Some Thoughts On The Islamophobic UK Riots

The riots that were perpetrated by right wing thugs shocked many Muslims in Britain and the world. It was a return to what many Muslims remember of the 70’s, when vulnerable communities were ravaged upon simply because they followed a faith different from the native population.

The rioters were complaining about several fictitious claims brought on by a media that is evermore islamophobic, as well as political scapegoating on a scale not seen in decades. The murder of three children was said to have been perpetrated by a Muslim, only to be a UK national of Christian heritage. This was coupled with the age-old mantra that Muslims are somehow ‘taking over’ receiving ‘free cars’ ‘houses’ and ‘free business space’. Muslims were told that we do not ‘integrate’ a term that means different things to different people, all of which are lies to stoke up further community tensions.

Now, let us look at our past and judge the events of the past few weeks in context. Allah has given Jews and Christians the right to abode in the lands of the Muslims. Throughout Islamic history, Jews and Christians had full property rights, the ability to adjudicate amongst themselves in accordance with their own laws, they could also conduct business between themselves according to the laws of their own scripture, and were given total freedom to practice their customary law. To the extent that the right wing Turkish-American economist Timur Kuran admits that Greek businessmen amassed huge fortunes greater than any Muslim in the latter days of the Ottoman Empire due to them using separate financial practices not based on Islamic law. The reason why so many ethnicities were able to live alongside one another in the great capitals of the Muslim world, such as Samarqand,Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Istanbul, and Cordoba was due to the fact that the Muslims accepted that such groups did not want to enter into Islam but still wanted peaceful coexistence. Those groups paid the Jiziyah, a small tax on non-muslims that was less than the value of Zakat, and were allowed to lead the lives they wanted. Through the passing of time, many of these groups entered into Islam as they became part of the society at large. They were not seen as the fifth column or the enemy from within.

So if anybody tries to question your religion, just remind them, that these issues never occurred in the Muslim world, and the Muslim world had greater demographic shifts in comparison to anything in Europe. We will not allow people ignorant of Islamic history to dictate to us things they have absolutely no knowledge about.