Daily Pioneer, India

Saturday, September 22, 2007

It’s not funny, Jeeves

Premen Addy

The long flowing beard, once greying, had attained the deepest shade
of black, the earlier hint of frailty was replaced with new vigour:
Osama bin Laden was back, either with a human makeover or else pumped
up with divinely brewed juices, as yet unbeknown to us godless
Earthlings, designed to conquer Time.

The voice from Araby, lodged temporarily in the secure badlands of
Pakistan, issued a hellfire warning to the beleaguered President of
the United States George W Bush, and to his divided and confused
people: They were bound for eternal damnation, a fate to be avoided
through mass conversion to Islam – whether to its Sunni or Shia wings,
he chose wisely not to say.

America is clearly a metaphor for the West but the massed ranks of
heathens in other climes would also suffer divine retribution for
false worship and apostasy. It could be worse for Britain (don’t ask
me how) with the breaking news that Ms Felix-Browne, a British
grandmother who married Osama bin Laden’s son, Omar, in Egypt, five
months ago is on the verge of divorce. A comedy of errors, perhaps,
wrought by the taming of the shrew: We are such stuff/As dreams are
made on…

Islam versus the Rest is a joust that encapsulates one of the
unexpected travails of globalisation. The Future (in which Islam is
seemingly condemned to play a marginal political role), say militant
Islamists the world over, does not and will not work for it violates
divine writ; and as the Islamic-dominated Past functioned according to
divine prescription, it can be transmuted (transmogrified would surely
be the more appropriate word) into a Future that works.

This may not quite accord with Einstein’s notion of time and space,
but it appears to have taken hold of Islamist hearts and minds in
myriad urban ghettos throughout the length and breadth of Britain.
Thousands of young Muslims of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and West Asian
descent, together with swelling numbers of alienated Black converts
and a liberal sprinkling of dyspeptic White colleagues advocate the
imposition of a global Islamic Khilafah or Caliphate as the instrument
of god’s will, with shari’ah law set in stone.

Laid back and indulgent toward perceived eccentricity, Britons in all
shapes and forms and accents were amused by the hyperbolic leaflets
and newsheets thrust into their hands by radical Muslims calling for
an Islamic Britain and a Muslim queen. Some cried for the destruction
of Parliament as it was an affront to the Creator, and demanded a
legal system and an educational curriculum fit for Islamic
purpose. For the milling weekend crowds enjoying the sights of
Trafalgar Square amid the laughter and gaiety of a summer’s day, this
was simply a comic spectacle, the circulating reams bearing a surreal
kinship to the English language. The native’s wonder at the
foreigner’s absurdity deepened. So much for the innocence of the PG
Wodehouse world, with its gawping Bertie Wooster and his inimitable
Jeeves.

The brave new world cut to Islamist cloth is better suited to the life
of the undertaker, as the British people were soon to find out. The
London transport bombings of July 7, 2005,with its heavy loss of life,
and the subsequent discoveries of similar Islamist terrorist
conspiracies, the recent bomb blasts in the vicinity of Glasgow
airport, plus the accumulating horrors elsewhere, in Madrid, Bali,
Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad, for example, have awakened a liberal
society, wedded to the rule of law, from its slumber.

The barbarians are no longer at the gates but well and truly through
them onto the verdant pastures beyond. "Hardline takeover of British
mosques" screamed a headline in The Times, in glaring defiance of
political correctness, earlier in the month. The top people’s paper,
as it used to be called, told how 600 of Britain’s 1,350 mosques were
now under the control of the Deobandis, who preach hatred of Jews,
Christians and Hindus.

Its imams rail at Muslims who say they are "proud to be British" and
argue that friendship with a Jew or Christian makes "a mockery of
Allah’s religion." One particular quote bears repeating: "Muslims,
Arabs going to the opera to listen to a Frenchman singing Italian?
That’s the level we’ve stooped to imitating the kuffar (unbeliever)."

Channel 4’s Dispatches programme highlighted the threats and levels of
violence faced by Muslims in Britain who have had the temerity to
convert to Christianity. Some subjects covered their faces for fear of
reprisal; in every instance the churches in which they worshipped were
neither named nor located by Channel 4.

The Islamic law on apostasy which decrees an apostate’s life to be
forfeit apparently trails the community wherever it goes. Prince
Charles’s appeal to the Muslim Council of Great Britain to amend the
law on apostasy in the UK has been met with stony silence.

This scarcely differs in spirit or flesh from the distant past. The
13th century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides lamented the
unrelenting persecution he suffered in the Islamic lands and the
pressure to convert. One of his co-religionists 600 years later told
how he was forced to wear a yellow sash as a badge of servitude to his
Muslim ruler. The Taliban in their pomp in Afghanistan meted out
similar treatment to Kabul’s Hindu and Sikh minority communities.

The Ottoman Empire, from which the faithful draw succour as the once
embodiment of Muslim power, reached its apogee at the gates of Vienna
in 1683. There, its besieging army under the feral Grand Vizier Kara
Mustafa, was routed by the combined force of John Sobieski, King of
Poland, and Charles, Duke of Lorraine.

Europe lived to savour the genius of Mozart, the Turks were left to
their murderous devices in the Balkans and in Armenia, where their
massacres of 1915 became the 20th century’s first recorded
genocide. Every Turkish regime since has been in denial over this
shaming event.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, architect of the modern secular Turkish
Republic, pointed to the destructive consequences of the Ottomans’
deluded pan-Islamic policies. The sword, he maintained memorably,
would invariably succumb to the enduring strength of the plough.

The governing Islamic AK party, with its Anatolian base, has changed
Turkish politics. If its cherished goal of European Union membership
is achieved, Turkey will have gained peacefully at Brussels what it
signally failed to accomplish on the battlements of Vienna.

Time surely to reflect.