Peter Tatchell has some peculiar ideas. In detailing Ken Livingstone’s habitual smear tactics, Tatchell recalls the leftist mayor’s public endorsement of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and says,
Because I criticised Ken on one issue (Qaradawi), he has slurred me as an Islamophobe. It all began when Ken invited the right-wing Muslim cleric to City Hall in 2004 and saluted him as an “honoured guest”. I found his embrace of Qaradawi very odd and quite appalling, given that the sheikh is indisputably anti-Semitic, homophobic and sexist… The mayor condemned me as anti-Muslim, and even suggested I was a pawn of the Israeli secret service and US NeoCons.
Qaradawi is indeed a monster of no small magnitude – much worse than Mr Livingstone, who’s merely a vain and spiteful opportunist. In his fatwas and al Jazeera broadcasts, the Muslim Brotherhood’s “esteemed spiritual leader” endorses acts of terrorism against civilians, including suicide bombing, along with the murder of gay people and apostates and the beating of “disobedient” women. (None of which was sufficient to prevent the Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting praising the cleric’s “horror of immorality and materialism” and his mastery of the internet.)
But what catches the eye is Tatchell’s description of Qaradawi as “right-wing”. Is this bearded little sadist also in favour of free markets, a small state, low taxation and individual freedom? If so, this is news. It seems to me Qaradawi is in fact a totalitarian collectivist par excellence – a man who, like his stated inspiration, Syed Abul A’ala Mawdudi, dreams of a world in which a person’s most intimate affairs are governed by the state, in this case an Islamic one. Mawdudi’s Islamic Law & Constitution, published in 1960, includes dozens of passages like the following:
An Islamic state is all embracing… [it] cannot restrict the scope of its activities… It seeks to mould every aspect of life… In such a state no-one can regard any field of his affairs as personal and private.
In April 1939, Mawdudi told his followers,
In reality, Islam is a revolutionary ideology which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals… Islam requires the earth – not just a portion, but the whole planet.
Like a low-rent supervillain, Qaradawi has echoed Mawdudi’s sentiments and declared the revolutionary destiny of Islam to conquer first Europe and America, then eventually the world:
The patch of the Muslim state will expand to cover the whole Earth and that the strength of this state will grow and become obvious to all. This also denotes good news for the long-cherished hope of revival of Muslim unity and rebirth of [the] Islamic Caliphate.
A Caliphate under which the individual must conform to intimate and exhaustive proscriptions of what is forbidden by Allah – proscriptions listed in ludicrous detail on Qaradawi’s own website. To describe Qaradawi, and Islamists generally, as “right-wing” stretches that favoured pejorative to an absurd and perverse degree. Unless, of course, sacralised bigotry, dreams of world domination and absolute state control are now considered proprietary markers of anyone who isn’t sufficiently leftwing.
Help fund my glorious revolution. Trust me, you’ll love the results.
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