Interest in Islam mounts
Martin Bright:The Observer | 02.09.2002 07:06
From Islamic bookshops and university comparative religion courses to the dusty corridors of Whitehall, non-Muslims are rushing to find out more about the beliefs of Islam and the life of the Prophet Mohammed.
A year ago they feared their religion would be tarred by the atrocities that left over 3,000 dead in the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. But Muslims across Britain are now crediting an '11 September factor' for the upsurge of interest in their religion.
From Islamic bookshops and university comparative religion courses to the dusty corridors of Whitehall, non-Muslims are rushing to find out more about the beliefs of Islam and the life of the Prophet Mohammed.
Sales of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, have gone through the roof. Penguin, the publishers of the best-known English-language translation of the Koran, registered a 15-fold increase in the three months following 11 September and sales have held up well since.
Meanwhile the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been overwhelmed by the response to new Islamic Awareness courses they have set up for diplomats being posted to Muslim countries and London-based staff with an interest in the wider Islamic world.
Not since the Satanic Verses affair in 1989, when novelist Salman Rushdie was condemned to death for blasphemy by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, has Islam been such a sensitive political issue in Britain.
The rise in Islamophobia and even racist attacks has been matched, sometimes in the same geographical area, by a thirst for knowledge of a religion which many are surprised to find has common links to Christianity and Judaism. Moses and Christ are both considered prophets in Islam.
Dilowar Khan, director of the East London mosque which holds open days for non-Muslims four times a year, said that visits from schools, university students and even tourists had increased over the past year. At the same time he said there had been an average of two or three people asking to convert every month.
'A similar thing happened during the Salman Rushdie affair. A lot of people converted to Islam as they struggled to understand what was happening. Of course, there has been the opposite effect as well, some people have become more hostile, said Mr Khan.
The East London mosque now plans to publish a magazine Discover Islam to cater for the demand for information. The first issue will contain an article on the attractions of the Muslim faith by journalist Yvonne Ridley, held captive by the Taliban last year and now considering converting to Islam.
Dr Abdulkarim Khalil, director of the Al-Manaar Cultural Heritage Centre in Kensington, West London, which opened shortly after 11 September, said: 'In a sense it was a natural reaction to the events. People wanted to know more and we expected that, but no one expected the scale of the interest, not just here but across the world.'
Dr Khalil said that there had been some minor incidents immediately after the terror attacks, when women were verbally abused for wearing the headscarf, the hejab. 'But we've been surprised that nothing serious has happened. We've even had non-Muslim members of the local community coming to reassure us and express their support for the centre.' Although some experts talk of a 'know thy enemy factor' in the rush to find out about Islam in the aftermath of 11 September, the panic has now settled into genuine interest.
At the traditionally Arabist Foreign Office, the fascination for Islam has filtered down throughout the department over the past year. Trial Islamic Awareness Training sessions have proved so successful that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has decided to offer them to all Foreign Office staff likely to come into contact with Islamic issues. The courses consist of a lecture on the basic tenets of Islam followed by a speech by a visiting expert on contemporary Muslim issues and a visit to a mosque.
In a speech to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies earlier this year, Straw urged a greater understanding of Islam. Last month the Foreign Office also hosted the largest reception for the Muslim community ever held by a government department, although many thought they were being softened up for a planned attack on Iraq.
A Foreign Office spokesman said: 'The cultural element has always been a central part of the training of diplomats, but it has usually been part of language courses. We wanted to extend the training and make it become systematic throughout the office.'
Observer special reports
Islam and the West
From Islamic bookshops and university comparative religion courses to the dusty corridors of Whitehall, non-Muslims are rushing to find out more about the beliefs of Islam and the life of the Prophet Mohammed.
Sales of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, have gone through the roof. Penguin, the publishers of the best-known English-language translation of the Koran, registered a 15-fold increase in the three months following 11 September and sales have held up well since.
Meanwhile the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been overwhelmed by the response to new Islamic Awareness courses they have set up for diplomats being posted to Muslim countries and London-based staff with an interest in the wider Islamic world.
Not since the Satanic Verses affair in 1989, when novelist Salman Rushdie was condemned to death for blasphemy by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, has Islam been such a sensitive political issue in Britain.
The rise in Islamophobia and even racist attacks has been matched, sometimes in the same geographical area, by a thirst for knowledge of a religion which many are surprised to find has common links to Christianity and Judaism. Moses and Christ are both considered prophets in Islam.
Dilowar Khan, director of the East London mosque which holds open days for non-Muslims four times a year, said that visits from schools, university students and even tourists had increased over the past year. At the same time he said there had been an average of two or three people asking to convert every month.
'A similar thing happened during the Salman Rushdie affair. A lot of people converted to Islam as they struggled to understand what was happening. Of course, there has been the opposite effect as well, some people have become more hostile, said Mr Khan.
The East London mosque now plans to publish a magazine Discover Islam to cater for the demand for information. The first issue will contain an article on the attractions of the Muslim faith by journalist Yvonne Ridley, held captive by the Taliban last year and now considering converting to Islam.
Dr Abdulkarim Khalil, director of the Al-Manaar Cultural Heritage Centre in Kensington, West London, which opened shortly after 11 September, said: 'In a sense it was a natural reaction to the events. People wanted to know more and we expected that, but no one expected the scale of the interest, not just here but across the world.'
Dr Khalil said that there had been some minor incidents immediately after the terror attacks, when women were verbally abused for wearing the headscarf, the hejab. 'But we've been surprised that nothing serious has happened. We've even had non-Muslim members of the local community coming to reassure us and express their support for the centre.' Although some experts talk of a 'know thy enemy factor' in the rush to find out about Islam in the aftermath of 11 September, the panic has now settled into genuine interest.
At the traditionally Arabist Foreign Office, the fascination for Islam has filtered down throughout the department over the past year. Trial Islamic Awareness Training sessions have proved so successful that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has decided to offer them to all Foreign Office staff likely to come into contact with Islamic issues. The courses consist of a lecture on the basic tenets of Islam followed by a speech by a visiting expert on contemporary Muslim issues and a visit to a mosque.
In a speech to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies earlier this year, Straw urged a greater understanding of Islam. Last month the Foreign Office also hosted the largest reception for the Muslim community ever held by a government department, although many thought they were being softened up for a planned attack on Iraq.
A Foreign Office spokesman said: 'The cultural element has always been a central part of the training of diplomats, but it has usually been part of language courses. We wanted to extend the training and make it become systematic throughout the office.'
Observer special reports
Islam and the West
Martin Bright:The Observer
Homepage:
http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,784241,00.html
Comments
Hide the following 3 comments
The Curiosity about Islamists
02.09.2002 08:58
The growing concern of the West, including myself, is what the fuck are these Islamists up to now? What the hell is going on with them? I am also reading about Radical Islam. We all want to know how to protect ourselves from the current biggest threat to our way of life.
Concerned
Biggest threat???
02.09.2002 11:15
Actually, I thought the biggest threat to all our lives was global capitalism and it's most powerful regimes which stockpile unimaginable quantities of nuclear explosives - enough to annihilate the lot of us several times over.
Having said that, I think the growth in radical islam among working class youth is not totally dissimilar to the growth of the blackshirts among working class youth in the thirties.
This kind of reactionary ideology somehow is managing to appeal, whereas revolutionary ideas seem to be making very few inroads in this section of our class.
Maybe we need to reassess how we present ourselves to working class people, whatever ethnic/cultural/religious background they come from.
King Pleb
Don't understand
02.09.2002 11:18
Another astonishing fact about the Al-Qaeda is that it has no class basis. Its supporters, such as Al-Muharjiroun, are not necessarily the under-class. In many cases, the foot soldiers and supporters of violent Islamic extremism are university graduates, people with professional jobs who are relatively affluent.
It is true that the Islamic extremists fighting jihads in Egypt and Algeria are generally the economically oppressed, but these tend to have definite, albeit warped, aims: the overthrow of an autocratic government and its replacement with one that has a moral duty to its citizens. Al-Qaeda's aims are obtuse; it is not a movement in the conventional sense, but a worship of death. To those following ideologies rooted in Enlightenment reasoning - Marxists, liberals, pan-Arabists, pan-Africanists, etc - Al-Qaeda is a threat not only to their physical well-being, but to the entire basis of our affirmation of life-affirming individual and social rights.
Al-Qaeda's jihad has nothing to do with Islam. As a system of thought, Islam embodies human rights, the structure and limitations of the state, the rule of law and a welfare state - much the same as any modern capitalist state. Al-Qaeda goes beyond the Qu'ran and the haditha and any other life-affirming strategy.
What I want to know is why people join these death cults? What is attractive about nihilism?
Dan