Islam: Tenets

Lord Pearson of Rannoch Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether, as part of their strategy against Islamist terrorism, they will encourage UK Muslim leaders to re-examine the Muslim tenets of abrogation, Taqiyya and Al Hijra and to publish their conclusions.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)]

My Lords, this Question is yet another attempt to start some sort of open discussion in this country about the nature of Islam. You can say what you like about the virgin birth, the miracles and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but you get into serious trouble if you try to touch at all on the subject of Islam and what it really is. I repeat that I am in no sense an expert on Islam, but I am advised by four people who are.

I have been encouraged by what the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury said in two speeches last autumn. He said that in order to defeat terrorism, we need to understand the mindset of those who perpetrate it; that if we treat religiously motivated violence solely as a security or political issue, it may prove impossible to overcome it; that it is wrong to say that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam; and that until religious leaders stand up and take responsibility for the actions of those who do things in the name of their religions, we will see no resolution. I make it clear that the most reverend Primate was speaking not only about the darkness which is erupting within Islam, but about the Christian militia in the Central Africa Republic and the Hindu treatment of Christians in south India. No doubt he would now add the Buddhist persecution of the Rohingya Muslims.

Before coming to the detail of this Question, I suppose I should repeat some of the absolute basics of the Muslim religion. Islam does not, as so often averred, mean peace; it means submission to the will of Allah, the Muslim God. Islam and its sharia law are an indivisible legal, religious and political system, taking all authority from the Koran and from what Muhammad did and said in his lifetime. So it is a complete way of life, and does not sit easily with our western liberal democracies and our separation of powers between legislature, Executive, judiciary and Church. Within this very broad generality there are a number of very controversial Muslim tenets, three of which I have put into the Question on the Order Paper, and two more of which I will mention. I very much hope that peaceful Muslim leaders do not accept any of them and that they will say so forcefully. The point is that the jihadists most definitely do accept them and take their evil inspiration from them.

The first is abrogation, which holds that the later verses in the Koran cancel the earlier peaceful verses—the verses of the sword cancel the verses of peace. So, for example, the much-quoted early verse, “Let there be no compulsion in religion”, is nullified many times in later verses. Taqiyya is more controversial but in its aggressive interpretation holds that Muslims living outside the Muslim world are encouraged to deceive their hosts in order to further Islam. A worrying example of Taqiyya took place on 18 September 2014, when 119 British imams and Muslim leaders wrote to the Independent newspaper to assure us that the beheading of the British aid worker David Haines,

“cannot be justified anywhere in the Quran”.

To back this up, they quoted from surah 5, verse 32 of the Koran as follows:

“Whosoever kills a human being ... it is as if killing the entire human race; and whosoever saves a life, saves the entire human race”.


The Taqiyya, or deception, becomes clear when you fill in the dots. The missing passage reads, “unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land”. So the Koran actually says you can be killed for spreading mischief in the land, which to the jihadist is doing anything that frustrates his evil purpose.

My third tenet is Al Hijra, which is taken from Muhammad’s example after he had accepted his multifaith hosts’ hospitality in Medina for five years and had become strong enough to force them to choose between exile, converting to his new religion or death. He ordered the death of several hundred people and Islam went on to conquer most of the known world. One of our so-called Trojan horse schools in Birmingham is actually called the Al-Hijrah School, so the tenet is alive and well in the UK today.

The two other Muslim tenets that I want to mention and ask our Muslim leaders to address are, first, the ambition to create a world caliphate and, secondly, the death penalty for leaving the Muslim religion, or apostasy. As for the caliphate, I can do no better than recommend a courageous article in the Daily Telegraph on 19 August this year entitled:

“Don’t blame the West, the terror won’t stop until Muslims reject the caliphate”.


The point about that article is that it was written by Mr Ed Husain, who was a militant Muslim for five years, so he knows what he is talking about. I will put a copy in your Lordships’ Library.

Death for apostasy applies in 13 predominantly Muslim countries but not here, so I trust that our Muslim leaders will have no difficulty in declaring it to be un-Islamic. Who are the Muslim leaders who the Government should encourage to re-examine these tenets? There is no Pope in Islam and its many sects and divisions make it very difficult to deal with. Presumably we will not be consulting the 119 imams who wrote to the Independent. There was a group of 130 leading Muslims who issued an unprecedented statement through the Muslim Council of Britain, refusing to perform the funeral prayers for the three terrorist attackers at London Bridge last June who were shot dead after killing seven people and wounding 48 others. Perhaps the Government could try them or the Muslim Council of Britain itself. I am advised that the Union of Mosques and Imams should also be approached. However, I do not have much doubt that the Government will not accept my suggestion and that, if they do, our Muslim leaders will not collaborate. This would be a pity because, if these tenets stand as part of the Muslim religion, Islam cannot possibly be a religion of peace and we should not go on pretending and hoping that it is.

We should instead be taking some initiative now which will help to avoid the eventual Muslim takeover of our society, at least in our major Muslim conurbations. You have only to look at the Muslim birth rate to see that that is now a real possibility. The latest figures I have from the ONS show that the Muslim population in England rose 10 times faster between 2001 and 2016 than did the rest of the population, by 107% compared to 11%. In six of our top Muslim conurbations, it rose by an average of 130%, and 33% of our Muslims in England are under the age of 15, compared to 18% of the rest of us.

The Government continue to tolerate sharia law here, whereby a Muslim man can have four wives, each of whom he can divorce by merely saying “I divorce you” three times. Of course, the Muslim wives cannot do the same.

Written Answers from the Government reveal that they do not have a clue what is being preached in sermons in our mosques or what is being taught in our madrassahs, or Muslim schools. What is more, they do not intend to try to find out.

Whenever some of us try to raise the issue of Islam, we are told that it is we who are undermining the Prevent programme or interfaith dialogue—dialogue with what faith?—even that we are spreading hate towards the Muslims and making them feel insecure. Speaking of the Prevent programme, it seems to me that our Muslim communities could be doing more to stand up to and expose their violent co-religionists, because only 8.6% of tip-offs to the programme or the police come from within those communities. If they co-operated more, they would be less distrusted by their non-Muslim neighbours.

In conclusion, as a leading Muslim said to a friend of mine recently: “We do not need to go on blowing you up. All we have to do is to wait until we can take you over through the power of the womb and the ballot box”. I hope he was not right.

I am very grateful to all noble Lords who are here to speak. At least we are talking about Islam. That seems to be a step in the right direction and I look forward to all other contributions, however much some contributors may disagree with what I have said.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, for securing it. There have been some very interesting contributions this evening and quite varied views, which is always the case in a debate. First, I thank noble Lords, such as my noble friend Lord Sheikh, who play an active part in communities and in promoting interfaith understanding, because that work is so valuable. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, for what he said at the start of his contribution. I am not nostalgic for those days; I look back with sadness. Noble Lords will detect that I have no hint of an Irish accent, and that is because I came to this country in the 1970s as an Irish Catholic. Those were unpleasant times for Irish Catholics in this country. The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, and I have many interesting discussions on that dichotomy. I join noble Lords who stated that terrorism has no place in Islam: it does not. It has no place in Islam, Buddhism, Catholicism, Hinduism or any religion, and to conflate the two is quite dangerous to society.

Over generations, we have built something quite incredible in this country: a successful multiracial, multifaith democracy. That success is underpinned by British values, which the mainstream majority share and celebrate, including freedom of speech, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. As the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, said, Britain is home to diverse communities who are free to practise their religion in accordance with the law. The noble Lord also talked about the 2 billion law-abiding Muslim citizens across the globe. He is absolutely correct. There are also people within our Parliament such as the noble Lords in this Chamber and of course the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, and my noble friend Lord Sheikh for describing the various tenets of the Muslim religion in the Question for debate, and the dangers of government asking Muslim leaders, or indeed any other religious leaders, to re-examine the tenets of their religion, because they are quite free to practise it.

The noble Lords, Lord Desai and Lord Hussain, and my noble friend Lord Patten talked about Muslim-on-Muslim terrorism. I saw that in Manchester, and of course we see it in every attack: these attacks are indiscriminate and Muslims suffer in them. The noble Lords, Lord Hussain and Lord Ahmed, talked about the aftermath of such attacks and how Muslim communities suffer further in the spikes in anti-Muslim hatred that we see afterwards. Those points were well made.

The noble Lord, Lord Pearson, made a point about sharia law which the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed, corrected him on. Sharia law is not promoted by government. It has no jurisdiction in England and Wales, and the Government have no intention of changing that position. Regardless of religious beliefs, we are all equal before the law. That is a really important point. The Government do not prevent people from seeking to regulate their lives through religious beliefs, and nothing in law prevents people doing that.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords—

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord will encroach on my response time.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

Is the noble Baroness therefore saying that sharia law is not running de facto in our land through the 87 Muslim tribunals? This is all very well documented.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I am saying to the noble Lord that people in this country abide by British law. It is as simple as that. Sharia law has no jurisdiction in England and Wales. I think I made it very clear that we do not prevent people from regulating their lives through religious belief—for example, in the sense that a Catholic might. I hope I have made that point clear.

The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, touched on what the Government are doing to tackle Islamist terrorism. We are absolutely committed to tackling it, and our strategy is firmly based on strengthening our partnership with communities, civil society groups and faith organisations across the United Kingdom. As the noble Lord said, the most effective way to counter the poisonous narratives of terrorists and extremists is to give the community the capacity to resist those narratives.

In the small amount of time I have, I will touch on the various questions that the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, posed. The first was on Prevent, and its outcomes rather than its aims. We have undertaken 169 community-based projects, delivered in 2016-17, reaching more than 53,000 participants; 44% of those were delivered in schools and were aimed at increasing young people’s resilience to terrorist and extremist ideologies.

Around one-third of the people who are supported by Channel are linked to far-right extremism; it is very important that the noble Lord brought up that point. He asked why so few Prevent referrals become Channel cases. As I have said, one-third of the people supported by Channel are linked to far-right extremism, and the Channel process is provided only to those who genuinely need it. About 14%, and he might think that figure is low, were discussed at Channel panels in 2015-16. A further 50% of the referrals, over 3,700 people, were referred on by the assessment process to other support services. Without that rigorous assessment, the vulnerabilities that many of these individuals might have might go unsupported. Around 36% of referrals require no further action, and that is broadly similar to those found in other safeguarding mechanisms. For example, out of the 621,000 children referred to social services in 2015, 35% required no action either before or after assessment.

The noble Lord questions whether Prevent is working. We believe it is. Apart from the statistics that I have just given him, since February 2010 300,000 pieces of illegal terrorist material have been removed from the internet. The Prevent statutory duty has prompted a significant step change in the delivery of Prevent work in sectors. The number of front-line staff who have received training has increased significantly, with over 850,000 front-line staff, including NHS staff and teachers, trained in spotting signs of radicalisation, while since 2012 over 1,000 people have received support through Channel.

More than 150 attempted journeys to the Syria/Iraq conflict area were disrupted in 2015. This includes action by the family courts. The courts protected approximately 50 children from around 20 families from being taken to the conflict areas in 2015.

The noble Lord asked about the Anderson report. The Home Secretary has asked David Anderson to provide an independent stock-take of progress in a year’s time. However, as the noble Lord said, implementation is linked to resources. We will shortly be announcing the budgets for policing in 2018-19, and the Home Secretary is clear that we must ensure that counterterrorism policing has the resources needed to deal with the threats that we face.

The noble Lord asked about providing more resources to MI5. The Government have actually increased funding for MI5. In the 2015 spending review a 30% uplift on counterterrorism spending was announced. This is equivalent to over £3 billion over the period to 2020. The additional funding was to meet the increased threat from Daesh and of marauding firearms attacks.

The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, asked me about the Muslim Brotherhood review. He is correct to say that a review was conducted. Having taken advice, Ministers decided against publishing the report for national security reasons, given the sources of some of the data in it. The UK has taken and will continue to take concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood very seriously. We have published a summary of the main findings of the report, and they support the conclusion that membership of, association with or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered as a possible indicator of extremism.

We will keep under review what is promoted and activities undertaken by the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK in Arabic as well as in English. We will challenge extremists’ poisonous narratives, promote positive alternatives that steer vulnerable people to better ways to get on in life and continue to refuse visas to members and associates of the Muslim Brotherhood who are on record as having made extreme comments, where that will be conducive to the public good. In line with our existing policy guidelines and approach to extremism in all forms, we will seek to ensure that charities with links to the Muslim Brotherhood do not give support or finance to the Muslim Brotherhood instead of undertaking their lawful charitable purpose. We will strengthen liaison arrangements with international partners to ensure that allegations of illicit funding or other abuse of charities are robustly investigated and appropriate action taken. We will enforce the EU asset freeze on Hamas, and keep under review whether the views and activities of the Muslim Brotherhood meet the legal test for proscription.

I have gone over my time and missed out half my speech, but I think that I have addressed noble Lords’ points, which are important ones to address. I finish by thanking all noble Lords for taking part in the debate.