism to a lesser degree also did
provided a space for second generation south asian Muslims in the west to dispute with their parents so-called
cultural Islam in favor of authentic deculturated Islam carried largely by
arab neo-traditionalists and their western translators so what i'm saying is we have to put
this myth of a deculturated Islam and Islam without culture to bed
it is out of state it's welcome as its consequences have been divisive in my view instead what we need to see
ta‘arruf as an invitation to have a healthy creative relationship between our faith and our
culture and we should we should accord the same courtesy to others we should be
thankful for this sign of Allah's creative power and they're not in our context we can only do so if we forge a
commitment to anti-racism into a cosmopolitan outlook culturally speaking
look you know this is happening anyway in our habits of cultural consumption but i suggest we deepen this to be to
make it a spiritual and ethical practice just as a as a clarification about that point i mean
isn't it the case that sometimes cultures do get in the way of this anti-racism call
i had a friend you know you live you're a white convert you live in Bradford i had a friend who was a white convert he
moved to London and partly he did so because he felt that he was never
accepted by some parts of the Muslim community uh because racism was quite rife in South
Asian cultures and and there was a reluctance to to embrace him
as part of the community isn't there a need to tackle uh find you know those
cultures as a as a as a whole uh you know we cannot deculturalize
Islam that's fair enough but isn't there a need to tackle some of these extreme um
ideas and and habits that have formed part of our cultural makeup well i think
that's right um i agree with you uh anti-racism is a self-critical
practice first and foremost it's not about um like any form of
muhasaba any form of self-examination anti-racism as a spiritual Islamic practice you
should start with yourself and you know that means examining our own attitudes um uh i think I've seen
since the black lives matter protests global protests
um you know i've seen a lot of much more reflection and energy say amongst British Muslims
of South Asian heritage about addressing anti-blackness uh in their communities there's a lot
more movement on that now and for decades it was quite a dismal picture but I see signs that this self
critique is already in play not that it's getting necessarily getting uh worse you know
that there's more myopia blindness i think there is self-critical practice going on and we should welcome
that i just think that everybody needs to do their homework so whether it's white converts or second generation
desis or whoever it is we all have to do homework uh you know ethical homework
uh on ourselves um i think it's important but obviously anti-racism is is about structural
injustice as well not just personal ethical practice now you spoke about uh
the aforementioned Muslim public intellectuals and how they can be characterized with the label
neo-traditionalists the understanding that um they're inheritors of a pure
Sunni tradition that revives Usul-al fiqh, scholarship and Sufi mysticism
but i think you make a really interesting point in your article that they are also equally defined by their
response to Salafism but also by the ethos of Syrian survivalist political
quietism what is quietism why is it problematic in your eyes when considering Islam's
take on justice put simply it's the politics of survival in the autocratic postcolonial state
and that's been transplanted uncritically into an entirely different context the secular democratic one of
the west where we have considerable political freedoms where you know i would argue despite the pressures on us
and I don't gloss over any of those in the essay we may yet thrive
not just survive yet the neo-traditionalist argument is that we should suffer in silence or
stand aside from the great causes of injustice in our times and we should not be naive. States like the United Arab
Emirates are actively trying to undermine democratic democratically elected Muslims in the west and they're
working with the Israelis to undermine Muslim activism in the west that is critical of undemocratic state power in
the middle east and the dispossession of the Palestinian people and all that is freighted on to a kind
of theological argument between neo-traditionalism and Salafism whether that Salafism was quietist or activist
after the Arab spring the counter-revolution led by the Arab monarchies and Sheikhdoms as well as the
secular Arab republics with their in-house ulema have developed a political theology of abject submission
to arbitrary state power with no room for civil society freedoms of any description
and here the branch of Salafism called Madhkali Salafism
and neo-traditionalist Islam have converged together so to be precise the quietism is for the
Muslim masses you must put up with gross injustices as a spiritual practice to
bear patiently with tribulations while political activism is outsourced to state aligned ulema on behalf of the
political authority whose task is to keep the masses quiet i note that Abdul Hakim Murad has thankfully
dissented from this curated form of state Islam but i must say he's done so
in a rather muted rather than a forceful way, which is what is really needed here.
you know are you asking for too much when you require that all scholars
should make very strong or should have very strong political positions on all issues no i mean I think if you broach
the issue if you talk about the state control of Islam you have to do it in a clear way that's all i'm saying as
Abdul Hakim has raised the issue himself um i feel that it has to be done clearly
um i'm not I don't expect you know not all ulema have to speak out
some can just remain engaged away from politics and focus on education and tarbiya that's perfectly valid and
part of Sunni Islam but there has to be some who speak out if they're going to raise the issues i
think they should do so clearly this is what i'm suggesting I think you know that there is a fascination uh
with second third generation Muslims with uh white converts uh who come to Islam
and and many Muslims see that many second third generation Muslims see
that the only hope for Muslims in the west will come from those who are indigenous
to Britain to America who are able to convey Islam in a way
that is recognizable to the majority population is there a
problem with people from from India from Pakistan from Syria having this type of
inclination the joy at seeing somebody convert to Islam comes from faith i'm
not one to deny that joy and pleasure and gratitude um it comes from from
faith let me go on to say however that you know to add also the contextual cultural
knowledge of course that's important to da’wah you can't be kind of culturally illiterate when you you know the
prophets were sent to their own people obviously it means that a kind of level of cultural competence is
essential but all i would say is that you know as time goes on and there's a percentage
of British born let's take the example of Britain as the percentage of British-born Muslims grows these no
longer be a relevant point because if you're born and brought up in Britain you're you're you're the very least
bi-cultural you know you could have competence in your heritage culture and
in your culture of birth you can code switch in other words you're conversant in both like being bilingual but you
mentioned securities and I do think that separate work has to be done on that
uh perhaps it's not really my place as i said we all have like our own homework to do all i will say is that colonialism
poisoned the well in the relationships between white peoples and non-white peoples between the colonisers and the
colonised in deep ways that stretch into our times today
there's much to unlearn perhaps we could do it together is what i'm suggesting if i need to dismantle the idol of white
supremacy in myself get off my pedestal but also fight for for justice and fairness
maybe a desi could do some work on dismantling their own internal Brown Sahib okay
so you know the Brown Sahib you know was popularised by the Sri Lankan exile
Tarzi Vittachi who died in and he wrote a book about it and the brown sahib was a desi who
preferred English culture and customs and looked down on those of the East now the brown sahib has fallen out of use
but perhaps you could revive it for critical even playful purposes i mean look there are no reasons why
reculturation has to be dour and agonistic you know combative and
contested it can also be done creatively it can be done with a sense of humour um you know maybe that will help us that
will make it easier for us to have these discussions with self-awareness humility
and a sense of humour self-deprecating humour um finally i would say that da’wah
the idea that converts lead can only converts can talk only white people can
convert white people to Islam i mean look da’wah is a general calling and so ultimately it cannot be subcontracted
that said converts should and could do more and i admonish myself firstly for
my own deficits here i think you make a deeper point about Islam and justice in your article can you expand on this how
important is anti-racism and challenging for example western foreign policy
when it comes to da’wa in the west and i'll make a simple point about da’wah here you know there's a
popular argument made nowadays that da’wah should firstly be theological in nature
and that effectively should be divorced from ethics and that argument is predicated on the
sequential nature of the chronic revelation over years so the argument goes that the early focus was on faith
on establishing belief in monotheism in god's judgement in the afterlife this
is uncontestable in one sense but it is misleading in another i would ask anyone to show me that the
Makkan period describes a circumstance in which monotheism is divorced entirely
from ethical principles i can't see it justice was always at the cornerstone of the call to Islam The
Prophet peace be upon him invited people of all backgrounds to Islam including those from the margins of that
chauvinistic tribal society the Qurayshite sense of tribal superiority was never indulged to the contrary all
believers stood equally in front of One God, all would be judged on their conduct in the world in the next i mean the idea
that you could divorce monotheism from ethics is all of a piece with a kind of
neoliberal neoliberalized Islam that we now see emerging which prefers personal
spiritual comfort over a struggle of justice for justice and rights i mean this this leads me to anti-racism i
don't see how Muslims cannot be anti-racists they're theology teachers at piety is the distinction of merit in
god's eyes and nothing else not culture not nation not skin colour not class not
wealth etc so it seems to me they are enjoying to uphold that principle in any
society in which they form a part whether as a minority or a majority
obviously as you mentioned earlier we need to address internal prejudices among Muslims too
such as anti-blackness among desis or white nativism among converts white
converts to Islam as i've been trying to do in this essay and in this conversation
you know a final point i touch on the essay i think we need to work towards anti-racism .
by which i mean one that is post-secular that allows for Muslim agency and distinctiveness and the reason why i say
this is that western anti-racism movements largely came out of the secular left which had traditionally
been uncomfortable with religious communities in Britain it was suspicious or lukewarm
about Islamophobia and has often been obstructive to furthering it as part of a policy
agenda but there has been the good news is there has been a new post 9/11
generation that has grown up with structural Islamophobia through the war on terrorism as a political fact of
their whole lives so that you know there's no longer really a denial about Islamophobia in the
anti-racism movement so part of this work towards anti-racism 2.0 would include deepening the story of
race-making in European history the focus in old anti-racism movements has been upon telling the story of race
from the early modern period through colonialism and Transatlantic chattel slavery to pseudo-scientific
forms in the 19th and early 20th centuries recent work has been done however to
push the story of race making back into medieval Christendom where it is much more wrapped up with religious
intolerance so the relations between the curse of Ham, Adam's cursed black son
and later skin colour racism between the Blood Libel against Jews and modern anti-Semitism and between
Christian polemics against Ishmaelite Saracen and later orientalism and Islamophobia
so this deepened story would help us all to make connections between racism as it
manifests in stigmatisation between cultural and civilizational difference and not just
bodily skin tone or phenotypical difference i mean i'm not i'm not the main person
working on this i should name check the decolonial Muslim intellectual Syed Mustafa Ali of the Open University in
this regard and a lot more attention should be made paid to his work on this matter and and that links to your
concept of Three-Tone Islam what what do you mean by Three-Tone Islam and why do you see that as a a way to
assist in the call to Islam well for me the future of Islam won't be or let's
say obviously shouldn't be indigenous or in the purest or nativist sense or white
but resolutely Three-Tone or brown black and white here you know i'm um
i'm stealing a term coined by somebody else um Salih Welbourne who's a grassroots
activist from from Nottingham and my reflections on Three-Tone Islam have
come out of a prolonged discussions that i've had with him so Three-Tone Islam and it's a very kind
of British reference it's a play upon the Two-Tone movement for those of us old enough to remember it it was a kind
of lit it was a new kind of youth movement they came up in the s and s and it was focused on
music on fashion and on anti-racism activism and it came from working class black uh
sorry black and white working-class British youth why we're referencing that is because
you know it's all very well having intellectual discussions about all of this about anti-racism what what a new
anti-racism could look like or what a three-tone song could look like but you know we have to go beyond a public
argument to faith in action to make it happen to vision a space in which black brown and white Muslims could come
together and fellowship in service breaking down barriers of race culture and class and you know i'm saying this
but i do believe there are spaces in which this is beginning to happen and um and you know so we should see
like Three Tone it's like an opening gambit the embodies the Quranic process of mutual understanding and recognition
through difference (ta’arruf) rather than some seamless perfect end product you know in other words it's a
goal to watch which we're trying to work and Three-Tone Islam recognizes
four things one it recognizes that western indigeneity isn't just white but it's
multicultural and it's open to change secondly the conversion itself has three
tones so we're not talking about conversion of whites to Islam but of whites browns and blacks to Islam that's
the reality thirdly three tone isn't meant to be a limitation it points to a wider
diversity in the um in humanity I'm saying to you shouldn't call itself Three-Tone Islam okay
it's not a branding exercise yeah it's just to get us to think differently the fourth point it
goes back to my earlier point we need a post-secular anti-racism
uh anti-racism . that includes a deeper story of religious chauvinism and
race making which i talked about earlier that's fascinating and tell me about the contrast you draw between the forgotten
earlier figures two converts to Islam uh Abdul Hadi Aguéli
and Lord Al-Farooq Headley yeah tell me about that it's a fascinating point you make about the outlook of these two
individuals once they embraced Islam yeah i think it's just i mean i think that um one of the reasons why i'm
interested in the early history of conversion to Islam in Europe and Britain is because I
kind of always want to see what choices were made uh by converts in early periods of history
what choices were open to them and what choices did they take if you see what i mean because quite often what we could end up
doing is sort of saying well Islam tells me to make a particular choice in this particular moment whereas it's never the
case you know they're always making different choices and trying to justify them Islamically
so i like going back into history to kind of see what choices they made and to
reflect on my own choices critically and that's why i do it um so during this kind of high noon of
European colonialism there was very similar questions like we have today about political loyalties of Muslims and
converts always get this accusation heard of them that they're turncoats you know they're
traitors and so it's always particularly acute for converts
particularly when the question of Islam is very politicized in the west there are periods when it's less
politicised but you know we're living in a politicised moment so these two figures one was uh it was
Abdul Hadi Agueli and the other was Lord Farooq Headley um so Agueli he was a
noted Swedish painter he moved in avant-garde circles in Paris with famous you know
impressionist painters and at that point in time he was an anarchist you know he he repudiated any
form of formal state control of any kind of description he thought the state itself was the enemy and in he
was arrested for firing a revolver to stop the introduction of Spanish bullfighting into France um and Spanish bull
fighting is where the animal is killed at the end you know regardless of the outcome so which is was not the case and
so he did it as a kind of form of direct action to preserve animal welfare so he
converts in around and is initiated into Sufism in Egypt some time after and he established the first branch
orthodox branch of the Sufi order in Paris in but after his conversion
what's interesting to me is that he married his Sufism with radical politics so he wrote against imperialism and he quite
he himself is probably the first person to coin the term Islamophobia which he does in and he uses it to
analyze the enemies of Islam so quite clearly he comes in with anti-imperialist kind of radical
politics anti-racist he coined the term Islamophobia he embraces direct action
you know so you know he's one possibility another possibility is by Lord Farooq
Headley a very different character a kind of natural kind of one of life's natural conservatives an Irish peer
he remained a solid empire loyalist after his conversion in 1913 he
campaigned to preserve British India where he had worked in Kashmir as an
imperial engineer in the 1890s and he was quite forceful in that campaign to preserve the integrity of British India
this is in the run-up in the middle you know in the in the kind of the beginnings of the independence campaign was really taking off in India at the
time and that was quite forceful competitors rather sort of tepid support uh protests
against the breakup of the Ottoman empire after the first world war so i would say that you know here we have
examples of Aguéli who read who who marries principal radical politics with
mysticism versus a kind of Lord Headley's rather kind of unreflective loyalism giving that a st century
makeover so kind of i think i'm reflecting this and to say that you know neo-traditionalists if you like even
sufIs going to can can be quite happy with radical politics it all
depends on the choices that we make obviously you know we've been through the decade of where radicalism has
been Muslim radicalism has been disparaged as extremists and has been stigmatized in law and in
policy and in social life and has been internalized by Muslim populations in the west because they've been
securitized and obviously i'm trying to suggests that we reclaim reclaim radical
in a positive sense as returning to foundational principle the root our root principles and trying to enact them in
the world so radical is a positive not negative um and this is one of my ways
of doing that is to look back into the past and see what other radical converts have done in the past um and what
difference they've made and that takes us to another early convert to Islam Abdullah Quilliam now for my cursory
reading of his life we may see him as someone who wanted to create an indigenous British Islam
uh possibly uh you know even an Islam that was at ease with
the conservative establishment uh at least that's how some would characterise his aspirations
how do we interpret this really important early figure in British Islam
i hope you'll indulge me and let me first introduce him for listeners who are unfamiliar to him please because you
know I never assume that people know they might know his name nowadays but they still might not know
much about him so let me spend a couple of minutes just trying to introduce them so
he was born in in and dies in
he's born in Liverpool um and why do why do i think he's an important figure in the history of Islam
in Britain well firstly you know he's the first convert in British history to make a concerted effort to call people
to Islam so around about people embraced Islam
in it at his hands in a time when Islam was viewed as heretical and dangerous or
a strange and unknown it's hard for us to imagine quite how difficult that was for him to do
his early community had stones thrown at them manure heaped on them their prayer
meetings were broken up sometimes violently and yet you know they persevered Fatima Cates the first female
convert in that community wrote a prayerful poem in reflecting on these early challenges so if you allow
me to just quote a little bit of her poetry so she writes in
set by numerous foes concealed along the way we must those enemies oppose and ever
work and pray so that just gives you a kind of a little feeling for what what the sort of the conditions and
the strenuous conditions under which they work and so the second reason for me while Quilliam is a historical figure
is that he founds Britain's first attested mosque community the Liverpool Muslim Institute in the summer of .
in many ways this multi-ethnic Muslim community comprised of converts as well as sailors
travellers and notables moving in and out to Britain's great port of Liverpool
this community was ahead of its time it fed the local poor it provided free adult education it established an
orphanage the Medina Home in . It provided legal representation for Muslim
sailors mistreated by the shipping companies. It ran political campaigns
local national international on issues of concern to Muslims it published a
journal the newspaper distributed to over nations it developed a
pan-Islamic network that stretched from Australia to America and news of its affairs were reported
weekly in Cairo Istanbul Bombay and Rangoon at times Quilliam was unafraid to be
critical of British imperial expansion such as into the Sudan in the s and
the issued a fatwa condemning any Muslims who would aid the British against their fellow believers your question goes you know now that i've
introduced him your question is how how should we assess Quilliam I would i
think it's a bit controversial i would discourage a hagiographical approach
in favour of warts and all but with the eye of charity to circumstances and context so i understand let me say i
understand the hagiographical impulse to find pristine roots for Islam and
Britain when our community is being constantly vilified but for many of the same
similar reasons i've discussed earlier in this interview i think we should resist that impulse for reasons i should
elaborate a little bit on so i was drawn to research Quilliam and his community further because i thought
there was more to be uncovered than previous scholars had found there were several unanswered questions about him
and his community to that end they spent quite a lot of time working with other sources outside of his own publications
not just in English but also in Urdu Arabic Farsi and Ottoman Turkish with the
assistance of other scholars um notably Riordan Macnamara and Münire Zeyneb Maksudoğlu
it is important not only to see Quilliam as he presented himself but how others saw him too the research that i've done
with others shows that among the Muslims of the day Quilliam had his critics as well as his
supporters let me take an example of a ottoman traveller that we worked on
we worked on a translation of a travelogue called Liverpool Müslümanlığı or Islam in Liverpool which was published
last year through Claritas Press. It cast new light on the early
Liverpool Muslims and it caused a stir amongst them and the book itself was eventually banned by the Ottoman
authorities in . The ottoman traveller was a journalist and travel writer Yusuf Samih Asmay
who started a pro-Ottoman newspaper in Cairo in . He was quite fiercely
anti-British and wanted the Ottomans to reassert authority over Egypt after it had become a British protectorate
Asmay’s account is witty and engaging and is based on his -day
stay in Liverpool and we meet through his eyes we meet an extraordinary cast of characters not least Quilliam himself
who lies at the centre of Asmay’s critique of the institute so Asmay’s travelogue throws up three issues that
resonate with today's Muslims the first is how much can conversion to Islam
be a process of gradual adoption rather than an instant adoption
of the expectations of quote unquote born Muslims after all Quilliam was largely
self-taught from meagre resources and his community faced familiar questions
what i mean by that is familiar questions today about their adoption of an angle of Islamic synthesis with
Protestant liturgical forms uh the second is second issue that Asmay’s prologue throws up is where do British
Muslims stand regarding the politics of ummah and the politics of nation and for Quilliam’s
community this wasn't yet a post-caliphate question but the debate about dual
loyalties then provides an instructive mirror for our debate about dual loyalties now the third and final
question for me that a smart travelogue throws up is how do we respond if we find out that
our religious leaders are not the role models we would like them to be Asmay’s account
questions Quilliam's fitness as a religious leader in ways that fascinatingly echo the “MeToo” movement
i'm not going to go into the detail of what those what Asmay’s kind of allegations are
but but i think it throws up a similar quandary you know if you've relied on somebody as
a kind of hero inspiration a mentor figure what do you do when they let you down
do you allow it to shake your faith or do you take the good that you took from them
um pray for them try to to try to guide them in the manner matter in which
they've gone wrong or leave them if you have to um you know how do you cope with that you know and
so you know we of course you need to respect polymer and we need to respect scholars but not with a kind of blind
loyalty that writes of a blank check you know we need a mature relationship whether with religious leadership
whether that's today or historical figures um and it doesn't mean that you know we
then demonise them either you know um we have to recognize the good that we've gotten from them
even if they turn out to be all too human and flawed like all of us are so this is the reason why i prefer what's
in all history with the eye of charity because reviewing the arguments back then amongst Muslims allows us to
reflect critically on our arguments now with an enhanced appreciation for the differences then and the possibilities
that we have now going forward okay but i must invite you back on to talk at more length in in
this discussion about Abdullah Quilliam i think there's there's a lot to unearth there uh but jazakAllah for your time today
and uh i think you've raised some really interesting points
thank you for having me and i'm the first one who's in need of correction inshaAllah
and all advice is firstly directed towards myself.