Queen’s Speech

Lord Pearson of Rannoch Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)]

My Lords, I propose to speak about Islam and its future in this country. Indeed, I hope that everyone—Muslims and the rest of us—can start talking about Islam without being told that we are Islamophobes stirring up religious hatred. I should make it clear that I am not speaking for UKIP and that I am by no means a Muslim scholar. However, I am advised by three such scholars, one of whom was a sharia court judge for 11 years.

Islam is a vast subject and so, given our time constraint, I refer noble Lords to a debate I had in Grand Committee on 19 November 2013. What I said then has been justified by subsequent events in north Africa and elsewhere, and a few respectable commentators are beginning to suggest that we should be allowed to debate openly the nature of Islam and its likely effect on our future society. For instance, Professor Tom Holland suggested last week that the moral perfection of Mohammed should now be questioned, even if to do so is akin to poking a hornet’s nest with a stick.

It will be common ground in this national debate—if we can get it going—that the vast majority of Muslims live good and peaceful lives. However, when we refer nowadays to extremism, we usually refer to extreme or radical Islam. We do not refer to radical or extreme Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Sikh or any other religion. It is also true that much bloodshed, the dark side of our human nature, has erupted within and through Christianity over the centuries, even if its founder was wholly good. But not now; now that darkness is moving strongly within Islam. If we want to stand up to it, I suggest that we should start by talking about it and trying to understand it.

There are many verses in the Koran which justify jihad, so why do we go on pretending that Islam is a religion of peace? It does not help to reply that there is also much violence in the Bible because that is all confined to the Old Testament and orthodox Jews are not killing tens of thousands of innocent people on the strength of it.

When our leading Muslims do try to prove the peacefulness of the Koran, they are less than reassuring. Last September, 119 British imams wrote to the Independent newspaper to assure us that the decapitation of two of our aid workers in Syria was,

“nowhere justified in the Koran”.

To support this they quoted from sura 5 verse 32 thus:

“Whosoever kills a human being … it is as if he kills the entire human race”.

That sounds peaceful enough until you fill in the dots, which go,

“unless it be for murder, or for spreading mischief in the land”.

So the Koran actually says that you can be killed for spreading mischief in the land, which to the jihadists is simply not being a Muslim or helping the victims of their brutality. Is that the best that 119 of our leading imams can do? The very next verse—sura 5 verse 33 —details the punishment for those who spread mischief in the land, which is,

“execution or crucifixion or the cutting of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land”—

not exactly peaceful stuff.

In 2013, I mentioned the Muslim tenet of abrogation, whereby when there is contradiction in the Koran or in the example of Mohammed, the later verses or actions abrogate or cancel the earlier ones. This is a serious problem for our debate because the Koran and Mohammed became steadily more violent as he went through life and Muslims are enjoined to follow the Koran and Mohammed’s example.

Today I fear I should mention another tenet, al-Hijrah, by which Muslims are instructed gradually to subjugate their host societies to Islam. It comes from Mohammed’s example after he moved from Mecca to Medina in 622. When he had accepted his multifaith hosts’ hospitality for five years, and his new religion had grown sufficiently, he offered them the options of conversion, exile or death. He ordered the deaths of several hundred and Islam went on to conquer most of the known world. So is it not rather worrying that one of the Trojan horse schools in Birmingham is actually called the Al-Hijrah School?

Is it not also worrying that our Muslim population has grown some 75% in the last 10 years, up from 1.6 million to 2.7 million, largely concentrated in a few cities and with a third of it under the age of 15? The Government tolerate sharia law, under which a man can have four wives, many of whom are having disadvantaged children who therefore become food for jihad. If we cannot give them something better to live for, and if present trends continue, I fear that civil unrest lies ahead.

I repeat that a large majority of our Muslim population is indeed mild and peace-loving, but I suggest that they are not doing enough to stand up to their violent co-religionists. And why should they? It would be dangerous, and all they have to do is to proclaim that Islam is a religion of peace which the jihadists misinterpret. So have we become their generous hosts and are they now fellow travellers on their way to al-Hijrah, blindly supported by our well-meaning but ignorant political class?

We must somehow make it worth their while to reform their fearsome religion and we must support them if they try. To this end I have suggested before that the Government should facilitate and support a major Muslim council in this country which could clarify the meaning of Islam here and cast the jihadists out of that new Islam. Without some major initiative of that kind, I fear that the long-term future of our Judaeo-Christian culture looks bleak indeed.