THE previous time David Cameron asked Parliament to bomb Syria, he wanted to drop bombs on Assad. Parliament rightly refused.
The ultimate goal wasn’t clear.
I’m still not convinced he knows what he is doing. Or, in the zone of the conspiracy theorists, if he does know he isn’t telling us everything. The vague claim of 70,000 soldiers, most of whom have been fighting each other, ready to be galvanised on the ground into fighting Islamic State seems to be just politically inspired wishful thinking.
I found myself instinctively against dropping bombs in Syria. I can see that there is a scam going on with oil. It’s clear that Turkey is busy buying the oil and Russia is exposing them. In a simpler world, where nothing else was going on, it might make sense to make it more difficult for Islamic State to fund their murders by selling under-the-counter oil to the Turks. But I think that the reality is much more complex.
I have never understood quite what the Saudis are up to. It’s the Saudis who most want Assad gone. They want him gone in the name of their kind of Islam. We sell the Saudis significant quantities of arms. I have always wondered if the UK’s government and the West’s rage with Assad is confected rage, to please the Saudis. But it was the Saudis’ more potent version of Islam which has produced the Wahhabi-inspired Islamic State.
It’s also clear that there are a number of different versions of Islam. For a start there are the Sunnis and Shias. The Sunnis make up three-quarters of the world’s Muslims. But on the fringes there are the mystically minded Sufis. When the Sunnis and Shias are not fighting each other, they both persecute the Sufis.
And there seems to be radical Islam and… well, I haven’t yet found a name for the other kind. Do we call it Moderate Islam? Peaceful Islam? To be Islamic is to take the Koran, Hadith and Sunnah as authorative. There is much violence commanded in the Koran; as there is in the Hadith, the sayings of Mohammed collected 200 years after his death; there is a lot of violence in the Sira, the life of Mohammed. Between 622 and 632, Mohammed, as a war-lord prophet, led 74 armed expeditions against his enemies. He executed 700 Jews at the battle of the Trench. And to be a good Muslim one is encouraged to model one’s life on Mohammed.
So what do we call the Muslims who don’t model their lives on him as opposed to those who do?
I was very moved to read that Canon Andrew White, the Vicar of Baghdad, works hand in hand with a Muslim woman, Dr Sarah Ahmed. Together they work for reconciliation in the Middle East. He was recently asked about who decides what kind of Islam is authentic. Are ISIS real Muslims or not? He thinks the problem of talking to them comes from within the Koran itself.
‘The trouble is a lack of forgiveness in Islam. I have looked through the Koran trying to find forgiveness… there isn’t any. If you find it, tell me. This makes it very difficult to talk to Isis because they can show you quite clearly that it is what Allah wants. They can justify their position when Allah says you should combat and fight the infidel and they say, “Well, these are infidels.” So the question is, how can you prove that these are not infidels? And you can’t.’
When Muhaydin Mire, clearly mentally unwell, tried to cut the throat of a busker in Leytonstone, a fellow Muslim caught the imagination of thousands around the world when he was heard to shout ‘You ain’t no Muslim, Bruv’. Even David Cameron took up the soundbite.
But it raised the question of who is to say what a real Muslim is? If the Leytonstone heckler is right – and so many people want him to be right, then let the other Muslims prove him right.
Let the Saudi-Arabians and the Turks and even the Indonesians and the Pakistanis create a ‘moderate Muslim coalition’ and take their planes and troops to Syria and Iraq and confront Islamic State. Let them come under the banner. It should not be the West dropping bombs on Syria to stop so called ‘radical’ Islam. If Muslims themselves are agreed ISIS are not real Muslims, even though they claim they are implementing the Koran and modelling themselves on Mohammed, it should be for the majority of other Muslims to say so, and not David Cameron and the twitterati, echoing the Leytonstone heckler. Only Islam can pronounce on what is real and false Islam. Let them come with troops and planes, under the banners ‘Islamic State terrorism – not in my name & “You ain’t no Muslim, Bruv”.’
