Oh no, she didn't!

Just before the start of the Second World War, the famous debate at the Oxford Union, “This House will not fight for King and Country”, became a national (and maybe international) legend. The story goes that when Adolf Hitler heard of the debate, it convinced him that Britain would not fight and so he made up his mind to invade Poland.

So what are we to make of the more recent Oxford Union debate, “This House believes that the West is right to be suspicious of Islam”?

As I have mentioned before, it was about thirty years ago that David Pawson started preaching about the dangers of Islam. Back in the 1960s, there was only one mosque in the whole of Britain. It was in Woking and you can see it from the train. Now there are something like 2,000 mosques in the UK and perhaps there will be a few more by the time you read this. Meanwhile, churches are closing at the rate of one a week (or maybe one a fortnight) and “Mohammed” is the most popular name for new baby boys.

 

The President of the Oxford Union Union, a young Muslim lady called Arwa Elrayess, spoke in the debate. Many people have claimed that her brilliant speech swung the audience against the motion and this resulted in the motion being defeated. I do not agree with this analysis.

In her speech, Arwa Elrayess reeled off lots of statistics that prove that British Muslims are decent, respectable and law-abiding citizens, so there is absolutely no need for anyone to be suspicious of them. Yes, I think that she is absolutely right. For a start, you don’t get many Muslim drunk drivers. (A contemporary of mine at Oxford, then a medical student and now a professor of Oncology, once told me that nearly half of all admissions to A & E wards in NHS hospitals are alcohol-related.) No doubt many Muslims in the UK are doctors, nurses, teachers, Police officers, charity workers and business people, all of whom contribute to British society, obey our laws and pay their taxes. However, the motion for debate was about Islam, not about individual Muslims or Muslim communities in the UK.

Now please let me give you an analogy. You would not go to Thailand or Australia if you wanted to find out about Roman Catholicism. No, you ought to go to Poland or Italy, if you want to see how Catholicism permeates and influences a society. In the same way, any fair-minded person must come to the conclusion that true Islam can only be found in those countries where it is the dominant religion, in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan. For some strange reason, Arwa Elrayess does not give us any statistics from these Islamic countries. Statistics about law-abiding British Muslims do not really prove that there is nothing to fear from Islam, since Islam is not the dominant faith in the UK.

Arwa Elrayess also claimed in her speech that terrorist acts that have been perpetrated in the name of Allah can never be blamed on Islam. Those misguided persons who did these dreadful acts were not Muslims at all, she argues, because they did not understand the clear teaching of the Quran. The holy book of Islam is all about peace, harmony and tolerance.

Well, I must confess that I have not read the Quran. I tried to read it once and gave up. It is not an easy book to read. In fact, many Muslim scholars say that the Quran should not be translated, so really you ought to read it in the original Arabic, just to make it even harder. As if that were not enough, it is common knowledge that the Quran is not written in modern Arabic, but in the Arabic of more than a thousand years ago. Expecting a modern Arabic speaker to understand the Quran is about as silly as asking a modern Englishman to understand the language of Beowulf or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Arwa Elrayess’s comments about misguided people (who claim to be Muslims) not really understanding the Quran must therefore be taken with a very large pinch of salt.

A little research on the Internet will show you that there certainly are plenty of verses in the Quran about mercy, tolerance and peace. The bad news is that there are also quite a few verses that talk about violence, killing the infidels and so on. So which is it? A religion of peace or war? Is jihad a spiritual struggle, the battle to live a good and moral life? Or is jihad to be interpreted more literally, a physical war, a violent conflict, in which suicide bombings and beheadings will be par for the course? 

And is the meaning of any verse of the Quran, whether it is a violent or a peaceful one, strictly limited to its immediate historical context, something that was happening more than a thousand years ago, or is it relevant and can it (and should it) be applied today? As if that were not enough, we also have to consider whether the verses should be understood literally or metaphorically. In response to all of these questions and problems, a fair-minded person who is not a Muslim scholar probably has to say, “Well, I really don’t know!” If Muslims themselves cannot agree, then there is not much chance the rest of us finding out the truth, especially as we cannot read the Quran in the original, seventh century Arabic.

There is a lot of truth in the old saying, "Actions speak louder than words." If we look at the spread of Islam from a historical perspective, it is fairly clear that in the early days Mohammed was quite friendly, positive and encouraging towards the Jews and Christians in Arabia, as he hoped that they would join his new religion. When they did not, then his attitude towards them became much more negative. This probably explains the mixture of the “peaceful” and the “violent” verses in the Quran. Of course, the Quran is not written in chronological order, with the earlier verses coming first and the later verses coming last, so I have to admit that it might be a bit difficult to prove that all of the “peaceful” verses came before the “violent” ones.  

Just as many Christians have great respect for the Early Church, as they feel that those early Christians were much closer to Jesus than we are today, then would it be right to assume that the earliest followers of the Prophet were closer to his original message? Well, maybe they were. And how did they spread Islam? By the sword. After his failures in Mecca, Mohammed went to Medina, raised an army and brought Islam to Mecca through force in 630 CE. Mohammed himself personally took part in something like sixty battles, skirmishes and desert punch-ups. If the founder of Islam was himself a very violent man, then is it not absurd to claim, as Arwa Elrayess does, that Islam is really a religion of peace?

Then the Muslim armies burst out of Arabia in the seventh century and swiftly captured all of North Africa in the name of Allah. There had been many thriving Christian communities in North Africa, producing writers like Tertullian and Augustine, but they quickly disappeared. Soon the whole of Europe was threatened by a gigantic Islamic pincer movement, as the Muslim armies invaded Spain, entered France and were stopped in 732 CE at Tours, a few miles south of Paris, while in the East they hammered on the gates of Vienna in 1529 and then again in 1683. Once more, Arwa Elrayess keeps suspiciously quiet about this huge, two-pronged Muslim military campaign because it does not fit in with her version of Islam that is tolerant, peaceful and gentle.

In her Oxford Union speech, Arwa Elrayess uses the word “peace” on a number of occasions, but she does not explain what she means by this word. Most Muslim scholars divide the world into two spheres or regions, those that are Islamic, under Allah’s rule, the Dar al-Islam, the realm of peace, and everywhere else, Dar al-Harb, the realm of war. So Arwa Elrayess is a bit dishonest in her use of the word “peace” because to a Muslim it means surrendering to Allah and following the Sharia. That is not the same meaning as the one that most non-Muslims will have.

 

Another word that Arwa Elrayess uses in a dishonest or misleading way is the word “religion”. For most people in the West, religion is a private matter, a personal choice, something they do on a Sunday morning or just before going to bed, when they say their prayers. But Islam is not a “religion” in that sense of the word. A Muslim believes that Islam is not just for the individual person or the family or the community. No, Islam must be for the whole country and eventually for the whole world. Islam is a totalitarian religion, as nothing less will do. Everyone must submit to Allah and indeed Islam means “submission”. That is why apostasy is seen as a civil crime, like treason, and it deserves the death penalty. This is the law in Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Malaysia (in certain regional states), the Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria (in specific Islamist-controlled areas), Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Pakistan also enforces the death penalty for blasphemy, which can include acts associated with apostasy. Once again, the death penalty for apostasy from Islam is something that Arwa Elrayess conveniently does not mention, as it does not fit into her image of Islam as a peaceful, gentle, tolerant religion.

My conclusion is that Islam is not simply a religion: it is also a social, economic and political ideology. In case you were wondering, the motion was indeed defeated. However, the speech that Arwa Elrayess gave at the Oxford Union is misleading, inaccurate and full of half-truths (she probably has a bright political future in front of her). And that is why I believe that the West has every right to be suspicious of Islam.