Thursday 25 March 2010

The Islam Channel Further Exposed

Back in January I blogged about the Islam Channel, Britain's most-watched Muslim TV channel, and its ties to jihadist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, as well as other unsavoury connections to radicalism.

Now, a report by the Muslim Quilliam Foundation has revealed that the channel is running programmes saying that women should not refuse their husbands' sexual advances, should not leave the house without their husbands' permission, and that if they wear makeup, they are prostitutes.

The new report notes that “Although the channel does not directly call for terrorist violence, it clearly helps to create an atmosphere in which religiously-sanctioned intolerance and even hatred might be seen as acceptable."

It is good to see the Muslims of the Quilliam Foundation actually opposing these things, but the report does not help matters when it refers to these particular teachings as "a single narrow version of Islam, [namely] Saudi Wahhabism". In fact, they are mainstream Islamic doctrine:

"If a husband calls his wife to his bed [i.e. to have sexual relation] and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning" (Sahih Muslim, v.4, b.54, no.460)

"The husband may forbid his wife to leave the home, because of the hadith related by Bayhaqi that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: "It is not permissible for a woman who believes in Allah and the Last Day to allow someone into her husband's house if he is opposed, or to go out if he is averse." (Reliance of the Traveller, a classic manual of Islamic law endorsed by Cairo's Al-Azhar University in 1991 as conforming "to the practise and fasith of the orthodox Sunni community")

“And tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest, and to display of their adornment only that which is apparent, and to draw their veils over their bosoms, and not to reveal their adornment save to their own husbands or fathers or husbands' fathers, or their sons or their husbands' sons, or their brothers or their brothers' sons or sisters' sons, or their women, or their slaves, or male attendants who lack vigour, or children who know naught of women's nakedness. And let them not stamp their feet so as to reveal what they hide of their adornment. And turn unto Allah together, O believers, in order that ye may succeed.” (Qur'an 24:31)

The article further mentions that a scholar on the "Islam Q & A" programme declared that "the majority of people in hell will be women". Again, he was simply following the example of his Prophet:

“The Prophet said: 'I was shown the Hell-fire and that the majority of its dwellers were women who were ungrateful.' It was asked, 'Do they disbelieve in Allah?' (or are they ungrateful to Allah?) He replied, 'They are ungrateful to their husbands and are ungrateful for the favors and the good (charitable deeds) done to them.'” (Bukhari v.1, b.2, no.28).

Finally, the channel "has already been found by Ofcom to have breached the broadcasting code on impartiality during elections, and for broadcasting an unbalanced programme about the ownership of Jerusalem." I've seen that one myself. It was appalling.

The famous words of Ibn Warraq seem appropriate here: "There may be moderate Muslims, but Islam itself is not moderate."

7 comments:

  1. Hey there...

    Thought you might enjoy this blog:

    http://truthjihad.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is actually a really interesting piece.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi, "Andrew", welcome back.

    Unsurprisingly, the first link is simply a platform for a 9/11 Truther, that particular ideology being rejected even by most on the extreme Left, and not even worth discussing.

    As for the second article, I read that several days ago, and it is just complete nonsense. I wrote about violence in the Bible, and why it is NOT remotely comparable to violence in the Qur'an, late last year:

    http://eye-on-islam.blogspot.com/2009/09/islam-vs-christianity-equivalent.html

    In any case, while we're on that subject, here are a couple of unfortunately very brief extracts from a three-year study by a Danish researcher specialising in textual analysis, who studied the core foundational texts of ten major world religions, and came to precisely the opposite conclusion from that of Philip Jenkins, namely that "The texts in Islam distinguish themselves from the texts of other religions by encouraging violence and aggression against people with other religious beliefs to a larger degree. There are also straightforward calls for terror. This has long been a taboo in the research into Islam, but it is a fact that we need to deal with…"

    http://fjordman.blogspot.com/2005/09/islam-is-most-warlike-religion.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. The idea of a text that old "calling for terror" is absolutley ridiculous.

    You dismiss this study because you don't like it's findings and you believe the other one because you do like it's findings!

    Talk about intellectual dishonesty.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "The idea of a text that old "calling for terror" is absolutley ridiculous."

    Well, here is the Qur'an in its own words: "“Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, TO STRIKE TERROR INTO (THE HEARTS OF) THE ENEMIES [emphasis added], of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know. Whatever ye shall spend in the cause of Allah, shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall not be treated unjustly.” (8:60)

    Obviously, the Qur'an isn't really calling for terror in the modern sense, but then again, I don't think there is much of a distinction. After all, there is no doubt that terror attacks such as those of September 11th, 2001 are designed to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemy”. A note in some written instructions left for the 9/11 hijackers read: “Shout Allah is great because this shout strikes terrors in the hearts of the infidels.”

    As for Jenkins' study, I don't dismiss it because I "don't like it", I dismiss it because it seems merely to be Jenkins' own opinion, and ignores the kind of relevant facts that I blogged about in my thread here last September, such as the important differences in context between Biblical and Qur'anic violence. It doesn't appear to use any objective comparison methods, whereas Tina Magaard's study, based on the admittedly limited translated extracts that I have been able to obtain, appears much more driven by hard data.

    In any case, Jenkins could be granted to be correct that the Bible is "more violent" than the Qur'an, and still the fact remains that it is Islam, and not Christianity, that today has TV stations teaching unpleasant things about women, and whose highest authorities are endorsing acts of terrorism, and whose followers have committed over 15,000 terror attacks in its name in just the last nine years. Jenkins' silly theory about "holy amnesia" does not explain this disparity adequately.

    ReplyDelete
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