'A Very British Muslim Activist' tells story of Islamist-turned-peacemaker
The book’s cover shows a young Siddiqui.
(REVIEW) Not much more than a mile away from where the Institute of Criminology conference on restorative justice ended with the stabbing to death of two of its students on London Bridge on Friday night, an old man was being celebrated for his career at the helm of political Islam in Britain.
The two events were not un-linked.
The celebration was the launch of Dr. Ghayasuddin Siddiqui’s biography A Very British Muslim Activist. The book describes the origins of attitudes that resulted in Friday’s horror.
Foundations for what happened were laid in the two decades from the 1960s through the work of a fistful of organizations founded and once headed by Siddiqui: the Muslim Institute, the Jamaati-e- Islami magazine Impact, the Muslim Parliament and the Muslim Manifesto it put out three decades ago, all committed to war and to “taking power from the West.”
Ghayas himself repudiated both violence and then political Islam itself by the mid-90s, but it came too late to save those two students who cared as much as he later did for peace and restoration.
Britain carelessly allowed Siddiqui to establish London as “the center of the Islamic movement,” according to the biography. It then allowed him the space to rethink and regroup, and in so doing, lose control of that movement.
“Great Britain … was a sandbox for Muslims to play at developing their ideologies, philosophies, and eventually movements,” writes the book’s young and somewhat awestruck American Muslim author, C. Scott Jordan.
That play has resulted in murder.
It cannot all be laid at the feet of Siddiqui, since it was for instance Margaret Thatcher who allowed the secret services to bring Afghan jihadis to Scotland to train for war that would repel Soviet incursions into Central Asia. The Cold War has littered the world with its causes and casualties.
Yet nonetheless Ghayasuddin Siddiqui has been a key player: perhaps the most important Muslim whom the world has never heard of.
A small, unassuming man with a neat beard and a talent for friendship, he was always far more interested in righting what he saw as wrongs than in theology. He worked with Malcolm X organizing his trip to Sheffield University in 1964, and with Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn with whom he founded the Stop the War Coalition to oppose the war in Iraq. If he felt it would address the, as he saw it, unjust condition of world Islam, then it must be done without delay. He drew the line at Tony Blair, whose hand he even refused to shake.
The blame for all injustice against Islam he laid at the feet of Britain. They alone ended Mughal power in India when Islam seemed, he believed, to have almost uniquely got the balance right between pluralism and cultural might. They alone should pay.
Yet his story begins in unlikely ways. His father worked for the British Raj in India before partition. And Siddiqui’s PhD in chemistry at Sheffield University was paid for with a grant from oil giant British Petroleum (BP). He has lived quietly in a typical English village for 30 years. His wife works for social services, his sons variously in the financial hub of London and as founder of Muju, the Jewish Muslim theatre company.
As a student mobilizer of the youth wing of the feared Islamist party, Jamaat-i-Islami, at Hyderabad University in Pakistan, he heard – literally - the wailing of a Hindu woman just widowed by her husband too poor to undertake the rituals that would see him to his next life. Ghayas rounded up some friends there and then, raised the money to hire a bus to take her to a priest and paid for the cremation. It was all achieved before sunrise the next morning. He was just 23 years old and it set a template for action.
His own radicalization happened in Pakistan long before he moved to Sheffield, when he was just 14, through the writings of the “father of Islamism” himself, Abul a’la Maududi. He travelled to meet him in prison in Multan where he was condemned to death for inciting the massacre of 200 Ahmadis, “heretic” Muslims. Maududi sought to revive the caliphate after its demise following the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, and to purify Islam, and he learned much of his methodology from the West, the Nazis in particular.
The idealistic young Siddiqui brought his thinking to Britain. But it was only when he met Kalim Siddiqui, infinitely more dangerous, who wrote for the Guardian newspaper and penned the infamous Muslim Manifesto that advocated the “capture” of British governance and the subversion of the elites, that the revolution Maududi wanted to see was consolidated. Ghayas remained in the older man’s shadow for the next 20 years. He even orchestrated the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, travelling frequently to Iran to meet Ayatollah Khomeini. That Kalim was the evil genius of the London-based revolution is clear from his reaction to the American Embassy hostage crisis in Tehran, on Jimmy Carter’s watch, in which one Iranian and eight Americans died: “such instances were the necessary evil of revolution . . . the hope and good the revolution could bring to the Muslim community outweighed these minor indiscretions” (p. 91).
It is hard to believe this book has passed through the hands of any careful editor. The language is occasionally garbled, and words are sometimes used with little thought for their actual meaning: what for example is an “eminent disaster”? But more serious are the statements of revolutionary intent, the projections of hatred and fear onto a country that never meted out the least retribution for such assiduous undermining.
Within a year of Kalim’s death, and the death of Khomeini had laid to rest the dreams of Islamist revolution, Ghayas came to see how much more effective it was to try to forge a truly British Islam within the structures and mores of British society. He once lauded Britain’s consensual style of politics to me. He confessed he felt partly to blame for the attitudes if not the actions that resulted in 7/7 when the London transport system was bombed and more than 50 people died – and let me write his “confession” in London’s Evening Standard newspaper. He recruited Christian friends to the High Wycombe interfaith group, the Council of Christian Muslim Relations, where he enthused: “You can say anything.” He joined the religious literacy charity, Lapido Media, as a trustee, and spoke up for its work to a Muslim within the Charity Commission inspectorate.
Above all he began to see that the real enemy was within. He founded the Halal Food Authority with Jewish help to ensure regulation and compliance. He took on the imams on child abuse in the then wholly unregulated madrassas. He campaigned for the registration of Muslim marriages to protect women, and he helped set up the Stop Forced Marriages Campaign. His gentleness, supportive nature and compassionate energy attracted many women to work alongside him, myself included. He has rather topically been dubbed “the bearded feminist.”
The new chapter of the Muslim Parliament and the new direction of the Muslim Institute was to initiate projects that set the stage for the first home-grown generation of British Muslims to flourish “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.”
This book is at its core a unique tribute not to Ghayasuddin Siddiqui and the journey he’s been allowed to make, but ultimately to his faith in a system. It is a system that believes as passionately as he does, in restoration. The tragedy of London Bridge is possibly the most unforgettable sign of it.
A Very British Muslim Activist: the Life of Ghayasuddin Siddiqui is available from Beacon Books.