On Maajid Nawaz’s LBC radio call-in show, he is forever taking fellow Muslims to task. He berates them if they believe homosexuals or adulterers should be stoned. He berates them for believing in sharia. He likens Muslims who believe that stoning adulterers and gays is okay so long as the conditions are met to the BNP (a racist, white nationalist group in the United Kingdom; it is now defunct). He doesn’t believe in the sharia punishment for apostasy or blasphemy. These are all fundamental aspects of Islam. He’s a Muslim who is following a fairy-tale version of Islam, an Islam that doesn’t exist anywhere else but in his mind.
And yet while he denounces Islam, he also lies about its teachings and defends it. There’s a hadith in which saintly Muhammad had rubbish dropped on his door every morning by a neighbouring Jew. Then, good Samaritan that he is, Muhammad went to check on the Jew when he awakened one morning to find no rubbish had been dumped at his door. He wanted to make sure the Jew wasn’t dead or ill. This is the picture Maajid Nawaz painted of Muhammad on one of his radio shows. Meanwhile, Nawaz is neglecting to tell listeners that Muhammad was fond of having his critics killed and tortured, and very fond of killing Jews, even young Jewish boys with so much as one pubic hair.
So what is he? Muslim or non-Muslim or alleged reformist Muslim for pay? If Muhammad is the perfect exemplar and role model for all mankind, who is Maajid that he gets to criticize and denounce his prophet’s teachings and example? You can hear the absolute frustration and rage in fellow Muslims voices when they call in, clearly citing the quran and Muhammad chapter and verse, only to then be told by Maajid that a thing is outdated or is not democratic or is not liberal.
So there you have it from Maajid Nawaz’s own mouth – Islam, essentially, is barbaric and medieval. Or is Maajid saying that he is better or more knowledgeable than Muhammad? If Maajid is all for liberalism and democracy, why is he a Muslim? There’s other religions out there that are absolutely peaceful at heart and by nature. Why be a Muslim? Why follow a religion when you don’t agree with or follow the teachings of its founder? Why follow something that you are having to dispose a great deal of in order to keep following it? Wouldn’t any sane, rational being give it up at some point and realise he or she is onto a loser?
Maajid has publicly stated on his radio show that a lot of the notions and attitudes in the quran, particularly towards women, are outdated and need to be ignored, if not removed altogether. He disagrees with chastising and beating one’s wife, is against slavery (although it continues in Muslim-majority countries today), and he also disavows the hijab, asking why men aren’t made to wear hijabs or be modest. Nothing about him on his radio show would suggest he is a Muslim. He even tells a woman that it’s psychological abuse to teach her daughter that if she isn’t modest and that if she doesn’t wear a hijab that she’ll end up in the hell-fire.
Maajid comes across, to my mind, as an atheist more than a religious person. I’d like him to condense the quran and publish his own little pint-sized version of whatever it is of Muhammad’s teachings are left that he agrees with.