Last year, the AfD hung campaign posters in Dortmund featuring women in burqas and the slogan “Stop Islamization.” This year’s poster bore the words “Islam-free schools!” under an image of five beaming, light-skinned children.
Seddiqzai, who was born to Afghan parents in the German city of Bochum and who wears a full beard and Nikes to school, said he worries about the effect on his students. “These posters tell them, ‘We don’t want you here,’ ” he said.
Is Seddiqzai also worried about Muslims who take to heart the Qur’anic commandments to wage war against the Infidels until the whole world submits to Islam? Or is he only concerned about the feeling of rejection — “we don’t want you here” — that must surely wound the feelings of young Muslims in Germany? Ought he not discuss with his students some of the reasons Germans might remain wary of Muslims? Could the German wariness about Muslims have anything to do with the Muslim terrorist attacks all over Europe, in Madrid, Barcelona, Paris (many times), Nice, Toulouse, Magnanville, Amsterdam, Brussels, London (many times), Manchester, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich,Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Malmo, Turku, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Beslan?
Is the anxiety among Germans about Muslims and Islam not well-founded? Shouldn’t he be describing to his students the deep impression the sexual attacks on 1,400 women by 2,000 Muslim predators in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015 made on Germans? And how should Germans have reacted to the reports of Muslim grooming gangs in nearly thirty cities in the United Kingdom, and of those tens of thousands of young English girls whom they preyed on, often engaging in mass rape?
I doubt that any of this intolerable behavior by Muslims forms part of Seddiqzai’s classroom discussion. The suspicion and fear of Muslims felt by many Germans is not a manifestation of islamophobia, but a result of the behavior of too many Muslims to ignore or discount.
“They are not accepted in Germany, they are not accepted in the countries of their parents, and that produces this craving for a group to belong to,” he [Professor Behr] continued. “And then an Islamist comes to you and says, ‘Yeah, you don’t belong to anyone. Therefore just be Muslim.’ They offer them a third way.”
Seddiqzai sees it as part of his job to make his students more informed in their consumption of such appeals.
If Mansur Seddiqzai wants to make his students “more informed” so that they will not heed the siren-song of “Islamists,” he ought to confront head on, rather than pass over in silence, the most violent and aggressive teachings of Islam. He can explain to students that the “extremists” who take these teachings to heart will, when they inveigle potential recruits into joining them, initially provide a “sanitized” version of Islam, but eventually reveal, and promote, those same violent teachings.
Earlier this year, when local politicians were discussing a ban on headscarves, a group calling itself Reality Islam launched a social media campaign to protest the proposal and recruit students. Seddiqzai showed his students how to trace Reality’s Islam’s links to Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist group banned in Germany since 2003. He also encouraged them to question the group’s stance on the headscarf, which it claimed the Koran mandates for women.
“I show them the Koranic verses about the headscarf, and we discuss it and we see there is no clear rule that a woman or girl has to wear a headscarf,” he said. “Most of them think the Koran itself has no contradictions, and even that is wrong. There are many contradictions in the Koran.”
Seddiqzai did — helpfully — show his students how Muslim extremists who have been banned from Germany use front groups as, in this case, Hizb-ut-Tahrir exploited Reality Islam’s campaign against banning the hijab. He further explained that the wearing of the hijab is not mandated in the Qur’an, and wanted his students to recognize that the Qur’an contains many contradictions. That is an important admission. But does he then go on to discuss how those contradictions are resolved, through the doctrine of naskh, or abrogation? He does not. Nor does he appear to tell his students that whenever there is a contradiction between two verses in the Qur’an, it is the earlier, milder, so-called Medinan verses, which are held to have been abrogated by the later, harsher, Meccan verses.