This week the British Islamic community launched a new poster campaign for the London Underground entitled ‘Inspired by Muhammad’. The posters feature pictures of British Muslims alongside such benevolent statements as ‘I believe in Social Justice’ and ‘I believe in women’s rights’ followed each time by the claim ‘so did Muhammad’. Especially intriguing was the one that claimed Muhammad believed in protecting the environment. I’m not entirely convinced that climate change and deforestation were concerns Muhammad would have been aware of in 7th century Arabia, but then I suppose if you are a prophet…..
The campaign justifies itself with a set of YouGov statistics that claim to show just what a negative attitude the British public has towards Islam. I wonder why that might be? And so in light of our collective ignorance we are all to be re-educated by a set of posters and an online campaign focused around the question ‘who was Muhammad’. Sadly the makers of the website seem to have absent mindedly forgotten to make mention of Muhammad’s marriage to a Nine year old or his massacring of populations who so unreasonably failed to convert to Islam. I wager that those behind this campaign hope the British public will be a little more cooperative than the troublesome Polytheists of Mecca or the obstinate Jews of Khyber.
Yet the real question is why is it that it is always the rest of the British population who must be educated, lectured to and preached at about their terrible ignorance of the apparently faultless doctrine of Islam? It seems to have become perfectly acceptable for Britain’s Islamic preachers to dismiss the entirety of British culture as materialistic, licentious and decadent. True there are aspects of British culture which have increasingly become some of those things but this now seems to be being used by the Islamic leadership as an excuse for rejecting integration into British society, deciding instead that it is the rest of us who should learn from them.
And while the British population is busily being ‘educated’ in the breathtaking wonders of the way of Muhammad, who is really making any genuine effort to educate the insulated parts of the Britain’s Muslim community to the importance of Western values of democracy and tolerance for individual freedoms. What, I wonder, would be the reaction if a similar campaign was began to target the Islamic community with posters promoting traditional British, or heaven forbid, Christian cultural values?
Lastly it might be worth remembering that we see no such similar campaigns to win over the wider public to the brilliance of Sikhism or the justness of Hinduism. No doubt those behind the ‘Inspired by Muhammad’ campaign would say that these religions don’t need such an initiative because they don’t suffer from the same negative public image as Islam does. But then that only raises the question of why don’t they? Why don’t people see Sikhism as a religion of war or Hinduism as a religion of female persecution or any of the religions of Britain’s Chinese immigrants as aggressively hostile to British culture?
Perhaps the reason that these other minority groups aren’t launching similar PR campaigns is quite simply because they don’t have anything to prove. For when we are told over and over again that Islam is a religion of Peace, one can’t help but eventually respond ‘I think the lady does protest too much’.
The campaign justifies itself with a set of YouGov statistics that claim to show just what a negative attitude the British public has towards Islam. I wonder why that might be? And so in light of our collective ignorance we are all to be re-educated by a set of posters and an online campaign focused around the question ‘who was Muhammad’. Sadly the makers of the website seem to have absent mindedly forgotten to make mention of Muhammad’s marriage to a Nine year old or his massacring of populations who so unreasonably failed to convert to Islam. I wager that those behind this campaign hope the British public will be a little more cooperative than the troublesome Polytheists of Mecca or the obstinate Jews of Khyber.
Yet the real question is why is it that it is always the rest of the British population who must be educated, lectured to and preached at about their terrible ignorance of the apparently faultless doctrine of Islam? It seems to have become perfectly acceptable for Britain’s Islamic preachers to dismiss the entirety of British culture as materialistic, licentious and decadent. True there are aspects of British culture which have increasingly become some of those things but this now seems to be being used by the Islamic leadership as an excuse for rejecting integration into British society, deciding instead that it is the rest of us who should learn from them.
And while the British population is busily being ‘educated’ in the breathtaking wonders of the way of Muhammad, who is really making any genuine effort to educate the insulated parts of the Britain’s Muslim community to the importance of Western values of democracy and tolerance for individual freedoms. What, I wonder, would be the reaction if a similar campaign was began to target the Islamic community with posters promoting traditional British, or heaven forbid, Christian cultural values?
Lastly it might be worth remembering that we see no such similar campaigns to win over the wider public to the brilliance of Sikhism or the justness of Hinduism. No doubt those behind the ‘Inspired by Muhammad’ campaign would say that these religions don’t need such an initiative because they don’t suffer from the same negative public image as Islam does. But then that only raises the question of why don’t they? Why don’t people see Sikhism as a religion of war or Hinduism as a religion of female persecution or any of the religions of Britain’s Chinese immigrants as aggressively hostile to British culture?
Perhaps the reason that these other minority groups aren’t launching similar PR campaigns is quite simply because they don’t have anything to prove. For when we are told over and over again that Islam is a religion of Peace, one can’t help but eventually respond ‘I think the lady does protest too much’.
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