Fundi Sisters

Published: 03/09/2008

Fundi Sisters
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

I have tried and tried to get Channel4 editors to commission a programme on a charismatic Islamic woman theologian (PhD, no less) who is spreading hardline, Taliban inspired Islam from Pakistan to Britain, now onwards to Canada. They weren’t really interested. They like their extremists hairy and scary. Makes better television. Finally, though, their attention has moved to fundamentalist Muslim women, the meek who are determined to inherit the world by any means necessary.

On Monday night on Dispatches, some of these deadly proselytisers were secretly filmed by an undercover Muslim journalist. In the beautiful Regent Park Mosque, ‘authorized’ female teachers brainwash those who come to them in good faith, many of them young women seeking answers and spiritual guidance. A number are angry about Iraq and Palestine; others need certainty in the age of uncertainty. They are innocents entering a web of deceit they can never leave intact. Veiled ‘experts’ convince them that Muslim apostates, gays, and other sinners ‘must be killed’ and will be when Wahabi Islam dominates the globe. Women must never be seen near men, friendships outside the circle are forbidden as is travel without a male escort. Driving too, I imagine, this being a Saudi funded mosque.

The preachers don’t rant, but use guile and wile. Um Saleem, feminine and seemingly pious, as poisonous as a black widow spider, convinces her flock that they must not take up British citizenship, not speak English, definitely not go to work because that means mixing with other humans.

These are mothers of impressionable children. If allowed to carry on thus, they will destroy the future for their own families, for integrated Muslims, for the nation itself, and for their Muslim sisters, many of whom are finally breaking through to claim rights to education and financial independence.

Why would preachers like Saleem do what they do? Some are stupid, easily used by fundamentalist male clerics; others display the unquestioning the cult mentality. Their minds have been surrendered to their leaders whose words they repeat mechanically. And then there fervent ideologues who are recruited as overseers. Grateful to be given petty power they feel a compulsion to be more extreme than even their masters.

In spite of the rights the Qu’ran gives them, Muslim women across the world are cruelly oppressed and controlled. In the west some have the chance to reclaim their lives. And so rise the fanatics to stop their progress, teach them lessons, right under our noses, in the heart of London. Time to say our city is not willing to tolerate such sinister cells and for those in power to intervene. When mosques turn bad, the state must act, and decisively.

Published in Eveining Standard