Open
letter to Dr Evan Harris from Shaikh Riyad Nadwi
Dear
Dr Harris
I
have listened to a recording of your lecture at
the Hijab Conference at St. Catherine's College,
Oxford University, on 28th February 2004 and I
am astonished at the various claims you have made.
Firstly, you claimed that you were unable to respond
to my letter because of the absence of any contact
details. Both you and I know that you did contact
OCCRi and that there were several email exchanges
relating to my letter. In fact, when you sent
us your first email, claiming that we had misrepresented
you, we requested that you clarify your concerns.
We wrote: "We would appreciate it if you
could provide us with details of the areas in
which you feel the letter has misrepresented your
views. Your comments will be given careful consideration
and we will make the necessary corrections if
need be." (Our email to you dated 04
February 2004 10:26)
You
have chosen to ignore this request and continued
instead to attack and intimidate those who published
my letter. You should be aware that some Muslims
do understand English and frankly find it condescending
to hear you claim that we are misrepresenting
what you actually said, even though we quoted
you verbatim and provided the context. Anyone
who listens to the whole programme of 29th January
will agree that you did indeed argue for schools
in this country to have the right to implement
a similar ban.
As
for your remarks that suggest that you have absolutely
no affiliation to anything remotely connected
to Israel, I think you should know that the Muslims
of this country are well aware of the fact that
you are the Treasurer of the All-Party
British-Israel Parliamentary group and
that you were part of a Liberal Democrat Friends
of Israel group visit to Israel in June 2000.
It came as no surprise to the Muslims of Oxford
that in your reading aloud of my entire letter,
the only sentence you chose to omit was the sentence
dealing with the sacking of Jenny Tonge. Jenny
Tonge was dismissed due to pressure from 'Friends
of Israel' MPs in various parties (e.g. Louise
Ellman, James Purnell et al). On the one hand,
Jenny Tonge was sacked by Charles Kennedy for
expressing reasonable sympathy with the Palestinians
and the party publicly dissociated itself from
her remarks. On the other hand however, your remarks
on the radio, which were deeply offensive to Muslims,
received not even a reprimand. My demand was merely
for consistency.
In
addition, despite your secular rhetoric in the
lecture, you are a committee member (Treasurer)
of the Council of Christians and Jews All-Party
Parliamentary Group and your official Party website
describes you as a member of the Jewish congregation
in Oxford. As a result, it would have been entirely
natural for you to discuss the rulings and views
of Rabbis in regard to the ban on skull caps.
Instead however, you have chosen to adopt a fatwa
from Shaikh Tantawi as your campaign slogan against
hijab and you continue to ridicule and
sneer at anyone who challenges your 'clever' criticisms
of Islam and Muslims. You are not an expert on
French society, or French politics, or French
culture, and you are dependent on translations
to understand French. What right do you have to
tell the Muslims of France, or of this country,
which fatwa they should follow?
It
is time you and your friends stop interpreting
the generosity and hospitality of Muslims as idiocy.
If you wish to respond to anything that I have
written about you or your comments, I suggest
you get in touch with us (as you have before)
using the contact details on our website.
Yours
sincerely
Shaikh
Riyad Nadwi, M.A., Ph.D.
OCCR Institute
www.occri.org.uk
29th February 2004
p.s.
- I am interested to know the source of information
for your erroneous claim that my area of expertise
is computing.
