Baroness Casey, the author of last week’s report on grooming gangs, has bravely said what few others will admit: that a troubling number of the men committing these reprehensible crimes come from South Asian backgrounds.
But as an Islamic theologian and a law-abiding imam who has devoted my life to promoting a moderate Islam – while championing Muslim integration into British society – I want to be even clearer than that.
The men involved in this disgraceful criminality, particularly in Yorkshire and the North-West, are disproportionately Pakistani, whether British or foreign-born; and, most tellingly, they are Muslim.
I am convinced that there can be no lasting political, cultural or social solution unless we address, head-on, the distorted version of populist Islam these perpetrators enable and name it for the chauvinistic cancer that it is.
Less than two weeks ago, seven Pakistani men from Rochdale were convicted of raping and assaulting two young girls for five horrific years. The abuse started when the girls were aged just 13.
And nothing seems to change: it’s more than a decade since a different Pakistani gang was convicted of abusing nearly 50 girls – in the same town.
Now, adding insult to injury, we learn that two of the jailed ringleaders cannot be deported because Pakistan refuses to have them back.
This desperate situation is why – as a matter of urgency – we must tackle what I call the Three Ms: the mullahs, mosques and madrassas which, collectively, brainwash many men of Pakistani heritage into believing their young female victims are no better than white trash – easy meat for the appetites of the ‘superior’ Muslim male.
The baleful influence of the mullahs – the imams or priests – is key, along with the stranglehold they exert on their unquestioning flocks. These clerics are almost entirely imported from Pakistani villages and, all too often, bring with them an outlook that is ignorant, ill-educated and intolerant of other faiths.
Last year four mosques were put under scrutiny by the Charity Commission for hosting an Islamist extremist preacher called Ibtisam Elahi Zaheer, who toured the UK last summer.
He said of female prisoners of war in 2021: ‘Islam designed a solution to the problem – that they are distributed to the soldiers in an organised manner, or are sold as slaves.’
In response to the Charity Commission, he said: ‘Whenever and wherever I have spoken to Muslim communities living as minorities… I have always stressed the importance of them following the law of the land.’
So when it when it comes to adapting to British life, they lack sophistication – to put it kindly.
With their Neanderthal views, particularly towards women and non-believers, this is the type of imam that, sadly, predominates in British mosques.
During Friday congregational prayers, worshippers are routinely told that only followers of Islam will go to heaven, in direct contradiction of what the Koran states (2:62, 5:69).
However, ultraconservative clerics consider adherents of any other faith as filthy ‘kafirs’ – unbelievers destined for damnation.
Yet this garbage cannot be found in Islam’s sacred scripture.
Instead of preaching the uplifting words of God, these foreign-born imams stick to a fabricated theology based on apocryphal fantasies. They prefer to call on a spurious theological triumvirate of the Hadith (reputed sayings of Islam’s founder), the sharia (which is just rigid medieval opinion masquerading as divine law) and fatuous fatwas (or religious views) that can be issued by individual clerics. Week after week, this deformed version of the faith is spewed from the pulpit.
Then there are the mosques, which – hugely influenced by the mullahs, of course – are men-only clubs, part of a world in which women can never be equal.
That’s why the mothers and daughters are banished, unseen, to basements or upstairs attics if they wish to worship God. Out of sight, out of mind.
Together, the mosques and their mullahs twist the Koran to claim God has made women inferior to men – that they must be obedient to fathers, brothers, husbands.
This patriarchal machismo finds no place in the Koran.
Yet it is sadly inevitable that when young boys are sent to madrassas – after-school classes for religious study – they are indoctrinated with this poison. The insistence on arranged marriages, frequently to illiterate first cousins from Pakistan, is another dangerous factor.
Again, the practice is nothing to do with Islam itself. Quite aside from spreading genetic faults (‘consanguineous’ marriage notoriously leads to birth defects), it makes integration into wider British society much less likely.
All too often, these arranged marriages produce loveless, sexless relationships which only serve to make the situation worse.
Angry men brought up to despise the female half of the population are an obvious menace to vulnerable young girls. Yet there are things that can be done.
As a topmost priority, we must ban the importation of all imams from abroad.
Why should we even need to invite clerics from other countries? As of last year, France will not allow foreign imams to preach in the country, while in 2023 Germany agreed with Turkey that it will not accept Turkish imams, and will instead train Muslim clerics on home soil.
So if Germany and France have already prohibited the entry of Muslim priests from abroad, why is Britain always late to the party? In my view, inviting clerics to come and live in Britain – along with their wives and families – is little more than a racket.
It bolsters the strength of the Pakistani community here, and keeps it more isolated and insular in the process.
We must encourage British universities and colleges to join their continental counterparts and establish Islamic seminaries or training courses so that home-grown imams can be properly educated. It is a chance to advance genuine Islam as well as patriotic British values.
And I call on the Government to support all those brave enough to put their heads above the parapet in the struggle against the fundamentalists and fanatics.
There can be no solution to the problem of Pakistani grooming gangs until we first tackle and defeat the religious bigotry that drives them.
We must jettison this twisted theology, which is a disaster not just for British society, but for all thinking Muslims, too. It brings Islam into disrepute.
