Civitas Blog

One sincerely hopes that the Prime Minster will have read Dr Reid’s report and taken to heart these words of his before he picks up a second report due to be landing on his desk any day now. This report, commissioned by Bill Rammell Minister for Further and Higher Education in response to the London suicide bombings of July 2005, has as its remit to review all current provision within British higher education for teaching Islam, with a view to recommending how to augment it by additional new material ‘to reflect a better understanding of Britain and its values as well as a more enriched understanding of Islamic culture’.

In announcing this review in May of this year, Mr Rammell said it would have three priorities: first, to ensure religious-orientated courses are not restricted to narrow interpretations of the religion; second, to consider how the spiritual advice available to students on campus may be improved; and, third, to propose additional study material appropriate for students of Islam in contemporary multi-faith Britain.

The reason one hopes that, by the time he reads the recommendations in this second report, the Prime Minister will have read Dr Reid’s, nor forgotten his words quoted earlier, arises from doubts as to the suitability for the task of the person whom Mr Rammell commissioned to produce it. This was Dr Ataullah Siddiqui, director of Markfield Institute for Higher Education in Leicester.

In a response to a written Parliamentary question tabled in May by Michael Gove asking whether, before appointing Dr Siddiqui for the task, Mr Rammell had checked what possible links Dr Siddiqui might have with the hard-line Pakistani Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, the minister replied that he had appointed Dr Siddiqui ‘after careful consideration’ and after receiving categorical assurance from Dr Siddiqui that he had no links with that party.

Without wishing to suggest Dr Siddiqhui is anything but a Muslim voice of extreme moderation and absolute integrity, one has to question his judgement about these matters in light of information about the Institute of which he is director that is contained on its website. This states the Markfield Institute to have been spawned by one called the ‘Islamic Foundation’ whose chairman is said to be a Professor Khurshid Ahmad whom it also names as chairman of Markfield’s Board of Trustees.

Readers of the web-site are also informed that Professor Ahmad has received several Saudi Arabian awards, including one from the Islamic Development Bank of Jeddah and another from King Faisal. The website also states that Markfield has ‘a video teaching link, as a result of support from the Islamic Development Bank of Jeddah, which links it with that bank’s Research and Training Institute, as well as with the International Islamic University, Islamabad, the State Bank of Pakistan, and Imam Sadiq University of Tehran.

Now, I am sure all these Middle Eastern and Far Eastern institutions with which Dr Siddiqhui’s own has these links would emerge from a vetting by any new Department of Homeland Security of the sort Dr Reid is currently proposing as being found to enjoy impeccably moderate credentials. Yet one is entitled to wonder. The Markfield Institute web-site omits to mention that Professor Ahmad is also vice-president of Jamaat-e-Islami on whose own web-site there appeared in 2003 , according to a Times report in May 2004, an article by Professor Ahmad in which he asserted that ‘all of that area which was controlled by the Taleban had become the cradle of justice and peace’. The Jamaat-e-Islami party of which Professor Ahmad is vice-president is well known to be extreme, albeit not one which espouses violent jihad against the West. However, like the Muslim Brotherhood, it has an unabashed mission to Islamicize the world.

No more reassuring is the information about the Saudi bank that has funded Dr Siddiqui’s Institute contained in an article posted in September 2006 on the Front-Page web-site by Islamism expert Robert Spencer. This states that, in recent years, it has given substantial grants to the stridently Islamist Council for American Islamic Relations. The article quotes Daniel Pipes as having called this bank ‘but an arm of Saudi foreign policy’.

If, as the Home Secretary has said, the country needs a Department of Counter-Terrorism and that the battle of ideas is something that would squarely fall within its remit, then it would seem that, until such time as a future such Department had given Dr Siddiqui clearance for the job of advising the country on how Islam should best be taught here, there is enough circumstantial evidence in the public domain to give the Department of Education reason not to act on whatever recommendations he might care to make on this matter in his report.

It could be, however, that the government commissioned Dr Siddiqui for the task as the price it decided had to be paid by the country for establishing with the Islamic world the sort of covenant of trust which supposedly spares from terror attacks countries whose governments enter into them. If so, this could well prove to be a Faustean pact. It might buy some security in the short-term, although news that the Spanish authorities have arrested several jihadsts in Ceuta planning a terror attack on mainland Spain shows how unreliable such pacts can be. However, even if such a pact would succeed in buying some short-term freedom from terror attacks, it risks storing up greater and more serious trouble further down the line by preventing from developing here a truly moderate home-grown form of Islam.

For what it is worth, what seems to me in urgent need of inclusion in the curriculum of this country’s schools and universities are courses in Western philosophy. A healthy dose of David Hume and Freddie Ayer would work wonders as a prophylactic against all forms of religious fundamentalism. No one is suggesting that the propagation of atheism becomes the orthodoxy; only that familiarity with the serious case that can be made for it, as well as against it, should be the patrimony of all who are born or domiciled here.

The choice the country currently faces is not between a rabid uniform secularism that all too easily degenerates into the mindless decadence, with the sight of which we have become all too familiar in our city centres at the week-end in the form of cavorting hordes of drunken teenagers, and an assortment of mutually antagonistic but equally unthinking and dogmatic forms of religious fundamentalism. The choice is between some uneasy admixture of these two cultural life-forms, which is presently where we seemed heading, and that of harbouring a variety of equally moderate different traditions and world-views that have all been suitably modulated for peaceful coexistence by their adherents all having been made to absorb the traditions and value of tolerance that form such an integral and long established feature of this country. There is much reform of the educational curriculum needed to achieve this, but it is doubtful whether the heads of what seem to be quite conservative Islamic educational institutions are best placed to advise the government on what reform is needed.