Counter-Daesh: Quarterly Update

Lord Singh of Wimbledon Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord about the Prevent strategy. Currently, the greatest threat comes from terrorist recruiters inspired by Daesh. Our Prevent programme will necessarily reflect that by prioritising support for vulnerable Muslims and working in partnership with British Muslim communities and civil society groups. I do not have up-to-date information about the extent to which we have been able to intercept and assist—in the right sense—those returning from the Middle East, but I shall gain data from the Home Office, if I may, and write to the noble Lord about that.

[Lord Singh of Wimbledon (CB)]

My Lords, Daesh cannot be defeated by military means alone. It lives and exists on a distorted ideology of religion. It is important to look at religion itself. If religions tell people what to do, they should be open to criticism. The Koran is an historic text. There are things written in the Koran for a particular period for a particular purpose. They have no relevance at all and it is false and wrong for anyone to say that any religious text is the word of God. The Koran says some good things about how to treat slaves better, but would we say today that the Koran condones slavery? It is very important to ensure that religious texts are taken in context and common sense is used to interpret them. Words such as “prevent” and “radicalisation” actually fog meaning rather than explain it. We need to get at what we are actually teaching, and the Government need to do much more with the Muslim clerics to explain Islam in the context of today, so that people know that this is a false ideology.

[Earl Howe]

The noble Lord makes a series of very good points. Only this morning, I was down in Shrivenham, at the international military religious leaders’ conference, where from 19 nations we have 40 representatives of mainly Muslim denominations, all of them Army, RAF or Navy officers, coming together to share experiences in this area. I attended a lecture on the very subject that the noble Lord mentions. I have personally visited mosques and spoken to imams, and there is no doubt that around the country the Government are engaging with Islamic religious leaders to ensure exactly the point that he makes: that where the Koran is preached, it is preached correctly and no fog of meaning surrounds the words that are bandied about.