4 July 2013, Oxford Union, Oxford, United Kingdom
The debate topic was ‘That Islam is a religion of peace’. Mehdi was arguing for the affirmative.
Thank you very much, Mr. President. Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. As-salaam 'alykum. Lovely to see you all here tonight. We are having a very entertaining night, are we not, with some very interesting things being said from the other side of the House tonight.
Let me begin by saying as a Muslim, as a representative of Islam, I would consider myself an ambassador for Islam, a believer in Islam, a follower of Islam and its prophet. So in that capacity, let me begin by apologising to Anne-Marie for the Bali bombings. I apologise for the role of my religion, and me, and my people for the killing of Theo van Gogh, for 7/7... Yes. That was all of us. That was Islam. That was Muslims. That was the Quran. I mean, astonishing astonishing claims to make in the very first speech tonight - on a day like today - where the conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom is having to come out and point out that these kind of views are anathema. And I believe you're trying to stand for the Labour Party to become an MP in Brighton. If you do, and you make these comments, I'm guessing you'll have the whip withdrawn from you. But then again, UKIP's on the rise. They'll take you. The BNP, they might have something to say about your views.
Anne-Marie:
This is what Mehdi Hasan always does. It's what you always do. It's what you always do.
By the way, just on a factual point, since we heard a lot about the second speaker about how backward we Muslims all are. On a factual point, you said that Islam was born in Saudi Arabia. Islam was born in 610 AD. Saudi Arabia was born in 1932 AD. So you're only 1,322 years off. Not bad, not bad start there.
Talking of maths, by the way, a man named al-Khwarizmi was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, a Muslim, worked in the golden age of Islam. He's the guy who came up with not just algebra, but algorithms. Without algorithms, you wouldn't have laptops. Without laptops, Daniel Johnson tonight wouldn't have been able to print out his speech in which he came to berate us Muslims for holding back the advance and intellectual achievements of the West, which all happened without any contribution from anyone else other than the Judeo-Christian people of Europe. In fact, Daniel David Levering, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of The Golden Crucible points out that there would be no Renaissance. There would be no reformation in Europe without the role played by Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd and some of the great Muslim theologians, philosophers, scientists, in bringing Greek texts to Europe.
As for this being "our university," I will leave that to the imagination as to who is "our" and who is "their." I studied here too.
An astonishing, astonishing set of speeches so far making this case tonight. A mixture of, just, cherry-picked quotes, facts and figures, self-serving selective, a farrago of distortions, misrepresentations, misinterpretations, misquotations. Daniel talked about my article in the New Statesman, which got me a lot of flack where talked about the antisemitism that is prevalent in some parts of the Muslim community, which indeed it is. Of course, I didn't say in that piece, that it was caused by the religion of Islam. In fact, modern antisemitism in the Middle East was imported from - finish the sentence - Christian-Judeo, Christian Europe, where I believe some certain bad things happened to the Jewish people. In fact, Tom Friedman, Jewish-American columnist of New York Times told me in this very chamber last week that he believed, had Muslims been running Europe in the 1940's, six million extra Jews would still be alive today. So I'm not going to take lessons in antisemitism from someone who's here to defend the Judeo-Christian values of a continent that murdered six million Jews. Moving swiftly on. Moving swiftly on. Yes?
Speaker 3:
Aren't you doing exactly what the opposition [inaudible 00:03:58] .
Anne-Marie:
Absolutely.
Well, I'm about to make that point. No, no, no. I'm about to make the point. You're right. I agree with you. I agree with you. I agree with you 110%. That is my point. I don't think Europe is evil or bad. I'm a very proud European. I don't want to judge Europe on that basis, but if we're going to play this gutter game where we pull out the Bali bombing and we pull out examples of antisemitism in the Islamic community, then of course I'm going to come back and say, well, hold on. I mean, look, let's be very clear. Daniel here was a last-minute replacement for Douglas Murray who had to pull out, and Douglas and I have our well-documented differences, but to be fair to Douglas - as to be fair to Anne-Marie and to Peter - atheists!
Atheists, see all religions as evil, violent, threatening. What the problem I have with Daniel's speech is that Daniel comes here to rant this robust defence of Christianity forgetting that his fellow Christians, people who said they were acting in the name of Jesus, gave us The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the anti-Jewish pogroms, European colonialism in Africa and Asia, the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, not to mention countless arson and bomb attacks on abortion clinics in the United States of America to this very day. I would like a little bit of humility from Daniel first, before he begins lecturing other communities and other faiths on violence, terror, and intolerance.
But I would say this: to address the gentleman's very valid point here, I'm not going to play that game. I don't actually believe that Christianity is a religion of violence and hate because of what the LRA does in Uganda, or what Crusaders did to Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem when they took back the city in the 12th or 13th, whatever century it was. I believe that Christianity, like Islam, like pretty much every mainstream religion, is based on love and compassion and faith. I do follow a religion in which 113 out of the 114 chapters of the Quran begins by introducing the God of Islam as a God of mercy and compassion. I would not have it any other way. I don't follow a religion which introduces my God to me as a God of war, as some kind of Greek god of wrath, as a God of hate and injustice.
Not at all. As Adam pointed out, you go through the Quran and you see the mercy and the love and the justice. And yes, you have verses that refer to warfare and violence. Of course it does. This is a motion about passivism. I'm not here to argue that Islam is a pacifistic faith. It is not. Islam allows military action, violence, in certain limited context. And yes, a minority of Muslims do take it out of that context. But is it religious? We've talked about Willich, Daniel and Anne-Marie have suggested that it's definitely religion that's behind all of this.
Well, actually what I find so amusing tonight, is we're having a debate about Islam and the opposition tonight have come forward - we have a graduate in law, a graduate in modern history, a graduate in chemistry. And you know, I admire all of their intellects and their abilities, but we don't have anyone who's actually an expert on Islam, a scholar of Islam, a historian of Islam, a speaker of Arabic, even a terrorism expert or a security expert, or a pollster let alone to talk about what Muslims believe or think. Instead, we have people coming here putting forward these views, putting forward these sweeping opinions.
Listen to Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, one of America's leading terrorism experts who, unlike our esteemed opposition tonight, studied every single case of suicide terrorism between 1980 and 2005. 315 cases in total. And he concluded, and I quote, "There is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism or any of the world's religions. Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists considered to be their homeland." And the irony is, when we talk about terrorism, the irony is that the opposition and the Muslim terrorist, the Al-Qaeda types, actually have one thing in common because they both believe that Islam is a warlike, violent religion. They both agree on that. They have everything in common. Osama Bin Laden would be nodding along to everything he's heard tonight from the opposition side, he agrees with them!
The problem is that mainstream Muslims don't. The majority of Muslims around the world don't. In fact, a gentleman here has started quoting all sorts of polls. Gallup carried out the biggest poll of Muslims around the world of 50,000 Muslims in 35 countries. 93% of Muslims rejected 9/11 and suicide attacks. And of the 7% who didn't, they all - when polled and focus grouped - cited political reasons for their support for violence, not religious reasons.
And as for Islamic scholars and what they say, well, Daniel talks about our University of Oxford. We'll go down to Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, get ahold of a man named Shaykh Afifi al-Akiti who is a massively well-credentialed and well-respected Islamic scholar who has studied across the world, who in the days after 7/7, published a fatwa denouncing terrorism in the name of Islam, calling for the protection of all non-combatants at all times, and describing suicide bombings as an innovation with no basis in Islamic law. Go and listen to Sheikh Tahir ul-Qadri, one of Pakistan's most famous Islamic scholars who published a 600-page fatwa condemning the killing of all innocents and also suicide bombings unconditionally without any ifs or buts.
There's nothing new here. This is mainstream Islam, mainstream scholarship, which has said this for years - you don't go out and kill people willy-nilly in the High Street or anywhere else, on a bus or a mall based on verses of the Quran that you cherry-picked without any context, any understanding, any interpretation or any commentary.
Point of information
Mehdi Hasan:
Please.
What about the stoning of women, for example in [crosstalk 00:09:31]
Anne-Marie:
It doesn't happen, apparently.
Mehdi Hasan:
I didn't say it doesn't happen at all. I never said it didn't happen. I don't blame Islam. Yes. It's a very good point. And a lot of us, a lot of us are campaigning against that and we're campaigning against it in the name of Islam. We're campaigning against it in the name of various interpretations of Islam. Anne-Marie comes and scares us with her talk of Sharia Law. I would like to see the book of Sharia Law. It doesn't exist. People argue over what Sharia Law is. And you empower the extremists by saying there is only one version. You empower them all. I don't believe you took any interruptions, Anne-Marie -
Anne-Marie:Several countries. Several countries -
Mehdi Hasan:
- so I think you should stay there for a moment.
Anne-Marie:
Several countries, not a tiny minority. Several countries.
Here's what we're dealing with. We are dealing with - I took your point. I took your point. Here we are dealing with a fourteen-hundred-year-old global religion followed by 1.6 billion people in every corner of the world. A quarter of humanity of all backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities, and yet the opposition tonight wants to generalise, stereotype, smear, in order to desperately win this debate. And here's my question, if we're going to generalise and smear: if, okay, people say yesterday's bombers and we've got to be careful, there's a trial going on. Were yesterday's attackers, sorry, motivated by Islam. Big debate. I don't believe they were. Let's say they were. Let's say Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber was motivated by Islam. Let's assume for sake of argument that Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber," was motivated by Islam. If Islam is responsible for these killers, if Islam is what is motivating these people and Islam is therefore not a religion of peace but a religion of war, then ask yourself this question: why aren't the rest of us doing it?
Why is it such a tiny minority of Muslims are interpreting their religion in the way that the opposition claim they are? Let's assume there are 16,000 suicide bombers in the world. There aren't. Let's assume there are for the sake of argument. That's 0.001% of the Muslim population globally. What about the other 99.99% of Muslims who the opposition tonight, either ignore or smear? The reality is that the rest of us aren't blowing ourselves up tonight. The reality is that the opposition came here tonight, not worried about the fact that me and Adam might pull open our jackets and blow ourselves up tonight because we're followers of a warlike, warrior religion, which wants to take over Europe and Daniel's university. The issue is this. The issue is this.
Unless the opposition can tell us tonight - and Peter Atkins is here, one of our great atheist intellectuals, can tell us tonight - can they answer this question tonight? Why don't the vast majority of Muslims around the world behave as violently and aggressively as a tiny minority of politically motivated extremists. Then they might as well give up and stop pretending they have anything relevant to say about Islam or Muslims as a whole. Ladies and gentlemen, let me just say this to you. Think about what the opposite of this motion is. If you vote no tonight, think about what you're saying the opposites motion is. That Islam isn't a religion of peace. It's a religion of war, of violence, of terror, of aggression. That the people who follow Islam - me, my wife, my retired parents, my six year old child, that 1.8 million of your fellow British residents and citizens, and 1.6 billion people across the world, your fellow human beings - are all followers, promoters, believers in a religion of violence.
Do you really think that? Do you really believe that to be the case? They say that in the Oxford Union the most famous debate was in 1933 when Adolf Hitler looked out for the result of the King and Country motion where they voted against fighting for king and country and Hitler was listening out for the result. Well, tonight, 80 years on, there are two groups of people around the world who I would argue are waiting for the result of tonight's vote. There are the millions of peaceful, nonviolent, law-abiding Muslims both in the UK, Europe, Asia, Africa, and beyond who see Islam as the source of their identity, as a source of spiritual fulfilment, of hope, of solace. And there are the phobes, the haters, the bigots out there who want to push the clash of civilizations. Who want to divide all of us into "them" and "us" and "ours" and "their."
Ladies and gentleman, I urge you all not to fuel the arguments of the phobes and bigots. Don't legitimise their divisions, don't legitimise their hate. Trust those Muslims who you know, who you've met, who you hear, who don't believe in violence, who do want you to hear the peaceful message of the Quran as they believe it to be taught to the majority of Muslims. The Islam of peace and compassion and mercy, the Islam of the Quran, not of Al-Qaeda. Ladies and gentlemen, I begged to propose this motion to the House. I urge you to vote "Yes" tonight. Thank you very much for your time.
