UK Islamists heading to Beirut to rally for Bakri

[Originally posted at NOW]

NOW speaks to Anjem Choudary, British protégé of Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, who plans to protest the “satans” of the Lebanese army this Friday.

Within the coming 36 hours, a group of European Islamists, including two Britons formerly jailed for solicitation to murder, plan to arrive in Beirut to hold a protest Friday afternoon against the Lebanese authorities’ attempt Tuesday to arrest Tripoli-based cleric, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad.

The group, comprising at least six Britons and one Swedish national, is headed by Anjem Choudary, a former leader of several now-banned British Islamist organizations. Choudary was a protégé of Bakri’s during the latter’s residence in the UK in the 1990s and early 2000s, when he led Hizb ut-Tahrir, among other parties. The other members of the delegation are also followers of Bakri – two, indeed, are his sons, Muhammad Fustuq and Abd al-Rahman Fustuq.

Their plan, according to statements posted by Choudary on his Twitter account, is to rally this Friday at 2pm, either outside the Lebanese Armed Forces headquarters at Yarzeh, or outside the Beirut office of the United Nations in Riad al-Solh Square (the details have yet to be finalized). When NOW spoke to Choudary via telephone Wednesday morning, he said the aims of the “peaceful” protest were four-fold.

“Our main message is, hands off the Muslims in north Lebanon,” Choudary told NOW. “Number two, hands off Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad and his family.”

“Thirdly, we will be condemning the conspiracy of the Bashar al-Assad regime and the Lebanese regime, who have a long history of cooperation,” said Choudary, adding, “I think there’s a man called [Maj. Gen. Abbas] Ibrahim, I forget his name now […] the one in charge of security, this one, I think he’s the one now just arresting people and sending them [to Syria].”

Finally, Choudary told NOW, “Our message will be to call for the sharia [Islamic law] and the khilafa [caliphate]. The only solution for this region, the only time we ever had peace, was when we had the khilafa system. As soon as the British and the French started to support their respective parties, the Druze and the Maronites, a couple of hundred years ago, we never had anything but sectarian strife. So I think it’s about time we went back to the law of God, and implemented it, and I think that is the solution for the whole region, not just Lebanon, but obviously Iraq, and Syria, and other countries in the Middle East.”

It’s unclear how warm a reception the group will get from Lebanese officials upon their arrival either Thursday or Friday morning, particularly at a time when authorities are cracking down on hardline Sunni Islamist movements across the country. While Lebanese law requires the interior ministry’s permission for all public demonstrations, Choudary told NOW his delegation had not obtained such permission and did not plan to seek it.

“We don’t need permission. We don’t recognize the Lebanese government […] so why should we ask permission from people who we don’t believe are legitimate in the first place?” he said.

NOW was unable to get an official reaction from the ministry to the planned demonstration, though an advisor to Interior Minister Nuhad al-Mashnouq, who spoke on condition of anonymity, reiterated that any protest carried out without ministerial approval would be in violation of the law.

Also uncertain is how significant the turnout will be on Friday, assuming the protest does go ahead. Several prominent clerics in Tripoli, including Sheikh Dai al-Islam al-Shahhal and Sheikh Nabil Rahim, told NOW they had not even heard of it. Sheikh Bilal Duqmaq, head of the Read Association, told NOW he doubted the protest would go ahead at all, saying it was merely a media stunt intended to exaggerate Bakri’s limited influence on the ground.

In any case, by Choudary’s own admission, the demonstration is not being coordinated with any established Lebanese parties or movements, being instead initiated “by the extended family of Sheikh [Bakri] and others who we are in contact with,” whom he declined to “put in jeopardy” by naming. When NOW called a Lebanese number provided in one of Choudary’s press releases, a man confirmed there would be no official parties taking part in what was “an independent call by [Bakri’s] supporters.” As soon as NOW asked the man his name, he hung up and subsequently switched off his phone.

Thus, we may not know until Friday afternoon itself what exactly will transpire. Choudary, however, continues to make preparations in the meantime. On Wednesday afternoon, he posted a link on Twitter to readymade placard templates that prospective attendees can print at home. It’s safe to say the slogans, if used, may raise a few eyebrows: “Khilafah For Bilad Ash-Sham [“The Levant”]! Lebanese Army Shiateen [“Satans”]! Shia Raafidah [Rejecters] You Will Pay! Ahlus Sunnah [The Sunnis] On Their Way!”

Nadine Elali contributed reporting.

British liberals should learn from their Arab counterparts

[Originally posted at Left Foot Forward]

Catching up last week on yet another milestone in the sorry emaciation of free expression in Britain, documented in this case by Nick Cohen (who has after all written the book on this), I took to Twitter to quote his elegant synopsis of the problem with far too many of London’s self-styled radicals and insubordinates: “We only challenge religions that won’t hurt us, and governments that won’t arrest us.”

Within seconds, a prominent Lebanese atheist blogger, Gino Raidy, had replied, pointing out the curious and conspicuous fact that the same could not be said of the average disbelieving scribbler in the Arab world.

He’s exactly right. The truth is it seems to be more taboo to criticise Islamism in Britain these days than it is here in Beirut, where it’s taken for granted in liberal circles that theocracy is the enemy (and where, incidentally, the religious bigots are Christians as often as they are Muslims). The takfiris whose “legitimate grievances” right-thinking Britons are so anxious to locate and placate are treated with open contempt by liberal and leftist Arabs, and for very good reason.

It’s not just the proximity to the daily sectarian slaughter in Syria and Iraq, or the residue of the heady Arab nationalist days when the titanic Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser urged Saudi Arabians to revolt against their “reactionary” Wahhabi-Salafist rulers and openly ridiculed the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is, crucially, that Arabs – who naturally know their own language, culture, and history best – have the least difficulty seeing the Bin Ladenists for the crackpot criminals they are, and consequently have the least inclination to respect them.

Take the recent murder in Woolwich of Private Lee Rigby by two unapologetic Islamists. British jihadism’s savviest self-promoter, the former head of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s UK franchise and founder of the now-banned al-Muhajiroun, Omar Bakri, quickly made headlines by defending one of Rigby’s killers and claiming that, “To people around here [in the Middle East] he is a hero for what he has done.”

One pictures it all too easily: the furious throngs of bearded young men, burning Union Jacks, and bellowing for the infidels to be put to the sword. But there’s a reason Bakri didn’t repeat that claim when I interviewed him for a local publication: none of it happened. There were no demonstrations, no posters plastered on the walls, no festive sweets jubilantly doled out in city squares. Even the fringe militant Islamists, who successfully torched a KFC during the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ furore, made nothing of the occasion.

There was, quite simply, no evidence to suggest anyone in Lebanon felt anything but ordinary shock and disgust.

Yet the impressionable British mujahid-in-the-making two thousand miles away wouldn’t and couldn’t know that (and, incidentally, would have been little enlightened by the BBC’s invitation of Bakri’s protégé, Anjem Choudary, on to Newsnight to explain that the real victim in Woolwich was the killer, who had only acted in self-defense).

Maajid Nawaz, the former Hizb ut-Tahrir zealot turned liberal democracy activist, writes in his memoir, Radical, of how easily enthralled he and his fellow east Londoners in the 1990s were by the mere fact of Bakri’s being an actual Arab:

“Everyone wanted to see him and hear what he had to say […] Here was someone who did have a beard, who spoke Arabic, and who had the theological authority from having studied shari’ah (Islamic jurisprudence) at Damascus University.”

Western liberals have for decades permitted themselves to be fooled by these charlatans, even while secular Arabs have consistently and vocally opposed them (some, like the Egyptian Farag Foda and the Algerian Tahar Djaout, paying with their lives for doing so).

Recall that when Salman Rushdie was being vilified by John le Carré and Germaine Greer for the malicious “insult” his novel had been to a “great religion”, no fewer than one hundred Arab literary heavyweights, from Edward Said to Mahmoud Darwish to Adonis to Amin Maalouf, jointly published a book unambiguously rejecting the pro-censorship arguments (let alone the pro-murder ones) and explicitly identifying Rushdie’s cause as their own.

Indeed, in this, they were only following a Middle Eastern tradition identifiable since at least the irreverent poetry of Omar Khayyam, and much revitalized by the intellectual nahda (“awakening”) that flourished in the 19th century, of combating clerical and faith-based stupidity and asserting the superiority of reason and free inquiry. (My favourite example is the 1882 ‘Lewis Affair’, when university students in Beirut boycotted classes and even dropped out in protest at the firing by a Christian missionary administration of a Darwinist professor.)

The day can’t come soon enough that Britain’s liberals realize that, so far from extending a hand of “solidarity” to their Arab counterparts by making excuses for religious fundamentalists, they are on the contrary sharpening the daggers of those who are, and have ever been, their great adversaries.