ALLAH IS ONE
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00:00Thank you very much, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, good evening, assalamu alaikum,
00:18lovely to see you all here tonight. We are having a very entertaining night, are we not,
00:22with some very interesting things being said. From the other side of the house tonight,
00:29let me begin by saying, as a Muslim, as a representative of Islam, I would consider
00:34myself an ambassador for Islam, a believer in Islam, a follower of Islam and its prophet.
00:41So in that capacity, let me begin by apologising to Anne-Marie for the Bali bombings, I apologise
00:47for the role of my religion and me and my people, for the killing of Theo van Gogh,
00:53the 7-7, yes that was all of us. That was Islam, that was Muslims, that was the Quran.
00:59I mean, astonishing, astonishing claims to make in the very first speech on a day like
01:05today where the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is having to come out
01:09and point out that these kind of views are anathema and I believe you're trying to stand
01:13for the Labour Party to become an MP in Brighton. If you do and you make these comments, I'm
01:19guessing you'll have the whip withdrawn from you, but then again, UKIP's on the rise, they'll
01:23take you, the BNP, they might have something to say about your views.
01:27This is what Mehdi Hassan always does.
01:30By the way, by the way, just on a factual point, since we heard a lot about the second
01:36speaker, about how backward we Muslims all are, on a factual point, you said that Islam
01:39was born in Saudi Arabia, Islam was born in 610 AD, Saudi Arabia was born in 1932 AD,
01:46so you were only 1,322 years off. Not bad, not bad start there.
01:51Talking of maths, by the way, a man named Al-Qawarizmi was one of the greatest mathematicians
01:57of all time, a Muslim, worked in the golden age of Islam. He's the guy who came up with
02:01not just algebra but algorithms. Without algorithms, you wouldn't have laptops. Without laptops,
02:06Daniel Johnson tonight wouldn't have been able to print out his speech in which he came
02:09to berate us Muslims for holding back the advance and intellectual achievements of the
02:13West, which all happened without any contribution from anyone else other than the Judeo-Christian
02:17people of Europe. In fact, Daniel David Levering, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author
02:23of The Golden Crucible, points out that there would be no Renaissance, there would be no
02:26reformation in Europe without the role played by Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd and some of the
02:30great Muslim theologians, philosophers, scientists in bringing Greek tech to Europe.
02:36As for this being our university, I will leave that to the imagination as to who is
02:44our and who is their. I studied here too. An astonishing set of speeches so far making
02:52this case tonight, a mixture of just cherry-picked quotes, facts and figures, self-serving, selective,
03:01a farrago of distortions, misrepresentations, misinterpretations, misquotations. Daniel
03:09talked about my article in the New Statesman which got me a lot of flack where I talked
03:12about the anti-Semitism that is prevalent in some parts of the Muslim community, which
03:16indeed it is. Of course, I didn't say in that piece that it was caused by the religion
03:20of Islam. In fact, modern anti-Semitism in the Middle East was imported from – finish
03:26the sentence – Judeo-Christian Europe where I believe some certain bad things happened
03:32to the Jewish people. In fact, Tom Friedman, Jewish-American columnist in the New York
03:35Times, told me in this very chamber last week that he believed, had Muslims been running
03:39Europe in the 1940s, six million extra Jews would still be alive today. So I'm not going
03:43to take lessons in anti-Semitism from someone who is here to defend the Judeo-Christian
03:47values of a continent that murdered six million Jews.
03:50Moving swiftly on. Moving swiftly on.
03:54I have a question for you.
03:55Yes.
03:56Why are you doing exactly what you're doing?
03:57Absolutely.
03:58Well, I'm about to make that point. No, no, no. I'm about to make that point. You're
04:00right. I agree with you. I agree with you. I agree with you 110%. That is my point. I
04:06don't think Europe is evil or bad. I'm a very proud European. I don't want to judge
04:10Europe on that basis. But if we're going to play this gutter game where we pull out
04:13the Bali bombing and we pull out examples of anti-Semitism in the Islamic community,
04:17then of course I'm going to come back and say, well, hold on. I mean, look, let's be
04:20very clear. Daniel here was a last-minute replacement for Douglas Murray, who had to
04:23pull out. And Douglas and I have a well-documented differences, but to be fair to Douglas, as
04:27to be fair to Anne-Marie and to Peter, atheists. Atheists see all religions as evil, violent,
04:33threatening. The problem I have with Daniel's speech is that Daniel comes here to write
04:38this robust defence of Christianity, forgetting that his fellow Christians, people who said
04:44they were acting in the name of Jesus, gave us the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition,
04:48the anti-Jewish pogroms, European colonialism in Africa and Asia, the Lord's Resistance
04:53Army in Uganda, not to mention countless arson and bomb attacks on abortion clinics in the
04:58United States of America to this very day. I would like a little bit of humility from
05:02Daniel first before he begins lecturing other communities and other faiths on violence,
05:06terror and intolerance. But I would say this, to address the gentleman's very valid point
05:17here, I'm not going to play that game. I don't actually believe that Christianity
05:21is a religion of violence and hate because of what the LRA does in Uganda or what Crusaders
05:27did to Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem when they took back the city in the 12th or 13th
05:31or whatever century it was. I believe that Christianity, like Islam, like pretty much
05:35every mainstream religion, is based on love and compassion and faith. I do follow a religion
05:40in which 113 out of the 114 chapters of the Qur'an begins by introducing the God of Islam
05:45as a God of mercy and compassion. I would not have it any other way. I don't follow
05:50a religion which introduces my God to me as a God of war, as some kind of Greek God of
05:55wrath, as a God of hate and injustice. Not at all. As Adam pointed out, you go through
06:00the Qur'an and you see the mercy and the love and the justice. And yes, you have verses
06:04that refer to warfare and violence. Of course it does. This is not a motion about pacifism.
06:09I'm not here to argue that Islam is a pacifistic faith. It is not. Islam allows military action,
06:15violence, in certain limited contexts. And yes, a minority of Muslims do take it out
06:20of that context. But is it religious? We talked about Woolwich. Daniel and Anne-Marie have
06:25suggested that it's definitely religion that's behind all of this. Well, actually,
06:32what I find so amusing tonight is we're having a debate about Islam. And the opposition
06:36tonight have come forward. We have a graduate in law, a graduate in modern history, a graduate
06:40in chemistry. And, you know, I admire all of their intellects and their abilities, but
06:45we don't have anyone who's actually an expert on Islam, a scholar of Islam, a historian
06:49of Islam, a speaker of Arabic, even a terrorism expert or a security expert or a pollster,
06:54let alone to talk about what Muslims believe or think. Instead, we have people coming here,
06:59putting forward these views, putting forward these sweeping opinions. Listen to Professor
07:02Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, one of America's leading terrorism experts,
07:06who, unlike our esteemed opposition tonight, studied every single case of suicide terrorism
07:10between 1980 and 2005, 315 cases in total. And he concluded, and I quote,
07:16There is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism or any
07:21of the world's religions. Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common
07:25is a specific secular and strategic goal to compel modern democracies to withdraw military
07:30forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. And the irony
07:35is, when we talk about terrorism, the irony is that the opposition and the Muslim terrorists,
07:41the al-Qaeda types, actually have one thing in common, because they both believe that
07:46Islam is a warlike, violent religion. They both agree on that. They have everything in
07:50common. Osama bin Laden would be nodding along to everything he's heard tonight from the
07:53opposition tonight. He agrees with them. The problem is that mainstream Muslims don't.
08:02The majority of Muslims around the world don't. In fact, a gentleman here started quoting
08:07all sorts of polls. Gallup carried out the biggest poll of Muslims around the world,
08:10of 50,000 Muslims in 35 countries. 93% of Muslims rejected 9-11 and suicide attacks,
08:18and of the 7% who didn't, they all, when polled and focus-grouped, cited political
08:23reasons for their support for violence, not religious reasons. And as for Islamic scholars
08:27and what they say, well, Daniel talks about our University of Oxford. We'll go down to
08:32Oxford's Centre for Islamic Studies, get hold of a man named Sheikh Afifi al-Aqidi,
08:36who is a massively well-credentialed and well-respected Islamic scholar, who has studied across the
08:41world, who in the days after 7-7 published a fatwa denouncing terrorism in the name of
08:45Islam, calling for the protection of all non-combatants at all times, and describing
08:49suicide bombings as an innovation with no basis in Islamic law. Go and listen to Sheikh
08:53Tahir al-Qadri, one of Pakistan's most famous Islamic scholars, who published a 600-page
08:58fatwa condemning the killing of all innocents and all suicide bombings unconditionally without
09:03any ifs or buts. There's nothing new here. This is mainstream Islam, mainstream scholarship,
09:08which has said this for years. You don't go out and kill people willy-nilly in the
09:12high street, or anywhere else, on a bus or a mall, based on verses of the Qur'an that
09:17you cherry-pick without any context, any understanding, any interpretation, or any commentary.
09:23Point of information. Please.
09:25What about stoning of women for example?
09:29Well, it's... It doesn't happen apparently.
09:31I didn't say it doesn't happen at all. I never said it didn't happen. I don't blame Islam.
09:35Yes, it's a very good point, and a lot of us, a lot of us, are campaigning against that,
09:39and we're campaigning against it in the name of Islam. We're campaigning against it in
09:42the name of various interpretations of Islam. Anne-Marie comes and scares us with her talk
09:46of Sharia law. I would like to see the book of Sharia law. It doesn't exist. People argue
09:50over what Sharia law is, and you empower the extremists by saying there is only one version.
09:57You empower them all. I don't believe you took any interruptions, Anne-Marie, so I think
10:00you should stay there for a moment.
10:02Here's what we're dealing with. Here's what we're dealing with.
10:07I took your point. I took your point. Here we are dealing with a 1,400-year-old global
10:11religion, followed by 1.6 billion people in every corner of the world, a quarter of humanity,
10:16of all backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities, and yet the opposition tonight wants to generalise,
10:20stereotype, smear, in order to desperately win this debate.
10:26And here's my question, if we're going to generalise and smear. If, okay, people say
10:30yesterday's bombers, and we've got to be careful, there's a trial going on, were yesterday's
10:33attackers, sorry, motivated by Islam? Big debate. I don't believe they were. Let's say
10:37they were. Let's say Faisal Shehzad, the Times Square bomber, was motivated by Islam. Let's
10:41assume for sake of argument that Richard Reeves, the shoe bomber, was motivated by Islam.
10:45If Islam is responsible for these killings, if Islam is what is motivating these people,
10:48and Islam is therefore not a religion of peace, a religion of war, then ask yourself this
10:51question, why aren't the rest of us doing it? Why is it such a tiny minority of Muslims
10:57are interpreting their religion in the way that the opposition claim they are? Let's
11:01assume there are 16,000 suicide bombers in the world. There aren't. Let's assume there
11:04are for the sake of argument. That's 0.001% of the Muslim population globally. What about
11:10the other 99.99% of Muslims who the opposition tonight either ignore or smear? The reality
11:16is that the rest of us aren't blowing ourselves up tonight. The reality is that the opposition
11:19came here tonight not worried about the fact that me and Adam might pull open our jackets
11:23and blow ourselves up tonight because we're followers of a warlike warrior religion which
11:26wants to take over Europe and Daniels University. The issue is this. The issue is this. Unless
11:35the opposition can tell us tonight, and Peter Atkins is here, one of our great atheist intellectuals,
11:40can tell us tonight, can answer this question tonight, why don't the vast majority of Muslims
11:44around the world behave as violently and aggressively as a tiny minority of politically motivated
11:48extremists, then they might as well give up and stop pretending they have anything relevant
11:51to say about Islam or Muslims as a whole.
11:54Ladies and gentlemen, let me just say this to you. Think about what the opposite of this
11:57motion is. If you vote no tonight, think about what you're saying the opposite of this motion
12:00is. That Islam isn't a religion of peace, it's a religion of war, of violence, of terror,
12:03of aggression. That the people who follow Islam, me, my wife, my retired parents, my
12:07six-year-old child, that 1.8 million of your fellow British residents and citizens, that
12:111.6 billion people across the world, your fellow human beings, are all followers, promoters,
12:17believers in a religion of violence. Do you really think that? Do you really believe that
12:21to be the case? They say that in the Oxford Union, the most famous debate was in 1933
12:25when Adolf Hitler looked out for the result of the king and country motion, where they
12:29voted against fighting for king and country, and Hitler was listening out for the result.
12:33Well, tonight, 80 years on, there are two groups of people around the world, who I would
12:36argue are waiting for the result of tonight's vote. There are the millions of peaceful,
12:40non-violent, law-abiding Muslims both in the UK, Europe, Asia, Africa and beyond, who see
12:45Islam as the source of their identity, as a source of spiritual fulfilment, of hope, of
12:48solace. And there are the phobes, the haters, the bigots out there, who want to push the
12:55clash of civilisations, who want to divide all of us into them and us and ours and their.
13:00Ladies and gentlemen, I urge you all not to fuel the arguments of the phobes and bigots,
13:05don't legitimise their divisions, don't legitimise their hate. Trust those Muslims
13:10who you know, who you've met, who you hear, who don't believe in violence, who do want
13:15you to hear the peaceful message of the Qur'an as they believe it to be taught to the majority
13:19of Muslims. The Islam of peace and compassion and mercy. The Islam of the Qur'an, not of
13:24Al-Qaeda. Ladies and gentlemen, I beg to propose this motion to the House. I urge you to vote
13:28yes tonight. Thank you very much for your time.