Several weeks have passed since I last spoke to Abdullah. Quite possibly we shall never speak again. But every so often, thoughts of him will intrude upon my consciousness like a miasma rising from some backwater of the mind, uncomfortable yet persistent, nagging at me, raising the question: What became of Abdullah? Is he safe? Does he still write?
Why do I worry about this man who is neither lover nor brother nor relation, whom, if truth be told, I have never even met?
That’s right. Abdullah and I have never actually met. We have spoken several times on the phone, but have never set eyes on each other and live (or used to live) on different continents—he in Europe and I in North America. But we are far closer than relatives, far closer than I am, for instance, to my next-door neighbour about whose life and interests I know nothing. Abdullah symbolizes what could happen—what has happened, what does happen—to those who, even if only with words, challenge, question or criticize what religion and society has placed above question, challenge or criticism.
Abdullah is an ex-Muslim. We met—where else? Through mutual politically aware friends—on Facebook. He was a Pakistani living in Manchester and had already written several articles under his own name that were highly critical of Islam and its Prophet. He invited me to read them, which I did, and immediately became concerned for his safety.
“They’ll kill you in Pakistan when you go back there,” I warned him.
He replied confidently that it was all right. He’d applied for asylum in the U.K. and he was reasonably sure that his petition would be granted, since his articles and his public declaration of himself as an apostate and an ex-Muslim had definitely put his personal safety in jeopardy should he return to Pakistan.
I found it difficult from the beginning to share his optimism. Having lived, if not in Europe, at least in the “West” for close to 14 years, I placed substantially less faith than my young friend in the fairness of Western legal process. So I reserved judgment and hoped for the best.
As his application process dragged on, Abdullah’s blithe confidence in the fairness of British justice waxed and waned according to the vagaries of the system in which he was now caught. One moment he would sound triumphant over the phone: “There’s no way they can refuse me, Pubali; they know too well that my life would be in danger back in Pakistan. They could not possibly send me back to almost certain arrest and criminal prosecution. They know that that’s what they’d be condemning me to if they reject me.”
I did my best (I can only hope) to support and encourage. Repeatedly I asked Abdullah to call Maryam Namazie, the founder and leader of the Council of ex-Muslims of Britain. I called a local radio station in Manchester to talk about Abdullah’s cause; through mutual friends I attempted to contact Johann Hari of the Independent (Hari did subsequently write about Abdullah)and interest him in Abdullah’s story. A Facebook group was formed to support Abdullah’s cause and quickly grew to several hundred members.
Abdullah’s case came up for a hearing. He went in hopeful, though nervous; but when he emerged and we spoke on the phone afterwards he was despondent. He said the judge did not seem to have before her all the papers pertaining to his case, such as copies of his published articles and information about what fate could await him in a country such as Pakistan, where Islam was the state religion. At first he remained in low spirits, but as the days passed he alternated between a feverish hope and kind of paralysis of despair.
“She must grant it. She can’t not grant it. She must know the danger I’d be in if she sent me back.”
“I’d go anywhere—Cuba even. All I ask is not to have to land in a Muslim country.”
“If she doesn’t grant it, I don’t know what I am going to do.”
Occasionally he would describe his state of mind. He was unable, at times, fully to comprehend the reality of his situation.
“Pubali, all this feels as though it were happening to someone else, you know? It’s not real, not really happening, or at least not to me . . .”
“I feel disconnected, unable to write—every waking moment passes as in a dream . . .”
At these times he did indeed sound “disconnected,” punctuating his words with little incredulous laughs, unable to believe the absurdity of his predicament. He was a man who had neither robbed nor killed, neither lifted stick nor stone; he had harmed none; all he had done was to exercise his freedom to think for himself. He had criticized, as surely all of us have a right to criticize, the scriptures and the prophet of his religion. Yet, on the one hand, his own country and government were bound to prosecute him once they had him within reach, and on the other, the “civilized” world, the world to which he had appealed for refuge, where freedom of thought and expression were supposedly valued and protected, refused to take him seriously, disregarded and trivialized the danger in which he stood.
The judge rejected Abdullah’s appeal for asylum. Just a few days ago, Abdullah had directed me to a news story about a family, émigrés from Russia who were also seeking asylum in the U.K. When their application had been rejected, the family—father, mother and a son in his early 20s—had jumped to their deaths from the balcony of their temporary Scotland residence.
Abdullah was bitterly disappointed at his rejection, but he also felt something else—a seething sense of rage and humiliation. The Home Office judge, he told me, had clearly implied that he had deliberately written the articles in order to prepare a case for asylum in England. Not only was he refused protection, but he was left feeling violated; the judge had questioned his integrity, called him, in effect, a conniving liar who had cooked up an elaborate scheme with the ultimate aim of pulling a fast one on her Majesty’s Government. He had bought into the PR of the West—we uphold civilized standards better than the rest of the world; we support free speech and academic freedom; we are against terror and coercion.
Words are cheap, for governments can always refuse, as in this case they had done, to live up to those claims. When push came to shove, it was easier not to. Words are dear; for Abdullah, his own words could quite conceivably end up costing him his life.
I watched, helpless, as Abdullah oscillated between hope and despair, between rage and frustration, between furious energy and total apathy. He was tossed, as who would not be in his place, on a roiling sea of confused and conflicting emotions. His fate remained uncertain, held carelessly in the hands of those who disbelieved in him as a person and who cared nothing for his ultimate fate.
One day he messaged me, sounding extremely agitated.
“Please call me as soon as you get this message.”
It was the lowest I’d ever heard him.
“They are going to deport me.”
He had asked for permission to leave voluntarily, which would have enabled him to reapply for asylum in another country in the future. Being deported would put paid to that. It would be a permanent part of his record henceforth; the label “deportee,” would follow him and precede him wherever he went, to whatever authority he turned for refuge.
We both had one question: Why? Why, if Abdullah was not to be allowed to stay in the U.K., could he not be permitted to depart, as he had arrived, voluntarily? Wherefore this apparent determination on the part of the Home Office to persecute and criminalize this utterly harmless man who had bravely, and at great personal risk, espoused the very values the “West” claims to hold so dear—liberty, free thought, the right to criticize? Are we not always being told that the terrorists hate “our freedoms”? Why then would we turn away one who sought to exercise and uphold those very freedoms? To all appearances, Abdullah’s presence would be an asset to the U.K., at least to a U.K. that truly values those freedoms it professes to be upholding in faraway Afghanistan. Surely freedom, like charity, should begin at home.
Worse was to come. Shortly after Abdullah learned he was to be deported, news arrived that two former Al Qaeda members,Abid Naseer and Ahmad Faraz Khan, known terrorists, had been granted asylum in the U.K., as returning to them to Afghanistan would “jeopardize their safety,” and they could face torture or worse from their erstwhile comrades. As Abdullah, a secular humanist, was being driven from British soil, that same country welcomed two men who had espoused—and possibly continued to espouse—a creed where women had virtually no rights, where an Islamist caliphate alone could provide the perfect form of government, where democracy, diversity and plurality of opinions were anathema. These were men who subscribed to a medieval worldview that was about as close to the polar opposite of everything Abdullah stood for, the polar opposite of every supposed “Western” value, as it was possible to imagine. And yet here they were, free to make themselves a new home and a new future in the U.K.
One can only speculate about what kind of influence these men would exert on their new surroundings. Apparent concern for their safety had overridden concerns about how their presence would affect their community and their neighbors. I have a hard time believing that these men would uphold the equality of men and women, the rights of adult women over our own sexuality and reproduction or even our right to wear what we choose. I cannot imagine these men enriching in any significant manner the society in which they find themselves. And as for contributing to cultural diversity, that simply won’t wash as a reason, unless we are to strip the word of all meaning and replace it with “regressive elements.”
If democracies do indeed thrive on a diverse intellectual and cultural climate, how could the U.K. have done better than to have granted asylum to one such as Abdullah? Many ex-Muslims, even those who live in the West, take great pains to conceal their identities for fear of retribution. Many have personally testified to me of the dangers they face as apostates in Muslim majority countries—the greatest threat often coming from close family members. By contrast, Abdullah stood ready to declare his apostasy. Instead of honoring his bravery, the U.K. Government chose to deport him.
Those who remember the Rushdie affair should need no reminding of the persecution even the wealthy and celebrated can face when they dare to criticize Islam. More ordinary people who cannot boast the connections and resources of a Rushdie or a Hirsi Ali find themselves condemned to live like shells of themselves, unable to be who they really are, to say what they really think. They can only pretend at life; they cannot really live, and they suffer the unspeakable pain of perpetual alienation from their communities.
On the other hand, no great imaginative effort is required to guess at how Abdullah would have impacted the U.K. had he been granted the asylum he sought. He was already extremely critical of Islam, an avowed atheist and freethinker, and a prolific writer, expressing his views with logic and clarity. He would have joined the very small but very crucial band of apostate ex-Muslims who are, at long last, subjecting Islam to the kind of criticism that Christianity had to face from thinkers like the poet Shelley 200 years ago. According to people like Abdullah, Hirsi Ali, and Warraq, the Koran is a book, just like any other book, and should be subjected to the same scholarly and critical scrutiny that the Bible has received for centuries now, and subsequently stand or fall by its own merits. These thinkers refuse to take any statement or belief system—from the Bible and the Gita to the Flying Spaghetti Monster—purely on faith, an approach with which one may disagree—if one is offended by an insult to the FSM—but nevertheless an approach that should not by any means be suppressed. In a democratic, secular society such as the U.K., there is every reason to believe that Abdullah would have been an undeniable asset, a worthy and necessary addition to the country’s intellectual circles. For, even in the U.K., there are few Muslims who dare openly to criticize Islam, although there are many Britons who have questioned and dismissed altogether the Christian religion.
Moreover, Abdullah’s criticism does not fall into the category that can easily be written off as the uninformed rants of a Geert Wilders or an Enoch Powell—both politicians who speak with an eye to their conservative electoral base, and have much to gain from their demagoguery. Abdullah, as we have seen, has nothing to gain, and plenty to lose, by publicly apostatizing himself from Islam. We cannot dismiss his writing as mere Islamophobia, that cry that stifles so much legitimate dissent within Islam. Islam is not a race; it is a belief system, a set of precepts, ideas, and principles. As such Islam’s scriptures can be critiqued, as can the texts of any other doxa, from Dianetics to the Communist Manifesto. But as of the time of this writing, precious few—even in the West—have been bold enough to come forward and declare that Islam must be held to the same standards as any other belief system.
Abdullah was one of those few. Instead of welcoming him to the country, the U.K. Government chose to handcuff him (as I learned later) and hustle him on to a plane, to be turned over to the tender mercies of Pakistani authorities, to a country where blasphemy against Islam is a crime. If any better example exists that the West’s vaunted commitment to “civilized values” and “freedom” is more than the merest lip service, I should like to be acquainted with it. At the moment, I am unable to think of any.
But wait. What about the Global War on Terror (GWOT)? What about the NATO action in Afghanistan and the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq—in both of which, let us remember, Great Britain has aided the U.S. with puppy-like eagerness to please? Surely one must conclude that these great Western nations are committed, as they so often claim with appropriate chest-thumpings by means of their 24/7 PR mill, the media—to the defeat of unfreedom and the upholding of righteousness? In other words, West still Good, no? Abdullah’s story has got to be an unfortunate aberration.
On the contrary, Abdullah’s story actually fits very well with the West’s grand plan of action, as long as we recognize the whole premise of the GWOT for the ridiculous bag of bollocks it undoubtedly is. You see, when the demon you are fighting is largely imaginary with only occasional pinpricks of authenticity, you cannot afford to have an exorcist on the premises. What would then become of the Grand Illusion, the bugbear you have constructed with so much care and into whose perpetuation and continual enlargement you have poured such tremendous resources? Supposing, instead of foaming at the mouth about the latest botched suicide bombing in shoes or panties, the TV cameras were to run blow-by-blow accounts of some real, present, atrocity, like—oh, I don’t know—maybe the 45,000 U.S.ers who die each year for lack of health insurance?
Crunch the numbers. There are 365 days in the year, 24 hours in each day, so the year comes out to 8,760 hours or 525,600 minutes. That nets each person out of the 45,000 yearly casualties approximately 12 minutes in which to tell his or her story.
Twelve minutes in which to tell the story of a life slowly squeezed out that need not have been; 12 minutes to talk about the months, sometimes years, of pain, the grinding misery, the shouting and the crying and the pleading for help from a deaf and unheeding system, the refusals of vitally needed medication or procedures, the slow disintegration of hope, the sour odors of blood and urine and soiled sheets, the gradual setting in of resignation and despair. Until you realize that although your story does not matter, your suffering and your death are not matters of indifference to those who hold your fate in their hands. Those medications you do not receive, those surgical procedures that you are told are experimental or unnecessary and that your insurance will not cover, the limitations on how many doctor’s visits are allotted to you regardless of your needs and condition—all this is not happenstance. You have not fallen through the cracks. The system works—very well, in fact; it’s just that it does not work for you, because you are not the one it is seeking to benefit and serve. What happens to you happens because someone cares deeply—no, not for you, dummkopf, but for how much the denial of your care is worth to them. Fear not—you do have a place in the system—you and millions of others. You’re fodder, manure, shit for the money tree to flourish. You, and those millions of your comrades, cannot be allowed to have even those 12 minutes wherein to compress all the misery and horror of your individual stories. Once in a while, a Real News Network or a Grit TV or a Michael Moore might come along and grant one of you a few minutes of airtime. With luck. Otherwise, feel free to suffocate and die in your piss and your disease and your silence. Your death is necessary. Remember that money tree you’re helping along?
So, once again, what’s the connection between the 45,000 (lack of) healthcare related deaths on the one hand, and the War on Terror and a Pakistani ex-Muslim on the other? The connection is a simple one: only those stories that sustain the status quo get told. The rest—the real stories, the important stories get squelched; their tellers get deported or criminalized or jailed or discredited—or just die. That is the connection between an American who cannot get healthcare and an apostate who speaks out against Islam. If either were allowed to tell their story, if either got the publicity he or she deserved, the very few, mind-numbingly wealthy people who are making the mucho bucks would be inconvenienced, irked—like one gets annoyed when there is grit in the machinery. Sure, one can throw out one pesky little grain of the stuff and think no more of it (one Michael Moore can be tolerated).
But what if there were another, and another, and another, and another? What if there were a sudden concerted rush among the little grits, who, encouraged by the sight of what a few of their members could achieve, attempted in unison to jam up the machinery? Such a determined bunch could do a fair bit of damage before the death-machine operators woke up to what was happening and pulverized the intruders. And the more little bits of grit that jump in, the harder to stomp them all to powder and the harder to operate those death-dealing soul-crushers efficiently and smoothly. So you see? One little blob of grit cannot be allowed to open its big fat mouth and blurt out the truth, lest it give the other pieces ideas. As Noam Chomsky reminds us, it is the simple logic of the Mafia. One cannot rebel, lest it inspire the many to do the same.
Abdullah is one of those little pieces of grit. If the war on terror is to continue, people like him, whose writings might challenge Islam and undercut the might of the Muslim clergy, must be silenced. The great machinery of the War on Terror does not need people like Abdullah. It needs people like the two Al Qaeda members who were granted asylum in the U.K. According to the logic of imperialism, if an enemy be not at hand, one must be created. And once created, it must be nurtured and blown out of all proportion lest it be revealed as largely sham. Usually some small kernel of truth may be found around which to spin some huge, ever-waxing, ever-more-complex web of lies. The specter of Islamic terror is one such web. Forgotten is the fact that victims of Islamism are not primarily North American or European, but largely Muslims themselves. Its victims are those women with acid-pitted visages, the little girls deprived of secular education, or sometimes any education at all, the little boys who attend madrasahs where the teachers teach of the superiority of Islam and the inferiority of all other religions. Its victims are the activists like Abdullah who point out that just because a country has a Muslim majority, it does not automatically follow that the state religion should be Islam.
Had the U.K. and its boss, the U.S., really wanted to defeat Islamism, they would not have supported past Islamic dictatorships such as Zia-Ul-Haq’s in Pakistan and present repressive Islamic regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They would not have supported the Shah’s repressive regime in Iran, which caused a fundamentalist backlash in the form of the Islamic revolution whose spawn has ruled the country ever since. And they would not have chosen military occupation and state terror as a response to the events of 9/11, as though women would shed their veils and hasten to school and to work if only there were enough foreign guns bristling with menace, enough armored trucks shaking the earth, and enough army boots staking their territory throughout an occupied land.
The U.S. and the U.K. and other Western countries could have supported progressive movements within the countries where now they wage their War on Terror, with its overwhelmingly civilian victims. The “First World” countries could have encouraged, funded, and publicized the efforts, for example, of secular activists like Malalai Joya in Afghanistan. Supporting democratic movements would have been the surest way gradually to loosen the hold of extreme religiosity on the public in Muslim countries. Instead of which, now feeling increasingly under siege, that same public understandably clings all the harder to its deeply held religious dogmas and the attendant regressivism.
But a free-thinking people, a people empowered by self-determination, may not long continue captive to the West’s free-market, neoliberal agenda that lies at the heart of our “War on Terror.” Free peoples have a way of trying to direct the course of their own futures, and that kind of freedom has nothing to do with the kind of “freedom” the West proposes to bring to the rest of the world. That “freedom” has nothing to do with democracy, or with more equitable distribution of the world’s resources, or even with women’s rights. It does have a great deal to do with the ability to enrich the very few at the expense, and often the outright destitution, of the very many.
Let us not labor under the illusion that the West cares one way or another how many dictators dictate, how many populations struggle to survive under horrific conditions of poverty and unrest, how many women’s lives are ruined, how many children are traumatized and orphaned and deprived of a viable future. The West—by which I mean the powers that be in Europe and North America, and their client states, care for none of these things. However, they are by no means insensitive to what really matters: how much the few can profit at the expense of the many. Since the power is in the hands of the few—the corporatocracy that controls every major Western government—the voices, including the media, are also in the service of those few. The 45,000-count fodder of dead Americans, the million plus dead Iraqis, the tens of thousands of dead Afghans, the civilians even now dying by that wonder of cutting-edge technology, the unmanned drone—an Abdullah here, a you there, an I—all of us do not matter, so our voices, our stories, do not matter. We are not, and we are never going to be, big timers on Fox News, or on CNN’s Prime Time, or on CBS’s 60 minutes. We are not sought out by Hollywood or pursued by reporters. Our “human interest” stories are of no interest. We exist to be used as fuel so that the great machines that run on death for the many and spew out vast profits for the few may grind relentlessly onward. “We” may not know our place in the scheme of things.
But “they” do.
So is Abdullah’s deportation, his now semi-criminal and fugitive status, a mere example of a bumbling Home Office bureaucracy, or am I suggesting that it is part of a nefarious scheme, deliberate conspiracy to silence an innocent ex-Muslim? Well, certainly not the latter, and the former interpretation is nearer to the truth. But the fact remains that a government so seemingly committed to stamping out Islamic fundamentalism is uninterested in welcoming an “inside man,” one who could dish the dirt in no uncertain manner about the regressive aspects of his part of the Muslim world. But granting space to such a voice, which criticized Islam but not Muslims, which spoke in a secular and humanist strain but refused to place itself in the harness straps of the Western imperialist juggernaut, which excoriated the Islamism of a Hamas but also sympathized with the sorrows of a Gaza, was of no use to the West. Neither terrifying, bearded Mullah, howling for infidel blood, nor reassuring imperialist yes-man. Neither an Ahmadinejad, for whom the West is an epitome of evil, nor a Hirsi Ali for whom NATO is somehow the Afghans’ best friend. Neither a bugbear nor a toady? What is to be done with this extraordinary, nearly extinct specimen, this slippery creature, this fluid identity—someone who insists on thinking for himself, ideologies be damned?
We could stuff him in a glass case among the rare exhibits at a museum. Or we could deport him. The only thing we cannot do, apparently, is to let him speak. And so the U.K. in its wisdom and magnanimity has effectively silenced Abdullah, leaving him to drift, ghostlike, across the inhospitable landscape of his lifelong prison, his native land.
Pubali Ray Chaudhuri is an Associate Editor of Intrepid Report.
RSS
No free speech, please, we’re British: The silencing of Abdullah, the ex-Muslim
Posted on July 9, 2010 by Pubali Ray Chaudhuri
Several weeks have passed since I last spoke to Abdullah. Quite possibly we shall never speak again. But every so often, thoughts of him will intrude upon my consciousness like a miasma rising from some backwater of the mind, uncomfortable yet persistent, nagging at me, raising the question: What became of Abdullah? Is he safe? Does he still write?
Why do I worry about this man who is neither lover nor brother nor relation, whom, if truth be told, I have never even met?
That’s right. Abdullah and I have never actually met. We have spoken several times on the phone, but have never set eyes on each other and live (or used to live) on different continents—he in Europe and I in North America. But we are far closer than relatives, far closer than I am, for instance, to my next-door neighbour about whose life and interests I know nothing. Abdullah symbolizes what could happen—what has happened, what does happen—to those who, even if only with words, challenge, question or criticize what religion and society has placed above question, challenge or criticism.
Abdullah is an ex-Muslim. We met—where else? Through mutual politically aware friends—on Facebook. He was a Pakistani living in Manchester and had already written several articles under his own name that were highly critical of Islam and its Prophet. He invited me to read them, which I did, and immediately became concerned for his safety.
“They’ll kill you in Pakistan when you go back there,” I warned him.
He replied confidently that it was all right. He’d applied for asylum in the U.K. and he was reasonably sure that his petition would be granted, since his articles and his public declaration of himself as an apostate and an ex-Muslim had definitely put his personal safety in jeopardy should he return to Pakistan.
I found it difficult from the beginning to share his optimism. Having lived, if not in Europe, at least in the “West” for close to 14 years, I placed substantially less faith than my young friend in the fairness of Western legal process. So I reserved judgment and hoped for the best.
As his application process dragged on, Abdullah’s blithe confidence in the fairness of British justice waxed and waned according to the vagaries of the system in which he was now caught. One moment he would sound triumphant over the phone: “There’s no way they can refuse me, Pubali; they know too well that my life would be in danger back in Pakistan. They could not possibly send me back to almost certain arrest and criminal prosecution. They know that that’s what they’d be condemning me to if they reject me.”
I did my best (I can only hope) to support and encourage. Repeatedly I asked Abdullah to call Maryam Namazie, the founder and leader of the Council of ex-Muslims of Britain. I called a local radio station in Manchester to talk about Abdullah’s cause; through mutual friends I attempted to contact Johann Hari of the Independent (Hari did subsequently write about Abdullah) and interest him in Abdullah’s story. A Facebook group was formed to support Abdullah’s cause and quickly grew to several hundred members.
Abdullah’s case came up for a hearing. He went in hopeful, though nervous; but when he emerged and we spoke on the phone afterwards he was despondent. He said the judge did not seem to have before her all the papers pertaining to his case, such as copies of his published articles and information about what fate could await him in a country such as Pakistan, where Islam was the state religion. At first he remained in low spirits, but as the days passed he alternated between a feverish hope and kind of paralysis of despair.
“She must grant it. She can’t not grant it. She must know the danger I’d be in if she sent me back.”
“I’d go anywhere—Cuba even. All I ask is not to have to land in a Muslim country.”
“If she doesn’t grant it, I don’t know what I am going to do.”
Occasionally he would describe his state of mind. He was unable, at times, fully to comprehend the reality of his situation.
“Pubali, all this feels as though it were happening to someone else, you know? It’s not real, not really happening, or at least not to me . . .”
“I feel disconnected, unable to write—every waking moment passes as in a dream . . .”
At these times he did indeed sound “disconnected,” punctuating his words with little incredulous laughs, unable to believe the absurdity of his predicament. He was a man who had neither robbed nor killed, neither lifted stick nor stone; he had harmed none; all he had done was to exercise his freedom to think for himself. He had criticized, as surely all of us have a right to criticize, the scriptures and the prophet of his religion. Yet, on the one hand, his own country and government were bound to prosecute him once they had him within reach, and on the other, the “civilized” world, the world to which he had appealed for refuge, where freedom of thought and expression were supposedly valued and protected, refused to take him seriously, disregarded and trivialized the danger in which he stood.
The judge rejected Abdullah’s appeal for asylum. Just a few days ago, Abdullah had directed me to a news story about a family, émigrés from Russia who were also seeking asylum in the U.K. When their application had been rejected, the family—father, mother and a son in his early 20s—had jumped to their deaths from the balcony of their temporary Scotland residence.
Abdullah was bitterly disappointed at his rejection, but he also felt something else—a seething sense of rage and humiliation. The Home Office judge, he told me, had clearly implied that he had deliberately written the articles in order to prepare a case for asylum in England. Not only was he refused protection, but he was left feeling violated; the judge had questioned his integrity, called him, in effect, a conniving liar who had cooked up an elaborate scheme with the ultimate aim of pulling a fast one on her Majesty’s Government. He had bought into the PR of the West—we uphold civilized standards better than the rest of the world; we support free speech and academic freedom; we are against terror and coercion.
Words are cheap, for governments can always refuse, as in this case they had done, to live up to those claims. When push came to shove, it was easier not to. Words are dear; for Abdullah, his own words could quite conceivably end up costing him his life.
I watched, helpless, as Abdullah oscillated between hope and despair, between rage and frustration, between furious energy and total apathy. He was tossed, as who would not be in his place, on a roiling sea of confused and conflicting emotions. His fate remained uncertain, held carelessly in the hands of those who disbelieved in him as a person and who cared nothing for his ultimate fate.
One day he messaged me, sounding extremely agitated.
“Please call me as soon as you get this message.”
It was the lowest I’d ever heard him.
“They are going to deport me.”
He had asked for permission to leave voluntarily, which would have enabled him to reapply for asylum in another country in the future. Being deported would put paid to that. It would be a permanent part of his record henceforth; the label “deportee,” would follow him and precede him wherever he went, to whatever authority he turned for refuge.
We both had one question: Why? Why, if Abdullah was not to be allowed to stay in the U.K., could he not be permitted to depart, as he had arrived, voluntarily? Wherefore this apparent determination on the part of the Home Office to persecute and criminalize this utterly harmless man who had bravely, and at great personal risk, espoused the very values the “West” claims to hold so dear—liberty, free thought, the right to criticize? Are we not always being told that the terrorists hate “our freedoms”? Why then would we turn away one who sought to exercise and uphold those very freedoms? To all appearances, Abdullah’s presence would be an asset to the U.K., at least to a U.K. that truly values those freedoms it professes to be upholding in faraway Afghanistan. Surely freedom, like charity, should begin at home.
Worse was to come. Shortly after Abdullah learned he was to be deported, news arrived that two former Al Qaeda members, Abid Naseer and Ahmad Faraz Khan, known terrorists, had been granted asylum in the U.K., as returning to them to Afghanistan would “jeopardize their safety,” and they could face torture or worse from their erstwhile comrades. As Abdullah, a secular humanist, was being driven from British soil, that same country welcomed two men who had espoused—and possibly continued to espouse—a creed where women had virtually no rights, where an Islamist caliphate alone could provide the perfect form of government, where democracy, diversity and plurality of opinions were anathema. These were men who subscribed to a medieval worldview that was about as close to the polar opposite of everything Abdullah stood for, the polar opposite of every supposed “Western” value, as it was possible to imagine. And yet here they were, free to make themselves a new home and a new future in the U.K.
One can only speculate about what kind of influence these men would exert on their new surroundings. Apparent concern for their safety had overridden concerns about how their presence would affect their community and their neighbors. I have a hard time believing that these men would uphold the equality of men and women, the rights of adult women over our own sexuality and reproduction or even our right to wear what we choose. I cannot imagine these men enriching in any significant manner the society in which they find themselves. And as for contributing to cultural diversity, that simply won’t wash as a reason, unless we are to strip the word of all meaning and replace it with “regressive elements.”
If democracies do indeed thrive on a diverse intellectual and cultural climate, how could the U.K. have done better than to have granted asylum to one such as Abdullah? Many ex-Muslims, even those who live in the West, take great pains to conceal their identities for fear of retribution. Many have personally testified to me of the dangers they face as apostates in Muslim majority countries—the greatest threat often coming from close family members. By contrast, Abdullah stood ready to declare his apostasy. Instead of honoring his bravery, the U.K. Government chose to deport him.
Those who remember the Rushdie affair should need no reminding of the persecution even the wealthy and celebrated can face when they dare to criticize Islam. More ordinary people who cannot boast the connections and resources of a Rushdie or a Hirsi Ali find themselves condemned to live like shells of themselves, unable to be who they really are, to say what they really think. They can only pretend at life; they cannot really live, and they suffer the unspeakable pain of perpetual alienation from their communities.
On the other hand, no great imaginative effort is required to guess at how Abdullah would have impacted the U.K. had he been granted the asylum he sought. He was already extremely critical of Islam, an avowed atheist and freethinker, and a prolific writer, expressing his views with logic and clarity. He would have joined the very small but very crucial band of apostate ex-Muslims who are, at long last, subjecting Islam to the kind of criticism that Christianity had to face from thinkers like the poet Shelley 200 years ago. According to people like Abdullah, Hirsi Ali, and Warraq, the Koran is a book, just like any other book, and should be subjected to the same scholarly and critical scrutiny that the Bible has received for centuries now, and subsequently stand or fall by its own merits. These thinkers refuse to take any statement or belief system—from the Bible and the Gita to the Flying Spaghetti Monster—purely on faith, an approach with which one may disagree—if one is offended by an insult to the FSM—but nevertheless an approach that should not by any means be suppressed. In a democratic, secular society such as the U.K., there is every reason to believe that Abdullah would have been an undeniable asset, a worthy and necessary addition to the country’s intellectual circles. For, even in the U.K., there are few Muslims who dare openly to criticize Islam, although there are many Britons who have questioned and dismissed altogether the Christian religion.
Moreover, Abdullah’s criticism does not fall into the category that can easily be written off as the uninformed rants of a Geert Wilders or an Enoch Powell—both politicians who speak with an eye to their conservative electoral base, and have much to gain from their demagoguery. Abdullah, as we have seen, has nothing to gain, and plenty to lose, by publicly apostatizing himself from Islam. We cannot dismiss his writing as mere Islamophobia, that cry that stifles so much legitimate dissent within Islam. Islam is not a race; it is a belief system, a set of precepts, ideas, and principles. As such Islam’s scriptures can be critiqued, as can the texts of any other doxa, from Dianetics to the Communist Manifesto. But as of the time of this writing, precious few—even in the West—have been bold enough to come forward and declare that Islam must be held to the same standards as any other belief system.
Abdullah was one of those few. Instead of welcoming him to the country, the U.K. Government chose to handcuff him (as I learned later) and hustle him on to a plane, to be turned over to the tender mercies of Pakistani authorities, to a country where blasphemy against Islam is a crime. If any better example exists that the West’s vaunted commitment to “civilized values” and “freedom” is more than the merest lip service, I should like to be acquainted with it. At the moment, I am unable to think of any.
But wait. What about the Global War on Terror (GWOT)? What about the NATO action in Afghanistan and the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq—in both of which, let us remember, Great Britain has aided the U.S. with puppy-like eagerness to please? Surely one must conclude that these great Western nations are committed, as they so often claim with appropriate chest-thumpings by means of their 24/7 PR mill, the media—to the defeat of unfreedom and the upholding of righteousness? In other words, West still Good, no? Abdullah’s story has got to be an unfortunate aberration.
On the contrary, Abdullah’s story actually fits very well with the West’s grand plan of action, as long as we recognize the whole premise of the GWOT for the ridiculous bag of bollocks it undoubtedly is. You see, when the demon you are fighting is largely imaginary with only occasional pinpricks of authenticity, you cannot afford to have an exorcist on the premises. What would then become of the Grand Illusion, the bugbear you have constructed with so much care and into whose perpetuation and continual enlargement you have poured such tremendous resources? Supposing, instead of foaming at the mouth about the latest botched suicide bombing in shoes or panties, the TV cameras were to run blow-by-blow accounts of some real, present, atrocity, like—oh, I don’t know—maybe the 45,000 U.S.ers who die each year for lack of health insurance?
Crunch the numbers. There are 365 days in the year, 24 hours in each day, so the year comes out to 8,760 hours or 525,600 minutes. That nets each person out of the 45,000 yearly casualties approximately 12 minutes in which to tell his or her story.
Twelve minutes in which to tell the story of a life slowly squeezed out that need not have been; 12 minutes to talk about the months, sometimes years, of pain, the grinding misery, the shouting and the crying and the pleading for help from a deaf and unheeding system, the refusals of vitally needed medication or procedures, the slow disintegration of hope, the sour odors of blood and urine and soiled sheets, the gradual setting in of resignation and despair. Until you realize that although your story does not matter, your suffering and your death are not matters of indifference to those who hold your fate in their hands. Those medications you do not receive, those surgical procedures that you are told are experimental or unnecessary and that your insurance will not cover, the limitations on how many doctor’s visits are allotted to you regardless of your needs and condition—all this is not happenstance. You have not fallen through the cracks. The system works—very well, in fact; it’s just that it does not work for you, because you are not the one it is seeking to benefit and serve. What happens to you happens because someone cares deeply—no, not for you, dummkopf, but for how much the denial of your care is worth to them. Fear not—you do have a place in the system—you and millions of others. You’re fodder, manure, shit for the money tree to flourish. You, and those millions of your comrades, cannot be allowed to have even those 12 minutes wherein to compress all the misery and horror of your individual stories. Once in a while, a Real News Network or a Grit TV or a Michael Moore might come along and grant one of you a few minutes of airtime. With luck. Otherwise, feel free to suffocate and die in your piss and your disease and your silence. Your death is necessary. Remember that money tree you’re helping along?
So, once again, what’s the connection between the 45,000 (lack of) healthcare related deaths on the one hand, and the War on Terror and a Pakistani ex-Muslim on the other? The connection is a simple one: only those stories that sustain the status quo get told. The rest—the real stories, the important stories get squelched; their tellers get deported or criminalized or jailed or discredited—or just die. That is the connection between an American who cannot get healthcare and an apostate who speaks out against Islam. If either were allowed to tell their story, if either got the publicity he or she deserved, the very few, mind-numbingly wealthy people who are making the mucho bucks would be inconvenienced, irked—like one gets annoyed when there is grit in the machinery. Sure, one can throw out one pesky little grain of the stuff and think no more of it (one Michael Moore can be tolerated).
But what if there were another, and another, and another, and another? What if there were a sudden concerted rush among the little grits, who, encouraged by the sight of what a few of their members could achieve, attempted in unison to jam up the machinery? Such a determined bunch could do a fair bit of damage before the death-machine operators woke up to what was happening and pulverized the intruders. And the more little bits of grit that jump in, the harder to stomp them all to powder and the harder to operate those death-dealing soul-crushers efficiently and smoothly. So you see? One little blob of grit cannot be allowed to open its big fat mouth and blurt out the truth, lest it give the other pieces ideas. As Noam Chomsky reminds us, it is the simple logic of the Mafia. One cannot rebel, lest it inspire the many to do the same.
Abdullah is one of those little pieces of grit. If the war on terror is to continue, people like him, whose writings might challenge Islam and undercut the might of the Muslim clergy, must be silenced. The great machinery of the War on Terror does not need people like Abdullah. It needs people like the two Al Qaeda members who were granted asylum in the U.K. According to the logic of imperialism, if an enemy be not at hand, one must be created. And once created, it must be nurtured and blown out of all proportion lest it be revealed as largely sham. Usually some small kernel of truth may be found around which to spin some huge, ever-waxing, ever-more-complex web of lies. The specter of Islamic terror is one such web. Forgotten is the fact that victims of Islamism are not primarily North American or European, but largely Muslims themselves. Its victims are those women with acid-pitted visages, the little girls deprived of secular education, or sometimes any education at all, the little boys who attend madrasahs where the teachers teach of the superiority of Islam and the inferiority of all other religions. Its victims are the activists like Abdullah who point out that just because a country has a Muslim majority, it does not automatically follow that the state religion should be Islam.
Had the U.K. and its boss, the U.S., really wanted to defeat Islamism, they would not have supported past Islamic dictatorships such as Zia-Ul-Haq’s in Pakistan and present repressive Islamic regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They would not have supported the Shah’s repressive regime in Iran, which caused a fundamentalist backlash in the form of the Islamic revolution whose spawn has ruled the country ever since. And they would not have chosen military occupation and state terror as a response to the events of 9/11, as though women would shed their veils and hasten to school and to work if only there were enough foreign guns bristling with menace, enough armored trucks shaking the earth, and enough army boots staking their territory throughout an occupied land.
The U.S. and the U.K. and other Western countries could have supported progressive movements within the countries where now they wage their War on Terror, with its overwhelmingly civilian victims. The “First World” countries could have encouraged, funded, and publicized the efforts, for example, of secular activists like Malalai Joya in Afghanistan. Supporting democratic movements would have been the surest way gradually to loosen the hold of extreme religiosity on the public in Muslim countries. Instead of which, now feeling increasingly under siege, that same public understandably clings all the harder to its deeply held religious dogmas and the attendant regressivism.
But a free-thinking people, a people empowered by self-determination, may not long continue captive to the West’s free-market, neoliberal agenda that lies at the heart of our “War on Terror.” Free peoples have a way of trying to direct the course of their own futures, and that kind of freedom has nothing to do with the kind of “freedom” the West proposes to bring to the rest of the world. That “freedom” has nothing to do with democracy, or with more equitable distribution of the world’s resources, or even with women’s rights. It does have a great deal to do with the ability to enrich the very few at the expense, and often the outright destitution, of the very many.
Let us not labor under the illusion that the West cares one way or another how many dictators dictate, how many populations struggle to survive under horrific conditions of poverty and unrest, how many women’s lives are ruined, how many children are traumatized and orphaned and deprived of a viable future. The West—by which I mean the powers that be in Europe and North America, and their client states, care for none of these things. However, they are by no means insensitive to what really matters: how much the few can profit at the expense of the many. Since the power is in the hands of the few—the corporatocracy that controls every major Western government—the voices, including the media, are also in the service of those few. The 45,000-count fodder of dead Americans, the million plus dead Iraqis, the tens of thousands of dead Afghans, the civilians even now dying by that wonder of cutting-edge technology, the unmanned drone—an Abdullah here, a you there, an I—all of us do not matter, so our voices, our stories, do not matter. We are not, and we are never going to be, big timers on Fox News, or on CNN’s Prime Time, or on CBS’s 60 minutes. We are not sought out by Hollywood or pursued by reporters. Our “human interest” stories are of no interest. We exist to be used as fuel so that the great machines that run on death for the many and spew out vast profits for the few may grind relentlessly onward. “We” may not know our place in the scheme of things.
But “they” do.
So is Abdullah’s deportation, his now semi-criminal and fugitive status, a mere example of a bumbling Home Office bureaucracy, or am I suggesting that it is part of a nefarious scheme, deliberate conspiracy to silence an innocent ex-Muslim? Well, certainly not the latter, and the former interpretation is nearer to the truth. But the fact remains that a government so seemingly committed to stamping out Islamic fundamentalism is uninterested in welcoming an “inside man,” one who could dish the dirt in no uncertain manner about the regressive aspects of his part of the Muslim world. But granting space to such a voice, which criticized Islam but not Muslims, which spoke in a secular and humanist strain but refused to place itself in the harness straps of the Western imperialist juggernaut, which excoriated the Islamism of a Hamas but also sympathized with the sorrows of a Gaza, was of no use to the West. Neither terrifying, bearded Mullah, howling for infidel blood, nor reassuring imperialist yes-man. Neither an Ahmadinejad, for whom the West is an epitome of evil, nor a Hirsi Ali for whom NATO is somehow the Afghans’ best friend. Neither a bugbear nor a toady? What is to be done with this extraordinary, nearly extinct specimen, this slippery creature, this fluid identity—someone who insists on thinking for himself, ideologies be damned?
We could stuff him in a glass case among the rare exhibits at a museum. Or we could deport him. The only thing we cannot do, apparently, is to let him speak. And so the U.K. in its wisdom and magnanimity has effectively silenced Abdullah, leaving him to drift, ghostlike, across the inhospitable landscape of his lifelong prison, his native land.
Pubali Ray Chaudhuri is an Associate Editor of Intrepid Report.