I’m being radicalized. I’m slowly becoming an extremist, and it is because of the people around me. Yes, I’m a young Muslim.
I regularly visit my local mosque, and I carry a copy of the Qur’an in my car. I live in a community that surrounds me with people who were not born in Britain, and who feel aggrieved by the government. I have a beard. I often watch Al-Jazeera. I perform Islamic prayers on aircraft and trains.
My statements may just be enough to scare you, and with good reason, because I’m also angry.
I’m exactly the kind of person that the government wants to warn you about.
I’m becoming an extremist.
There was a time not long ago when I would have been considered normal, and middle of the road. I support the idea of marriage. I think that it is bad to steal and that murder is always wrong. I think that people should repay their loans, not use drugs, not rape, not get drunk. I don’t believe I should be able to walk around topless (or worse). I don’t think we should dispose of the elderly. These were once normal values!
Without changing a single thing, I’m now an extremist. It is clear that the British government has a relativist agenda that opposes the values of its people.
A perfect example of this principle is the recent comment by influential government adviser Baroness Warnock. She sits in the House of Lords, and was in charge of the Commission on Human Fertility and Embryo Research. She has decided that the elderly have a duty to die. Note that she isn’t talking about rights, but a moral obligation to die. This type of view is a slippery slope that devalues a human life. Her argument is that an old person is of no use to anyone, and is just too costly to keep around. Her disgusting, brazen statement was
“If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives – your family’s lives – and you’re wasting the resources of the National Health Service.”
Try as they might to deny it, people like Warnock do have a prism through which they view the world, and they are doing their best to apply it to us. The brash nature of insisting on the large-scale genocide of the elderly is designed to desensitize us. The government would have us believe that there is nothing – including life itself – that is sacred.
Suddenly it is your relative burden on services that determines your worth. This is the classic slippery slope. Anyone who is born with a disability, anyone injured at work, would simply be a waste of space. Warnock isn’t just a random nobody, she’s a part of the government, described as “the philosopher queen” and has famously influenced policy. Her point of view is shocking, but honestly, it isn’t as shocking as it ought to be. Given time, just as with drugs and marriage, the political and ethical policy will shift, making extremists out of those with reasonable, normal values.
Being Muslim – an “Islamist” – isn’t a fast-track to radicalization. Simply doing nothing is good enough.
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Ya Shaykh,
Muslims have a great deal in common with other faiths, most notably Judaism and Christianity. You are right to assert that possessing , what some might term a ‘conservative moral outlook’, is now almost akin to carrying a National Socialist Party card. Followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam share many values which they would like to see infused into the structural dynamics of UK society.
There is, however, one core difference between Judaism and Christianity on the one hand, and Islam on the other: whilst Jews and Christians might disapprove of loan defaulting, drug abuse, rape and drunkenness and even seek to legislate against such eventualities, unlike Muslims, they don’t believe that the major responsibilty of the state is to enforce Draconian laws to forbid such things. I too don’t believe I should be able to walk around topless (or worse), but I don’t want to be jailed or punished if I did. Rather, through education and a good upbringing centred around a strong family unit, I would hope that society and its members would inculcate values that armed citizens with the intelligence and wherewithall to view such actions through a moral prism. This, to me, seems closer to ‘Alaamah Mawdudi’s vision for Islamising society.
Islam seeks to ban things outright, including the discussion and consultation over whether such objectivally ambiguous actions ought to be banned. Many Muslims argue that Islam is not a duality of blacks and whites, where freedoms are ringfenced and liberty is what the Qur’an and Sunnah say it is. Ostensibly this is true, and Islam allows a considerable amount of flexibility according to the ‘limits’ outlined in its canonical texts. Yet, basing ones worldview on finite and fallible texts incompletely codexed some 1400 years ago cannot underpin a just, fair and equitable society in the 21st century.