Q: So British mainstream politicians are missing the point here?
They have missed the point for the last 40 years.
Mr Brown, Mr Cameron should pay close attention next time they want to visit a Muslim community like mine. They could start counting the mosques springing up like mushrooms and the lack of resources for the youth in the community, especially for Muslim girls. They should introduce a law prohibiting total square metres of one religion's buildings exceeding a certain amount in a given area per capita. Next time when they are up here they could visit bookshops and run-down Islamic schools. They have abandoned these communities.
Polygamy is more common than the British realize. Young teenage forced marriages and honour killings have escalated. So why was our plight ignored and why the Islamists appeased? I could take them to some really nice mainstream English, Irish, Indian, Jamaican, Sikh and 'Modern' Muslims who sense and fear this rise of Islamism but because Britain is a civilised, tolerant society they remain silent. Most fear being called Islamophobic or racist. The public needs educating. As one decent Indian family told me, Islamists were trying to buy a pub in Hodge Hill to turn into yet another Islamic centre.
There are not many Muslims in Hodge Hill but this is how the Islamists operate. People in Hodge Hill are going to either get angry and move out or worry about their young becoming converted.
Muslims and non Muslims at grassroots level know something isn't right. They should talk to people, not just representatives or leaders. I am not scaremongering.
If you integrate you get to hear all sides like I have. Anyway I was in the minority who was standing up to radicals 20 years ago, no-one would listen to me then either. I feel the tide is turning - the Islamists have gone too far too soon. Britain is waking up and will show the world how to deal with these people.
Britain's political leaders have ignored the plight of Muslim women, although every day now the media is reporting honour killings, forced marriages and even the BBC Asian network debated polygamy recently. The silent taboos are being broken.
The forced marriage unit run by the foreign office will tell you that (although our hero is a British Sikh woman Jaswinder Sanghera, who had raised the issues of honour killing and forced marriages) they established the crimes against Muslim women are amongst the highest in the Pakistani communities in Britain. Take a look at Britain's most wanted list and a shocking amount of those wanted are Muslims. Young British Asian girls are still taken out of school and taken back to South Asia, denied a British Education and freedom of choice.
My God, it was the British themselves who passed the Marriage Act setting the minimum age to 14 for girls and 18 for boys in 1872 during the British Raj. They were themselves shocked at the practice of child bride marriages then. Over a century and half later and regardless of the abolition of slavery we didn't get very far did we?
Thank God for Jaswinder Sanghera and other activists like Dr Shazia Sovaisi.
Q: And meanwhile unelected groups are setting the local agenda?
A union member, a British Muslim mother, emailed me the 'manifesto for schools' that the MCB printed. She, as well as her Muslim female students, were stunned and opposed the manifesto. Others echo the same concern. They should read the emails I get.
I went to school in Britain too, my parents were Muslims and desired no special treatment for me at school - thank God. My faith was my business, between me and God, that if I wanted to fast, I didn't expect every one else to put up with my whims, we never asked for special treatments above everyone else. But the Islamicization of this country is headed by men like the MCB and their focus is on women's status as they perceive it and British Muslim children's education as they want it.
They have been manipulating government bodies and want to influence foreign policies. Hello?? Are we all living in the same country or not? Gender apartheid printed on an MCB letterhead isn't going to stop the young from falling in love or marrying non Muslims. Human beings are human beings. Teenagers will be teenagers. I'm sick of these ringleaders of Islam forcing their backward anti-Jewish, anti- gay, anti- women, anti- ex Muslims ideologies down our throats. Who gave them- these unelected nobodies - the right?
They are not Gods ambassadors, God doesn't need any. They have no right whatsoever to tell Muslims how to live in Britain.
They have to stop forcing the hand of God on us all and reject the writings of Maududi and Syed Qutb. They need to stop inflicting one brand of Islam on us all. They politicized young Muslims the wrong way. The Middle East are not what every Muslim worries about. The situation in Britain has to be addressed.
They're not forcing the hand of God on anyone -- they are forcing their own domination, attempting to manipulate and enslave others in the name of Allah.
Q: You say the MCB and the other self-elected Islamist groupings are affecting your human rights?
The declaration of Human rights in 1948 is now being used by Jihadists. We never got a look in as abused Asian Muslim women. The defenders of freedom are letting the people of this country down. There are 52 Muslim countries around the world. If you don't like the West and their liberal way of life no one is stopping an Islamist from leaving the country on a one way ticket.
Leaving the infidel countries isn't what it is all about -- converting, subjugating and enslaving the infidel countries is what the game is about. They don't want to go back to the hellholes they are from; they want to make the UK a hellhole.
And this is the way it must be -- as long as there is freedom somewhere in the world, people will dream of escaping to that freedom. The only way this version of Islam can survive is by destroying the light of freedom anywhere it can be found, until there is nowhere to escape to -- then people will be more controllable in the hellholes.
The likes of Dr Bari - the MCB leader - should be more concerned about his own people and their tragedies in Bangladesh than whether the British should adapt to arranged marriages. He's really getting peoples backs up. He has no right to put down the western woman or compare her to the pious Muslim woman, there is no such thing as the perfect religion or perfect human being. And they have no right to dominate and stress our status in British Islam. Islam is not as rigid as they would want it to be because it is still down to Muslims making their own choices, we are free agents. There's real inadequacy shining through these men in their actions and their ideology.
Another big Islamist myth is that arranged marriages rarely end in divorce. Today every other British Muslim woman I have come across is divorced or a lone mother. The lone mother isn't in the Islamic conscience but she is in the conscience of this great country. Sharia law defines the family structure but is silent on the status of the lone mother. Islam nor can God protect women from the raw power of male hierarchy exercised in Muslim communities. Arranged marriages are the norm. What isn't normal is being forced into or being manipulated into marriage for the sake of honour or extended family. They pretend to be in denial about the real issues Muslim women endure in the name of honour or because of the status they wish to keep us confined in.
Pointing out the hardships women face because of their backwards sharia is racist and xenophobic!
They have done nothing for the emancipation of Muslim women, in fact they advocate the opposite. They emphasize our duties not rights. Just like Maududi, who was not a scholar - he was a journalist who engaged with Syed Qutb in the mid 19th century. Men, who wanted Muslims to control the sexuality of women, advocated the burkha and a revival of 7th century Islam. They welcomed extreme Islamists from the Middle East. In so doing they fouled up. They do not represent the majority of mainstream Muslims.
We have to protect ourselves through learning to be independent, through education, skills, employment, housing, money for food, clothes and shelter. Where else in the world is the lone mother protected so that she can live with dignity? Most move out of Muslim communities that have turned into ghettos. It's no place for a lone mother.
Islam's ambassadors and spokesmen don't protect you here just because you're a Muslim woman. Ask the Muslim teenager who was ganged raped in a Muslim area by Muslim men. Was Islam's ringleaders or Sharia law there to protect her or give justice? No - only the British law and the services in place to support her protected her. These men have no idea what they are talking about except when it comes to reinforcing the burstable bubble that is political Islam.
A Muslim woman gangraped by Muslim men? The rape victim will be lucky if she isn't targeted for honor-killing to remedy the problem.
Q: You believe that these organisations serve Muslim women no purpose?
Absolutely no purpose. Community leaders are in denial about the real issues manifesting in Muslim communities besides Jihadism. Rape, sexual harassment, forced marriages, honour killings, polygamy, forced conversions, domestic violence, depression, drugs, gang culture and paedophiles all exist on our streets too, in our communities. And we remain shamefully silent. There is no such thing as a pious, true Muslim country or community. Not in Pakistan or in 'the great republic of Iran', where religious police force the subjugation.
Or in Saudi Arabia.
No wonder Muslim women feel they need to wear the veil in Muslim communities. We get harassed in Muslim areas. But I'm not afraid to speak the truth now.
What do you have to lose? Live like a slave, or risk your life to be free.
And that's what this is all about.
Public harassment is on the rise in such areas. Ask the local women. That's what happens when communities go backwards and not forward. That is the consequence when women are denied leadership in mosques or not given the space to have dialogue with the government. OUR VOICES ARE DROWNED OUT BY THE ISLAMISTS.
I hope Hazel Blears succeeds in this idea to empower Muslim women against extremists. What did Bunglawala have to say this time in response? Instead of welcoming the idea he said the government is asking women to be spies. With this obfuscation you can see that he is actually at war. The thought of Muslim women being empowered and standing up to their ideology threatens them.
Well, yeah.
Women are supposed to be sex objects, not equals.
I'd like to tell Bunglawala, I know who I would want outside my house protecting me and my children against harassment, extremism or Jihadism. Not the likes of him, who are part of the problem not the solution. If they're not blaming the police, they're blaming the Americans or the Zionists or they latch onto foreign policies. They never look within. They take on the mindless rhetoric that we Muslims have lost our true path and must return to 7th century Islam. Millions of Muslims want to live and let live and that's why we have to break our silence.
And this is my point -- what if what those guys teach really is the true path of Islam?
What if those who want to live peacefully, and not force Islam on the infidel world, really have strayed from Islam?
Stay tuned for Part 15, where Pride of Lions concludes as we finish reviewing The Gina Khan Interview - Part Four.
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