‘Unity and Tolerance in a Multicultural Society’

The following speech was delivered by Ken Livingstone during the 2nd conference of ‘Love Muhammad - The Prophet of Mercy’ in January 2014 organised by The World Forum for Proximity of Islamic Schools of Thought (special interfaith edition issue 65 March 2019)

“It is both a pleasure and honour to be here. When I looked at the agenda for tonight I was reminded of an event just about two years ago. I was attending a meeting of Christian Churches in London. It was part of the last mayoral election campaign…with Boris Johnson, Lib Dem Brian Paddick, the Green candidate, and we were answering questions from representatives of the Christian Churches and Brian Paddick answering a question said: “You have to understand Islam is a peaceful religion” and there were murmurs of dissent.

Kenneth Robert Livingstone

What he said was clearly unpopular and disbelieved by many of the people present. Fortunately I was the next person to speak and I came prepared….. In all my meetings I always carry with me two quotes from the last sermon of the Prophet; the last sermon which he delivered knowing that his time was coming to an end spells out how humanity should live side by side.

So after the murmurs of dissent and disapproval I read to those Christians the words of the Prophet where he says, “No Arab has superiority over a non-Arab. No non-Arab has superiority over an Arab. Also no white has superiority over a black and a black has no superiority over a white”.  It goes on to say “that God forms you in tribes and nations, so you get to know one another”, not so that you may fight, oppress, occupy, convert or terrorise but so that you would get to know one another. All the audience burst into applause.

That was always the response in any meeting whether they were Muslims, Christians, atheists or others. They were all enlightened and infused by those words because those words have absolute relevance to how we live our lives today.

He was a man over thousand years ago fore–calling a code on how we should live, and his words are absolutely relevant today as they were the day he delivered them. What was striking was the number of people who came to me at the end of that meeting and said,  “that was amazing; I must go and read that whole sermon”.

I ask myself how many non-Muslims in Britain have ever heard those words. Have they even heard that there was a last sermon?

I spent my entire childhood in schools, not even once was the name of the Prophet Muhammad ever mentioned. We were never taught anything. Even when I became a politician I was ignorant on a vast scale about the meaning of Islam and its history. That is why it is so easy for those who wish to divide us and spread fear and hatred to succeed because they are talking to people who have never been taught the truth about Islam.

There was a survey about four years ago conducted by a unit from the University of Cardiff. They read all British newspapers from 2000 to 2008. They found that two thirds of all stories in our papers in those eight years were negative about Islam, portraying it as a threat, problem or both.

That is why it is so important that when we gather in the meetings like this we don’t forget when we go out, what we came here to do. It is what we say, how we educate, and the way to spread the truth not only in the meetings like this, [but] in our day to day lives, what we say when we meet others, in the things we write on the internet and elsewhere. There is a huge task ahead of us.

Think back to 2011 when a terrorist killed 77 people in Norway, mainly children. He wrote on the internet his personal manifesto. If you read that horrific document it is filled with quotes from British newspapers demonising Islam. It is filled with quotes from the journalist Melanie Philips who wrote for the Daily Mail for many years and published a book called ‘Londonistan’, saying that we have been taken over by Muslims and we are a centre for Muslim terrorism. The hatred she perpetrated on an almost daily basis in the Daily Mail, sinking (please check this word) in his [the terrorist] heart and mind and filled his acts of horrific murder against innocent Norwegian boys and girls.

Following the killing of those 77 Norwegians the former [Norwegian] Prime Minister Mr Jagland who is now the Chair of the Noble Peace Prize Committee warned that ‘we have to stop talking about Islamic terrorism because it helps to demonise Islam and we need to recognise that the vast majority of terrorist acts that happen here in this continent, happen at the hands of right wing groups, extremists from the far right’. He also mentioned our own Prime Minister, David Cameron, warning that ‘his message helps to stir up hatred against Muslims’.

If you look at the work commissioned in 2011 by George Soros, the billionaire, a study of Muslims in European countries, it is quite revealing. One of the questions they asked….. was, ‘do you feel a part of your country?’ In France they asked ‘do you feel you are French?’ Here ‘do you feel you are British?’ The results of that study were quite revealing. Only one Muslim in four in Germany felt that they are also German. Only one in two in France, felt that they are French. I was very proud to read that nine out of ten Muslims in Britain felt that they are British. They have no problem living their lives as Muslims and living their lives as British people, and I look at this city [London]  – apart from New York. the most diverse city on earth – every faith, every ethnic group, every nationality, gather together, and when we had those terrible bombings in London we saw the response of Londoners.

A week after the bombing we had a service in Trafalgar Square. I was able to say that within a week of that bombing there had been no recorded incident of an attack on a Muslim Londoner. Londoners knew that terrorist attacks sought to divide us, they refused to be divided and that is the legacy of the teachings of the Prophet in that last sermon.

Ayatollah [Araki] just spoke about the legacy of invasions, the American, the British and the French invasions of Muslim lands over many decades. Everything he said was true and even more. One can go on all night about what we have done, but there are two phases to this.

In that period after World War I, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the real driving force for Western imperialism and its interventions, whether it was Egypt or the overthrow of the government of Iran in 1953, was about control of oil. But then with the collapse of the Soviet Union there was another dimension and we saw it in the book published by the American academic Samuel Huntington in 1996. The book was called ‘The Clash of Civilisations’. In this book he spelt out an inevitable clash between West and Islam. It set the political agenda for the intolerant right for the decades that followed and it is wrong and it is dishonest. Why was this taken up so eagerly by American presidents such as George W Bush? Because America had a vast economy based on its military machine. Half of all the military spending on earth is by one nation, the United States of America. With the collapse of the Soviet Union they couldn’t justify vast stock piles of nuclear weapons, hundreds of bases around the world and they needed a new enemy, and that is what Huntington gave. We have to challenge this.

One of the final acts of George W Bush in his last year of Presidency was to put $300 million into the hands of terrorist groups to allow them to undertake terrorist attacks inside Iran. Sadly president Obama did not cancel that.

How many people read the British papers, reading about terrorism, how many read the truth, about what the west has done, what America has done so often?

We know now that hundreds of millions of pounds were spent funding Iraq to invade Iran in the 80s. We need to tell people the truth. Both the truth about what Islam really stands for and what lies behind this demonisation of Islam today.

Finally I just want to say this. When we look at how we live our lives, as we look around London, we notice we are living according to the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. We are tolerant, we do accept difference and diversity, and this is a striking example of the power of his message of peace and love.

In the 1300 years following Prophet Muhammad’s death, from Morocco to Iran, every Muslim nation had in it a strong and vibrant Jewish community, free to practice its faith. Accepted and tolerated, not threatened, not evicted. By whom was Judaism victimised? By the Christian King of Spain who expelled the Jews from Spain. By the Christian King of England, who expelled them from England. Around much of the Christian world, the Jews were victimised and expelled. In the Muslim world the legacy of Prophet’s last sermon actually guaranteed peace and harmony between Jews and Muslims and that of course was shattered by the war of 1948, a tragic event.

I, as you have guessed, am not a Muslim, but I don’t have any doubt whatsoever, I have no problems saying that I try to live my life as he left his message, being tolerant, accepting diversity and being proud of that difference and that is why I am proud to be a Londoner and am proud to be among you tonight.

Former Mayor of London Kenneth Robert Livingstone is a veteran British Labour Party politician.

Iran’s Islamic Revolution: The Real Islamic Alternative

Kevin Barrett

“Islam was and is not only a viable option, but is the only alternative to an Occident that is increasingly troubled by social and ideological crises.” – Murad Hoffman

In his 1992 book Islam the Alternative, German career diplomat Murad Hoffman argued that far from having reached an “end of history” in secular capitalist paradise, the West was heading for trouble. The only viable solution to the coming crisis, as Hoffman saw it, was authentic, corrected Abrahamic monotheism: namely, Islam. Hoffman expected that by the mid-21st century, Islam would be the majority religion in the West, not because of immigration, but because Westerners would embrace it.

Zionist arch-Islamophobe Bernard Lewis likewise understood that Islam offered a tempting alternative civilizational model. Lewis found this terrifying. In his 1990 essay “the roots of Muslim rage” Lewis coined the term “clash of civilizations” to describe the alleged long-term incompatibility of Christian and Islamic forms of Abrahamic monotheism. Lewis’ lifelong crusade to cast Islam as a dangerous “other” was, among other things, a psychological overreaction to his repressed realization that Islam could save Christian civilization. And that, to a committed Zionist, must be a terrifying prospect.

Reacting against Hoffman, while echoing Lewis, Samuel Huntington published his essay “The Clash of Civilizations” in 1993. Like Lewis, Huntington exaggerated the differences between Islam and Christianity, predicting that an immanent “clash” between Islam and the West would be central to the coming era of inter-civilizational warfare.

The truth, of course, is that the differences between Islam and Christianity are miniscule compared to the differences between universalist Abrahamic monotheism (Islam/Christianity) and other dins including secular materialist humanism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, paganism, and so on. In reality, there is only one traditional Western religion, universalist Abrahamic monotheism, and it is shared by all of the world’s 2.5 billion Christians and 2 billion Muslims, who together make up a majority of the world’s 7.5 billion people — and who have been disenfranchised in their own Holy Land by a few million Zionists. But Zionist-influenced Western elites threw all of their international-banker-financed weight behind the Lewis-Huntington prophecy that the West would soon go to war with Islam. On September 11, 2001, they rolled out the “most perverse publicity stunt in the history of public relations” (in the words of National Medal of Science winner Lynn Margulis) and made sure their prophecy came true.

In the post-9/11 world, proposing Islam as “the only alternative to an Occident that is increasingly troubled by social and ideological crises” is even more subversive than it was in 1992. Indeed, the Global War on Islam (GWOI) was designed to throw a monstrous roadblock into the peaceful and natural Western path toward Islam proposed by Murad Hoffman. Today we cannot help but see that the highest-level Western elites, who dominate the world through weaponized usury, will stop at nothing to maintain their power and the riba system that sustains it.

Today Murad Hoffman’s liberal yet vaguely salafist approach seems a bit dated. His belief that the secret rulers of the West would allow individuals to discover Islam for themselves the way he did, through free inquiry protected by Enlightenment liberalism, now appears naive (perhaps that is why Hoffman’s excellent books are now in the discount bin at IslamicBookstore.com).

Hoffman apparently did not fully understand that even in 1992, the only functioning “Islamic alternative” society was the Islamic Republic of Iran. Today, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, we should take time to ponder the experience of Iran’s Muslims in their ongoing efforts to realize an Islamic civilizational model.

The first lesson of the Iran’s Islamic revolution is: think pan-Islamically, act locally! Though Imam Khomeini sparked an Islamic Revolution, not a Shi‘i revolution or a purely Iranian revolution, his was nonetheless a “revolution in one country” (as the Russian Bolsheviks started calling their project after 1925). Both Imam Khomeini and his successor, the Rahbar, Imam Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei, have been devoted to supporting Islamic movements as well as other justice movements in various countries that embody values compatible with Islam, while at the same time focusing on building viable long-term institutions in Iran. And those institutions, for obvious reasons, have to be compatible with the local religious and ideological orientation of the population. So just as Islamic Iran is naturally going to have religious institutions dominated by Persian speakers of the Twelver Shi‘i (Ja‘fari) school of thought, those seeking to Islamize Turkish society will have to work with Turkish speaking Hanafis, those working in Morocco will be among Arabic-speaking Malikis including quite a few Sufis, and so on (and of course everyone, everywhere, will have to be able to communicate with those who have unthinkingly absorbed the secular-materialist progressivist humanism that is the de facto hegemonic religion imposed by the West on much of the world).

While the above observations may seem obvious, the unfortunate reality is that too many Islamic activists have been hindered by the sectarian delusion that their own approach is the only acceptable one. These folks need to remember the Qur’anic edict, “For every community faces a direction of its own, of which He is the focal point. Vie, therefore, with one another in doing good works. Wherever you may be, Allah will gather you all unto Himself: for, verily, Allah has the power to will anything” (2:148, Muhammad Asad’s interpretation).

The Islamic Revolution succeeded in part because Iran nurtures high-quality Islamic scholarship, and many of those scholars are willing and able to apply their knowledge to real-world social and political problems. It succeeded because a nucleus of the Iranian ‘ulama’, led by Imam Khomeini, refused to do what so many Islamic scholars have done, which is sell their souls and their services to corrupt rulers. Instead, Imam Khomeini and his allies spoke truth to power, sparking a popular revolution that institutionalized a role for religious scholars in a democratic-republican political order, under the doctrine of walayah al-faqih.

Should Muslims be working to impose the Iranian walayah al-faqih model in other Muslim-majority countries? Probably not. The conditions in most countries will not permit an exact duplication of the Iranian experience. But other Muslim communities can certainly “compete in goodness” with Iran by developing and empowering communities of first-rate Islamic scholars who speak truth to power. They can heap scorn on sellout pseudo-scholars who lick the boots of tyrants. And they can engage politically, wherever they happen to live, focusing on the most important issues from the standpoint of authentic Islamic values. Among those issues are: the fight against the international bankers’ usury-based currency system; the struggle for truth against official lies and cover-ups; the struggle to liberate Palestine; other struggles on behalf of oppressed people (mustad‘afin); and the larger struggle to re-establish God rather than man (or his emerging replacement, the post-human cyborg) as our focus of conformity.

All of the above issues require revolutionary rather than reformist approaches. Usurious currency creation by private bankers must be completely abolished, not reformed. The most subversive truths of “hidden history” must be fully unveiled, destroying public confidence in the lying rulers. Palestine must be completely liberated from Zionism. Neo-liberal capitalism must be overthrown and replaced by a system that cares for the poor and oppressed. And the idolatrous conformity to the human and/or post-human must cede to the conformity to God.

In short, 40 years after Iran’s liberation from the Shah, we still need Islamic revolutions. Meanwhile the Islamic Republic of Iran endures as a source of inspiration to Muslims everywhere, while the lessons of the 1979 Revolution remain more relevant than ever.

 

Kevin Barrett