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Terrorism and Community Relations

I know that we are supposed to say nice things, but today I really mean it: we are having an excellent debate and I have learned a great deal from hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber. I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) for my departure during his contribution. I assure him that it was essential. I shall talk about the processes that we are going through with the legislation. The hearings of the Home Affairs Committee and its report, printed in April, before I joined the Committee—I am a new kid on the block—have already had an impact on Government thinking and on legislation in the form of the Terrorism Bill, which had its Second Reading last night. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister will comment on that. I abstained last night because I cannot go along with the view that it is essential for the police to have up to 90 days to hold suspected terrorists before charging them. I shall not rehearse the arguments, as during the Committee stage next week on the Floor of the House, they will all be advanced when the amendments are discussed. However, changes have been made and I appreciate them. Those changes include a High Court judge rather than a district judge overseeing detention prior to charge. Proposals for the possible closure of mosques appear to have been dropped. They could have caused more problems than they would have solved. When there have been problems with mosques, they have usually arisen because the mosques have been taken over by radical groups not of the neighbourhood. Reinstituting the original mainstream local Muslims might have been more useful than closing the mosques entirely. Proposals to proscribe the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir—sometimes described as a political party, sometimes as a cult—also appear to have been dropped. I welcome that, as its proscription could have created martyrs. Driving it underground would have meant that we could not keep an eye on its activities, and that would have been unfortunate. I was a little confused about Hizb ut-Tahrir, but last week's Tribune, of all things, described it as"““a cult that believes voting is haram””—" I apologise if I pronounced that wrongly; I am trying my best—"““an act of disbelief, and that the return of the khalifah—an Islamic state headed by the caliph, the ‘successor' to the prophet Muhammad—is the only answer to every problem faced by Muslims in the modern world. How can voting be an act of disbelief? Those such as members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, who insist that it is, claim it means participating in a democratic system that upholds the will of man over the will of Allah. For them, Islamic government is ‘God's rule' and they reject democracy as ‘people's rule'.””" I must give credit for that piece. It was written by a Muslim called Murad Qureshi. I thank him for explaining why Hizb ut-Tahrir recommends to its members that it is unIslamic to vote. That is extremely unhelpful, especially in towns such as my own where 20 per cent. of the community is Muslim. To dispel any myth that all young Muslims are members of Hizb ut-Tharir, I will quote from a document that I received from a young man. He did not tell me his name or where he lived, so I have been unable to respond to it. He wrote:"““I am afraid in most cases the community leaders””—" he is talking about Muslim communities, of course—"““do not have any influence over the youth due to them having such different points of view. In a town in West Yorkshire (Keighley) the local M.P. has raised the issue of forced arranged marriages. She has been condemned by some of the community elders, but has been applauded by the Muslim youth for standing forward and addressing the issue. So I believe it would be wrong for people to assume that they can communicate with Muslim youths through the community elders.””" That has long been my belief and it is, I think, where many Labour-controlled local authorities have gone wrong. They felt that they just needed to pick up the phone, ring a few known leaders and that was their contact with the community. It has been wrong all along and I hope that will start to change. We are now gaining another view of how our Muslim communities operate. Since we seem to have plenty of time, I will mention a number of things that happened to me in the recess from which I learnt a great deal about Hizb ut-Tahrir, young Muslims and, to some extent, my female constituents who are Muslim, although I already knew a great deal about them. At the beginning of the recess I was invited to the Leeds BBC studio, where I seem to spend a lot of time. I was doing a down the line interview and phone-in with the BBC Asian Network. When I arrived, a young man was sitting in the waiting area. He made himself known to me and said that he was one of my constituents. He was a very pleasant young man. He told me about the problems that he was having with neighbours dumping rubbish behind his house, and I said that I would help him as his MP. We then went into the studio and the interview started. The young lady who was the anchorperson in London—I believe that she was Hindu, although I am not sure—and managed the whole discussion asked that young man, who, although a little vague, seemed sympathetic to Hizb ut-Tahrir, whether it was true that in universities they bully women from their religion about their method of dress. He said, ““Oh no, we don't bully them. We explain to them what will happen to them in the afterlife if they continue to dress inappropriately.”” Even I was stuck for words. My jaw dropped and I did not know what to say to him or the anchorperson. That explains the attitudes that are prevalent in some of our universities. I went to another university—I will not mention its name, as I do not want to damage it. I was told that, during the previous Ramadan, members of Hizb ut-Tahrir went into the canteen and were forthright in condemning young Muslims who were eating there because they should have been fasting. Eventually, the university's security people had to be brought in to move them on. It was explained to the group's members that it was up to each Muslim to determine whether he or she fasted during Ramadan and that it was not up to that clique to tell them how to conduct themselves. When I went to the university a few weeks ago, I was told that Hizb ut-Tahrir has taken over the Islamic society and was preparing to take over the students union. I am not sure what has happened about the students union, but I hope that it has not been taken over. Such events are really sad, because it is the hundreds of mainstream Muslims at the university—good, intelligent young men and women—who should be the guiding force in our communities. They have the correct ideas, they are enlightened and they are terrific people. I do not regard members of Hizb ut-Tahrir as fluffy bunnies or as nice, but I am still quite pleased that the organisation was not proscribed. That would have been the wrong the direction to go in, because it would have made them martyrs.