Islam: Tenets

Debate between Baroness Stedman-Scott and Lord Parekh

Thursday 7th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by complimenting the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, on securing this debate. His introduction was quite interesting, although I was a little disappointed that what began as a calm disquisition on Islam turned, as it moved on, into a kind of diatribe. That is an inevitable danger. If one talks about Islam as a whole, rather than concentrating on a particular aspect of it, there is a danger of spreading oneself too thinly and covering a lot of ground. Therefore, as, I hope, a good academic, I want to concentrate on the Question itself.

The Question that the noble Lord has asked—every word is carefully chosen, although occasionally mischievous, and certainly interesting—is whether the Government will encourage Muslim leaders to re-examine the three Muslim tenets of abrogation, Taqiyya and Al Hijra, and to publish their findings. I want to look at those three concepts. What are the Islamic tenets on these three concepts? Do they need to be revised or re-examined and, if so, along what lines?

The first is “abrogation”. I am sorry that the noble Lord used Arabic for the other two tenets, whereas he left this one as “abrogation”; in Arabic the word is “Naskh”. Naskh is simply a theoretical tool to interpret the Koran. Where the different verses of the Koran—or the verses of the Koran and the Hadith—do not match, you need a rule for interpretation. The rule generally is that the later Koranic verses supersede the earlier ones, as they do in the Hadith. That is what abrogation means.

Taqiyya is a much trickier concept. It largely means “covering up” or “dissimulation”. It means that when a Muslim is in a crisis situation or likely to face intense persecution, he is allowed to lie about his faith. He can say, “Look, I’m not a Muslim”, if Muslims are going to be attacked. At one level, he would seem to be disloyal to Allah to whom he has agreed to submit, but on another level he is excused because his life is in danger. As the Oxford dictionary puts it, it is really a precautionary dissimulation of religious belief. But again, it has been reinterpreted, as all these tenets have been. It was reinterpreted after 9/11 to mean that a Muslim has a religious obligation, not just a religious permission, to lie and to lie not only to survive but to proselytise his own religion.

The third idea is the idea of Al Hijra, which refers to Muhammad and his companions migrating from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE to set up the first Islamic state. The Muslim calendar counts dates from the Hijra, and Muslim dates have the suffix AH, which means “After Hijra”. In recent times, the concept of Al Hijra or Muhammad’s move from Mecca to Medina is taken to mean that Muslims have an obligation to move from a secular society to one that allows you to practise religion or be suffused with the religious spirit—or to oppose colonial rule. That is what happened, as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, suggested, in India during the time of British rule, when several Muslims on religious grounds said that they would rather move to Afghanistan from India rather than stay on because they suspected that colonial rule was not going to give them freedom.

My point in all this is simply to say, first, that the re-examination of these concepts is going on and that no encouragement is required because circumstances compel Muslim leaders to reinterpret those concepts, just as Hindus and Christians have been compelled. Secondly, government intervention in these matters is always ill-advised because it politicises scholarship. Scholarship loses its sense of detachment and integrity. More importantly, the Government have no competence in the matter. If someone interprets Al Hijra in one way and the noble Lord, Lord Desai, interprets it in another and the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed, in another, how will the Prime Minister decide which one to encourage and which to discourage? It is not the Government’s business. To give the Government religious authority is the worst thing that any liberal, or even non-liberal, society can aim to do.

The third difficulty is why only these three tenets? These three are not really crucial. I can think of half a dozen others, so why just these three? And more importantly, why only Islam? What about Hinduism? The noble Lord, Lord Desai, wrote a book about the Bhagavad Gita—a secular reading of a religious text. Lots of Hindus whom I know are deeply uneasy about it because they would like it to be seen differently. The question is why concentrate only on Islam. Even verses in the Old Testament breed the spirit of violence and hatred. The New Testament is just as bad in some cases—apart from the “Sermon on the Mount”, it contains other passages that can be just as obnoxious. So why concentrate on only one religion?

The next question that worries me is: will it assist the cause of anti-terrorism? It will not. Terrorists are not just guided because of these three tenets. They are guided by other considerations, such as being unhappy with our foreign policy or a sense of alienation growing up in our society. There are all kinds of reasons, and religion is simply being used as the language of expression, not as the source from which the inspiration is derived. When religion is simply being used as the language of expression, the causes lie elsewhere. If we are looking for a reinterpretation of the tenets in the hope that that would stop terrorism, there is no such possibility of that happening.

The last point that I want to make is that Islam, like any other religion, has both violent and non-violent traits. That is just as true of Christianity. How could the religion of simple peasants lead to the largest empire, of many different kinds, in human history—the British colonial, the French and all that? How could it justify slavery? If we think of Christianity, the enormous amount of good as well as harm that it has done simply cannot be explained away. Every religion has the potential for both. Which potential is being actualised depends on the circumstances. Muslim countries—it is not Islam as such but Muslim countries—are passing through a phase of identity crisis, deep alienation and anger against the West for its foreign policy or for its support of native tin-pot rulers, so obviously they are going to take the form of aggression.

The simple point I want to make is that, if we want to have this sort of discussion as part of an anti-terrorist strategy, the Government’s strategy—which I would have loved to discuss—leaves a lot to be desired. The Prevent strategy is not the answer, and to fit anything into that mould is not the way to proceed.

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I may say respectfully that we have limited time in this debate. All noble Lords have prepared for it incredibly well and have great points to make, but we need to allow time for the Minister to reply to them. I would ask noble Lords to honour the time allowed for speaking.