Vote Paddick

A famous maxim goes: when faced with a crisis of two evils, go for neither. This basically means, there aren't always binary choices in life, but third options, usually involving the creation of hybrid values, sitting on fences, sitting on sidelines, doing nothing, having the best of both worlds, the worst of neither, but in the case of the London Mayoral elections, a much better third option, in the form of a person: Brian Paddick.

Some say that is the whole reason the Lib Dems were created, as a way to siphon our hatred for the two main parties; a haven for the disillusioned; a palace for the pragmatic, a lure for the liberal, an underground for the unopinionated. What good is a party like that, some may ask. And the answer is any good you want it to be. The true opposite of conservatism is liberalism. If anyone thinks the Liberal Democrats are confused, at least they're not left wing socialist capitalist neo-conservatives, like the party that is currently ruling us (or to put it more euphemistically, the party with its finger on the nuclear bomb launching button). At least the Liberal Democrats don't pretend that they're not confused.

That is why I'm going to vote for Paddick. (Yes, I know I am yet to find my polling card, but at least I know it's somewhere in the house). When I vote for Paddick, I'm not voting for a gay former policeman, as Sky News so professionally introduced him, but for the sensible choice, and if I have doubts about this on the day, I can at least rest assured that I'm not voting for Boris (which some Arabs pronounce 'Boorish') or Ken. A politician's job is to be pliable and irregular (and if we're living in a true democracy, to be a servant to the fickle masses), but also to act like a commissioning editor and give public opinion a little nudge. Who better to make sensible policies than someone who isn't Boris or Ken, someone from a party that is not retrograde or confused?

Some Muslims tell me it's 'haram' to vote a gay man into power, but those same Muslims have no qualms about voting womanisers, buffoons, adulterers, thieves and murderers into power.
Given that homosexuality is a much lesser sin than all of the above, Paddick ought to have the religious vote, too.

loving Britain

I don't want anyone to get me wrong. I love Britain. I love its politics and its institutions, its parliament and archaic honours system, its legal horsehair wigs and red buses, its natural landscape, its heritage: Celtic, Germanic, Norman or Gothic, its mystically dreary climate that evokes Constable and Turner, its delightfully dry middle class humour and reservedness, its working class boisterousness and friendliness, and its unique hybrid language that will go down in history for being the first of its kind.

These are just a few of the things you've got to love about Britain, but everyone has their own idea of Britishness. And it is precisely this inability to make up our minds, this inability to have a strong opinion about anything, our dull pragmatism and our lack of passion that makes Britain so unique and makes me the quintessential Brit.

'Britishness' or citizenship?

'Lessons in how to be a citizen'
Muslim News, March 2008.

Pledges of allegiance to monarchs, national anthems, national days and flag waving; crowds of jubilant citizens are cheering the homecoming of their brave soldiers fighting wars that have a beginning, middle and end; a clear enemy and general purpose; Britannia is still ruling the waves with unwavering gusto. Life is good.

This is how it would be if the past 90 years didn’t happen; if Britain didn’t cede its colonies, if democracy and human rights didn’t evolve, if feminists never saw the light of day, if the Word Wide Web was a weird, dystopian, Sci Fi fantasy still festering in the warped mind of some lonely geek. But, unfortunately for some, the past 90 years really did happen.

Tradition is sacred and inspires respect, but can you really resurrect the nationalism of a bygone era to give binge-drinking, crack-smoking teenagers a sense of identity and belonging? Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, apparently thinks you can, as he welcomes the findings of the recent report on British Citizenship he commissioned. A sense of belonging would certainly make people less prone to the problems associated with anomie, but I don’t see the type of belonging being proposed here, namely a formal one based on abstract and defunct concepts, having any clout in the face of such causes of anomie as the break down of the family, the loss of communities, poverty, ghettoisation and a general disenchantment with politics.

It seems that former Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who authored the report, has confused citizenship with nationalism: a loyalty to a geographic, ethnic and cultural collectivity that governs and represents its members through a common law. In this ‘space-age’, space has become virtual and relative; culture dynamic, fluid and postmodern; and the machine of the state is no longer the symbol of the acquiescence of its citizens. Loyalty, allegiance, obedience and worship of these flimsy notions are more redolent of an age in which army conscription was mandatory as opposed to being simply a job you do for “the adventure”.

A sense of belonging that we all so desperately need right now, especially the young, can take on many forms: parallel loyalties have been a reality since the dawn of man. I’m sure by citizenship Lord Goldsmith was really talking about civic responsibility, which he did rightly touch upon in recommending proposals to encourage volunteerism (the anomaly of financial incentives aside). Maybe he included the Oath of Allegiance and the National Day as a suggested addendum that got into the main text by an editorial accident. Either way, while we mull over how to encourage people to contribute to the community and act more responsibly towards their fellow citizens, we could possibly encourage more political devolution and greater empowerment of local councils, and it wouldn’t hurt not to berate people for putting religious beliefs before a government they feel doesn’t represent them.

We’re currently going through a time of heightened fear over disappearing British values and ‘Britishness’, with fingers pointing at the usual suspects: multiculturalism and immigration. All the furore does leave you wondering what exactly British values are, and how they differ from universal values enshrined in international law.

Citizenship, which is essentially about responsibility and fellow feeling, should never mean attachment to one cultural heritage at the expense of another; cultures themselves aren’t set in stone but are the fruits of time and circumstance. Becoming good citizens in this brave new world would mean some much needed moving on as well as some much needed growing up.

Hilali extradited to spain

'UK resident loses battle against extradition'
Muslim News, February 2008.

A Moroccan who has lived in the UK for the past 15 years has been extradited to Spain under the order of a European Arrest Warrant. After a long legal battle, Farid Hilali, 39, made a final attempt to fight extradition through an asylum application on February 7, but the application failed and he was extradited the following day.

Hilali was arrested in June 2004, after the Spanish courts issued a European Arrest Warrant seeking his extradition to Spain to be prosecuted for various charges in relation to the September 11 attacks. His arrest was based on telephone intercept evidence that showed him to have had conversations with another suspect in the 9/11 attacks, Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas.
Upon arrival in Spain Hilali was charged with one count of “belonging to a terrorist organisation,” even though a hearing in the House of Lords stated that it was inadmissible for Hilali to be extradited for such an offence under EU law, and that: “The Spanish prosecutor appears not to have appreciated this point (…) The right to liberty is at stake in these matters. The importance of accuracy and attention to detail in the preparation of the European arrest warrant and of any order that is made to give effect to it cannot be overemphasised.”

The legality of Hilali’s extradition is also under scrutiny because of key changes in the initial grounds for his arrest. Yarkas, who was charged with direct involvement in the murders of all those who perished in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was acquitted on September 24, 2005, of direct involvement in those murders. On May 31, 2006, his conviction of indirect involvement in the murders was also quashed by the Supreme Court on the grounds that the telephone intercept evidence was fraudulent and legally null and void as it was illegally obtained. But a more important development was that the conversations between Hilali and Yarkas were found not to even evidence a conspiracy to commit acts of terror.

On April 25, 2007, the Divisional Court granted a writ of habeas corpus to Hilali, a court order which would have given him the chance of a trial to prove his guilt or innocence, on the grounds that his detention in custody while awaiting extradition had become unlawful because of the acquittal of Yarkas. However, the House of Lords appealed against the granting of habeas corpus on the grounds that EU member states have no right to question each other’s grounds for arrest warrants, and that “inquiry by a member state into the merits of a proposed prosecution in another member state” was “inappropriate and unwarranted.” The proceedings continued that a habeas corpus “would be inconsistent with the principle of mutual respect and recognition of the judicial decisions in that member state.”

Arani solicitors, representing Hilali, are appealing to the European courts and believe they have a strong case. In their rebuttal against the European arrest warrant in 2006, Arani solicitors used evidence from a report compiled by a Lawyer of the Madrid Bar Association. The report argued that the Spanish prosecutor, Pedro Rubira, acted “behind the back of his hierarchical superiors and the Director of Public Prosecutions.” A posture which was “(…) punishable via disciplinary proceedings, [and] has already been criticised in the cases relating to the crime committed during the dictatorships of Argentina and Chile.” The report also states that Rubira produced false witness statements that “invert the burden of proof and proceed with an unconstitutional presumption of guilt.”

Hilali had previously alleged he was tortured in prison in the United Arab Emirates and Morocco in 1999 under the orders of the British Secret Intelligence Service because he refused to be a spy for them. In a recent press release issued by his solicitors he said: “My extradition to Spain is a smokescreen to conceal Britain’s true intentions of sending me to Morocco to face torture leading to death. If I am ultimately sent to Morocco and tortured, Britain will be held legally and morally responsible.”

In response to these allegations, the Foreign Office told The Muslim News: “We are aware of Mr Hilali’s claims and have made clear that the British Government, including the intelligence and security agencies, never use torture for any purposes including to obtain information.”
Arani Solicitors claims that “the Spanish authority’s relentless pursuit of an innocent man is nothing short of administrative rendition,” and maintains that “the European Arrest Warrant allows EU countries to get around their obligations under International Law to grant people like Mr Hilali, who have been tortured, political asylum.” They also claim that if extradited to Spain, Hillai will eventually be returned to Morocco where they also maintain he has been tortured on the direct instructions of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

In a statement to the press they said: “We are thus concerned that having secured Farid Hilali’s extradition from the UK, his liberty and Article 3 of the European Convention of Rights [absolute prohibition on torture] are being negated for the sake of ‘political correctness’. The fact that the Spanish have now charged Mr Hilali for the very offence which the House of Lords held he could not be tried for, is unequivocal evidence that Mr Hilali will not receive a fair trial in Spain.”

Moazzam Beig, former Guantánamo detainee and Spokesperson for Cageprisoners, said: “The extradition of Mr Farid Hilali to Spain demonstrates how some foreign nationals in the UK held under anti-terror measures, without charge or trial, have become non-persons.
“After five years of incarceration in British prisons - equivalent to serving a ten year sentence if he had been convicted - Hilali faces the bleak prospect of remaining in Spanish prisons until, if ever, he is brought to trial.”

Sharia madness

'The day the Archbishop became a hero'
Muslim News, 29 February, 2008.

Hysteria is a funny old word. In ancient Greece it referred to a malady of losing your marbles that was exclusive to women. That is why it’s funny that the events following the Archbishop of Canterbury’s crucial mistake of making an intellectual speech with the word ‘sharia’ in it to an audience that included the Daily Mail amongst its members, resembled the knee-jerk reaction more characteristic of men. Like a virus that starts off harmlessly in one place (possibly at the Daily Mail table) then suddenly appears every place all at once before you know it, the deliberate misjudgment of the delicately nuanced utterances of the Archbishop spiraled so scarily out of control that you just know someone somewhere had unsavoury fantasies of a crucifixion.

The minute he said ‘sharia’, it was too late for poor Dr Rowan Williams. Cue the clichés of hysterical reporting and scare-mongering that were so clichéd you don’t even need me to list them. It is hard to imagine any of those hacks mulling over the finer points of pluralistic jurisdiction by candle light before proceeding onto their insightful analyses that would appear on the front pages the next day. No one is pretending to really understand the entirety of what Dr Williams was addressing: the depths of the complex issues that evoked memories of echoing and dimly lit University lecture theatres couldn’t even be fully grasped by an ordinary journalist, so no one will ever know why the Daily Mail thought it had a good chance.

The Archbishop’s speech at the Royal Courts of Justice was addressing a largely theoretical politico-legal debate theoretically. He left many open ended questions, in fact, the whole speech was a bunch of questions concerning how pluralism can be brought into a new age, where, instead of sticking to a stringent post- enlightenment paradigm of jurisprudence, the law should be a dynamic dialogue between all stakeholders, until a mutual understanding and equilibrium can be reached that allows for different views within the boundaries of enshrined universal principles that everyone can agree on. Unfortunately, this wasn’t understood the first time, so the Archbishop’s website had to translate it into ‘English’.

The Archbishop’s speech wasn’t about Islam. It wasn’t even about religion. It was about how a lot of different people can live together so everyone is happy - to oversimplify it drastically. Given that the most fervent minority offshoots of today are religious groups (and not football fans), and given that Islam is the largest minority religion in the UK, the speech inevitably used religion, and Islam more specifically, as a case in point of how to balance different minority views in our endless quest for universalism.

Now, I’m not expecting the media to understand that (can you imagine the tabloid headline ‘archbishop wants everyone to be happy’?), even though they can. It’s just that they don’t even want to, even if they could. Tabloids will be tabloids, I guess. Yet, the ‘qualities’ on the other side of the journalistic spectrum did exactly the same thing (as for putting headlines like ‘adopt sharia in the UK’ in inverted commas when they clearly weren’t quotes, well, both tabloid and quality were equally guilty). The Sun’s almost witty feature that took two pages to scream that the Archbishop’s speech was a “victory…for terrorism” was echoed in a more sophisticated veneer, and somewhat smaller font, in The Telegraph, which argued that this new controversy was going to be ammunition for extremists.

Commentary in The Times even lamented the loss of Christian Sovereignty. One columnist started off on the premise that the Archbishop was wrong to call Britain a secular country, when in fact, the whole point of his speech was to emphasise the exact opposite (which leaves you wondering whether even 2 per cent of our journalists even bothered to read the speech). She then went on to lament the loss of Anglican Church sovereignty that was slowly being encroached by a growing pluralism, to the extent of undermining the monopolistic authority of the current State religion. This echoed the Bishop of Rochester’s second most stupid statement of the year: that British law was based on Judeo-Christian values, and only those values. A far cry indeed from the Archbishop’s claim that modern liberal democratic law was based on the values of all three Abrahamic faiths.

The Archbishop got the attention of the world with his heroic daring, especially countries like France. But as the ultra-secular states looked on with amusement, they were hubristically unaware that the Archbishop was at least a century ahead of their childish militant atheism. Some pessimists may have taken issue with what seemed like an almost sickeningly utopian vision from Archbishop. But no matter how soppy, the last thing such depth of vision from such an important public and spiritual figure could ever be is “unhelpful”.

Some of Dr Williams’s fellow Church leaders complained about his erudition, saying that it wasn’t befitting of clergy or of a public figure. Some of the more intellectual media waxed philosophical and said that the Archbishop should have been a bit more tactful and that this was public suicide. But the Archbishop did not only challenge the feral beasts of the simplistic media hacks, he dared to be erudite in a public atmosphere that is so averse to critical debate. If anything, we need to bring erudition to the general public, not stuff it into a University lecture theatre where only the privileged few have access to it. The Archbishop was not only visionary like a true leader, but withstood the barrage of enemy arrows, like a true hero.

Yara El-Sherbini

Manifesto, Yara El Sherbini; 2006, digital image.
Manifesto is a series of say what you see wordplay posters.

'Not just for art’s sake'
Muslim News, February 2008.

When last year’s Turner Prize winner, Mark Wallinger, came on television in a bear suit (his winning entry being a video of himself in said bear suit wandering around a gallery at night) many people may have felt justified in thinking that modern conceptual art had reached a new height of inexplicable weirdness. What with all its Tracy Emins and Damien Hirsts, you can’t blame the average Joe for thinking that this is a realm of culture that he can comfortably do without. But it doesn’t have to be this way, says artist Yara El- Sherbini, who wishes to make art more accessible to the general public. “I think there are problems: art has always been elitist; art is elitist; but I’d like to say it won’t always be.”

Growing up in Pontefract, an ex-coalmining town in West Yorkshire, Yara says being the only ‘brown’ person there “was pretty hard…It made me extremely aware.” She recalls being four years old when she first realised she was different. “If I had grown up in a very multicultural atmosphere like London, I would have a very different attitude to my identity. You can’t escape being a non-white person.” She was 18 when she understood the potential that art had, namely “the ability to alter people’s conscious, their awareness of things, social issues. I could create work that was socially and politically engaging, and that made me very excited.” It was then that she decided it was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. After going to live in Egypt for a year “to get to know my roots” (she’s half-Egyptian, half-Trinidadian), she studied Fine Art in Context at Bristol, then Fine Art Media at Slade, London, where she has stayed since.

“Growing up, being Muslim was part of my every day life, it was who I was, it very much defined myself and my actions and my outlook on life, it was always there, it was just…who I was. I think post 9/11 there was so much negative press and so many negative attitudes in the media, that it became something that I had to talk about a lot more, because I was so angry and so frustrated that I wanted to fight back in my own way, and I found that art gave me a space in which to do that.” But even before 9/11, she had always been deeply aware of her Islamic identity (her father is writer on comparative religion); she even wanted to become a theologian at one point. After 9/11, it wasn’t a matter of becoming more aware of her Islamic identity, but becoming more vocal about it, and art was the perfect medium.

Her work can sometimes have direct social and political relevance: she is currently working on a project in Beeston, a place which was particularly affected after 7/7 as some of the bombers were from there. To help alleviate some of the alienation in the community an Islamic cultural centre commissioned her to adapt her famous pub quiz (which satirises media portrayals of Muslims) for an interfaith event.

But regardless of her background, her art is in essence politically and socially engaging. When she is not satirising common perceptions of Muslims, her work uses a variety of media - including video, photography and sculpture - to portray art that uses humour, satire and wordplay to many ends. “I don’t believe in just the idea of painting a nice picture for someone to look at,” she says, but retracts: “I believe in it, but that’s not what I want to do. I want to make something a lot more political. People say to me why don’t you study politics? I disagree with that. I believe art has the ability to live in the realm of political engagement.”

But of course, combine a politicised artist, with a minority background, and you get the tokenism that can frustrate anyone who just simply wants to be a master of his or her craft. “I have to clarify one thing: I don’t ever consider myself a Muslim artist; I’m an artist who happens to be Muslim. One of the things I’m battling against is that a lot of the time I’m labelled into this little token of an artist, when I don’t want to be. I want to be an artist, and I want my work to be on the same level as everybody else’s.”

An instance of this tokenism came when she was commissioned by Book Works to look at the Muslim vernacular in the form of a joke book. “I said actually, I just want to make a book, why aren’t you just inviting me as an artist? But they weren’t. The only person who was inviting me was the ethnic minority candidate who was in for their year placement, for the ‘tick box’, and she wanted me to do a ‘tick box’ project. So I was forced to make a work about exploring this concept of my experience as a Muslim. I don’t think that’s the way to make work.”

But being of a minority group in any socially engaged field has it burdens. The first black American artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, was acutely aware of his social background at the same time as trying to be impervious to it: in one scene in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film portrayal of his life, Basquiat is asked by a journalist about being a black artist, to which he wryly replies that he’s not a black artist, but paints in other colours too.

“I’d like to think it’s not always going to be case,” says Yara “and that’s what I’m fighting for, to be seen as an artist, who sometimes looks at all of these cultural issues, but also looks at many other things, things that are going on in the world, all over the place. I’m trying to fight that so we can be seen as people first. Surely this is what people of colour have been fighting for, for generations, and I don’t think I’m going to stop doing that.”

So where does she see the future of art? “I don’t know where I see its future. There has always been an art world and there’re going to be different levels: there’s always going to be work which is more and more elitist, and that is actually always just about money; and there’s going to be work which is actually radical and pushing the boundaries of what art is.”

When he isn’t in bear suits, Mark Wallinger is also the author of a sculpture which is a reconstruction of peace activist Brian Haw’s protest banners after they got confiscated by the Government in 2006. The banners became illegal following the passing by Parliament of the ‘Serious Organised Crime and Police Act’ prohibiting unauthorised demonstrations within a one kilometre radius of Parliament Square. Wallinger not only reconstructed the confiscated protest banners, but defiantly placed them within the forbidden one kilometer radius around Parliament Square. And who said art was just about being weird?

The Muslim News, 29 February, 2008.