- 2 days ago
Islam is the way of life
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00:00Thank you very much, Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, good evening.
00:17As-salamu alaykum, lovely to see you all here tonight.
00:19We are having a very entertaining night, are we not, with some very interesting things
00:23being said.
00:23From the other side of the house tonight, let me begin by saying, as a Muslim, as a representative
00:32of Islam, I would consider myself an ambassador for Islam, a believer in Islam, a follower
00:38of Islam and its prophet.
00:40So, in that capacity, let me begin by apologising to Anne-Marie for the Bali bombings, I apologise
00:46for the role of my religion and me and my people, for the killing of Theo van Gogh for
00:53seven, seven, yes, that was all of us.
00:56That was Islam, that was Muslims, that was the Qur'an.
00:59I mean, astonishing, astonishing claims to make in the very first speech on a day like
01:05today, where the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is having to come out
01:09and point out that these kind of views are anathema.
01:12And I believe you're trying to stand for the Labour Party to become an MP in Brighton.
01:16If you do and you make these comments, I'm guessing you'll have the whip withdrawn from
01:20you, but then again, UKIP's on the rise, they'll take you, the BNP, they might have
01:25something to say about your views.
01:27This is what Mehdi Hassan always says.
01:30By the way, by the way, by the way, by the way, by the way, just on a factual point, since
01:35we heard a lot about the second speaker, about how backward we Muslims all are.
01:38On a factual point, you said that Islam was born in Saudi Arabia.
01:41Islam was born in 610 AD.
01:43Saudi Arabia was born in 1932 AD.
01:45So you were only 1,322 years off.
01:49Not bad?
01:50Not bad, start there.
01:51Talking of maths, by the way, a man named Al-Qawarizmi was one of the greatest mathematicians
01:56of all time, a Muslim, worked in the golden age of Islam.
01:59He's the guy who came up with not just algebra, but algorithms.
02:03Without algorithms, you wouldn't have laptops.
02:05Without laptops, Daniel Johnson tonight wouldn't have been able to print out his speech in which
02:08he came to berate us Muslims for holding back the advance and intellectual achievements
02:12of the West, which all happened without any contribution from anyone else other than the
02:16Judeo-Christian people of Europe.
02:18In fact, Daniel David Levering, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and
02:22author of the Golden Crucible, points out that there would be no Renaissance, there
02:26would be no Reformation in Europe without the role played by Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd and
02:30some of the great Muslim theologians, philosopher, scientists in bringing Greek text to Europe.
02:36As for this being our university, I will leave that to the imagination as to who is our and
02:45who is there.
02:46I studied here too.
02:48An astonishing set of speeches so far making this case tonight.
02:53A mixture of just cherry-picked quotes, facts and figures, self-serving, selective.
03:01A farrago of distortions, misrepresentations, misinterpretations, misquotations.
03:08Daniel talked about my article in the New Statesman, which got me a lot of flack, where
03:12I talked about the anti-Semitism that is prevalent in some parts of the Muslim community, which
03:16indeed it is.
03:17Of course, I didn't say in that piece that it was caused by the religion of Islam.
03:21In fact, modern anti-Semitism in the Middle East was imported from, finish the sentence,
03:27Christian, Judeo-Christian Europe, where I believe some certain bad things happened to
03:32the Jewish people.
03:33In fact, Tom Friedman, Jewish-American columnist in the New York Times, told me in this very
03:36chamber last week that he believed, had Muslims been running Europe in the 1940s, six million
03:40extra Jews would still be alive today.
03:42So I'm not going to take lessons in anti-Semitism from someone who's here to defend the Judeo-Christian
03:47values of a continent that murdered six million Jews.
03:49Moving swiftly on.
03:53Moving swiftly on.
03:55Yes.
03:57Absolutely.
03:57Well, I'm about to make that point.
03:58No, no, no.
03:59I'm about to make that point.
03:59You're right.
04:00I agree with you.
04:02I agree with you.
04:03I agree with you 110%.
04:05That is my point.
04:06I don't think Europe is evil or bad.
04:08I'm a very proud European.
04:09I don't want to judge Europe on the basis.
04:11But if we're going to play this gutter game where we pull out the Bali bombing and we pull
04:15out examples of anti-Semitism in Islamic community, then of course I'm going to come back and say,
04:18well, hold on.
04:19I mean, look, let's be very clear.
04:20Daniel here was a last minute replacement for Douglas Murray who had to pull out.
04:24And Douglas and I have a well-documented differences.
04:26But to be fair to Douglas, as to be fair to Anne-Marie and to Peter, atheists.
04:31Atheists see all religions as evil, violent, threatening.
04:34What the problem I have with Daniel's speech is that Daniel comes here to write this robust
04:39defense of Christianity, forgetting that his fellow Christians, people who said they were
04:44acting in the name of Jesus, gave us the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the anti-Jewish pogroms,
04:50European colonialism in Africa and Asia, the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, not to mention
04:55countless arson and bomb attacks on abortion clinics in the United States of America to this
04:59very day, I would like a little bit of humility from Daniel first before he begins lecturing
05:03other communities and other faiths on violence, terror and intolerance.
05:08But, no thank you.
05:11But I would say this, to address the gentleman's very valid point here, I'm not going to play
05:18that game.
05:19I don't actually believe that Christianity is a religion of violence and hate because of
05:23what the LRA does in Uganda or what Crusaders did to Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem when they
05:29took back the city in the 12th or 13th or whatever century it was.
05:32I believe that Christianity, like Islam, like pretty much every mainstream religion, is based
05:37on love and compassion and faith.
05:39I do follow a religion in which 113 out of the 114 chapters of the Qur'an begins by introducing
05:44the God of Islam as a God of mercy and compassion.
05:47I would not have it any other way.
05:49I don't follow a religion which introduces my God to me as a God of war, as some kind
05:54of Greek God of wrath, as a God of hate and injustice.
05:58Not at all.
05:59As Adam pointed out, you go through the Qur'an and you see the mercy and the love and the
06:02justice.
06:03And yes, you have verses that refer to warfare and violence.
06:06Of course it does.
06:07This is not a motion about pacifism.
06:09I'm not here to argue that Islam is a pacifistic faith.
06:12It is not.
06:13Islam allows military action, violence in certain limited contexts.
06:17And yes, a minority of Muslims do take it out of that context.
06:21But is it religious?
06:23We've talked about Woolich.
06:24Daniel and Anne-Marie have suggested that it's definitely religion that's behind all
06:28of this.
06:29Well, actually, what I find so amusing tonight is we're having a debate about Islam and the
06:36opposition tonight have come forward.
06:37We have a graduate in law, a graduate in modern history, a graduate in chemistry.
06:41And, you know, I admire all of their intellects and their abilities, but we don't have anyone
06:45who's actually an expert on Islam, a scholar of Islam, a historian of Islam, a speaker of
06:50Arabic, even a terrorism expert or a security expert or a pollster, let alone to talk about
06:55what Muslims believe or think.
06:57Instead, we have people coming here, putting forward these views, putting forward these
07:00sweeping opinions.
07:02Listen to Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, one of America's leading terrorism
07:05experts, who, unlike our esteemed opposition tonight, studied every single case of suicide
07:10terrorism between 1980 and 2005, 315 cases in total.
07:14And he concluded, and I quote, there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic
07:20fundamentalism or any of the world's religions.
07:22Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic
07:27goal to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists
07:31consider to be their homeland.
07:33And the irony is, when we talk about terrorism, the irony is that the opposition and the Muslim
07:40terrorists, the Al-Qaeda types, actually have one thing in common.
07:44Because they both believe that Islam is a warlike, violent religion.
07:48They both agree on that.
07:49They have everything in common.
07:50Osama bin Laden would be nodding along to everything he's heard tonight from the opposition.
07:53He agrees with them.
07:54The problem is, the problem is that mainstream Muslims don't.
08:02The majority of Muslims around the world don't.
08:05In fact, a gentleman here started quoting all sorts of polls.
08:07Gallup carried out the biggest poll of Muslims around the world of 35,000, 50,000 Muslims in
08:1235 countries, 93% of Muslims rejected 9-11 and suicide attacks.
08:18And of the 7% who didn't, they all, when polled and focus grouped, cited political reasons for
08:24their support for violence, not religious reasons.
08:26And as for Islamic scholars and what they say, well, Daniel talks about our University of
08:30Oxford.
08:31We'll go down to Oxford's Centre for Islamic Studies, get hold of a man named Sheikh Afifi
08:35Al-Aqiti, who is a massively well-credentialed and well-respected Islamic scholar, who has
08:40studied across the world, who in the days after 7-7 published a fatwa denouncing terrorism
08:44in the name of Islam, calling for the protection of all non-combatants at all times and describing
08:49suicide bombings as an innovation with no basis in Islamic law.
08:52Go and listen to Sheikh Tahir al-Qadri, one of Pakistan's most famous Islamic scholars,
08:56who published a 600-page fatwa condemning the killing of all innocents and all suicide
09:01bombings unconditionally without any ifs or buts.
09:04There's nothing new here.
09:05This is mainstream Islam, mainstream scholarship, which has said this for years.
09:09You don't go out and kill people willy-nilly in the high street or anywhere else, on a bus
09:14or a mall, based on verses of the Quran that you cherry-pick without any context, any understanding,
09:20any interpretation or any commentary.
09:23Point of information.
09:24Please.
09:25What about stoning of women, for example, in the international action?
09:29Well, it's...
09:30It doesn't happen, apparently.
09:31I didn't say it doesn't happen at all.
09:33I never said it didn't happen.
09:34I don't blame Islam.
09:35Yes.
09:36It's a very good point.
09:37And a lot of us, a lot of us, are campaigning against that.
09:39And we're campaigning against it in the name of Islam.
09:41We're campaigning against it in the name of various interpretations of Islam.
09:44Anne-Marie comes and scares us with her talk of Sharia law.
09:46I would like to see the book of Sharia law.
09:48It doesn't exist.
09:49People argue over what Sharia law is.
09:51And you empower the extremists by saying there is only one version.
09:56You empower them all.
09:57I don't believe you took any interruptions, Anne-Marie.
09:59Several countries.
10:00So I think you should stay there for a moment.
10:01Several countries.
10:02Here's what we're dealing with.
10:03Clarifying minorities.
10:04Several countries.
10:05Here's what we're dealing with.
10:06We are dealing...
10:07I took your point.
10:08I took your point.
10:09Here we are dealing with a 1400-year-old global religion, followed by 1.6 billion people
10:13in every corner of the world, a quarter of humanity, of all backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities.
10:17And yet the opposition tonight wants to generalise, stereotype, smear in order to desperately win this debate.
10:25And here's my question, if we're going to generalise and smear.
10:28If, okay, people say yesterday's bombers and we've got to be careful, there's a trial going on.
10:32Were yesterday's attackers, sorry, motivated by Islam?
10:35Big debate.
10:36I don't believe they were.
10:37Let's say they were.
10:38Let's say Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, was motivated by Islam.
10:40Let's assume for the sake of argument that Richard Reeves the shoe bomber was motivated by Islam.
10:44If Islam is responsible for these killings, if Islam is what is motivating these people,
10:48and Islam is therefore not a religion of peace, a religion of war, then ask yourself this question.
10:51Why aren't the rest of us doing it?
10:53Why is it such a tiny minority of Muslims are interpreting their religion in the way that the opposition claim they are?
11:00Let's assume there are 16,000 suicide bombers in the world. There aren't.
11:03Let's assume there are for the sake of argument.
11:05That's 0.001% of the Muslim population globally.
11:09What about the other 99.99% of Muslims who the opposition tonight either ignore or smear?
11:14The reality is that the rest of us aren't blowing ourselves up tonight.
11:17The 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
11:23because we're followers of a warlike warrior religion which wants to take over Europe and Daniels University.
11:28The 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,
11:40can they can 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?
11:48Then they might as well give up and stop pretending they have anything relevant to say about Islam or Muslims as a whole.
11:53Ladies and gentlemen, let me just say this to you, think about what the opposite of this motion is.
11:57If you vote no tonight, think about what you're saying the opposite of this motion is.
12:00That Islam isn't a religion of peace, it's a religion of war, of violence, of terror, of aggression.
12:04That 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,
12:11that 1.6 billion people across the world, your fellow human beings, are all followers, promoters, believers in a religion of violence.
12:18Do you really think that? Do you really believe that to be the case?
12:21They 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,
12:28where they voted against fighting for king and country, and Hitler was listening out for the result.
12:32Well, 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.
12:37There are the millions of peaceful, non-violent, law-abiding Muslims, both in the UK, Europe, Asia, Africa and beyond,
12:43who see Islam as the source of their identity, as a source of spiritual fulfilment, of hope, of solace.
12:49And there are the phobes, the haters, the bigots out there, who want to push the clash of civilisations,
12:56who want to divide all of us into them and us and ours and their.
13:00Ladies and gentlemen, I urge you all not to fuel the arguments of the phobes and bigots.
13:05Don't legitimise their divisions. Don't legitimise their hate.
13:08Trust those Muslims who you know, who you've met, who you hear, who don't believe in violence,
13:13who do want you to hear the peaceful message of the Qur'an as they believe it to be taught to the majority of Muslims.
13:19The Islam of peace and compassion and mercy. The Islam of the Qur'an, not of Al-Qaeda.
13:24Ladies and gentlemen, I beg to propose this motion to the House. I urge you to vote yes tonight.
13:28Thank you very much for your time.
13:38Thank you very much.
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