Islam Awareness Week hosting speakers with suspect views

Next Monday Jan. 18, the U of A will start playing host to the fourth annual United Islam Awareness Week on campus. Promoted by the Muslim Students’ Association, the series of open lectures has as its objective to answer general questions about the faith and engender a spirit of understanding across religious divides in our multicultural society. As a mission statement this seems perfectly honourable. It’s true there are embarrassing factions of our university community that are under terrible misapprehensions about Islam. Lectures and booths that correct certain misbegotten clichés and harmful caricatures should be welcomed with earnest zeal, but this year’s Awareness Week features some problematic individuals.

Abdullah al Andalusi is a lecturer, notorious in Britain for his extreme posture even within reactionary political Islam. Known by various names, al Andalusi was once employed by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary to advise on counter-terrorism operations. Once the absurdity of his situation was made public, he was dismissed from service, but The Telegraph ran an interesting piece; a sort of afterthought about the whole affair which exposes the sincerity of the part-time cleric’s Islamist convictions.

Writing in Britain’s conservative broadsheet last summer, Andrew Gilligan noted that, “Mr. al Andalusi, a prominent figure on the extremist lecture circuit, is closely associated with the extremist group Hizb ut Tahrir, which believes that voting and democracy are un-Islamic.” On his personal website al Andalusi ponders the decennial impact of 9/11 by referring to event as, “the day a vicious world empire found a publicly acceptable excuse to bomb others, invade non-threatening nations, torture political dissidents and kill at least 300,000 innocent people, in pursuit of economic and political objectives.” If that doesn’t immediately tell you everything you need to know about a person then I’m not sure what does. This is a man who considers the tragedy of that solemn autumn morning to have been a simple excuse for our most kindred ally to cynically exhaust a geopolitical region of its industrial and human capital.

If you aren’t yet bored of this tripe, his commentary on the present state of the Near East is even more disturbing. He writes, in an online post from June 2014 that Muslims “who reject I.S. merely because I.S’s school of thought is disagreeable to them, should remember that Islam permits difference of opinion. To reject something as outside the fold of Islam, due to it being a different school of thought to one’s own, makes one a purveyor of disunity amongst Muslims (when those opinions are validly derived from Islamic texts).” Even though al Andalusi criticizes ISIL for not adhering the “rules of war” and failing to establish an ideologically sound caliphate, he does make the observation that ISIL has textual justification for their general mission.

Also billed as a visiting presenter is Shayk Abdullah Hakim Quick, a cleric who has been accused, rightly so, of overt bigotry in the direction of gays and non-believers. In response to a group of youth who asked, while he was an imam in Toronto, “what is the Islamic position (on homosexuality)?” Quick replied, “(p)ut my name in the paper. The punishment is death and we (Muslims) will not change.” A multitude of his audio lectures contain disparaging remarks about the LGBTQ community and he firmly establishes a brand of Islam that considers homosexuality unpardonably deviant.

I would be aghast at the mere suggestion that either of these speakers have their invitations revoked but I think there needs to be an open and honest discussion about their beliefs and the utility of their ideology with regards to multicultural life at the U of A. The MSA has every right to extend a summons to whomever they please. And, I have every right to tell you that certain invitees taking part in United Islam Awareness Week have opinions about your colleagues, about world events and about the way a society should operate that you probably find repulsive. Free speech is an absolute right, I am a fundamentalist in that arena. However, we need to find the courage to challenge extremism and intolerance wherever it arises. So go to the lectures, peruse the reading materials, and if something doesn’t sit quite right with your pluralistic, liberal-democratic, modern sensibility, quash your knee-jerk masochistic impulse to feel guilty, and speak up.