When Tim Winter Became Abdal Hakim Murad, He Found A Peace That Passeth Understanding

Those who find their peace by living within the pre-fabricated grid of Islam, that Compleat Regulation of Life and Total Explanation of the Universe, are not limited to the economically marginal. I am sure those who have known Tim Winter — knew him at Westminster, or at Cambridge — and rack their brains, will find some explanation, other than the sheer wonderfulness of Islam, to explain his conversion.

He’s a constant propagandist and Defender of the Faith. Sometimes he uses “Tim Winter” (as in the TLS) and sometimes he deems it more effecive to use his Muslim name, as in his attack on the Western notions of free speech which, he wierdly thinks, should include the right of Muslims to be free of “insults” which means, there should be no treating of the figure of Muhammad with disrespect. His inabiilty to make distinctions astonishes. He seems to think that the deliberate, and pointed, and repeated, attacks on a particular tiny Christian chapel, interrupting its proper functioning, is akin to publishin cartoons of Muhammad, in a French magazine that is not forced on Muslims, not plastered on the walls of mosques, but is simply available to those who wish to read that magazine. The ability to make distinctions, someone once noted, is one of the tasks, perhaps the main task, of intelligence.

I have put in bold the bizarrerie in question:

Scorning the Prophet goes beyond free speech – it’s an act of violence

The Paris murders aside, the law has a duty to protect us all from insult and abuse

So it would be easy to dismiss this as yet another tragic case of fringe elements trampling on the teachings of the mosques. Globally, Muslims admit that such lawlessness is an increasing worry. No significant Muslim scholar supports the radicals in Iraq and Syria, but some young people simply pay no heed. In an age of individualism, angry minds tend to ignore established religious leaders.

But there is more at stake here. Charlie Hebdo, like the Danish magazine Jyllands-Posten several years ago, did not simply publish images of the Prophet. That, on its own, would probably have occasioned little comment. The difficulty lay in the evident intention to mock, deride and wound. To portray the Prophet naked, or with a bomb in his turban, was not the simple manufacturing of a graven image. It was received, and rightly so, as a deliberate insult to an already maligned and vulnerable community.

Mosque burnings and a raft of legal disadvantages are increasingly a fact of life for Muslims in Europe. I recently visited a Swedish mosque which has logged almost 300 separate attacks; on one occasion it was burnt to the ground. In this fearful and tense environment, the French cartoons were scarcely a piece of harmless jocundity appearing in a vacuum.

Scorn towards despised minorities is a hazardous business. During the days of Nazi terror, cartoons supplied a key weapon of anti-Jewish polemic. To laugh at the Prophet, the repository of all that Muslims revere and find precious, to reduce him to the level of the scabrous and comedic, is something very different from “free speech” as usually understood. It is a violent act surely conscious of its capacity to cause distress, ratchet up prejudice and damage social cohesion.

It is because of such risks, as well as out of a sense of due civility, that the British legislators who in 2008 abolished the common law offence of blasphemy, have replaced it with a range of legal restraints on forms of hate speech or offensive images. In 2010, to take one example, an atheist activist was convicted for distributing anti-Christian images in the prayer room at Liverpool Airport. The deeply distressed airport chaplain took him to court, and won easily.[yes, and if the staff of Charlie-Hebdo had gone around to mosques, and into them, and handed out, or plastered on walls, images of Muhammad, they too would have been convicted. But that “atheist activist” was convicted of violatin the time, place, manner (to use terms commmon in American constitutional jurisprudence about free speech) restrictions. It was not illegal for him to make those anti-Christian images, or to publish them in an edition of seven milliion, if he so chose, and Tim Winter — Abdal Hakim Murad — surely knows this His aim is to confuse]

The English legal tradition recognises not only the right to free speech, but the right to protection from agonising insult, slander and abuse.[“slander” is a tort; “abuse” is so vague as to have no legal signifiance, and “agonising insult” is not a tort, but a shrill propagandistic scream] In the case of vulnerable minorities that legal concern seems particularly appropriate. It is also in line with the tolerant and courteous national character.

It is for the many Muslims who now populate the Inns of Court [the implied threat of all those newly-minted Muslim lawyers, eager to do battle]to discover whether these legal precepts can in practice be used to protect non-Christians from abuse.[cartoons one is not obliged to see constitute, now, “abuse”] A series of complex cases would trigger an overdue national and perhaps Europe-wide discussion on the right to protection from hate speech. Not all the lawsuits would succeed, but the community would have shown that it is determined to enjoy the protection of our country’s laws.[the Muslim “community” appears to be eager to threaten and cajole others to change their laws and understandings to accommodate Muslim sensibilities, and that  impulse is so strong, more and more non-Muslims into whose lands Muslims have entered, may come to the conclusion that Islam, and Western laws and customs, are permanently incompatible, and from that still other conclusions will be drawn]

Abdal Hakim Murad is a British Muslim theologian and broadcaster. His most recent book, “Commentary on the Eleventh Contentions”, is published by the Quilliam Press