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"The
petrodollar-funded literalists think their version is the real
Islam. I'm for an Islam that is at home in Britain"
Rachel Aspden
The New Statesman
Monday 27th February 2006
It's a surprising admission. "I used to be militant," says Fareena
Alam, 27-year-old editor of the Muslim magazine Q-News. "I
didn't put my religious views into action, and I never joined an
extremist group, but I was myopic and judgemental." Since 2002, Alam
has emerged as a leading voice of liberal British Islam, calling for
restraint and mutual tolerance. But in a community increasingly
polarised by difficult questions - Abu Hamza, the Danish cartoons,
Iraq and Palestine - her arguments are as determined, if not as
shrill, as any advanced by Hizb ut-Tahrir and other
radical groups. "If we do not stand up to the bullies now, they will
push us further next time," she says.
Alam is bringing the battle for the hearts and minds of British
Muslims to the pages of the broadsheets and the streets of London,
Bradford, Manchester and Luton. "I wonder what the parents of the
child wearing the 'I love al-Qaeda' cap would say had their son been
on the No 30 bus that terrible day," she wrote after the first
London protests against the cartoons. She and her magazine have
helped organise the
Radical Middle Way, a series of
talks funded by the Foreign Office aimed at tackling extremism among
young British Muslims.
Battling religious and political radicalism is a tall order for any
young woman. But Alam is no grim-faced ideologue. She is,
incongruously enough, jolly: her eyes bright under her headscarf,
laughing as she describes her rise to prominence while she tackles a
plate of crab-claw starters. Born in London in 1978, she moved to
Singapore with her Bangladeshi parents at an early age and grew up
there, studying literature and sociology at the National University
of Singapore. In 2000, she returned to the UK and "fell into"
journalism. "I had no formal training at all," she remembers. "I saw
Q-News in a bookshop in London, called them up and by chance
their news editor had just left."
Four months later, after a crash course from the magazine's founder,
Fuad Nahdi, Alam had filled the position. "I've been a journalist
for 20 years, and you learn to spot people with integrity and
conviction," says Nahdi. "Fareena's views were also in a state of
flux - she had just started wearing the headscarf - which I thought
was good for Q-News. We want to question things." Nahdi, Alam
says, has been "instrumental" in guiding her career, and he takes on
a Svengali-like tone when discussing his protegee. "She has followed
in my footsteps," he says, adding that he insisted she take an MA in
international journalism at his alma mater, City University,
followed by a six-month stint on the Observer in 2003. "I was
struggling with questions of who do I want to be: a Muslim
journalist or a journalist who happens to be Muslim?" Alam says,
describing her struggle not to be pigeon-holed as a minority-issues
writer. But in 2003, when Nahdi invited her to become editor of
Q-News, she accepted, finding herself at 25 in charge of an
independent monthly magazine with an estimated circulation of
60,000. It was a canny move on Nahdi's part: Alam's articulacy and
experience with mainstream broadsheets has put her at the head of a
media-savvy generation of young Muslims.
She soon found herself immersed in a long-running battle for control
of the aims and beliefs of an entire community. Q-News has
long been at the centre of a feud between Nahdi and senior members
of the Muslim Council of Britain, a microcosm of what the Muslim
journalist Ehsan Masood describes as the "war being fought at the
heart of British Islam itself". Q-News and MCB members have
exchanged allegations of corruption, as well as disagreeing
profoundly over the nature of, and solutions to, the problem of
Islamism in Britain. In a 2003 Guardian article, written in the wake
of a British-led suicide attack in Israel and proleptically titled
"Tel Aviv first, then Manchester?", Nahdi warned of a coming "intifada
in the streets of Birmingham and Detroit". The MCB dismissed this as
hysterical scaremongering.
Nahdi is keen to play down the controversy, dismissing Ehsan's
account of the conflict. Others are less diplomatic. "Q-News
has been hostile to the MCB since its inception," says Inayat
Bunglawala, the organisation's media secretary. "Nahdi is almost
universally despised in this community. It's a tiny magazine,
published sporadically." The feud is bitter, and, for Alam,
personal. Following John Ware's 2005 Panorama film on the subject, A
Question of Leadership, Alam's husband, Abdel-Rehman Malik, who is
also a Q-News contributing editor, received death threats
from within the community. When I ask her about the MCB, her face
crinkles. "How can I say this?" she begins guardedly. "There's been
a lot of trouble. It was even suggested that Q-News benefited
from creating stories about extremism in Britain. Then 7/7 happened
and I thought: I don't want to say it, but I told you so."
From her own brush with radical ideology, Alam knows extremism
exists in Britain. She attributes much of it not to economic
deprivation or political frustration, but to a warped interpretation
of Islam provided by illegitimate books and websites. "I quenched my
thirst for knowledge with guidance from the internet," she
remembers. "I looked to half-baked online fatwas and badly
translated books, and used that little knowledge to judge people
around me, and fuel the arrogance and anger within me."
Her views began to change when, in 2001, she came into contact with
the teachings of traditional scholars.
The only way to counter extremism, she believes, is with more
religion, not less: by promoting an Islam she characterises not as
"moderate" but as "fundamentalist". She argues: "Mercy and patience
are the fundamental values of Islam. This is not a watered-down
version of religion." Her conviction worries more secular Muslims,
who perceive the group around Q-News as "odd", "crazy" or
"Islamists by another name" - and so, perhaps, does her language. "I
know people have trouble with the promotion of religion, and that's
a legitimate concern," counters Alam. "But we cannot run away from
the fact that religion is important to these young people. The 7/7
bombers didn't come on the platform of secularism, they came on the
platform of being bearded, praying-five-times-a-day Muslim guys. We
have to talk to people on their own level."
Yahya Birt, the Muslim convert son of John Birt, former director
general of the BBC, and a research fellow at the Islamic Foundation
in Leicestershire, agrees: "To deal with extremism, you have to
understand the heavily religious culture of the extremists," he
says. "A thorough theological engagement with violent radicalism is
necessary." Like others, he is wary of any group within the
community seeking to promote its views alone. "Q-News doesn't
have a monopoly on understanding," he warns.
In the scramble for influence, the best-funded (and loudest) voices
are likely to prevail. "The petrodollar-funded literalists think
that their version of Islam is the real Islam, and they've had the
money to promote it around the world," explains Alam. "I'm for an
Islam that is very at home in Britain: I don't want a foreign
religion." The Radical Middle Way project attempts to bolster
moderate Islam in Britain by promoting traditional scholars, such as
Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah of Mauritania and Habib Ali of Yemen,
"whose learning and authority are undeniable".
The scholars' tour of Bradford, Oldham, Manchester, London and Leeds
has attracted 15,000 young Muslims since December. Though the
promotional material does not mention it, government funding is
common knowledge. Birt sees this as a positive shift: "The debate is
moving on from a knee-jerk cynicism against any government
involvement. The basis of engagement is really changing." Yet this
dialogue throws up difficult questions. In supporting the tour, the
government is funding highly conser-vative scholars who accept few
of the tenets of secular western society. Alam believes the
scholars' piety and compassion make their cultural mores
unimportant. "How is it that a man from Yemen understands so well
the nature of our situation here?" she asks. "That's traditional
scholarship for you."
The strategy seems to be working, satisfying a real hunger for
religious knowledge among young Muslims. When Shaykh bin Bayyah,
wrapped in a traditional Yemeni blanket, walked on to the stage at a
recent Middle Way meeting in London, awestruck teenage girls craned
to capture him on their cameraphones as if he were Pete Doherty. "It
takes very little to tip someone over. To bring them back from the
edge," says Alam. "I know this from my own first contact with the
sheikhs, about five years ago."
Her own experience with radicalism has ensured that although Alam
may sympathise with the pain of the Muslim community, she refuses to
become a mouthpiece for their grievances. Her measured response to
the cartoon controversy is a case in point. "The burden of
representation is immense. But I am definitely not going to change
to make myself representative," she says.
This determination has powered Alam's rise to prominence in a
community almost exclusively led, as Nahdi puts it, "by middle-aged,
bearded men". Some are quick to play down her achievements. "There
are many talented Muslim women," observes Bunglawala drily. "Some
are better at promoting their own work than others." Alam knows that
as a young, articulate and influential Muslim woman she holds a rare
position. "The absence of women has a huge effect on the end results
of what we produce as a community," she says. She believes that more
outspoken Muslim women will in time emerge, and be in the vanguard
of positive change. "Women have a unique contribution to make: we
bring humanity and compassion to the debate. These are things that
men can do, but so often we do them better."
She insists that the many challenges can be best resolved through
religion. "Islam has an incredible capacity to develop distinct
cultural forms and expression while maintaining its universal
principles," she says. "I want British Islam to reflect the best of
my - and others' - faith and citizenship." |
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