The late respected British scholar of Islam, Dr. Mervyn Hiskett, in his Some to Mecca Turn to Pray, noted then (i.e., in 1993) the prevailing opinion among leaders of the British Muslim community that unless Muslim immigrants to Britain were allowed unrestrained access to Islamic law, Sharia, in all aspects, Britain was to be regarded, Dar-al-Harb, or the House of War, that is, the target of jihadism. Citing what he characterized as “a more urbane but some may consider ominous statement of the Muslim intention to brook no opposition,” Hiskett quoted Zaki Badawi (d. 2006), a Muslim scholar and former director of the Islamic Cultural Center, London, who was made an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) in 2004, and also appointed by the Duke of Castro as a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Francis I. Incidentally Badawi, an Egyptian Muslim, never became a British subject although he had lived in the country for more than thirty years and had received all manner of honors there. Badawi opined,
A proseltyzing religion cannot stand still. It can either expand or contract. Islam endeavors to expand in Britain. Islam is a universal religion. It aims at bringing its message to all corners of the earth. It hopes that one day the whole humanity will be one Muslim community, the “Umma.”
Just over a decade later, polling data from six hundred British Muslim college students (disclosed in a U.S. Embassy cable) indicated that one-third supported killing in the name of Islam, while 40 percent wanted the sharia to replace British law. And sharia indoctrination of British Muslim youth began well before college entry. A BBC Panorama investigation has revealed the presence in Britain of forty “weekend schools” attended by some five thousand Muslim children aged 6-18. Such schools teach the British Muslim youth who attend them, for example, traditional Islamic motifs of Jew-hatred and mutilating sharia punishments—as per the Saudi National Curriculum—under the rubric of “Saudi Students Clubs and Schools in the UK and Ireland.”
These revelations validate Hiskett’s prescient warnings from 1993, which framed the predicament not only of Britain, but all Western societies when confronted with the relentless advance of the Sharia agenda by Muslim immigrants.
Which does one prefer? Western secular, pluralist institutions, imperfect as these are? Or the Islamic theocratic alternative? And if one decides in favor of one’s own institutions, warts and all, one then has to ask again: How far may the advocacy of Islamic alternatives go, before this becomes downright subversive? And at that point, what should be done about it?
Hiskett concluded by asking whether political elites—but I would add those in the media and academy as well—possessed,
the moral guts to do what is needed, or will they simply give way, bit by bit and point by point, to insistent and sustained pressure from the Muslim ‘Parliament’ and other Muslim special-interest lobbies like it?
