Choudhry Rahmat Ali from Punjab, moved to study law at Cambridge in 1930. Three years later he published ‘Now or Never’, in which he argued for a separate state of Pakistan to shelter Bharatiya Muslims from being sacrificed to Hindu nationalism.
It was therefore in Britain and not Bharat, that the idea of Pakistan was born. Was this coincidence? Or was there something about the environment in Britain that was so conducive to the Islamic ideology which would split Bharat to create Pakistan?
In 1841 Scottish thinker Thomas Carlyle wrote a sympathetic account of Islam in ‘Heroes and Hero Worship’, as like so many others he sought spiritual solace to counter the mechanistic world being thrust upon Britain by the Industrial Revolution.
Henry Edward John Stanley, Third Lord of Alderney, became the first Muslim peer of Britain when he converted in 1859, and married his Catholic Spanish wife Fabia in Algeria according to Islamic law.
William Henry Abdullah Quilliam was born into a Methodist family of watch-makers in Liverpool in 1856. After conversion he founded the Liverpool Muslim Institute. Quilliam chose Islam because of its pure monotheism.
The left embraced radical Islam as part of multicultural diversity and colonial guilt. The right also embraced them because the Afghan mujahedeen were anti-communist freedom fighters, and such darlings in the eyes of Thatcher and Reagan.
To regard radical Islam as just same alien import is to miss the point. The system and ideology just described was not even functioning in the ancestral homelands. It was made and manufactured in Britain, host to Islamic organizations banned in actual Muslims countries.
The left-wing defenders of free speech were now demanding censorship against Rushdie, allying with elements that might be anti-capitalist, well organized and rooted in some ethnic minorities, yet were simultaneously illiberal, intolerant and male-dominated.
Deputy Labour Party leader Roy Hattersley said that Satanic Verses should not come out in paperback. The Conservative Party was hardly much of an alternative. Its extreme right-wing leading light Norman Tebbit castigated Rushdie as an “outstanding villain”.
The anti-establishment nature of this new Islam and its apparent status as an alternative to capitalism and secularism is also winning converts among native Britons.
(This article has been compiled from the tweet thread posted by @RanbirS11414092 on March 14, 2023, with minor edits to improve readability and conform to HinduPost style guide)
