165.
As Sheikh Chowdhury explained in his preamble (posted on the website
www.muslimmatters.org), the speech was delivered in early December 2008, shortly
after the 28th November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, at a dinner organised by the Muslim
Council of Wales attended by some of the nation’s top counter-terrorism officers and
prevention of terrorism experts. Sheikh Chowdhury also stated in the preamble:
“And before some self-righteous individual points my actions
as being done in fear, know this: I did not deliver this lecture
with nifah and hypocrisy in my heart rather, rather with
absolute izzah and honour and passion and conviction and
arguing for our right to preach our pristine and pure religion.”
166.
In my view, Sheikh Chowdhury’s speech was
manifestly measured and moderate. His essential message and
thesis is that Islam is the solution not the problem, that Islamic
extremism is a perverted ideology, that Muslim scholars are the
natural allies of the West and too many mainstream moderate
scholars have been denigrated and negatively portrayed in the
media as aberrant Wahabi8 when their knowledge and teaching
of (true) Islam should be harnessed in fighting extremism and
terrorism. In essence, Sheikh Chowdhury posits: Who better to
fight the intellectual war than credible, mainstream, moderate
Muslim scholars who speak the language, understand the
jurisprudence and share the common values of the Islamic and
Western civilizations? This might have been thought to have
been a praiseworthy message which the Claimant should have
welcomed. It was not (see further below).
167.
I set out below some of the key passages in Sheikh Chowdhury’s speeches. He began
as follows:
“In the mistaken equation of terrorism with mainstream Islam
and denigrating it with labels of radical or fundamental, the
war on terror has sidelined and marginalized one of its greatest
allies – Independent Islamic Scholarship. Worse still, the war
on terror has failed to recognize that those that we have come
to call fundamentalist Muslim scholars are precisely those who
have been long fighting the war on terror – long before
September 11 and long before the Gulf War. For example, the
former Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia was of the opinion that
hijacking airplanes was “an extremely great crime”…[and]
condemned the ‘Jamaaa’atul-Jihadd’, a terrorist group, [as]
“…evil….harmful to Muslims…the brothers of Satan”. The
present Grand Mufti…said about the September 11 incidents:
“It is nothing but oppression and tyranny”. There are also
numerous such quotes from the Grand Muftis of various
countries. These are not sophisticated PR campaigns – rather,
8 Wahabi scholars, i.e. those scholars who identify with the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abdul
Wahab (1703-1792), an 18th Century religious reformer who opposed the religious innovations of
Ottoman Sunni Islam and propounded a purified Islam of the earliest generations of Islam (Salaf).
Followers of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab are also known as Salafi. After Muhamad ibn Abdul
Wahab formed an alliance with Muhammad ibn Saud of the Saudi family, the theological-political
partnership between Salafi Islam and Saudi tribal power and authority became the basis of the modern
Saudi State. (c.f. Dr Wilkinson, para 10.2).
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