Citizenship, Islam and the West

Organised by Q-News  in partnership with The Fabian Society, The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), The Centre for the Study of Islam (University of Glasgow), openDemocracy.net, City Circle, SHUKR Clothing, Mobisphere and Charles Anderson Public Relations

Former hostage Terry Waite condemns denial of Guantanamo prisoners' rights as leading western and Islamic thinkers agree that a 'clash of civilisations' can be avoided at a packed Q-News and Fabian Society public debate (5th May 2004).

Former hostage Terry Waite condemned the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as morally equivalent to the forced kidnapping suffered by western hostages, including himself, in the Middle East in the 1980s.

“To be in that limbo of captivity is a terrible experience – to not know how long you will be there or what charges you will face. What is the difference between the experience through which I passed and that of the men who have been taken and lodged at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Airbase?”, asked Waite, who was held for 1763 days in Lebanon from 1987, the first four years in solitary confinement.

Waite was speaking at a major public debate on Islam, Citizenship and the West - hosted by Muslim Magazine Q-News, the Fabian Society and openDemocracy.net in London. The packed meeting saw over 1100 participants hear leading scholars and thinkers including Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, Timothy-Garton Ash and Dr Tim Winter agree that it was less a ‘clash of civilisations’ but a 'clash of caricatures' which was fuelling conflict and misunderstanding between the west and the Islamic world.

”To talk of ‘Islam and the West’ is misleading” said Tim Winter of Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge introducing the debate as moderator. “We inhabit each other. There is plenty of the west in the Islamic world, for good or ill, and an increasing Muslim presence in the heartlands of the west too”. Winter said that the focus on the negative and fringe extremism often meant “neglected but reassuring truths” were often overlooked: that we do live together successfully, and that friendship and mutual trust were the norm for most people on both sides. Pointing out that “the leaders of the world’s religions have never been closer”, Winter argued that increasingly deep interfaith dialogue had been one overlooked by-product of the tensions following September 11th 2001.

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, one of the leading Islamic scholars in the west, warned that “Islam has become a bogeyman for some in the west”. He asserted that Muslims have “a rich history of being minority communities – of being citizens in other states – but a lot of Muslims are not aware of this history and we need to be able to draw upon it … We must remember that in Islam, you are bound by the laws of the land which you are in, whether it is a Muslim or a non-Muslim land, and there is no disputes within Islamic traditions about that”. He called upon Muslims to participate and contribute to the societies of which they were a part, for example in hospitals, police forces and schools, warning against a tendency to focus on past glories repeating the phrase “we used to be …”. “Instead of focusing on being proud of the past, the real concern should be to make our children proud of us”, he said.

Hamza was extremely sceptical about claims to export democracy or western values by war, and highly critical of the lack of preparation for the realities of post-war Iraq. "The Muslim societies need to be transformed. But they will not be transformed into the mirror image of the west”, he said, arguing that democracy had to be built from civil society. Long-standing despotic governments in the Middle East saw that “despotism replicated and reflected in the patterns of authority throughout societies” from schools to families. “So it is not surprising that there is also a despot at the top. To change that will take a lot of time – and we must begin at the very fundamental level of society”.

Timothy Garton-Ash argued that “the living together of Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain, in Europe and in the west is one of the most important questions – if not the most important question – of our times”.

Yet this was complicated by an identity crisis: “the west no longer knows what it is”. Following the demise of the common enemies against which the west had defined itself, he warned that some were tempted to reach back and recreate an older ‘enemy’ – Islam. ”A key moment of decision is coming soon: whether the EU will open negotiations with Turkey. This is a question of whether Europe will declare itself (at least implicitly) as a Christian Club or as a community of liberal democracies”, said Garton-Ash.

”We have to confront the clash of caricatures which equates Islam with terror and which can not distinguish between one Sheikh Hamza and another. But we must also ask why some Muslims were converted to radicalised support for terror in Hamburg, in Paris and in Madrid. What was it about that encounter with a version of the west in Europe which drove a tiny minority to such an extreme?”, said Garton-Ash.

Garton-Ash criticised the common argument that ‘Islam needs its Reformation’, arguing that this was invariably an argument made by western secularists rather than Christians. “They confuse Martin Luther with Voltaire, for what they really mean is that Islam needs its Enlightenment. But what they really, really mean is that Islam needs its secularisation”, said Garton-Ash, arguing that this was therefore very radical demand made of Islam in the name of “the religion of secularism – which is itself a kind of faith”. Sheikh Hamza concurred, arguing that Islam needed “a restoration not a reformation”, arguing that the religion contained all of the resources it needed but that more recent extremist distortions of what the faith stood for risked discarding over 1300 years of scholarship.

Terry Waite focused on the plight of prisoners held without legal rights at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Airbase, comparing this to the experience of forced kidnapping which he endured in Lebanon. He pointed out that he had been kidnapped because of a false assumption that he was an agent of western governments and drew parallels with the treatment of those held on suspicion by the United States: ”There is no due process. They have no rights. Lawyers have no access to these men, and so can only represent the families. We do not know what is happening to them. We hear stories that four of them have committed suicide. To be in that limbo of captivity is a terrible experience – to not know how long you will be there or what charges you will face”.

”There was a great public outcry about the experiences of western hostages like myself. I have found it disturbing that those held in Guantanamo Bay are hardly mentioned and that their treatment is explained away with all sorts of excuses and reasons. This seems to me such a violation of that which the west claims to stand for – international human rights. These were cradled in America and nurtured there. Yet, almost at a stroke, they have been discarded”.

“I am speaking out because it is difficult for the families to speak out. It is difficult for Muslims to speak out. They are told that ‘you have an obvious vested interest’. But we all have a vested interest. As their rights are being eroded, we all lose our freedoms”, said Waite.

• The event took place on Tuesday 4th May at Friends House, Euston Road, London.

Source: The Fabian Society, 2004

British Muslims cheer Terry Waite

The former Lebanon hostage, Terry Waite, won rapturous applause from hundreds of British Muslims in a packed meeting at London’s Euston Friends’ Meeting House, on 4 May, organised by the Muslim magazine Q-News on the theme of identity and citizenship. Waite focussed on the suffering of Muslim detainees at the US internment camps in Bagram, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and the now-notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, scene of the infamous pictures depicting grinning US soldiers torturing and abusing detainees.

He expressed serious concern that the US had refused entry to Amnesty International to investigate the treatment of detainees in these prisons. Entry is restricted to the Red Cross, and even their access is limited. Waite’s comments were received with concerned silence, since the fear of many Muslims was that if abuse, rape and torture are occurring at Abu Ghraib, what might be happening at Bagram and Guantanamo Bay – especially to British detainees?

Waite was cheered when he drew comparisons with his years of captivity and the suffering of people held by the US without trial or charge. Whilst the circumstances were different, he said, the process was the same. Like him, they are held often purely on the basis of suspicion of involvement with the enemy. Also like him, they are denied legal rights and access to their families. Waite also commented movingly on the suffering of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and the refugees in Lebanon, denied their right to return.

The biggest applause came when he expressed forgiveness to his captors, and warned against bitterness, which hurt the one holding it as much as those against whom it was directed. Another speaker, American convert Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, perhaps the most popular and influential Muslim in the West, was clearly moved by this, and expressed his appreciation of Waite’s sentiments.

Source: Anthony McRoy, the Christian Herald