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 Another Inconvenient Truth >> Aki Nawaz “Go Join Hezbollah!" >> Amina Nawaz So, You Wanna Change the World? >> Sarah Waseem 10 Books To Read Before Going To University >> Mujadad Zaman Still Learning to Tread on Hallowed Ground >> Omar Fraser A Prophet for All >> Abdul-Rehman Malik Emerging from the Rubble: A Letter from New York City >> Zeeshan Suhail and Muntasir Sattar Istanbul’s Illuminated Ramadan Nights >> Abdal Hakim Murad The Pain of Panjshir >> Chris Sands A People Coming Apart at the Seams >> David Lepeska A Cynical Plan to Rebuild Islam >> Louay Safi Suffer The Little Children >> Tasneem Osgood Dangerous Denial on Darfur >> Muhammed Abdelmoteleb Is the Glass Half Full of Hope or Despair? >> Fozia Bora The Mother of All Muslim Organisations >> Mullah Charles Bala Subramaniam Narasimha Rao A Pious Mole >> Mudasser Ali Living on the Edge >> Tauhid Pasha The Silly Season >> Dal Nun Strong Walk in the Old Paths >> Daoud Rosser-Owen A Modern-Day Ibn Battuta - A tribute to Thomas Omar Abercrombie (1930-2006) >> Shiraz Sheikh “How can you hear a million words from a million mouths at the same time?” >> Shan Khan A Triumph of Myth >> Abdul-Rehman Malik The Timbuktu Charter: “We will be like ferocious lions” >> Muammar al-Gaddafi Updike’s Terrorist: An(other) American Folly >> Raneem Azzam A Crooked Commission >> Sunny Hundal Aural Remembrance Whitewashing White Terror Veil-Gate - The End of Tolerance? Organic Iftars, Unholy Garbage iPod vs iMuslim Formula One Fatwas Vox Populi |
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Another
Inconvenient Truth Page 50 Don’t expect Fun-Da-Mental frontman
and punk rocker activist Aki Nawaz to
be polite. He’s angry and his new album – All is War: The Benefits of
G-Had – lays it bare: global injustice, slaughter in the name of
‘democracy’ and UK foreign policy are radicalising young people and
pushing them to violence. Full stop. After a lifetime on the frontlines
of the anti-racism struggle, Aki talks about inciting people to
violence, his battle with the music industry and why he can’t stand
moderate Muslims. God is watching us all and He’s going to ask us, there was so much injustice and what did you do? Did you even say anything? Forgive me, I can only shout my mouth off, but I’m shouting as loud as I possibly can. Some people still insist we’ve got to look within our community for answers to this ‘extremism’ problem. If you believe that, you don’t understand anything. I’m telling you, it’s the foreign policy I’m telling you, it’s foreign policy. If foreign policy changes, this will stop. Western foreign policy is based on colonial attitudes that have been around for the last fifty years. On the streets, the kids say, “If you’re gonna be anything, be a terrorist, not a lowly gangster.” People warn me, “Aki, you might incite somebody to terrorism!” and I say, “Tony Blair’s inciting people. This government is inciting people everyday.” My music is nothing compared to that kind of incitement. I’m 43. You’ve gotta understand that I have always shared in the struggle – civil rights, anti-racism. I’m not a young chicken. Fun-Da-Mental didn’t start yesterday. We started on the back of the Salman Rushdie controversy. I was a punk rocker and I still kind of see myself as that – my philosophy was to reject British society and even our Asian cultural upbringing. I still reject it all. I just wanna be free. I’ve travelled to Bosnia after the war and South Africa after apartheid. I met South African bombers who are now ministers. If you ask them, “Do you regret what you did?” they say, “I didn’t enjoy what I did but I had to do it because I witnessed the wholesale slaughter of black people. I killed 25 people but it was the end of killing thousands.” When you’ve been exposed to such people, including all the beautiful sisters in Bosnia who’ve been raped, to even contemplate a ‘middle path’ is impossible. You can’t do it. It’s dishonest. History repeats itself We’ve seen the film, read the book, got it all in front of us and yet some Muslims still think I’m too hard. I’m not. I’m just really passionate and if tomorrow, Jews get slaughtered, I’d be the same. If it was Afro-Caribbean people, I’d be the same. If it was Hindus, I’d be the same. I’d fight against the system that is perpetrating the slaughter. If it was Muslims killing Muslims, I’d do the same. We can’t let history repeat itself. I often visit my elders in Bradford. I ask what it was like when they first came to Britain. They tell me great stories: “All the white women used to love us because we looked like Elvis Presley, and all the white guys used to hate us because we looked like Elvis Presley!” They have great stories of diaspora and we must learn from them. You’ll realise that Britain never wanted us to stay. They didn’t want us to be equal; they just wanted us as low paid slaves. The only reason why they didn’t kick us out is because there was no one to clean their floors and run their buses. It is inherent in the white man to see us as second and third class citizens – even more so if you’re Muslim. Don’t hate the guys who’ve been made to hate the system So don’t hate the guys who’ve been made to hate the system. Hate the system that has made them hate so much. Our neighbourhoods were more multicultural in my time than it is now. Now – no white person wants to live in our areas. Sir Andrew Green from Migration Watch insists, “You have got to be British.” I challenged him, “What is it to be British?” I swear, he can’t even tell me what this Britishness he is trying to integrate me into, is. It’s an insult to our intelligence. I’m not against their way of life. Every time I have a debate with these people, they turn round and say “Well, if you don’t like it here, why don’t you go home?” Firstly, that is so racist. Secondly, they only say that because they don’t see you as equal in the first place. Thirdly, fine – I’ll ‘go home’, but you also get your people out of my home. Wherever I go in the world, I cannot escape your political, military and economic tentacles. Everywhere I look, you’re there. The begining and the end I’m sick and tired of those who deny the foreign policy link. Don’t you even dare move away from that issue, because that’s the catalyst for violence. That’s the beginning. That’s the end. Suicide bombing is something new that’s happening here. Ruth Kelly recently tried to say young Muslims are becoming radicalised because they face racism and Islamophobia. Sorry, but up in Bradford when I was growing up, we faced brutal racism, but we didn’t tie bombs to ourselves. We didn’t even go out as a collective black group to beat up white people. If they came to us, we defended ourselves. They were and still are welcome in our neighbourhoods. “It’s our policy” I took a whole load of grassroots people to see Met Police Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur a year ago. These were people in their 40s - real, serious, passionate, well-experienced in past struggles. We sat with Ghaffur for three and a half hours. He admitted so many things – that the ‘extremism in the mosque’ and ‘mad mullah’ issues were blown out of proportion. It’s all exaggerated. In the end he said, “It doesn’t matter what you lot think. This is our policy.” Here we were, passionate and eager to tackle the issue and we were completely let down. Answers have to come from 10 Downing Street At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many times you meet the ministers and visit 10 Downing Street. You aren’t responsible for suicide bombings. You haven’t got the answers. These answers have to come from 10 Downing Street. Channelling all this anger, frustration and youthful energy is a challenge for all of us, not just Muslims. To believe that this society is innocent of any blame for the actions of this government is to live a lie. Why are Muslims always in the interrogation chair? Have you noticed the politicians who say we can’t change our foreign policy at the whim of terrorists? It’s like, hang on a minute. Your foreign policy is terrorism. If people practised slavery today, and the media showed black people getting whipped, whacked and murdered, do you think that black people would sit around and just watch? You think they wouldn’t lash out? It’s the same with Muslims. We’re seeing the slaughter of innocents everywhere. We are furious but how come we’re always the ones getting interrogated? We even question ourselves. When will they give us the opportunity to ask them the questions? ‘Moderates’ walk out of No. 10 with their trousers around their ankles Even the ‘moderates’ are being insulted now. Every time they walk into 10 Downing Street they’ve got great aspirations like, “Ok, we might get somewhere now.” They’re walking out with their trousers around their ankles. Most of them are after pots of gold. I say give me a small bag of chips and a bottle of pop and I’ll tell you what the answer is. We don’t need money to solve this. We just need the truth - it’s free for God’s sake. We’re talking about the slaughter of human beings. Throughout Islamic history, our ancestors met their enemies and talked to them – there’s nothing wrong with that, but don’t walk out of there empty handed with others dictating the terms and conditions. Sufism for political leverage Now we have things like the so-called Sufi Muslim Council. I grew up with Sufism, but now it’s now being used for political leverage. What’s next? How many different kinds of Muslims are the government going to exhaust before they admit the problem lies with them? We have a leadership void but I don’t know how you can resolve this without holding an election. Q-News should call for one - say that it’s time for Muslims to elect a leader. It won’t be easy. What makes a good leader? Power? Finance? A beard? I wear my beard on my head. The human race is so sick – if a person meets a nice man on the street, he won’t even stop to give him a hug. We wanna hug the bad man - the one who’s got twenty cars, the one who’s got twenty servants, and the big houses. Leaders who have no connection with the people In the absence of proper leadership, what happens? Someone will fill the vacuum. I’m connected with guys on the street who are getting angrier and angrier everyday. Is Shahid Malik connected to them? Is the council of mosques? Is the Muslim Association of Britain? Every post 7/7 forum I went to last year was London-centric, run by Muslims who’d just come out of Oxford and Cambridge – very nice, proper, intelligent, but no grassroots in them. If these guys go to Bradford, they’ll get chased out. They have no connection with the people. The youth of today aren’t fighting smart When we were young we were smart about the way we struggled. Why are the youth not fighting it in the same way? There’s something wrong. We had fifteen years of Thatcher. Generations differ but there’s definitely a need for better leadership. There are a couple of people I really love and I ask them why they won’t stand up. They go, “Aki, man – I’ve got a mortgage. I’ve got a family. Whose gonna pay me?” Just because I imagined what a bomber might be thinking? When Fun-Da-Mental started off we did four to five sessions for John Peel and he never ever censored us. Now Radio 1 won’t play any of the records. I’ve written to them and I’ve said “Why?” First, they said, “Oh, it’s our policies.” I said, “Hang on! I went to South Africa and you asked me to do a diary. I came in and talked about that diary for Steve Lamacq. You had no problem with that. We’ve had interviews. You’ve asked me to talk about racism. You’ve asked me to talk about young people. What is your problem now? Tell me? Come on. Come out with it.” They say, “Oh… we have to be careful.” Why? Just because I imagined what a bomber might be thinking? Bruce Springsteen did a track about it. Prince did a track about it. Slayer, the heavy metal band, has just done a track about it. Why is it that there’s a different rule for Aki and a different rule for them? If a white artist had done anything like I’ve done, [we’d be asking] where are the scarves? Where are the posters? Get him on the cover of everything. Great! He’s thinking outside the conventional box. It was purely my intention to provoke them, to expose them and to show everybody else their hypocrisy. “Aki, it’s too hot to handle” The distributors loved the album. Then they phoned me up and said, “Aki, it’s too hot to handle”. They know I’m right and they know that the way I’m thinking I can answer them, I can debate them and I can totally destroy every argument against the album from their perspective because of my background. In terms of punk rock and music, I know what the parameters are and what rebellion music is. I know what the psychology is behind it. I sometimes have this kind of little weird smile inside my stomach because when I listened to the final cut of the album, I thought, “Oh! If I was a non-Muslim, I’d get really pissed off” or “This is really stressing me out! Who are these people? They’re challenging every notion of democracy and all that what we stand for.” I understand how they feel because I know their state of mind. That’s why it’s easy to destroy all their arguments, given time and the right conditions. You could totally destroy them. “Viva Osama Bin Laden!” Not long after 9/11, I spent ten days in the Amazon jungle. At one point, when all the American tourists had left, and we were with just the Brazilians. An Indian guy, whose ancestors were imported as indentured labour over three hundred years ago, said “We love Osama Bin Laden! Viva Osama Bin Laden! Come on let’s go for a swim Aki.” They’d shout “Viva Osama Bi Laden!” as they dived into the water. So it’s not just Muslims. I went to Spain and met these thirty-odd Spanish women who told me, “We think he’s very good looking! We think he’s beautiful” - the world is not as clear cut as it’s made out to be. I’m prepared to go to jail for my views That’s why I say I’m prepared to go to prison for my views. I don’t care. Come and get me. Don’t go arresting another innocent brother or sister who hasn’t done anything, who are not known. Come and arrest me. Take me. You won’t be interrogating me. I’m gonna be interrogating you! What if it was the Holocaust? Some people ask, do you agree with suicide bombing and I say well if I was living during the Holocaust and I couldn’t handle the genocide, I’d wrap up a thingy and go blow up Hitler. Would you have a problem with it then? “You can’t think that way!” they tell me. They even refuse to let me think like that. I’m not saying it’s right - I’m just saying it’s so desperate. It’s such a desperate thing to do. All I know is that if I was in Lebanon, I would be dead now. If I was in Pakistan or Afghanistan, I’d be dead. Not because I’m obsessed with some kind of big fight for Islam - I just couldn’t handle the injustice. Sometimes my head’s just bursting because of the injustice I see against Muslims. I know brothers who are in jail even though they haven’t done anything. I also know people who have actually fought in foreign jihads. I try and talk to them about my frustration and they say, “Any Muslim who gives you any hassle about what you’re doing, give them my number and we’ll sort them out. This is your fight. You get in with it. We don’t care if you’ve got a beard, not got a beard, got long hair… we don’t care.” Armchair mujahids, messing with people’s brains But there is the acknowledgment that there is a very, very small minority of people who are, you know, messing with people’s brains. But I mean they’ll never win anyway. It’s a kind of demonic kind of Islam – and I’ve met some of these guys. It won’t go anywhere. There’s a lot of armchair mujahids out there. What kind of Muslim are you? I don’t like alienating anyone – not even the ‘moderate’ Muslims. I’d love to talk to them. There are Muslims amongst us who would sell us out. And I know who they are and they’ve done it constantly and they would have been the same people who would have waited at the shores when the British came and said, “Oh, can I carry your bags”. They’re the same people who sold India to the colonialists; they’re here. This is no time for games, political scoring, and career-mindedness. The question is: what kind of Muslim are you? Allah is my sponsor I’ve got a beautiful family, a beautiful wife, beautiful children and Alhamdulillah, Allah is my sponsor and He’s looking after me. To even contemplate that [my children will] be talking about the same things I talked about ten years ago is terrifying. So now, it’s no nonsense for me. I will take the beast by its horns and expose it for what it is. There are too many people who are selling Muslims out, but not enough supporting us. I am my community. My first priority is Muslims. Aki Nawaz spoke to Fareena Alam near his Nation Records office in Ladbroke Grove. |