Helmintholog

Perhaps the most important thing about learning religion young is that we tend to internalise the phrases and the doctrine, gradually introducing sense into our understanding, as well as meaning. And then one comes across the same thing done from an entirely different perspective, an entirely different childhood, and the complete, naked absurdity of what is affirmed stands out like a live owl in your breakfast yoghourt.

Not the least absurdity of fundamentalism is the thought that monotheistic texts could have literal meanings if you thought about them carefully. But it takes a really subtle scholar to forget that they ever had literal meanings.

As part of my Templeton reading I have finally grabbed a copy of (Moham)Ed Husain’s book the Islamist, which is an account of a smart Bangladeshi kid and how he got drawn into Hizb ut Tahrir before rejecting them for a sort of English Sufism.

It reads very truthfully to me, though I may not be part of the intended audience. In particular, the nerdy arrogance of these young totalitarians, like Trotskyists with a cause, is beautifully caught:

We believed that the Muslim ummah was in a state of war with the West, particularly Britain, France, Russia, and the United States, so lying and deception were simply strategies of war. Besides, our enemies were kajir, not deserving of our honesty or integrity. We employed the scrip­tural justification for deceiving the enemy that was used in the seventh century. We failed, however, to understand the context. Hizb ut-Tahrir believed that all natural events were acts of God (though in some actions man could exercise free will), hence insurance policies were haram. Furthermore, the kuffar economic system should on no account be supported. Conse­quently, Hizb members could not insure their cars or mortgage their homes.
However, many members of the Hizb had a penchant for fast cars and now, without having to insure the turbo-powered engines, these cars became increasingly affordable. Hizb mem­bers were frequently stopped by police for speeding and many were banned for driving uninsured. The brothers from west London began to provide Hizb leaders with false certificates of insurance to produce at police stations. To this day I do not know how we managed to get away with it so often, but we did. (More pragmatic members circumvented the Hizb stipulation by insuring their cars in the name of a non-Hizb family member, which even at the time felt hypocritical.)

This reminds me vividly of the mindset of IRA gangsters in the Seventies, though I haven’t got a cite to hand for that, and part of my impressions are based on talks with journalists who were there at the time.

Another reference is the Communist Party of Darkness at Noon. Here is Farid Kasim, their cell leader, in action:

he mentioned that he would be attending a wedding at the weekend. A member asked, ‘Who’s getting married?’ To which Farid replied, ‘Why does that concern you?’ He had mentioned the wedding only to indicate that he would be busy; it was not for us to enquire about the details.
There was a group culture inside the Hizb that no question should be asked unless it was relevant to our global aims. Our focus had to be total, unwavering, and zealous. Irrelevant enquiries resulted in accusations of ‘shallowness’ and the rep­etition of the same material in the halaqah rather than moving on to study new ideas. When Farid reprimanded me for asking too many questions about the life and death of Nabhani, I realized that I had strayed. We should not be interested in Nabhani the man, but Nabhani the ideologue and his vision for a future world.

Finally, of course, there was the problem of sex among the revolutionaries, which doesn’t seem to change at all no matter how the great global revolution changes its character.

Our parents failed to understand where this ‘Islamic marriage’ had come from. It was neither Western nor Eastern but, like relationships the world over, still often ended in tears when couples realized that simply having a religion in common did not necessarily make for compatibility. Some did end up marry­ing, often after the sister had run away from home. Often she would discover that he was not the pious Islamist she thought he was. And vice versa: brothers would complain that the sisters had been ‘influenced too much by feminism’. It is a sad truth that the rate of divorce among Islamists is far higher than among ordinary Muslims. To my mind, this is due in no small part to the extremist, literalist blinkers worn by many Islamists in an attempt to idealize their lives.
Among the brothers, many wanted to marry those very sisters who had covered everything. They were considered to be the ‘truest Muslims’ and evoked the desires of many a brother. Rather than ask for a date, as was the practice of the kafir, we made marriage proposals. Several of my members who had previously had little interest in women now fell head over heels in love with one of them simply because she had covered all.