The Life After Research
Through MECO, I found the address and telephone
number of a great Muslim reformer Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui in
London. He inherited the organisation Muslim Institute after
the death of his friend (not related) Dr Kalim Siddiqui, a
conservative anti-western, pro-Khomeini demagogue, who
supported the infamous Khomeini fatwa for killing Salman
Rushdie. The Muslim Institute (MI) was established by him in
1973, and at some point it acquired the property 109 Fulham
Palace Road (near the Hammersmith Tube Station), and
possibly some other assets as well. He also created what he
called Muslim Parliament in 1992 with some hand-picked
members and used it as the platform for his demagoguery –
the UK Press cultivated him as a Muslim bigot, whose
ridiculous claims and utterances were a source of great fun
for them. His Parliament died with him. I think both
Siddiquis were originally from the same part of north India,
who perhaps immigrated to Pakistan and finally settled in
London. Dr Ghayas Siddiqui, the inheritor of Dr K. Siddiqui,
has changed and become a liberal Muslim, which I am sure had
made the dead Siddiqui turn in his grave, not once but
perhaps several times.
As I found later, Dr G. Siddiqui is also a
pro-Bangladeshi person, supporting the war-crime trial in
Bangladesh, which he said is hated by the Pakistanis. He
passed to me many articles, some from the Guardian,
supporting the Bangladeshi trial. He also believes like me
that India should not have been divided.
Returning to the present, I telephoned Dr Ghayas Siddiqui,
who responded very courteously and immediately invited me to
meet him. I sent him a complimentary copy of my book. On
receipt of the book, he read some of it and telephoned me to
meet him as soon possible for a whole-day discussion. So I
met him at 109 Fulham Palace Road where he sits, as the Head
of a Halal Meat Organisation, in a small office supported by
his Bangladeshi secretary, Mansur Ahmed. Dr Siddiqui
received me very warmly with open arms.
I found him a most charming man, a man without any
pretensions. He
said he was most impressed by the book, and congratulated me
for writing this book especially without demonising anyone,
which is so tempting to do and so commonly done in books
like this, he added. He liked my remedy in the book which
suggested reforming the madrasa education as the start point
of reform. He was involved with madrasas, which he wanted to
reform, for which he asked me to help. I agreed gladly. But
after a few years of visiting many of some 400 madrasas in
the UK and reading about them, I gave up, as I could not see
any willingness on their part to change anything. They
listen to us very politely, but never follow up anything.
A few years ago Dr Siddiqui suffered a stroke, but
recovered though with some memory impairment. He is now a
lot weaker and cannot remember things which restricts any
serious discussions. He knows this, in fact he himself told
me this. He
asked me to take over from him his madrasa reform agenda,
but I respectfully declined, thanking him for thinking of
me, and at the same time saying that I do not have the
authority and credibility he had (I do not have even the
obligatory beard), and therefore I would be the wrong person
for the job.
Dr Siddiqui wanted me to present a seminar to a liberal
Muslim youth group run by his sons, but the invitation never
came even though I met the sons many times and had friendly
conversations with them.
Like many Muslims, I guess their audience, if
interested in science at all, is interested in the past
scientific glories of Muslims, but not to any self-criticism
of why they failed. These reform groups do have members who
are science graduates and even science professionals, but
most members are not particularly enthusiastic about
science, as I found in the MI meeting in December 2013 (see
later). However, I had one unexpected invitation to speak,
that was in a Bradford Muslim group. The meeting was very
enthusiastic on CAMSAM, but the follow-up meeting did not
take place. I think expressing strong support in a meeting
and then translating it into action is too wide a step for
most people, unless there is a strong personal commitment.
It is also likely that many of the attendees later concluded
that my ideas were too far away from their orthodox
tradition – after all Bradford is not exactly well-known as
a place for liberal Islam.
At this point I think I should mention Professor Salim
Al-Hassani, an Iraqi by birth and Professor of Engineering
at Manchester. His organisation: Foundation of Science,
Technology and Civilisation (FSTC), which also goes by the
name 1001 Inventions, on the past Arabic achievements in
Science, Technology and Medicine in the middle ages. It is
funded partly I think by the British Government, and more
substantially by many Arab Governments. The FSTC holds (or
held) month long exhibitions on the past Arabic inventions
in many museums, not only in the UK but also abroad,
including the USA, Turkey and many Arab countries. The
exhibitions are inspiring, and I hope will motivate many
Muslim kids to take up science and technology, as aspired by
the CAMSAM campaign, but to my regret the FSTC does not
directly urge Muslims to study Science and Technology.
Having discussed this with Professor Hassani many times, I
have come to the conclusion that he perhaps does not wish to
dilute the pure aim of FSTC into any topic beyond exhibiting
past Muslim glory.
I still believed in Muslim Reform groups. I wanted them to
meet together in London, to explore if they could cooperate
with each other on some topics of their common interest, and
if they would agree, then to meet once a year.
As I was not well-known I did not have the clout, and
hence I asked Dr Siddiqui to invite the groups. He agreed
but he also said he had to consult with his friend Professor
Dr Ziauddin Sardar (usually referred to as Dr Zia for
reasons unknown to me), whom he met on most Saturdays.
Dr Zia is at present Professor of Law and Society at
the Middlesex University, perhaps a tailor made post for
him. Besides this, he is a leading Muslim intellectual in
the UK, who has published over fifty books on Muslim related
issues, in which he generally advocated Muslim reform, at
the intellectual and philosophical level, but not at the
practicing level where Sharia and hadiths become important.
Unlike Dr Hargey, he does not seem to express opinions on
things like hijab, women Imams or hadith reliability. I am
sure Professor Ramadan’s public declaration that British law
is his Sharia law would be fully endorsed by Dr Hargey, but
I am not so sure if Dr Zia would do so publicly, even though
privately he probably does agree with them.
Many times I have asked him questions on hadiths, but
I always found him on the fence. Once and only once in
Oxford in 2012, I had a one-to-one discussion with him in
private on some of our thorny theological issues, and it
seems his views on these issues are no different from those
of mine, and on these issues I am probably closer to Dr Zia
than to Dr Hargey. It could be (I am speculating here) that
he does not wish to upset his aggressive Pakistani community
in Britain by public statements.
For me, however, he
has made a very important contribution in his recent book on
the Quran, in which he stated that the Quran is full of
contradictory verses, the way to interpret them is to
consider the contradictory verses on a topic together as a
bundle and then try to decipher them, when one can discover
a higher truth. What surprised me most is that despite what
I said above on him being on the fence, he has clearly
stated that the Quran is full of contradictory verses. This
statement although true needs real courage to make, since a
maker of such a statement will surely be killed in Pakistan,
if not under the infamous Pakistani blasphemy law, but
certainly by the Pakistani fanatic Muslims, who will regard
it as a defamation of the Holy Quran. Dr Zia said it and my
congratulations to him for that. Secondly his solution of
how to interpret such verses is I think a new insight and
hence a significant advancement on how to interpret and
understand the Quran, even though this is not enough [see my
blog in www.universalvaluesunderislam.blogspot.com].
Returning to my proposed meeting, eventually a date was set
for it in London (April 2009), but I noticed that most of
the invitees were poetry, theatre and art groups including
even a Bosnian TV group, who were perhaps known to Dr
Zia and the sons of Dr Siddiqui. The reformist religious
groups were mostly those that I invited.
At the meeting Dr Zia took up the chair, I imagine on
behalf Dr Siddiqui, and began the proceedings, while Dr
Siddiqui himself took a back seat. Dr Zia then asked every
group to state what they did and what they were interested
in, starting with me perhaps as a kind of recognition of my
role in initiating this meeting. As each group described
their activities, I realised that this meeting was very
different from those I organised on databases, in which
everyone was eager to advance the database teaching and
research, none had any personal fiefdom to protect, and
everyone appreciated my effort in bringing them together.
In contrast, every Muslim reform group in this London
meeting was afraid that others would steal from their ideas,
find faults with their work programme, brief their sponsors
against them and thus bite into their already meagre
funding, and so on. The fear was such that many of them did
not even present any information beyond what was on their
websites. As I understood later, some of the groups I
invited did not even turn up, in case some of their secrets
got out inadvertently during the discussion sessions.
I guess Dr Zia knew of the Muslim attitude well, and
proposed to my surprise a new group, to be called Islamic
Futures Group, with himself as the Director and his friend
Merryl Wyn Davies his Deputy, in which everyone present in
this gathering would be member. The proposed group would
hold discussion meetings every few months, followed by an
annual conference. My suggestion that it should be called
Forum not Group was turned down unceremoniously, until
several others, particularly Dr Hargey, pressed for Forum as
the more appropriate term. At that Dr Zia accepted the
changed name as Islamic Futures Forum (IFF). I later learnt
that this proposal for IFF was not a sudden brainwave of Dr
Zia. He was already running a blog on this name, jointly
with the Guardian newspaper, and had also established a
discussion group of that name in a US University.
Also I suspect that Dr Siddiqui had already blessed
Dr Zia’s proposal, but as mentioned earlier Dr Siddiqui was
playing a retiring role.
However, as it happened IFF died its death a few
months later, when nobody, it seems, turned up at its next
meeting. As was
the case with my Bradford meeting, people who attended the
first meeting, did not perhaps feel strongly enough to show
up at its follow-up meeting, given that they were already
reluctant to converse with each other, as stated earlier.
Returning to that meeting, I collected email addresses of
those groups that showed to me an interest in listing other
like-minded reform groups on their own websites, naturally
with a caveat that listing did not mean endorsement.
I did much further work on this but eventually it
dawned on me that despite their assurance to me, no group
was going to mention other groups, for fear of undesirable
contamination, even after the caveat. Such is Muslim reform
environment. I was shocked by this brotherly trust among the
so-called Muslim reformists.
Some months later a plan was drawn by Dr Siddiqui with Dr
Zia to revive the Muslim Institute (MI) that had remained
dormant under Dr Siddiqui. Perhaps the reason for this
inactivity was a court case by the family of late Kalim
Siddiqui against the MI on the ownership of 109 Fulham
Palace Road. Eventually the MI under Dr G. Siddiqui had won
the case and got that property. Its rent income is assumed
to be good. Apparently Dr Zia was an earlier MI member, whom
the old Siddiqui threw out due to a disagreement – the
Muslim way of solving an argument. Now our Siddiqui made his
friend Dr Zia, the Director, as Dr Siddiqui himself was not
so able these days. I do not know if there was any legal
transfer of ownership (or equivalent), if any, of the MI
from Dr G Siddiqui to Dr Zia.
A three-day (Fri-Sun) long residential meeting was called at
the Sarum College (associated with and on the grounds of,
Salisbury Cathedral). Dr Zia knew the Sarum establishment
and secured food and board at a discounted rate which the MI
paid for some 70 attendees at this first meeting. Many
intellectual Muslims came to this inaugural meeting, in
which aims and objectives, and the constitution of the MI
were meant to be discussed and finalised. Delegates were
divided into small groups for discussions with reports to be
presented to the full sessions. It was agreed that the
objective would be to “Promote Muslim Excellence in the UK”
in every sphere of Muslim life, including, academia,
business and industry. The MI would become a Royal Society
for the British Muslims, it was dreamed. Yes there were a
lot of aspirations. It was declared that there would be full
freedom of expression in the MI, implying that no opinion
and no question can be barred from discussion on religious
ground. This immediately went through the roof, when someone
asked: “Will you permit a seminar on whether the Quran is
Divine?” It seems, everybody then understood the limitations
of freedom of speech even in a Muslim intellectual forum.
However, it was decided without dissention that anyone who
claimed to be a Muslim would be accepted as Muslim in the
MI, and both Muslims and non-Muslims would be welcomed as
members. Members would be of two types: Fellows (the likes
of me, at a fee of £120 a year) and Associates (at a lower
annual fee) –
the MI to be run and managed by the Fellows, as done in the
Royal Society. It would be headed by a Director, a Deputy
Director, a Board of Trustees and a Management Committee of
Fellows, each position to be elected annually by the
Fellows.
The other ideas put forward were for the MI included
collecting funds as a charity in order to award study grants
to Muslim scholars in the areas of Muslim deficiencies in
the UK. There was a long discussion on the areas of Muslim
deficiencies in the UK and on the independence of the MI
from any governments, with emphasis on the need to avoid the
Saudi Government. The areas of promotion for Muslim business
and industries, and how the MI could support and encourage
excellence in these enterprises were also aired.
Obviously the organisers were too ambitious.
I was aware (I am sure many others as well) that to
do all these, the MI would need a lot of funds and many able
members to dedicate time and efforts, not only to bring in
funds but also to manage the MI. Where would the MI find so
much funds and the required able and committed members?
Also the MI needed to establish its reputation before
anyone would donate funds. These and similar other concerns
of many attendees were brushed aside in a sea of optimism,
as it often happens in such situations.
A follow-up meeting was held in London six months later,
with some 30 attendees, not all went to the inaugural
meeting. It seems all the written documents produced in the
group discussions and even the minutes of the inaugural
meeting had disappeared in a typical Muslim tradition.
There was a long discussion again on what the
objectives were, but there was no conclusion. It was
declared that every Winter there would be a three-day
(Fri-Sun) meeting at the Sarum College, (in which Fellows, I
think also the Associates, would be given free full-board),
a quarterly magazine called the Critical Muslim would be
published (with complementary copies to the members), and
seminars would be held periodically in London, and possibly
elsewhere depending on the demand. Elections,
accountability, constitution were forgotten in a good Muslim
way. No more any talk of a Muslim Royal Society, or of any
Muslim excellence with annual recognition of talents. So, we
came down to the real world of what was possible, not
through any discussion, but by the absence of any
discussion. Nobody raised any awkward questions, and hence I
must conclude that everybody was happy. This is the way the
MI has been operating for the last five or so years.
After these five years, it seems Dr Zia is the Director, his
friend Merryl Wyn Davies the Deputy Director, supported by a
Board of Trustees made up the Director, the Deputy Director,
Dr Siddiqui, and
Dr Zia’s friend likeable Dr Ehsan Masud who is a well–known
science writer and a former editor of the magazine Nature. I
think the MI needs a strong leadership headed by people with
vision and ability. Therefore although election is
desirable, it could also be disruptive. For instance, if
someone else replaces Dr Zia as the Director, then I would
fear that the MI might collapse. But the MI needs to find a
way, such as through a Management Committee of the Fellows
(as proposed in the first Sarum College meeting), of getting
the other people involved in the ownership and the
decision-making process of the MI. This may not change
anything, but it might provide a sense of belonging,
particularly for the non-Pakistani members.
Compared to MECO, where Dr Hargey is everything, the
MI has several people working in it together, but then the
MI is a larger organisation which cannot be managed by a
single person.
In the subsequent annual WGs I have noticed less and less of
non-Pakistani attendees, except for a handful of other
nationals, including one or two Bangladeshis (of which I am
one) among this 60 odd community. I sometimes wonder if the
inability to influence the decision-making process (e.g.
through a management committee of Fellows) is keeping the
non-Pakistani intellectuals away from the MI. Sadly,
contrary to my earlier expectation, the MI WGs have not
become the gatherings of
all reform-minded
Muslim intellectuals in the UK,
but mainly of the Pakistanis. However, I still go
there because I think if I cannot get the whole apple, I
should at least go for part of it. And finally I suspect if
its attendees are not given free accommodation and meals,
then most members might not attend.
Similar is the situation in MECO where free meals are
provided, but free accommodation is not required, since most
attendees are local. Whereas the MI has the rental income
from the 109 Fulham Palace Road and the annual fees of the
Fellows and the Associates, MECO has no such source, and
hence Dr Taj Hargey has a very hard job. I wonder what would
happen if he charges a realistic fee for food and the
conference cost? Will there be many attendees then? Perhaps
not. Such is the commitment of the Muslim reformists to
reformist conferences, or perhaps these meetings are not
good value for money.
