Moderate Muslims in Britain have a problem with Islam too | We need to talk about Islam. We also need to talk about
Muslims, and since we’re having more and more Muslims in Europe we really need
to talk about whether or not they can integrate in mainstream society, and what
are we supposed to do with the ones that don’t. We have actually been having muslim immigrants in Europe for
a few decades and for a long while they got along with the rest of the
population and integrated. Well, not in its entirety. There are muslim immigrants
communities in the West that have been trying to get along just fine with
others and succeeded for the most part.
These are the ones who came with the open stated purpose to make a
better life for themselves, who adjusted to the Western way of life and found a
happy compromise between their Muslim religion and living in the West. You know
them. They are the people who have jobs, businesses and are socially
successful. They’re the ones who managed to pick and choose and for which “muslim”
is not the core of their main identity, it’s just one of the many things they
are. They are the ones whose daughters
don’t cover their hair, those who have succeeded socially, those we call
moderates. My friend Ahmed is one of them. Ahmed is a local councillor,
a businessman, a college teacher, a marathon runner and a Muslim. He is
ethnically Indian but was born in the Indian community in SA and immigrated
to the UK with his parents when he was 5.
40 years later he is a pillar of his community, he has friends and
associates that are both muslims and non muslims and manages to keep his life
carefully on the middle line between his muslim community and the mainstream
community. Ahmed really hates the “refugees”. In our private
discussions he’d get angry because “these stinking
goatfuckers are coming over and ruining everything we’ve worked for since the
80’s”. There are a lot of
people who think like him, because they came to integrate and live at peace
with their non muslim neighbours but are now feeling that the changes in their
community by the new arrivals are ruining their efforts to integrate and live
peacefully. “you have people like
me, who came over because we want a better life for us and our kids. I want my
son to be happy and be free to do what he wants with his life. I have my shop,
I watch football and he goes to the best private school in town. If I wanted
him to live in a shithole I’d have stayed home”. I’ve known Jamal for 15 years and he’s never worn Muslim
garb. His wife wears western clothes, with her hair uncovered and she works in
the shop with him. Well she used to, because now they have three kids and she
has to look after them and Jamal is successful enough to hire people in his
much larger new shop. Both Ahmed and Jamal feel that Britain’s over the top
generosity to certain immigrants has created a bad environment for them.
Ahmed says that Europe is being overly generous with the
wrong people. “When it was hard to come over, when you needed a job and
money, you made a commitment. It put everything you had on the line, and you
did it because you wanted a better life. My parents wanted to live better and
to give me and my brothers a better life so they saved their money and came to
the UK with that purpose. But the newer arrivals, the ones the Blair government
imported in, didn’t have the same motivation. “Muslims are lazy,
innit? You’re told by the Quran that coz you’re a Muslim you’re better than the
Kuffar and they owe you. Why you think all our countries are shithole? Why you
think Mohammed took his people and set to conquer others’ lands? Because they wanted
what they had, especially the Jews. They wanted their big cities and commerce,
but didn’t want to work for them. SO you tell a bunch of desert people a story
that says “you are better than everyone else and God loves you, so you should
go and conquer these other people and take what they have”, of course that’s
gonna be an attractive message. More attractive than “work to get what you want”.
Innit?” So you had families coming over from Pakistan or India and
Africa who didn’t come to make it, they came for the free money. Coming over
was no longer an investment in success, it was just a matter of gaming the
system. Jamal “There guys don’t do
shit all day. They sit home and bang out kids and go to the mosque and you’re
paying for it and they think they fooled you. They know they have it good
because they remember how shit back home was, but their kids don’t. The muslims who are socially
successful are unlikely to become radicalized. Radicalization happens when
people are unhappy, and in a lot of cases that’s because their parents and
community put pressure on them. Ahmed confirms this.
The clothes are a way of showing the dedication to the silent
segregation that is practiced by the Muslim communities all over the UK. The ones who dare to resist being pulled in have to suffer
social ostracism. The entire family, which is always an extended family will
look down on them. They’ll get stern words and looks from their elders and from
the imam and the social pressure is terrible. The one who have the fortitude to escape have to accept that
the price for their freedom of mind is renouncing their families. Those who don’t are shamed into getting back into the community,
and the social pressure on them is horrid. The parents want their kids to be
like them, and the kids are forced into complying which makes them unhappy and
angry. Ahmed “The kids get radicalized online and at the mosque. There’s
a lot of money coming in from abroad to the mosques, and propaganda, books and
stuff printed in Saudi that tell them
how awful and degenerate the West is and how they’re superior. How the
Kuffar are inferior. So you have kids
who are told that their inferior have better stuff than they do. Of course that’s
gonna make them angry, and that’s why they go and do this dumb shit. In their
eyes, the fact that the Kuffar live better than they do is an injustice, and by
blowing back against it they are just doing what is their duty as good muslims,
what is their right as superior people”. “It’s never the good
kids who go, innit? It’s always the losers from the families on the bennies
that never had to realize their view of the world is wrong because the bennies
and the mosque protect them from that. When you work and get your own money and
learn you can live well from your work, you get to thinking about it innit? And
you realize that what you’ve bene taught and what your parents believe is
stupid backwards bullshit. But if you
never have to go into the world and rub your elbows with people who aren’t like
you, you won’t see that.” Of course that causes problems. Being seen as a bad muslim
has dire consequences. “Your parents and uncles will talk down to you and try to
shame you. They’ll put pressure on you
and your mum will cry and put this whole circus on and the imam will come over
and they will try to shame you into going back to the mosque. They’re being earnest here, they still
believe apostates should be killed so in their heads they’re trying to save
their baby from himself”. So you ill go back coz if you don’t they will kick you out.
Now just that they won’t let you see your baby brothers anymore and nobody in
the family will speak to you, but if you like have a business, they won’t buy
from you anymore. They’ll go to where the Imam tells everyone that you’re a
failed man so buying from you or even talking to you is a sin, and that’s hard.
You get chased out by your community” Ahmed Jamal: “And then you have all that’s been happening, these attacks
and so, and there’s a lot of people who look on us as if we are the enablers of
these bastards innit? And maybe we are coz you’re too scared to speak against
them. Them kids who had that table at Clock Tower protesting ISIS as British
Muslims were risking their lives. We are their enablers coz it’s dangerous to speak against
it. At the mosque, most mosques are dangerous. It’s supposed to be this place
of community where all come together but it’s how the belief and the hatred
spread. And you can’t talk about it, innit? Christians had their
reformation and shit, right? You had people who said “hold on this is stupid
and doesn’t work so we need to change it and make it easier for people to be
Christian”. You don’t get that here. You
think I’m so stupid to believe Mohammed fled on a flying horse? I’m not but
nobody’s willing to admit it’s a stupid fairytale. |
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