UK Prison Service Allowing Jihadi Book to Be Distributed to Inmates

From Newsweek

The extreme views of a “racist, homophobe and anti-Semite”, who supports killing non-Muslims and “stoning adulterers” are being made available to prison imams and prisoners throughout England and Wales with the blessing of the authorities, according to a former adviser to the UK government.

Haras Rafiq, managing director of the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank, warned that prisons have become “incubators for Islamic extremism” by allowing inmates to read the works of controversial South Asian cleric, Abul Ala Maududi. He described  Maududi – who died in 1979 – as the “grandfather of Islamism”.

Newsweek has discovered that hundreds of gold-laminated, hardback copies of Maududi’s analyses of the Koran were distributed last month at a training event for prison imams and chaplains held at the prison service college in Rugby. The books came from the Markfield Institute for Higher Education, part of the Islamic Foundation, a UK-based organisation that publishes educational materials on Islam.

A spokesman for the commercial sales arm of the Islamic Foundation, Kube Publishing, confirmed that it does supply books to the Muslim Chaplaincy and publishes books by Maududi, but said that it had no contracts with Her Majesty’s Prison Service, and was unaware of the prison training event.

The Islamic Foundation is “inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood”, according to Rashad Ali, a Counter Terrorism Interventionist for the Home Office, and is the only publishing house to have published the entire translations of commentaries on the Koran by Sayyid Qutb, who was widely cited as the scholar who most inspired the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden.

While a minority of the imams and chaplains at the event in Rugby expressed concern about the books, they were told by HM Prison Authorities that the only banned author from prison libraries is Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric who advocated violent jihad against the US, and was linked to a series of attacks including 9/11.

In one of his books, Maududi says:  “There are only two methods of dealing with an apostate. Either make him an outlaw by depriving him of his citizenship and allowing him mere existence, or end his life. The first method is definitely more severe than the second, because he exists in a state in which ‘he neither lives nor dies’ .Killing him is preferable. That way both his agony and the agony of the society are brought to an end simultaneously.”

The Ministry of Justice, which oversees prisons in England and Wales, declined to comment. I bet they did.