Subverting Islam

Muslims in the West are increasingly worried about the rise in open attacks against Islam. Even the BNP has switched from blaming the Jew to blaming the Muslim and Nick Griffin is trying hard to appease Jewish sentiment after having identified the common Muslim enemy. In this climate of open season for anything Islamic Muslims fail to realise that a much greater danger is looming from a subversion of Islam with help from within. As for the public denunciation of Islam I tend to recall the words of Hamza in the late Mustapha Akka's movie The Messenger: "What faces me never frightens me". The downfall for Muslims has historically been from backstabbing and betrayal.

Meanwhile, Islam is being redefined for us by those who cannot live with its courage of conviction. Until very recently Muslims resisted the temptation of the banking world to lure them into the conceited net of debt-finance. As a consequence, they many Muslims were unable to get a mortgage for their home without feeling associated guilt and ended up having to pay somebody else's mortgage instead via inflated rental prices. The colonial Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) was the first to come up with the ingenious idea of re-branding with its Amanah house finance scheme. If an interest-bearing mortgage could be sold to Muslims as "halal" and virtually interest free, those Muslims desperate to do the right thing would happily pay even higher interest rates than anywhere else on the market. The government even changed the rules on stamp duty to allow this con to be marketed. For details on this "halal mortgage" scam see my article "Spot the Difference: Selling halal mortgages is like telling porkies with interest". Many other lending institutions have since moved into the field, most notably the inaptly names "Islamic Bank of Britain". Of course, they all have so-called Shariah boards of scholars to make the unlawful permissible.

A similar development is now taking place on the dietary front. The insistence of Muslims to only eat halal meat has also frequently come under attack, notably under the guise of animal rights with the fraudulent claim that halal slaughter is cruel to animals whilst stunning animals before slaughter is more humane. I discuss this subject in my leaflet "The halal slaughter controversy: Do animal rights activists protect the sheep or the butcher?" which also contains my translation of a scientific study comparing the two methods. I have had discussions with animal rights activists which went round in circles because on the one hand they claimed the study, the only of its kind, was irrelevant since it was outdated, on the other hand they objected to carrying out a new study because it would involve the suffering of animals. So they are quite happy to have animals go through the pain of stunning followed by slaughter which also suits the butchers who, due to the high amount of meat we consume nowadays, run fully automated conveyor belt slaughter lines.

Recently the British food market is flooded with "halal" labelled meat and poultry provided by non-Muslim slaughter houses and distributed through supermarket chains like Safeways, Asda or Lidl, threatening to put the halal family butcher's shop out of business. They all carry the stamp of approval by the "Halal Food Authority". In spite of the official sounding name this is a voluntary organisation which gave the "authority" to pronounce meat items as halal to itself. Their wording of the halal slaughter process is clever and misleading when they state that the animal must not be "stunned to be killed or otherwise rendered wholly insensible prior to slaughter". Of course, the HFA approves stunning for slaughter as its president Masood Khawaja admits to the BBC: "It is acceptable as long as the animal is not dead prior to slaughter". As with "halal" interest the Islamic requirements have once more been reduced to a mere ritual in which the poor animal suffers twice, first by a blow to the head and then by being slaughtered whilst still conscious. This foul compromise is the worst of both slaughter methods, but Muslims are glad to be able to buy their "halal" meat supplies cheaper at their local supermarket, and the HFA is making a handsome profit from certification. The bizarre result is a conveyor belt of carcasses in a non-Muslim slaughter house attended by a Muslim slaughterman who recites the "Bismillah" whilst they pass by, aided by an audio recording in case he should not be able to keep up with the speed of production. If reciting a prayer was the only difference between "halal" (permitted) and "haram" (prohibited) meat, I might as well buy any meat item I please and say the prayer just before eating. They whole point of the dietary prescription in Islam is that the animal is dispatched with the least amount of suffering, and this suffering is certainly increased by stunning. Stunning does not make the slaughter process any less painful for the animal, it simply makes the handling easier for the slaughterer and thus permits higher outputs.

Gradually, because as Muslims we want to be part of the consumer society, Islam is being undermined until all that remains is a few labels. We can then wear Islam on our sleeves (or fashion accessory headscarves), but little substance will remain. Islam will no longer be a principled way of life but a mere fashion whilst our habits and attitudes will differ little from those not sharing our faith. Here is the latest example: The government-sponsored Muslim Council of Britain, another self-appointed "authority" came under a lot of fire for refusing to take part in Holocaust memorial celebrations and more so when its knighted leader Sir Iqbal Sacranie criticised homosexuality in a radio interview as socially destructive. They are now making amends and have promised to campaign to eradicate homophobia amongst the Muslim community. In turn the "Muslim" spokesman of the gay rights campaign organisation Outrage is promising to help them eradicate Islamophobia, too. All is well then in the state of Denmark (oops, Britain, we're meant to boycott Denmark these days). The only remaining stumbling block is that modern Muslims and their treacherous "representatives" must now also acknowledge Israel's inalienable right to exist and occupy. Then we will finally be considered as sufficiently civilised and admitted as a full member of the "international community".