Islam: Tenets

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Patten, who has always been a thoughtful Member of your Lordships’ House. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, on introducing this topic. We have sat next to each other for many years and of course we have often disagreed, but the thing about the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, is that everyone thinks he is wrong, but he wins in the end—as he did with Brexit—so we have to listen to him carefully. Let us hope he does not this time, but that is another issue.

Ever since 9/11, I have taken the view that Islam will be used by the terrorists for what they do, but it is not an Islamic problem; it is a political movement which I and others have called Islamism. Islamism has a very tenuous connection with the religion and its religious texts. I do not read Arabic, so I will not comment on whether abrogation is a good or a bad thing, but I will say this: if we are to understand what is happening by way of jihadist terrorism, we have to understand that it is first of all a civil war within Islam. A lot of damage is done by the Islamic terrorists to fellow Muslims. Indeed, ever since 1973, which was the third and last defeat of the Arab nations to abolish Israel, it has been clear that the modernist, socialist alternative in the Arab world had lost credibility. The Middle East went back to religion; it thought that the only answer was to go back to religion to find a solace or a solution.

Ever since then, we have had this schism in the Islamic world, in which those who want a purer, more fanatical regime—Wahhabism or Salafism—have wanted to subvert Muslim majority societies and replace whoever rules them with a harder version of sharia law and enforcement of religious morality and so on. The human cost to Muslim societies has been much, much bigger than we can calculate compared with what has happened to our societies. Since 1973—nearly 44 years ago—the Middle East has been in a continuous war-like situation. I will not cite all the cases, but in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, in Nigeria and Sudan in Africa and in Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt in north Africa, there have been continuous war-like situations. It is entirely an internal civil war.

One reason why I believe this civil war has been carrying on—I wrote about this in a book about 10 years ago—is that we have not solved the vacuum created by the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire in 1921. I have recently also written about how we can think of the last 100 years’ history as solving the problem caused by the First World War. Each empire that disappeared—such as the Romanov or the Hohenzollern empires—caused problems that had to be solved in the rest of the century. The Romanov problem was solved finally in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Hohenzollern gave us lots of problems but those problems were tackled by the end of the Second World War. The Ottoman Empire disappeared in, as you choose, 1918 or 1921, or whenever it was. We have not resolved that problem. We drew up the arbitrary Sykes-Picot line and created countries but we have not resolved the vacuum that that left.

I take up a technical issue with the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, concerning the caliphate. As noble Lords know, a continuous caliph was established soon after the Prophet died. The caliph was a spiritual leader and, very often, the ruling emperor in the Islamic world. Muslims used to offer prayers to the caliph at Friday prayers until the last caliph disappeared. In India, there was a movement called the Khilafat movement because it was suspected that the British might either abolish the caliphate or replace it with one of their own infidel appointees. As it happened, Kemal Atatürk abolished the caliphate. However, its abolition has created a huge vacuum which we ought to take very seriously. It is as if the papacy had been abolished while the Catholic Church had been kept. We cannot imagine that but that is precisely what the effect is. After 1921, for the first time in the 1,200-year history of Islam, there was no caliph. That psychological shock has not been taken on board. If I were to suggest a policy that we ought to follow, it would insist on there being a caliph approved by the entire Sunni community, not some upstart like Baghdadi who made himself a caliph with absolutely no qualification or pedigree. There are rules regarding who can become a caliph. We have missed a trick here. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire has not been resolved and we have not understood the politics involved here.