The excesses of Eid have long been digested and the glow of Ramadan's soul-nurturing prescription of prayer, fasting and restraint has sadly begun to fade; we once again are immersed in the gritty reality of this tweet-infested, information overloaded, 24 hour news, face-booking society.
Despite numerous attempts to invigorate our new website with an article, my fingers lay paralysed on the keyboard because like an amphetamine overdosed junkie caught in the glare of a flood lamp, I found myself wide-eyed and twitching at every new "Islam story" offered up in the variety of media, social networking and messaging systems that is both the bane and defining feature of today's society.
Where to start in the dross pile of half truths, false outrage and ignorance that constitutes the vast majority of current reportage on Islam and Muslims? The choices seemed endless.
The Ground Zero Mosque was an obvious starting point. It was an issue that was unique for several reasons. Not only has it unified America's bigots such that their guttural shrieks of anger at the presence of "sand-niggers and rag heads" in the country that they stole off the Native Americans have merged into a crazed cacophony of mindless rhetoric, wild accusations and wailing tirades of hate. Not only was it a complete misnomer – neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero; and not only did it expose the hypocrisy of the whole "its not a war on Islam" rhetoric that has pervaded the post 9/11 invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan; but it also exposed the myopia of those Muslims who would happily discard vast tracts of Islamic reasoning, thought and jurisprudence all in the vain hope that it would make us "fit in": if Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, with his famously...ahem..."liberal" interpretation of Islam (exemplified by his wife, Daisy Khan's uncovered hair and his "long-term relationship" with the US State Department), cannot build a community centre with an over-riding emphasis on multi-faith bridge-building, then doesn't this expose the fallacy of the "compromise and conform" brigade who would justify their watered-down hipster version of Islam as the only way to be accepted by the wider community?
Europe was not immune – as surely as the Gulf Stream flows across the Atlantic every year – this year it seemed to carry with it the foul stench of bigotry and hatred.
This was seen in the spectacle of Thilo Sarrazin a former board member of Germany's central bank Bundesbank calling for a eugenic-style state intervention in the fertility of working class Muslim migrants due to their "low IQ". His scaremongering book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Does Away With Itself) published this summer has become a runaway bestseller with nearly a fifth of Germans stating in a recent opinion poll that they would vote for a party with Sarrazin as leader. The time when this sort of nasty rhetoric would provoke a country's leaders into swift and harsh condemnation of the speaker is history. All we have now are spineless papier-mâché politicians like Horst Seehofer (Bavarian State Premier) and Angela Merkel whose only wish is to demonstrate an almost embarrassing eagerness to get the boot in as well. Multiculturalism has apparently failed completely according to Merkel and immigrants can only fit in if they learn German. To follow this premise then it would mean that for arguments sake if the 4 million strong Muslim population of Germany were entirely composed of niqab wearing women and kufi wearing bearded men all of whom spoke perfect German then there should be no problem. Of course this would not be the case, as then the argument would metamorphose from being linguistically based to pointing out the un-Germanic nature of the niqab or men's facial hair (aside from a very small moustache located centrally on the upper lip), or perhaps the "cruelty’ of halal meat, or the pointiness of minarets, or the presence of mosques...the list goes on – or more accurately will continue to go on until one surmises it will only finish when the kalimah itself is disowned by Muslims. Perhaps one should point out to Fräu Merkel that whilst she may issue trite statements about multiculturalism's failure, the last time Germans developed an appetite for ‘monoculturalism’ it didn’t end particularly salubriously for either Germany or the religious minority that had become the focus of their bigoted ire.
France also seemed to embrace this new Europe-wide fashion for intolerance when her partly Jewish President took on the mantle of those who persecuted and murdered his relatives during World War II by forcibly expelling France's Roma population whilst simultaneously pushing through a niqab ban in the French Parliament. Not to mention the almost obscene haste demonstrated by other Western European countries like Italy and Spain in their race to pass their own legislation banning the niqab. In Spain's case the bluster was somewhat muted due to the government's dawning realisation that it couldn’t tag a hijab ban on as well as it would effectively outlaw the mantilla – the headscarf that Spanish women traditionally use to cover their hair.
The toxic ash cloud of bigotry hanging over Europe is perhaps exemplified best in the current political climate of the Netherlands with its new coalition formed by uniting the Dutch Christian Democrats with Geert Wilders bafflingly named "Freedom Party". When Wilders appeared on the Dutch political scene not so many years ago his at times ridiculously over the top hostile rhetoric towards Islam meant that some Muslim commentators felt that he was merely a pantomime villain that was best ignored until he had given up and slunk back to whichever bog he had crawled out from. Yet, here we are, the very same bouffant blonde buffoon holding the balance of power in a European country and able to force through a ban on niqab, get stricter immigration controls and a conditional passport for new citizens whilst the Dutch Christian Democrats speak triumphantly about how they have managed to block (at the moment) other parts of his malignant manifesto like the banning of the Quran, a tax on the hijab and mass deportations of Muslims. One wonders if anyone else sees the irony of the current Dutch political climate where a prostitute can stand almost naked in a store front window in Amsterdam's notorious red light district displaying her "wares" like a side of mutton in a butcher's shop and be completely within the law, but a pious Muslim women covering completely is effectively a criminal. It seems that the Netherlands – once a haven for liberal thought - is now just a den of iniquity, preserving the rights of drug addicts, prostitutes and pimps whilst simultaneously criminalising a tiny subgroup of law-abiding Muslim women, thus endorsing state sanctioned religious-based discrimination. Perhaps the national motto should be changed from "We preserve" to "We preserve the morally bankrupt...everyone else can take their chances".
Back home in ol'Blighty how should we react to this strange wave of anti-Muslim feeling? Should we just arch an eyebrow and murmur something nonsensical about it never happening here? Anyone tempted to do so should reflect on the events of the summer which saw a string of EDL protests in cities with large Muslim populations on the back of a slew of biased newspaper and press reports citing the "growing Islamification of the UK" , coupled with growing evidence that Islamophobic organisations in Europe, the US and the UK are forging closer links. One wonders where it will all end. With the media rhetoric turned up at full volume, growing numbers of public figures openly deriding Islam and Muslims as a uniquely troublesome group, and the presence of street protests specifically targeting Muslims, I can’t quite imagine that one fine day everyone will get up and remark "Islamophobia...seriously?! That is like so last week" and move on to the next big issue. Similarly, I can't see the two typical strategies deployed by many Muslim organisations succeeding - namely either jamming ones head in the sand and pretending that there is not a problem, or (even worse) acknowledging that there is a problem and attempting to combat it by discarding vast tracts of Islamic thought and jurisprudence in the vain hope that we will be accepted.
So what is the answer? As always the immortal words of Allah hold guidance and succour to Muslims:
الَّذِينَ قَالَ لَهُمُ النَّاسُ إِنَّ النَّاسَ قَدْ جَمَعُوا لَكُمْ فَاخْشَوْهُمْ فَزَادَهُمْ إِيمَانًا وَقَالُوا حَسْبُنَا اللَّهُ وَنِعْمَ الْوَكِيلُ
Those to whom people say: "A great multitude of people is gathering against you, so fear them"; But it (only) increased their Faith: They said: "For us Allah sufficient, and He is the best disposer of affairs."
(3:173)
يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا ادْخُلُوا فِي السِّلْمِ كَافَّةً وَلَا تَتَّبِعُوا خُطُوَاتِ الشَّيْطَانِ إِنَّهُ لَكُمْ عَدُوٌّ مُبِينٌ ﴿
O ye who believe! Enter into Islam completely; and follow not the footsteps of Satan; for he is to you an avowed enemy.
(2:208)
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