We Reap What We Sow

Britain's casual habit of accepting migrants and refugees who hate and despise us, is going to be our downfall ....

The Fatwa Instigators?

 .... indeed we may already have laid the foundation of decades of low level terrorism, with the acceptance of just two hardline radical Islamists to our shores.

Kalim Siddiqui and Ghayasuddin Siddiqui are both hard-line imams (its hard to describe them as 'scholars.' Initially they just had a hatred of the West, but a wish to live in it - probably because the benefits make it so much better than Northern India or any Muslim paradise they could have chooses to live in). They had both been born in British-ruled India - before the 1947 Partition between India and Pakistan, but emigrated to the Britain they despised.

Ghayasuddin Siddiqui for example founded and headed a fistful of organizations with radical messages .... the Muslim Institute, the Jamaati-e-Islami magazine Impact, the Muslim Parliament (in which no one voted for the self appointed members, and which ceased in 1997), and the Muslim Manifesto all aimed at “taking power from the West”.

In 1964 he organised a trip to Sheffield University (where he was a student doing a PhD in chemistry following getting his degree at Hyderabad University, where he was also an organiser for Jamaat-i-Islami), by Malcolm X, and during a life time of hatred of the West he even founded the 'Stop the War' Coalition with Jeremy Corbyn (yep, the ex Labour Party leader, who would be Prime Minister now, if Boris Johnson hadn't thrashed him at the polls).

While in India he had become a follower and admirer of Abul a’la Maududi, who was he said the “father of Islamism” and had been sentenced to death for inciting his followers to kill 200 Ahmadis “heretics,” and had sought to revive the caliphate and purify Islam. He had admired the Nazi methodology in particular, and adopted their methods.

Despite his hard-line views on Muslims and the Islamic revival, Siddiqui lived in the Cotswolds village of Chesham (a distinctly non Muslim area, as far from the Muslim community as you can get), for thirty years, with his sons educated at a local non-Muslim grammar school ... all while he campaigned to replace that way of life, and introduce Islamic values.

The reason for his despisal of the Western values, and Britain in particular, was his belief that the blame for all injustice in the Muslim world was that Britain alone ended the Mughal's (Muslim) power in India, and thus its supremacy over the Hindu's, and Islam's then major claim to world political and cultural power.

So it was in Britain, which carelessly allowed both Siddiqui's to establish London as“the centre of the Islamic movement,” that allowed the seeds of home grown terrorism and radicalisation to fester. This despite the fact that Ghayasuddin Siddiqui much later came to repudiate both violence, and then political Islam itself by the mid-90s. However this change of heart came too late to stop a violent political movement, from growing from what he had sown earlier.

American Muslim author, C Scott Jordan later described  it as “Great Britain … was a sandbox for Muslims to play at developing their ideologies, philosophies, and eventually movements,” and that it allowed for the deep rooted establishment of Islamic religious radicalisation in Britain. So when Ghayasuddin Siddiqui met Kalim Siddiqui in Britain, the alliance was created that would sow the seeds of terrorism ... Kalim, would you believe it, was allowed to write for the left wing broadsheet newspaper The Guardian, and had penned the infamous Muslim Manifesto that advocated the “capture” of British governance and the subversion of the elites", presumably by Muslims.

Dr Kalim Siddiqui, director of the Iranian-backed Muslim Institute, shouted at a protest meeting against Salman Rushdie in Bradford in 1988: 'I would like every Muslim to raise his hand in agreement with the death sentence on Salman Rushdie. Let the world see that every Muslim agrees that this man should be put away.' ... he and the other speakers at the rally were not prosecuted for inciting murder.

So the pair of them were free to become the alleged instigators of the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, after a chance meeting at Tehran Mehrabad Airport, when bad weather had closed it, between Kalim Siddiqui and Ghayasuddin Siddiqui and Mohammad Khatami an Iranian government minister (who would later become Iranian president).

Kalim Siddiqui and Khatami had a private word, and he later told Ghayasuddin that he was asking my view about Salman Rushdie - and I told him, "You know, something drastic has to happen." A few hours later, the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the Fatwa against Rushdie, but also against his publishers, editors and translators, and.that resulted in Rushdie being stabbed in New York, and the murders of two translators.

The Fatwa issued said "I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth." ... its power to incite violence is apparently undiminished by the passage of 33 years, nor the death of its author 20 years ago. When Kalim Siddiqui was asked by journalist Ludovic Kennedy in 1992 if "You feel proud of it?" .... he replied "Absolutely. Yes."

Ed Husain, a writer on religion and extremism, who used to be a close friend of Ghayasuddin said that until that chance meeting, Ayatollah Khomeini had not been minded to do anything about Sir Salman Rushdie because he was just a "foreign author in another country". He added that it was a British Muslim who had approached "a fascist government, asking for a theocratic leader to issue a fatwa on one of their citizens back in a free country".

Kalim Siddiqui died in 1996, but Ghayasuddin is still alive, and his son Asim says his father has distanced himself from the Fatwa decades ago, and that he became a supporter of free speech. He has apparently largely changed his views on matters such as democracy, interfaith groups (Christian, Muslim, Jewish Relations), marriage practices such as forced marriage and child abuse within the Muslim community, and also founded the Halal Food Authority (with Jewish help), to ensure regulation and compliance. He now sees British Muslims “not as outsiders looking for a voice, but as native members of a larger society dedicated to progress and justice for all of their neighbours”.

However, no matter his slow road to Damascus path, to being an over 80 year old supporter of Britain’s consensual style of politics ... much harm has already been done to our society by his and Kalim's earlier writings and actions. The 2005, 7/7 attack in London (Ghayasuddin  confessed that he felt partly to blame for the attitudes that resulted in that attack), the Manchester Arena bombings in 2017, and the 2019 London Bridge killings are all the bastard children of those warped radical teachings.

Kalim Siddiqui, never apologised for the harm he wrought, in fact he probably didn't think he had done harm, but Ghayasuddin has said, “There are hundreds of things I have done wrong for which I am sorry. There are so many other things which I have done for which I am proud.”

Rushdie's Shia Muslim attacker Hadi Matar, has not admitted that his actions were influenced by the fatwa (however his now-deleted Facebook page, was apparently plastered with pictures of Iranian politicians), but he has reportedly said he has only read two pages of the Satanic Verses ... which was two more than Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who issued the Fatwa ever did.

We continue to reap what we sow .....