Undercover mosque: How did police get it so wrong?

A report into the first riots in Bradford in 1995 warned that there were ‘politicized Muslim activists’ in Britain bent on using disaffected youth for sinister ends – and that policy-makers were burying their heads in the sand about it.

That report by the Bradford Commission – a body comprised of city leaders including a Muslim trade unionist Mohammed Taj - warned of extremists bent on the seizure of temporal power, urging the destruction of secular society.  It all seemed rather far-fetched, and was mostly ignored.  But that was seven years before 7/7.  Ten years later, far from just a cult of silence about the true nature of radicalism, there’s now a culture of institutionalized denial.  West Midlands police with no less a body than the Crown Prosecution Service have had to apologise to Hardcash Productions, the makers of the Dispatches film ‘Undercover Mosque’, for libeling them with accusations of ‘fakery’ and inciting religious hatred.  Their exposure of hate preachers at Green Lane Mosque and other Birmingham Islamic centres, rather than being praised as a service to the community, was reported to the broadcast watchdog Ofcom by the police.

Police have had to pay out £100,000 after Channel 4 sued for libel.  It is a crumb of comfort in a depressing scenario of political cowardice that shows just how flawed is the government’s ability any longer to see the wood for the trees.

How could the police have got it so wrong?  David Henshaw, of Hardcash Productions, told The Guardian: ‘The abhorrent and extreme comments made by the fundamentalist preachers in this film speak for themselves. They later claimed they had been taken out of context - but no one has explained the correct context for arguing women are “born deficient”, that homosexuals should be thrown off mountains and that 10-year-old girls should be hit if they refuse to wear the hijab.’

Even this comment by the film’s producer hardly does justice to the horrific stuff they filmed.  Muslim leader after Muslim leader is witnessed advocating treason, murder, subversion and jihad.  One says:  ‘You have to live like a state within a state until you take over.’  That would once have been considered treason.  Another says:  ‘Do away with the man-made laws.’  That is sedition.  Another says:  ‘Homosexuals are dirty, filthy dogs that should be murdered.’  Why has he not been prosecuted for incitement?  The Bishop of Chester had his finger collared for saying less.

Government advisors; visiting imams to institutions like the UK Islamic Mission, praised by Tony Blair as a model of interfaith dialogue; heads of Islamic schools educating many thousands of tomorrow’s Britons are all on film describing Christians and Jews as kufaar; advocating the dismantling of democracy; denouncing freedom and equality.  There’s even a section commending the marriage of old men with children, since Mohammed consummated his marriage to Aisha, his favourite wife, when she was nine years old.

In the West, religion is usually the stuff of satire; the gently irrelevant pomposities of prelates and priests.  The Vicar of Dibley; Nuns on the Run; vicars rhyming with knickers.  When someone does something bad in the name of religion, they are usually deemed mad or criminal.  How do you criminalise a worldview?  You can’t.  You just pretend it doesn’t exist.  You lie to yourself about what is there in front of your face.   Finally, if you can’t stand the message you shoot the messenger.  The police and more worryingly still the CPS haven’t a clue about how to tackle cultural crime on this scale.  It goes to the heart of our own most sacred cow – a secularism that says all religions are equal – and equally irrelevant.

What we are witnessing is the national sickness of the soul.  It is a sickness that leads first to moral and actual blindness – and then to social collapse.  A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The health of the spirit has profound social consequences – and it’s been totally neglected by the state.  There are no votes in spirituality.  Yet someone once said:  ‘Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.’  If your heart is full of sickness, of hatred and the will to power, you might believe your religion gives you the right to kill in the name of God and that becomes a matter for all of us.  If you think you find justification in your holy text for mayhem, especially if that text is not at all clear about whether it’s right to kill or not, we ought to look more closely at that text as a matter of political expediency. The founder of the Muslim faith was a warrior who conquered in battle those who opposed him or refused to believe that what he announced was divine truth.  However good a man he might have been, and however important a social reformer, nonetheless his methods did not brook dissent.  It has been very difficult for Muslims ever since to live as a minority in a non-Muslim system without seeking at the very least separation within or from it, as at Partition in India in 1947, or the millet system in Ottoman Turkey when non-Muslim minorities were administered in enclaves.  That makes religion political.  A text on the other hand that demands you love your enemies may help you and society resist the baser instinct to retaliate – and that too is political.  Why does the government not do more to understand spiritual motivation?  Poverty is not at the root of what’s gone wrong, and we seem to have no alternative answers.

A former Muslim who is now Professor of History at Yale says that the materialist West appears to have no spiritual system of explanation to go with it.  ‘It is therefore easily caricatured in its beliefs and values’, says Lamin Sanneh originally from Senegal.  Because we no longer speak in public or teach in our schools about the religious underpinnings of our way of life, we are assumed to have none.  Which of course acts as a catalyst for the extremists.

The bloodthirsty rhetoric of the radicals reveals an ugly – and very real - determination to force their religion on the country by fair means or foul, and it is good citizenship for the sake of all our faiths - not racist or islamophobic or an incitement to religious hatred – to recognize it.