What is it that really upsets Nesrine Malik of the Guardian?

Nesrine Malik is one of the "ex-Muslim types who knows how to deal with her kind" that Western newspapers and media love hearing from. A recent article by her "Swine flu: can Muslims claim the moral high ground?" berates Muslims for thinking that swine flu is some divine wrath because people are consuming pork. The crux of her argument is the hypocrisy of Muslims, who think that anything bad to them is a "test" from Allah and that anything bad which happens to non-Muslims is divine retribution. I mean, how dare these Muslims pretend that somehow they are better than everybody else? That they are somehow moral and just people?

But is this article really about the hypocrisy of Muslims? No it is not. Nesrine Malik joins the media frenzy surrounding swine flu with good old fashioned Muslim bashing. Yet it has not occured to her rational, Westernised and liberated self that whilst the media froth at the mouth with the 300 or so people who have succumbed to the flu, they ignore the 355 people killed in Iraq in April this year alone by what Layla Anwar calls the, "Virus of Occupation". Like the boring Khalid Diab, she is pathologically incapable of seeing fault in anything outside the Arab and Muslim world. That is what I call hypocrisy.

When immoral people are confronted, and you can go and test this, there are a number of common responses to be expected. It almost follows a pattern. At first, they claim that everybody else is doing this. This is what children also say, and the simplest answer is also the same as what a parent would say. "If everybody else threw themselves off of a cliff would you also do that?". The child will go silent.

Once that does not work, the next step is to challenge, "who says that what I'm doing is wrong?". This is now getting serious, there is a challenge. You cannot claim yourself as an authority on this morality, a standard which is accepted by both parties now has to be called for. This can be law or God. But if this also does not work, the final refuge of the morally bankrupt is in hypocrisy. It sweeps away all before it, I mean where can you find someone who is completely just, who is without sin? So the final retort is that you should mind your own business, since you have so many problems yourself, and let me carry on doing what I see is best. Either that or that there are more important things to worry about. In both ways, you are not allowed to judge...

But there are judges, and they do carry out judgements. A judge is a judge not because they are without any fault, but because they have an idea of what justice is, and they can tell such and such a person, in summary, "justice is this, you are not this, therefore you are not just".

When a Muslim stops drinking and refrains from eating pork, she does not care about the Muslims who do drink or eat pork. When a Muslim does not fornicate, he is not concerned with those Muslims who do. When a woman wears the hejab, she is not concerned with those other women who wear one but use it as a license to do what they want, or wear super tight jeans and makeup along with it. The religious person tries to follow their faith because they believe this is what their God wants them to do, that this is the standard that has been set - for them it is better to have standards and fail to reach them than to have none at all.

In the West, there is no law which is unchangeable. There is no abnormality which cannot be turned into something normal. When a law is not adhered to, the logic is that the law is unworkable, that a good law would not have been broken by so many people. That's ok, that's what the West wants. But in Islam, the laws are not changeable, they are solid and they are there for a reason. The English John Stuart Mill, so concerned with potential for oppressing minorities in working democracies, misses the point. Of course many of us can drink responsibly, of course there are some benefits to drinking a glass of wine each night, but when the Quran tells us that the harm outweighs the benefit, it is because there is a minority of people who cannot handle their drink, who destroy not only their own lives but that of the people they love as well and those around them. Where pork is forbidden in Islam, it is not because most of the time it is harmless to eat, but because of the times when it can be harmful. 

Each and everyone of the standards that genuine Muslims expect and are expected to adhere to throughout their lives is to get them as safely as possible from point A to point B in their lives with a minimum of corruption to their hearts and to their bodies. For the person who says that such a life is not worth living, that it is boring, the question must be posed, is a pleasurable life and a good life one and the same or are they different? There are many things we do which are pleasurable which are actually harmful, and many unpleasant things which are actually good for us. Working hard, studying hard and being patient are not things we'd like to do, but we know that they lead us to something good, a better paying job, an enlightened mind and a good temperament, or a beautiful garden with an apple tree. Eating a lot of what we like to eat, getting drunk and doing drugs are great fun, but a sane person would tell you that such a life can leave a person an empty husk with many scars...just look at Iggy Pop.

So what could such a persons response be after we tell him these things, that the pleasurable and the good are not the same. Wouldn't it make sense to escape from those things which are bad as much as is possible in life and to try to stay as close as possible to those things which are good? When life is good, doesn't it then become worth living? And when life is bad, doesn't it become unbearable?

Going back to our friend Nesrine Malik, what is it that riles her? That some Muslims are hypocritical? No, I think what upsets Nesrine and other people like her is that there are people out there who try their very best to be just and moral every day. This makes her and her friends look very ugly indeed, and they cannot stand themselves...