Young Muslims must challenge extremists, says leading imam
MUSLIM leaders and teachers should equip youngsters to counter the claims of extremists, a Government adviser and leading imam has said.
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Qari Asim likened Islamist hate preachers to paedophiles and said they groom youngsters by distorting “challenging” passages of the Quran “to turn people into terrorists”.
Mr Asim said it “falls on to the Islamic faith leadership” to teach young people to rebut claims by extremists, including online and in prisons, that Islamic scriptures justify terrorism.
Mr Asim, the senior imam at Makkah Mosque in Leeds, is leading Government work on establishing a definition of Islamophobia, akin to that of antiSemitism which helps organisations to police hatred against Jews.
He warned that anti-Muslim hate was fuelling extremism, by allowing hate preachers to cite Islamophobic incidents as “a clear sign of Muslims not being accepted in this country”.
In 2017 Mr Asim led a delegation of more than 100 imams who visited the site of the London Bridge attack to condemn the perpetrators, declaring: “Enough is enough”.
Last month, it was claimed that he had questioned free speech during an interfaith workshop the following year in which he said that some Muslims wanted exceptions to free speech in cases where something is “distasteful to Muslims or they find it offensive”.
But he said his brief had been to “highlight the views of Muslims” and he had been setting out a strand of opinion that “man-made laws should not be followed”.
Mr Asim, who is a solicitor alongside his role as imam, said: “I am completely opposed to that view.”
Addressing the problem of extremism, Mr Asim added: “I think we also need to ask what can be done from within our syllabus, to equip our young people with the relevant knowledge to challenge extremist views.
“What happens [in] faith communities and also in supplementary schools, in mosques, you only focus on citizenship and you focus on moral values.
“But you don’t necessarily focus on the challenging passages in a scripture.
“Because you think, that doesn’t really impact ordinary faith communities, that’s something that’s debated within certain circles. And that’s true of all faiths, all scriptures have challenging texts, and Islam is the same.
“So we have challenging passages in the Quran and in Hadith, which are the sayings and traditions of the Prophet, because they’re context based.”
Mr Asim added: “There are extremists [that] are using passages from the Quran, albeit a distorted interpretation of those passages, to turn people into terrorists.”