I asked an informed British friend: What do you make of this: http://jmm.org.au/articles/20147.htm ?

Response:

First off, I am *not* impressed by the Times imitating a tabloid, but with longer words. Norfolk dramatically announces that half the mosques are “owned” by Deobandi, but this information comes, apparently, only from “a police report seen by the Times”. Then, after the obligatory rabble-rousing about the Taliban and general bloodshed, he admits that “It is not suggested that all British Muslims who worship at Deobandi mosques subscribe to the isolationist message preached by Mr ul Haq”

Of course, that’s halfway down the article, and buried in accounts of fundamentalist sermons – which, incidentally, are par for the course in the Bury / Bradford area, which has a big Muslim population. (The *reason* it has a big Muslim population, and one which tends to be strongly orthodox and less integrated than in other parts of the country, is down to racist immigration legislation which backfired, but that’s another story.)

As to Usmani: jihad is an established part of Islamic tradition; however, jihad does not necessarily involve physical warfare, any more than Christian evangelism involves the burning of heretics. When Norfolk says that “[Usmani’s] views explode the myth that the creed of offensive, expansionist jihad represents a distortion of traditional Islamic thinking” – well, uhm, that isn’t a myth. The nineteenth-century jihads were certainly the product of “traditional Islamic thinking” and Usmani would be quite wrong to say that they weren’t. It would be like a Christian arguing that the Crusades weren’t the product of Christian tradition of the time.

(And, don’t forget, he’s an anti-modernist; his view of the position of Islam in relation to western cultural ideologies is not going to be integrationist.)

Incidentally, a rather more balanced view comes from the Daily Times of Pakistan which points out that “supposedly learned answers to the tangled question of violence and propagation of faith are more problematic than is often imagined by ordinary Muslims whose hearts remain unburdened by what the pontiffs have to teach.”

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page06%5C10%5C05%5Cstory_5-10-2006_pg3_2

In other words, scholarly debates about jihad don’t, on the whole, have much impact on the daily lives or behaviour of the average Muslim individual, any more than the average Catholic individual takes a lot of notice of high-level discussions by Vatican councils. And that’s in Pakistan, where there are a hell of a lot more Muslims than there are in Britain.

September 2007