The Radio 4 Blog Feed

Jalalabad university bombing hits 'imam of peace'

2011-02-11T19:00:30+00:00

Editor's note: Nadene Ghouri's Radio 4 programme about John Butt from a couple of weeks ago now has a melancholy postscript. On Tuesday, bombers struck the university he founded in Jalalabad. The programme is no longer available on the iPlayer so I've republished it here, in full. In this blog post, Nadene brings the story up to date - SB

An Islamic university run by former British hippie turned Islamic scholar John Butt, was bombed by the taliban on Tuesday. The attack came just two weeks after John Butt was profiled on Radio 4 in My Story - the Imam of Peace (listen to the whole programme below).

The programme revealed how John, now 60 years old, had gone to live in the often lawless Afghan/Pakistan border region in 1969 as a 19 year-old hippie. When the other hippies returned home he stayed on living among the Pashtun tribes who inhabit the region. He adopted the Pashtun's ancient tribal codes and became fluent in the language. He converted to Islam and is the only Western man ever to graduate from South Asia 's largest Madrassa, Darul Uloom Deoband as a fully fledged Imam.

However, the attack on the university, known as Jamiyat'al-Uloom, was not entirely unexpected. Over the last few weeks so-called night-letters (threatening letters sent at night and in secret) have been distributed in Jalalabad targeting those who work at the university, warning students not to attend and denouncing John Butt as a Christian missionary.

John Butt told the BBC he had welcomed the awareness the radio programme had created about the university and did not think airing the programme was related to the attacks:

Unfortunately anyone who works for peace in Afghanistan is going to be subject to attacks like these. But the voices of peace and moderation must be heard, whatever the personal risks.

During the making of the programme, he said:

We are trying to strengthen Islamic learning and promote a peaceful non-violent theology. To take a life is a sin. I look at those who do that so easily and wonder how far removed from true Islam they are.

The bomb, which appeared to have been set off by remote-control, was left in a water-cooler next to the gate of the building. No one was seriously injured in the attack, which caused considerable structural damage. The latest attack comes eight months after an similar bomb attack on a media training centre - also run by John Butt in jalabad.

In My Story John told how in recent years he saw the Pashtun way of life he had come to love become contaminated by a more militant hard-line ideology. He decided to fight back for his adopted culture by mobilsing young tribal men and women to work with him to promote their old culture over newer more hardline ideas; setting up a radio station broadcast messages of peace and solutions to conflict; and spearheading the formation of a new Islamic university to promote a non-violent theology and give a platform to moderates.

But as the hippie turned peace campaigner, his message of non-violent jihad has set him on a direct collision course with the Taliban and other militants who promote holy war, and who now seek to kill him. When asked in My Story if he feared he would be killed, he replied: "You only die once and I could hit by a bus tomorrow. But if I do die in the cause of doing good for humanity and promoting true Islam will be a good death."

Nadene Ghouri presented The Imam of Peace

Read Nadene's story about John Butt on the BBC News web site and listen to the despatch she recorded for From Our Own Correspondent.
The Guardian covered the story of the bombing. Butt wrote an article about Islamic learning in Afghanistan for the Hindustan Times at the end of January.

Hitler's Muslim Legions

2010-07-14T17:13:02+00:00

Editor's note: Sometimes the decision to commission a programme about events from recent history is a complicated one. Samir Shah lays out the many factors that contributed to one such decision - SB.

Fascination with the Second World War and Nazism is one of the abiding characteristics of post war Britain. By 2010, you'd think that almost every conceivable topic and angle has been covered. But not so. Programmes on television and radio continue to be made and books by distinguished historians about the period continue to come off the printing presses. Recently one such caught my eye. It was by Jonathan Trigg and entitled 'Hitler's Jihadis.' I knew nothing of this story and wondered how it came about, how many were involved, how this could be reconciled with Hitler's Aryan fantasies. Questions came tumbling out and I turned that into a proposal for a radio documentary.

Later this month Radio 4 will broadcast a programme called Hitler's Muslim Legions. A clue as to the care and attention taken in producing this programme was the discussion surrounding the title. Was it right to juxtapose Hitler and Muslims like this? Is the word legions appropriate - especially the use of the plural?

The story reveals that over 70,000 Muslims fought for Hitler, many in the Waffen SS. There are photographs of Himmler visiting these Muslim soldiers and an extraordinary photograph of Hitler in conversation with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (although not a figure of lasting significance, he was central to the recruitment of Bosnian Muslims). The title is undoubtedly accurate.

However the debate illustrates some of the care taken in making what is nevertheless a challenging documentary. As story it fits comfortably within a tradition on Radio 4 of exploring little known aspects of the war: Document, for example, reported how thousands of Sikhs renounced allegiances with Britain and instead fought for Hitler; Secret Warriors looked at the involvement of British Jews in the 1947 War of Independence and militant activity against British forces; France's Forgotten Concentration Camps investigated French collaboration with the Germans; Crossing Continents (Reopening Lithuania's old wounds) reported on allegations that Holocaust survivors had committed war crimes. So the basic idea for the programme was not exceptional.

What of the story itself? Well, with over 70,000 people involved, it was clearly a significant enough number for it to be of import. However, of course, many more Muslims fought for the Allies - and this is made clear in the programme. But there are other fascinating aspects of the story: how did they reconcile their vision of a master race made of Aryans with using Muslims to fight for them? And what motivated the Muslims to join up? The answers reveal much about the contradictions and absurdities of Nazism. The motivations of the Muslims themselves ("starve or join") are telling about the realities of war.

Inevitably a little-known story such as this restricts the cast list of contributors. In fact we found a number of serious historians who did know something of the story. What was surprising - well, perhaps not altogether surprising - was the paucity of Muslim scholarship. We did try a range of Muslim academics and organisations and all but one felt they did not know enough about the subject to contribute . But the programme did pull off a coup - an eyewitness account: a German, now in his 80s, lived and worked with Muslim soldiers when he was 19.

Indeed, thanks to the journalistic diligence of the producer Jenny Chryss and the measured commentary of seasoned reporter, Julian O'Halloran, Hitler's Muslim Legions throws an illuminating light on a remarkable chapter in the continuing story of the Second World War.

Samir Shah is Executive Producer of Hitler's Muslim Legions

Hitler's Muslim Legions is on BBC Radio 4 at 2000 on Mon 26th.
The picture shows Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (ca. 1895 - 4 July 1974). The picture is from the Wikimedia Commons. He has a detailed Wikipedia entry.

Does 'Muslim Demographics' abuse numbers?

2009-08-07T12:30:07+00:00

On More or Less we patiently survey the statistical landscape. It's a kind of mathematical stakeout. When, finally, a number-abuser strays out into the open - we pounce.

Our victims are usually journalists or politicians. But of course now there are other channels open to the purveyor of rogue statistics.

A recent YouTube video, Muslim Demographics, uses data to portray the rapid Islamification of Europe and the United States. The claims it makes are rather startling.

But is a YouTube video fair game for More or Less? It's an interesting question - not least because we don't know who made the video. Or why (though one might speculate).

We decided to pounce. After all, the video's been played over 10 million times. That's a big hit. And it chimes with a thesis - the rise of 'Eurabia' - which has some traction elsewhere.

So how reliable are the statistics in the Muslim Demographics video? The short answer is: not very. But the long answer is more interesting, because the video is mix of the right, the wrong and the unknowable.

It's quite hard to dispute a figure for which there's no firm data either way. Take, for example, the video's claim that half of Dutch new-borns are Muslim. The Dutch cannot provide the relevant data because they don't collect it.

But Dutch statisticians estimate a Muslim population of 5 per cent of the total population. So to put it bluntly: could 5 per cent of Dutch women really be having 50 per cent of Dutch babies?

It sounds unlikely. But it's not an easy question to answer. If you want to see how we set about it, you might like to read this essay by my colleague Oliver Hawkins. Indeed, if you're into maths, we positively encourage you to; you might be able to suggest an even more elegant calculation.

The video is over seven minutes long, covering more ground than we could deal with on the radio. So we've made a video of our own - a more thorough analysis - and we've posted it on YouTube as a reply to the original video. It's embedded here, too.

If you like it, do pass it on.

Richard Knight is Series Editor of More or Less

You can embed the More or Less video on your own web site: click the 'share' button at bottom right of the video and copy the embed code to your web page.
The new series of More or Less starts today at 1330 on Radio 4. In the first programme Tim Harford investigates statistics which some claim reveal the 'Islamification' of Europe and checks whether the Home Office has been doing its sums properly. Do its claims about the DNA Database really add up?
Muslim Demographics on YouTube and the More or Less reply.
Richard Knight has written a longer piece about Muslim Demographics for the BBC News Magazine.