Video: Undercover Mosque pt 2, last night
Here is part 1, courtesy of YouTube (cheers Nyrone)
Part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.
I think there’s an important need to highlight this extremism. While I don’t tolerate racism or prejudice against all Muslims, it cannot be denied that there is still a hardcore element in the UK that are intent on preaching and spreading hatred. Pretending they don’t exist is not only dangerous but, over the longer term, counter-productive. We have always been against any sort of bigotry on this blog.
Can I just say, when the director of the Central Mosque said he didn’t know about these women preachers, I find that very believable. Two worlds coexist inside a mosque, and there is no way any man can know what goes on on the women’s side unless his wife tells him. Even in the unlikely event that any man knew of a particular preacher and wanted to stop her, he’d never have the opportunity to approach her, not being able to recognise her for one, and not being able to talk to her if she is not his wife. The underlying problem here is gender apartheid, milder forms of which exist in almost every ‘moderate’ mosque I’ve been to, and probably every synagogue too.
This justification is worse, in my view. If a message is out of the ordinary – like one would expect when considering hate speech – then surely it would be discussed among couples and community. It is also a bit dubious the fact that there is no control or knowledge over what message is spread in mosques on either side.
Ala, why would you think a man would do something, if the women who attended allegedly didn’t?
The mosque director’s response to hate speech in the women’s section (and the extremist literature in the bookshop) being ‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that.’ may or may not be ‘believable’. It’s certainly inexcusable.
In what other large institution would you accept the senior administrator’s excuse that he just didn’t feel it was appropriate/convenient to know what was going on in certain sections?
‘… knew of a particular preacher and wanted to stop her, he’d never have the opportunity to approach her, not being able to recognise her for one, and not being able to talk to her if she is not his wife.’
What? Doesn’t she need some sort of permission to hold forth? Are you saying he can’t question her at all, chaperoned to the eye-balls if need be? That’s a cop out.
Of course gender apartheid is an issue, but I don’t personally see it as the key one here.
The bigoted hatred for kuffar was bad enough, but that hundreds of women (some of them clearly educated and articulate) should listen to the harridan’s dull, thudding, repetitive ‘Kill them…kill them…kill them…’ as though it were a perfectly reasonable approach to anyone who diverged from her vicious interpretation of an old collection of writings was jaw-dropping.
At the private ‘consultation’ the woman who had come (presumably having been persuaded by the subtleties of the ‘kill,kill,kill’ school of islamic ‘thinking’) seemed to more concerned that she couldn’t pop out without her husband than that she was about buying into a system of thought based on unthinking hatred and bloodshed.
I’m not excusing him, all I was saying was that there is no structure or governance of the mosque that includes women, and therefore women have free reign on their side. Go to the women’s section of a mosque one day Ravi, and you would know what I mean when I say it’s a separate world.
And Don, clearly the mosque attendees aren’t so moderate as to be discussing the shocking things they heard at the mosque with their husbands. I doubt much debate and questioning of religion goes on at all, let alone from a wife to a husband. Again, I’m giving you the realities, not making excuses.
You find it shocking that people can be so evil, right? I was taught these same things as a teenager at my faith school. Some girls would voice their opinion regarding the harshness of the punishments. I would always get this gut wrenching feeling while remaining quiet at the back of the class. It was always my least favourite lesson. But we took down our notes, got A’s in our tests, and went out to breaktime to talk about boys. Some of us went on to go out with a boy, some went on to marry and have children, others went on to be doctors, and I went on to be a heathen apostate. So as you can see, we’re not all that evil.
‘So as you can see, we’re not all that evil.’
We’re not yet well acquainted, so I’ll let that one go.
You may not have been excusing him, but if there is no structure or governance of a section of a mosque of which he is the director, then he should by now have put structure in place. It’s not exactly a brand new issue.
After all, what is the point of being a honcho in a patriarchal structure if you can’t control the women?
(That was a joke.)
Ala, who hires or gets these women to talk in Mosques? Isn’t there someone responsible who takes control over both sides? Somebody needs to be accountable. Who is it?
No, Ala. I find it shocking that hate is taught freely to you and everyone else without much resistance from the community. It makes the claim that the mosque director didn’t know what is going on even more dubious.
What they say and the teachings in the books sold may be extremist by modern British standards, but it fits in pretty well with islam as it was preached and practised for most of history though.
I don’t know, Roger. All the protaganists in the programme were Arabs or spokespeople for Arabian Wahhabism. Wahabbism is about 100 years old. The failure of pan-Arab unity in the 40s, the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 20s, the growth of Israeli power coupled with the humiliation of Arab defeats at their hands, the breakup of Mesopotamia.
All these geo-political factors happened in the crucible of the Middle East and are now coded into the religion of Arabian Islam, influenced by political events of the last 100 years or so. Add to that the ascedance of Saudi petro-wealth and their enthusiasm for funding Whabbi ideology so that its tentacles spreads worldwide to poorer Asian muslim lands who regard Arabs as spiritual superiors and we have a recipe for the creation of a new political ideology morphed into a cult, indistinguishable from the host religion per se, but with the patterns of a political cult.
Well, Nik, the Book of Revelations- or the rest of the bible- doesn’t exactly inculcate a tolerant view of life either: 144,000 people saved according to some calculations.
Sid: there have been instances of muslim cultures becoming more tolerant, but I think that the Wahhabis and earlier reformers are the ones who returned to something closer to the roots of the religion. The same sort of thing happened with christianity too. Later interpretations which incorporated external influences and locally acquired were abandoned and the original texts used as exclusively as possible.
As a member of the real majority in this country – an alliance of atheists, agnostics and couldn’t give a shits – I found the first quarter hour of this basically unbelievable. After that, I could not watch. This is actually evil.
This has to be stamped out.
It is evil to teach young folk hate and I do not care who is doing it. That woman ought to be made to confront her beliefs in a public forum, not within her comfort zone.
If this is what Whahabi money is doing to us, then we must stop that too.
Disgusting.
Wahhabi, obviously.
Sikander Hayat (Muzumdar): tell me with a straight face that al-Qaeda are influenced by Aurangzeb.
I watched the old-fashioned way: recorded onto a video-tape from the TV! *gasps*
Can I just ask: how is it that when all the hate-preachers featured in the programme were asked about what they were doing, they just denied it?
Um… you were featured… RECORDED… in the midst of those activities.
I also like the claims that ‘Oh, we never told anyone to hate all non-Muslims.’
Seriously, I’d like to think I’m fairly liberal, but if you want to talk about how people shouldn’t take British citizenship and go licking the boots of a virulently extreme Saudi-supported ideology, you should be fucking DEPORTED, and from then on, denied entry into the country.
Will the government ever act against these people though? It doesn’t want to piss off the Saudis…
Sid @ 9 – great comment!
Amrit @ 13,
Folk like that ought to be viewed as child abusers. Which is precisely what they are. I do not know how these idiots are getting money into the country to spread their disgusting ideology, but it must be stopped.
I get the feeling that after this doc, gender relations at the mosque may change. Who knows…
dc @ 14:
Aaaaaaaaa-men!
Are you coming to the PP meet-up, btw? I’d go on to your blog and ask if you had one… but you don’t… so I have to here!
I can’t get over the irony of women wanting to be preachers, i.e.experiencing a professional advancement of sorts, in order to prevent other women from doing the same.
Ala… I salute you.
It’s such a grey, complex world isn’t it?
So many great Muslims doing fantastic things all the time(I see them in my life everyday) and then this tiny, fractional minority of extremists that appoint themselves ‘real’ Muslims and proceed to talk like a gang of hateful, racist, homophobic chavlims because they have ‘the truth’.
I agree that pretending these folk don’t exist is counter-productive, and that extremism like this needs to highlighted for the sake of all people…but I also believe it’s ok to praise and criticize the program at the same time. Praise the job of highlighting it, offering the people a right-of-reply and providing a balanced fair context about the actual reps from the mosque (as opposed to this seemingly mad old woman from another time-zone spreading her brand of ‘education’)
but then also realize that this program was not made by Hardcash Productions (same one?) with the explicit intention of highlighting extremism, but more to make eye-popping viewing for the audience, which means sometimes talking 10 hours of footage and taking 4 seconds out of context to assemble a hate-narrative, using the craft of film to edit and manipulate the authentic strand to become something ‘creative’. Did you hear that music as they approached the ‘dungeon of Saudi books’ or notice several times when ‘angry moments’ at sermons had been sequenced together coherently to project the speakers as raving nutters? lol! gimme a break..Every documentary is manipulated, but you can bet ones like these are re-edited to the point where fact/fiction just totally blur.
However, I’m not excusing the people featured in it. I’ve met people like this plenty of times, ignorant as hell and armed with more idiocy and time than the average person, and who seemingly feel the ‘facts’ as they have them are non-debateable…and they are smugly going to tell you how to live! They don’t need to be thrown out or put in jail, they need to be engaged and debated by some of the very people in those rooms who stayed quiet.
So what to actually do about it? Arrest them? What they said was objectionable, but was any of it illegal enough for a prosecution to stick? If they are excluded from this mosque, they’ll just frequent another one, or engage in such activities in their own homes!
Don’t you think this is all about power and pride with nothing to do with religion at all. I know what ala says is true so none of this or anything else I try to express here is ever bigotry, but I’m not sure how I feel about all the lines from actual texts being read and then the whole situation being blamed on Saudis’…
I do know some things about religions – though I do not claim to know anything… Islam is quite fascinating, it predicts itself this will happen and gives the answer too…
They do need exposed for what they are, which is not muslim at all..
What can governments do though?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/02/islam.saudiarabia?showallcomments=true
Apparently we are fools for not appreciating the conspiratorial significance of the programme being aired on the first day of Ramadan. I despair sometimes.
Amrit ,
Sorry, can’t make it. Bit strapped for cash at the moment. Maybe next time
Nesrine:
‘Apparently we are fools for not appreciating the conspiratorial significance of the programme being aired on the first day of Ramadan. I despair sometimes.’
Well, it is rather ironic, don’t you think Nesrine? Anyway, what’s even more ironic is that many Muslim’s didn’t even watch it for the fast broke at 8, and well, that’s when the programme started.
Unless the police take action – I don’t know if there are sufficient grounds for them to do so – the row will disappear and the preaching continue.
After the first show the mosque authorities said that they would make sure that the “nothing to do with us” bookshop would be monitored more carefully, which clearly has not happened.
Of course the police did ttake action after the last show – they tried to prosecute Channel 4!!
[...] PP.) [...]
Extremism exist in all faiths. I’m catholic and proud of it yet last Sunday in church my wife and I found a leaflet calling Barrack Obama a murderer for his stance on adoption. Channel Four should take a camera into our church and get a skin full of fire and brimstone. That’s what they do. Preach love as well as hate. The Islamic faith is just the easy whipping boy of our time and dead easy TV to make. Channel Four wouldn’t dare take their undercover team into a Synagogue and get slapped up-side the head as a consequence. Big deal!
Channel Four wouldn’t dare take their undercover team into a Synagogue
Why not?
Don
I’ll give you their (Ch4) explanation:
” It wouldn’t make good television.” Ha ha ha!
A leaflet versus “kill kill kill”…right
and the reason it wouldn’t make good television is that you won’t hear anything nearly as unpleasant as what gets said in mosques. and the “gender apartheid” doesn’t prevent women listening to what is being said, even if the seating is separate. with that said, i think the rabbi of my community (who is old-school arabic-speaking iraqi) would make interesting viewing, being as he is given to sermons which are basically “i used to live there, all arabs are bastards and we are fab”, but on the other hand tend to be very short. the filming would have to cut away to the people sitting in the audience rolling their eyes, though.
b’shalom
bananabrain