IN HER speech at the Labour Party conference, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said she believed ‘patriotism is at risk of turning into something more like ethno-nationalism’.
If she is genuinely concerned about growing internal divisions within the nation, I urge her to read lawyer Anna Loufti’s report, The Sharia Question, published last month.Primarily dealing with the inferior status and abusive treatment of women in Muslim enclaves in Britain, Dr Loufti’s analysis digs deeper to highlight the political implications of allowing an informal and unaccountable jurisdiction, supervised by arbitrarily appointed ‘community leaders’, to lay down the law for allegedly British subjects.
We are often asked to define what makes a person British. One thing should be beyond debate: an essential qualification for anyone wishing to enjoy the benefits of British citizenship, whatever their ethnic origins, is the acceptance that in this country there is one legal jurisdiction which applies equally to all. Unfortunately, this is now being actively disputed by Muslim communities who claim special dispensation for their unusual religious or tribal customs. Worse, successive UK governments have either turned a blind eye to certain unlawful, even murderous, practices among these groups, or have been complicit in undermining national unity by deliberately granting them exemption from any oversight by the State.
These ‘culturally distinct groups,’ writes Dr Loufti, ‘enforce cultural norms as law within their communities’, with ‘the sharia principles of male entitlement [taking] precedence over all other considerations’, and it is in matters relating to the regulation of marriage and family life that sharia courts operate in ways which militate against integration, let alone assimilation, with the host population.
One cultural norm which, though it is not (yet) specifically against the law entrenches ‘insular clan loyalties at the expense of integration’ is cousin marriage. Recently the Independent MP for Dewsbury and Batley, Iqbal Mohamed, pleaded in Parliament that the practice should not be outlawed because ‘ordinary people see family intermarriage overall as something very positive; something that helps build family bonds and helps put families on a more secure financial foothold’.
It sounds so harmless and so worthy until we look more closely at what, exactly, the word ‘family’ means, in the context of those recently arrived from, say, Pakistan or Afghanistan, many of whom still have a ‘foothold’ in their ‘home’ country, where they build houses and go on holiday, and to which they send frequent financial remittances. What we mean by family is mother, father, children, grandparents, and a few aunts, uncles and cousins. What Mr Mohamed means is the clan: a sprawling network of tightly enmeshed blood connections criss-crossing continents, which, in Dr Loufti’s words, allow ‘wealth and influence to be internally consolidated through the strengthening of family alliances, often with the aim of maintaining strategic relationships and financial assets in the country of origin’. Cousin marriage is, in fact, a way in which a clan ‘others’ itself from the native population. Depressingly, rates of consanguineous marriage within the clans have been rising, rather than falling, in recent years, despite awareness of the health risks. The solution suggested by Mr Iqbal, outrageously, is that the NHS should ‘facilitate advance genetic test-screening’ of the couples involved at taxpayers’ expense.
Women in the Muslim enclaves of places such as Bradford and Birmingham, and indeed of our capital city, are regarded as clan property; and when we look at the many practices offensive to British assumptions of sexual equality and civilised behaviour which are imposed or sanctioned as ‘cultural norms’ in back-room sharia ‘courts’ (the wearing of the hijab, niqab or burqa; honour killings; forced or under-age marriage; female genital mutilation; wife-beating; forced abortion of female foetuses as a result of ‘son preference’), it appears that, as Dr Loufti contends, ‘clans measure their chances of survival in direct proportion to the amount of control they are able to exert over women and girls’. The ‘modesty’ requirements imposed on women, for instance, are a ‘cultural assertion of clan territorial and legal supremacy’. The face-covering niqab, in particular, ‘is a radical symbol and is associated with recent manifestations of political Islam in countries such as Egypt, where it is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood’.
In an interview with Peter Whittle for the New Culture Forum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGMcaPX0FQI Dr Loufti homes in on the political implications of allowing a select group exemptions from the normal law-abiding standards expected of a British citizen.
‘The British state,’ she says, ‘recognises formal equality of all before the law; so if you have systems that are allowed to operate, and even encouraged to operate, that do not recognise formal equality as part of their legal infrastructure, then the British state has been undermined, and the British jurisdiction has been undermined, and we see the emergence of quasi or parallel legal jurisdictions.’
Dr Loufti was commissioned to write her report by the Women’s Policy Centre but, as she says, ‘Even if you don’t give a toss about women . . . you may give a toss about British sovereignty; you may give a toss about the coherence and the resources of the British legal system to enforce its own jurisdiction across the population in a uniform and broadly egalitarian way.’
She concludes the interview with this plainly stated warning of exactly what it is that we are facing: ‘If a group of people move to a country en masse and say . . . “It is to be understood that we wish to operate as a large collective within this country, with rules that do not sit well with the existing legal status quo, but, you know what, you can’t do anything about it, because this is our law,” what you are dealing with de facto is colonisation: that is to say, the enclaves of which we’ve been speaking are settlements, and they are settlements with intention to grow.’
Colonisation: and not the sort of colonisation which, as in the Roman and British empires, brought benefits as well as deficits, but colonisation by a backward tribal culture which, if it succeeds in its attempts to dictate the agenda, has nothing to offer but strife, not only with the host population, but with people from other ethno-cultures, and even between its own feuding sects.
This refusal to adapt and fit in with the hereditary British and long-term, well-integrated immigrants is the source of division which should concern you, Ms Mahmood. What are you going to do about it?
