Sajakkini

So who is Sheikh Omar Bakri, anyway? He has been called a “firebrand cleric” (is there a cleric who isn’t these days, I wonder), and who has a penchant for pissing off moderate British Muslims, apparently.

The guy heads an organisation called the Al-Muhajirun (huge red flag there), and doesn’t have much good to say about the West, so it would seem.

Which makes it odd that he chose to live in London, don’t you think?

I mean, correct me if I am wrong here, but London, as every Malaysian schoolkid knows, is the capital of the United Kingdom. This London, which happens to be in Europe, is nowhere near the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It is about 1,500 kilometres on the wrong side of Makkah.

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He needs glasses

In fact, the UK - in case our good old sheikh had been led to believe otherwise - is a de facto Christian country. It has a great big cross in its flag. Its queen has a cross in her crown. Its national hero is a blonde-tressed Christian knight called Saint George. How much more obvious do you need things to be?

So why, then, would someone who claims to hate the devil with a vengeance actually choose to live in the belly of the beast, so to speak?

Maybe it is a war tactic? To defeat the enemy, so goes the saying, one must know it as one knows oneself. So perhaps that’s what Sheikh Omar’s doing among the cobbled stones of the old city?

Maybe he fancies himself a warrior hidden inside a metaphorical Trojan horse, waiting for the right time to clamber out, sword brandished, to smite the heads of the despised ones. If so, the mind can only boggle at such superhuman patience and startlingly far-sighted vision.

Sheikh Omar was born in Syria. Being too lazy to do research, I can merely conjecture that he fled that country because he disagreed with the socialist government there, and in retaliation they threatened to make his life - and that of his family’s - shall we say, uncomfortable.

That is a fair reason to leave. But the question remains: why go to the despised West, instead of a moderate Muslim country?

And despised the Westerners are indeed to him. One newspaper report quoted him as saying thusly: “We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value. It has no sanctity.” Wooo. London watch out - the avenger is in thy midst and verily it be one angry dude!

Why is he in the UK?

Hence the mystery deepens: why head out towards the dragon and willingly be swallowed by it?

Could it be - gasp - because Mssr. Omar felt that these other fellow Muslim countries could not (would not?) give him or his family the freedom and quality of life that he sought? Every man, after all, wants only the best for his woman (or women, as the case may be) and children.

If so, you have to wonder about the depth of commitment of this man and others like him. He is purportedly fighting to return the world to the believers, no less, yet shirks from the tedious, mundane challenge of bringing it up from within.

What is he hoping to do? Somehow mutate British society from within and turn it into a Muslim entity? The brightness of such logic blinds me.

Here’s a question that Mr Sheikh might be able to help us out with: which would be easier to do - patch up a country that’s already full of Muslims so that they would go one step ahead and become a beacon for progressive Islam (as Khatami is trying to do with Iran and - like it or not - Mahathir with Malaysia), or convert a country that is, oh, 90 percent non-Muslims to the Muslim way of life?

Doesn’t take a genius to sort that one out, I’m sure. But commonsense, it would seem, has become a liability amongst my excitable brothers.

It could very well be that masochism runs thick in the veins of would-be martyrs. Or maybe this is simply some kind of perverse guilty-conscience thing that I am not familiar with, along the lines of “I am not worthy so I treat myself like shit”?

Defender of the universe

No matter the reason or rationale, the point is, our dear friend chose to reside in a country of infidels (his own words, mind). And therein - to me, anyway - lies the conceit of these supposed defenders of Islam.

This is what the late Mssr. Khomeini had also done. Again, in fleeing the tyranny of fellow Muslim countrymen, this wannabe great leader of the free Muslim world chose to run to a non-Muslim country. And once he got the reins of government in Iran, Khomeini directed his fury at the Westerners bedevilling him.

Of course, that makes Khomeini even more of a hypocrite than Mr Sheikh. Having suckled on the teats of a pig, once grown stout you would then turn around and call your surrogate mother a dirty swine? What does that make you, then, eh?

If you really want to do something good about the world, then why come out with such fiery rhetoric that could only divide and make things even worse? If you were really sincere about it wouldn’t you just roll up your shirt sleeves and heave to with the rest of the toiling masses?

This is Karl Marx all over again, isn’t it. The story of yet another self-righteous prick who believes himself too good to do some real work, and feels it his calling instead to sit on a cosy chair in an air-conditioned pulpit from where he can spew the politics of hatred and get other people to do his dirty work for him.

But what am I going on about, eh. Talking about honour in a world bankrupt of such romantic notions!

It is a pity that Muslim extremists insist on living in a world without hope. One which is very much their own construction, I should add. It is amazing, isn’t it, for sane people like us to observe the madness of a group of people who build prisons for themselves in the deluded belief that without those constrictive walls they are defenceless. A bit like Israel, really.

I suppose such neat divisions make it easier for terminally sad people to deal with the complications of modern life. Me, I don’t claim to understand the modern world, either; nor am I a big fan of it. But at least I don’t cling on to 12th Century solutions to 21st Century problems.

Not like the way Mr Sheikh clings on to life in the good old UK, at any rate. The only regret he has for making such incendiary remarks about his adopted mother, apparently, is that some day the British government will kick him and his family out for his outspokenness.

Ah. But of course. Who would be mad enough to give up those lovely tea and scones for a life of bullets and guns, eh, Mr Sheikh?