If His Religious Knowledge Is As Sharp As His Political History…

Spanish Pundit and others are very concerned about this article by one Michael Hodges in London’s “Time Out”:

It’s the capital’s fastest growing religion, based on noble traditions and compassionate principles, yet Islam can still be tainted by mistrust and misunderstanding. Here Time Out argues that an Islamic London would be a better place…

Their concerns are certainly reasonable.  For after opening with what he believes to be ”…a hysterical, right-wing nightmare of a future Muslim London…”:

…The lorry halted by the plinth that had once held Marc Quinn’s sculpture ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ – long since removed as an insult to decency – and was now the place of public execution. A rope noose attached to a wire cable hung from a mechanised hoist. The main doors of what had been the National Gallery flung open and an Imam walked down the steps of the new Institute of Islamic Jurisprudence, opened only a week before by Sultan Charles, Prince of Islam and protector of the faithful in England…

. . . he moves on to what he considers the positives of the Islamic outlook.  Mr Hodges is entitled to his views, of course.  Yet if he can’t even get this following set-up statement fundamentally correct, readers are definitely entitled to challenge the validity of any of the rest of his article’s sunny views of a supposed Islamic London:

…For a start, Islam is not an alien religion to London. At the end of World War I the city sat at the heart of an Empire that had 160 million Muslim subjects, 80 million in India alone. London was the largest Islamic capital in the world. Forty years later and the end of the Empire, unrest and war and poverty in south Asia had lead (sic) to mass immigration to the mother country and London became a Muslim capital in another sense…

For a start, what’s worrisome right at the outset is if Mr Hodges’s knowledge of Islam is as deep as it is regarding the nature of the former British Empire, his producing this article is unsurprising.  For London was never “Islamic”.  It was rather the center of an officially Christian nation-state presiding over an empire that did not confer the same equality of citizenship on all. 

Most overseas peoples, including south Asian Muslims, were never British subjects; they usually fell under the category of “British protected persons” because they lived in imperial territories governed by intermediate local rulers who were themselves responsible to the distant authority of the Crown.  The British empire was usually administered at the bottom rung by local chiefs and princes who were allowed to continue to govern their peoples according to “traditional laws”, unless the British objected.  (Hence the outlawing of suttee — a wife committing suicide on her husband’s funeral pyre — in India in 1829; the British found that practice appalling.)  Those native authorities answered to various local British commissioners, and on up the “totem pole” responsibility went until one found the man at the top: the British colonial governor. 

Essentially, Queen Victoria had indeed been Empress of India (including what would become today’s Muslim states of Pakistan and Bangladesh), but that did NOT mean in practice that those Indians residing there had the same right of abode in London as a UK born British subject; distance and expense alone, let alone cultural issues, prevented most from ever considering making the trip, and in the twentieth century, as travel became easier, British restrictions began to appear.  It was indeed only after independence that immigration from India and Pakistan became commonplace; but that was because as now independent countries within the Commonwealth (like Canada and Australia), their citizens were granted (until controls were imposed starting in 1962) far more liberal British Commonwealth citizenship access when it came to their moving to Britain.  

Thus terming Britain “the mother country“ is ridiculous.  So apply whatever twisted logic one likes, but there is still no escaping the fact that Islam IS absolutely historically alien to London . . . and to the United Kingdom.  And one would think that would be self-evident.  After all, if it weren’t alien, we would not now even be having this conversation about integration.  No?

Regardless, relax.  “Time Out” is not a newspaper; it is a magazine emphasizing “arts and entertainment“.  Therefore, for news insight, it probably ranks below Metro — which is a free publication most often read for a minute or two on The Tube as a few moments’ diversion from having to reflect too much on the fact that the person next to you has his _____ in your face.  

So one shouldn’t take that piece too seriously on any level.  For while discussions of “what ifs” of what might be decades hence based upon today’s concerns are intriguing (remember, there were many convinced in the 1970s that the world was bound to have been enjoying the blessings of Soviet dominion by now), we have more important immediate real matters to worry about.  Sorry if I seem to be writing that a lot lately.