Non-Muslims react to: Debate about Islam at Oxford University

0:03 thank you very much mr president ladies and gentlemen good evening assalamu alaikum lovely to see you all here tonight we are having a very entertaining night are we not with some very interesting things being said uh from the other side of the house tonight um let me begin by saying as a muslim as a representative of islam i would consider myself an ambassador for islam a believer in islam a follower of islam and its profit so in that capacity let me begin by apologizing to anne-marie for the barley bombings i apologize for the role of my religion and me and my people uh for the killing of theo van gaal for seven seven yes that was all of us that was islam that was muslims that was the quran i mean

0:49 astonishing astonishing claims to make in the very first speech tonight on a day like today where the conservative prime minister of the united kingdom is having to come out and point out that these kind of views are anathema and i believe you're trying to stand for the labour party to become an mp in brighton if you do and you make these comments i'm guessing you'll have the whip withdrawn from you but then again ukip's on the rise they'll take you the bnp they might have something to say about your views by the way by the way by the way by the way by the way it's not a factual point since we heard a lot about the second speaker about how backward we muslims all are on a factual point you said that islam was born in saudi arabia islam was born in 610 a.d saudi arabia was born in 1932

1:34 a.d so you were only 1 32 years off not bad not bad start there talking of maths by the way a man named al-kawarismi was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time a muslim worked in the golden age of islam he's the guy who came up with not just algebra but algorithms without algorithms you wouldn't have laptops without laptops daniel johnson tonight wouldn't have been able to print out his speech in which he came to berate as muslims for holding back the advance and intellectual achievements of the west which all happened without any contribution from anyone else other than the judeo-christian people of europe in fact daniel david levering the author of the pulitzer prize-winning historian and author of the golden crucible pointed out that there would be no renaissance there would be no reformation in europe without the role played by ibn sinha and ibn rushd and some of the great muslim

2:20 theologians philosopher scientists in bringing greek text to europe as for this being our university i will leave that to the imagination as to who is our and who is there i studied here too an astonishing astonishing set of speeches so far making this case tonight a mixture of just cherry-picked quotes facts and figures self-serving selective a farago of distortions misrepresentations misinterpretations misquotations uh daniel talked about my article in the new statesman which got me a lot of flack where i talked about the anti-semitism that is prevalent in some parts of the muslim community which indeed it is uh of course i didn't say

3:07 in that piece that it was caused by the religion of islam in fact modern anti-semitism in the middle east was imported from finish the sentence christian judeo-christian europe where i believe some certain bad things happen to the jewish people in fact tom friedman jewish american columnist in new york times told me in this very chamber last week that he believed had muslims been running europe in the 1940s six million extra jews would still be alive today so i'm not going to take lessons in anti-semitism from someone who's here to defend the judeo-christian values of a continent that murdered 6 million jews moving swiftly on moving swiftly yes you're doing on what absolutely well i'm about to make that point no no i'm about to be on the point you're right i agree with you i agree with you i agree with you 110

3:54 that is my point i don't think europe is evil or bad i'm a very proud european i don't want to judge europe on the basis but if we're going to play this gutter game where we pull out the barley bombing and we pull out examples of anti-semitism in the islamic movie then of course i'm going to come back and say well hold on i mean look let's be very clear daniel here was a last-minute replacement for douglas murray who had to pull out and douglas and i have a well-documented differences but to be fair to douglas as to be fair to anne marie and to peter atheists atheists see all religions as evil violent threatening what the problem i have with daniel's speech is that daniel comes here to run this robust defense of christianity forgetting that his fellow christians people who said they were acting in the name of jesus gave us the crusades the spanish inquisition the anti-jewish pogroms european colonialism in africa

4:40 and asia the lord's resistance army in uganda not to mention countless arsenal and bomb attacks on abortion clinics in the united states of america to this very day i would like a little bit of humility from daniel first before he begins lecturing other communities and other faiths on violence terror and intolerance but no thank you that's the water but i would say this to address the gentleman's very valid point here i'm not going to play that game i don't actually believe that christianity is a religion of violence and hate because of what the lra does in uganda or what what crusaders did to jews and muslims in jerusalem when they took the city in the 12th or 13th whatever century it was i believe that christianity like islam like pretty much every mainstream religion is based on love and compassion

5:27 and faith i do follow a religion in which 113 out of 114 chapters of the quran begins by introducing the god of islam as a god of mercy and compassion i would not have it any other way i don't follow a religion which introduces my god to me as a god of war as some kind of greek god of wrath as a god of hate and injustice not at all as adam pointed out you go through the quran and you see the mercy and the love and the justice and yes you have verses that refer to warfare and violence of course it does this is not a motion about pacifism i'm not here to argue that islam is a pacifistic faith it is not islam allows military action violence in certain limited contexts and yes a minority of muslims do take it out of that context but is it religious we talked about

6:12 woolwich daniel and anne-marie have suggested that it's definitely religion that's behind all of this well actually what i find so amusing tonight is we're having a debate about islam and the opposition tonight have come forward we have a graduate in law a graduate in modern history a graduate in chemistry and you know i admire all of their intellects and their abilities but we don't have anyone who's actually an expert on islam a scholar of islam a historian of islam a speaker of arabic even a terrorism expert or a security expert or a pollster let alone to talk about what muslims believe or think instead we have people coming here putting forward these views putting forward these sweeping opinions listen to professor robert pape of the university of chicago one of america's leading terrorism experts who unlike our esteemed opposition tonight studied

6:58 every single case of suicide terrorism between 1980 and 2005 315 cases in total and he concluded and i quote there is little connection between suicide terrorism and islamic fundamentalism or any of the world's religions rather what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland and the irony is when we talk about terrorism the irony is that the opposition and the muslim terrorists the al-qaeda types actually have one thing in common because they both believe that islam is a war-like violent religion they both agree on that they have everything in common osama bin laden would be nodding along to everything he's heard tonight from the opposition side he agrees with them

7:45 the problem is the problem is that mainstream muslims don't the majority of muslims around the world don't in fact a gentleman quoting all sorts of polls gallup carried out the biggest pole of muslims around the world of 35 000 50 000 muslims in 35 countries 93 of muslims rejected 9 11 and suicide attacks and of the seven percent who didn't they all when polled and focus groups cited political reasons for their support for violence not religious reasons and as for islamic scholars and what they say well daniel talks about our university of oxford we'll go down to oxford's center for islamic studies get hold of a man named sheikh afifi al-aqiti who is a massively well credentialed and well-respected islamic scholar who has studied across the world who in the days after 7-7 published a fact while

8:32 denouncing terrorism in the name of islam calling for the protection of all non-combatants at all times and describing suicide bombings as an innovation with no basis in islamic law go and listen to shaykh one of pakistan's most famous islamic scholars who published a 600-page fatwa condemning the killing of all innocents and all suicide bombings unconditionally without any ifs or bots there's nothing new here this is mainstream islam mainstream scholarship which has said this for years you don't go out and kill people willy-nilly in the high street or anywhere else on a bus or a mall based on verses of the quran that you cherry pick without any context any understanding any interpretation or any commentary please

9:18 well it doesn't happen apparently i didn't say it doesn't happen at all i never said it didn't happen i don't blame islam yes it's a very good point and a lot of us a lot of us are campaigning against that and we're campaigning against it in the name of islam we're campaigning against in the name of various interpretations of islam anne-marie comes and scares us with her talk of sharia law i would like to see the book of sharia law it doesn't exist people argue over what sharia law is and you empower the extremists by saying there is only one version you empower them all i don't believe you took any interruptions so i think you should stay there for a moment here's what we're dealing with here's what we're dealing with we are dealing i took your point i took your point here we are dealing with a 1400 year old global religion followed by 1.6 billion people in every corner of

10:03 the world a quarter of humanity of all backgrounds cultures ethnicities and yet the opposition tonight wants to generalize stereotype smear in order to desperately win this debate and here's my question if we're going to generalize and smear if okay people say yesterday's bombers and we've got to be careful there's a trial going on were yesterday's attackers sorry motivated by islam big debate i don't believe they were let's say they were let's say faisal shazad the time square bomber was motivated by islam let's assume for the sake of argument uh that richard reads the shoe bomb was about islam if islam is responsible for these killers if islam is what is motivating these people and islam is therefore not a religion of peace or religion of war then ask yourself this question why aren't the rest of us doing it why is it such a tiny minority of muslims are interpreting their religion in the way that the opposition claim

10:49 they are let's assume there are 16 000 suicide bombers in the world there aren't let's assume there are for the sake of argument that's 0.001 percent of the muslim population globally what about the other 99.99 of muslims who the opposition tonight either ignore or smear the reality is that the rest of us aren't blowing ourselves up tonight the reality is that the opposition came here tonight not worried about the fact that me and adam might pull open our jackets and blow ourselves up because we're followers of a war like warrior religion which wants to take over europe and daniel's university the issue is this the issue is this unless the opposition can tell us tonight and peter atkins is here one of our great atheist intellectuals can tell us tonight can they can answer this question tonight why don't the vast majority of muslims around the world behave as violently and aggressively as

11:35 a tiny minority of politically motivated extremists then they might as well give up and stop pretending they have anything relevant to say about islam or muslims as a whole ladies and gentlemen let me just say this to you think about what the opposite of this motion is if you vote no tonight think about what you're saying the opposite motion is that islam isn't a religion of peace it's a religion of war of violence of terror of aggression that the people who follow islam me my wife my retired parents my six-year-old child that 1.8 million of your fellow british residents and citizens at 1.6 billion people across the world your fellow human beings are all followers promoters believers in a religion of violence do you really think that do you really believe that to be the case they say that in the oxford union the most famous debate was in 1933 when adolf hitler looked out for the result of the king and country motion where they voted against fighting for king and country and hitler was listening out for the

12:21 result well tonight 80 years on there are two groups of people around the world who i would argue are waiting for the result of tonight's vote there are the millions of peaceful non-violent law-abiding muslims both in the uk europe asia africa and beyond who see islam as the source of their identity as a source of spiritual fulfillment of hope of solace and there are the phobes the haters the bigots out there who want to push the clash of civilizations who want to divide all of us into them and us and ours and there ladies and gentlemen i urge you all not to fuel the arguments of the phobes and bigots don't legitimize their divisions don't legitimize their hate trust those muslims who you know who you've met who you hear who don't believe in violence who do want you to hear the peaceful message of the quran as they believe it

13:07 to be taught to the majority of muslims the islam of peace and compassion and mercy the islam of the quran not of al-qaeda ladies and gentlemen i beg to propose this motion to the house i urge you to vote yes tonight thank you very much for your time so i i just think it's very unfair that why has islam been singled out as this horrendous bad violent religion just because of what a tiny percentage of extremists have done claiming it's in the name of islam why don't we do that why don't we look at other religions and treat it the same and use what a minority of extremists have done

13:53 to dictate how we feel about the entire religion i'm personally not a follower of islam but i still can look at actually the facts and the people that i know that follow islam that are kind lovely caring helpful people that don't agree with what these extremists have done and are very open and say that that isn't islam you can say something's in the name of it but that doesn't actually embody what the religion is about and i think what was really interesting in that video is how he was saying the people that are arguing against him have they actually gone and studied islam have they studied the quran in its depth

14:38 like i can hold my personal opinions but how can i you know start arguing against something if i haven't looked into it properly and i think that was really interesting i think actually the way he put his point across was so powerful that you can't argue against it he's the facts the numbers that he you know he puts in there he he is a follower of islam he knows what the quran says he knows the ins and outs of it all and yet there are people out there who've probably never picked it picked the book up never probably never even done a google search on the religion and go oh well this is

15:25 what the media says this is what society says so we'll follow that we'll create a divide we'll create you know i just i personally don't understand why people feel that way i think if more people saw that video and actually took the time to think and reflect i think that you know the world would be a better place i think that you know those principles could probably be applied to different religions different ethnic minorities different groups of people that why do we base the majority of the good people why do we overrule them by the minority of the bad people

16:12 you know i think i don't know i i feel very um overwhelmed by that actually because i think that made me personally think a lot and actually question what i've heard and what i've seen in the media is that true or is that just a popular opinion that is posted to create controversy and to get views and to get likes again i thought that video was very very educational and inspiring as religion is not something i know lots about but to bring together everyone in unity and a community and to educate yourself and all the

16:58 different religions is very important there are so many different religions out there everyone believes they're true to believe whatever they want to believe and it's just about aligning everyone and bringing everyone together and it doesn't have to be a competition who's better and it's just all about educating yourself with all the different religions wow that was um obviously hassan is very intellectually versed in um saying the argument that islam is a peaceful religion and i really agree with that um obviously as i said in the previous videos or saying it now i'm not i'm not an islam

17:44 identifying i don't identify myself as a muslim i don't identify myself with any religion i do feel like there is a higher power out there but um i'm more of into spirituality and having my own beliefs but i feel that there's not a lot of media representation for the beliefs of muslim and i'm so glad that there's someone who spoke up like hassan uh that islam isn't a religion of war because it really isn't um you could say the islams could even say that the christianity is a religion of war with how many wars that have been started in the last hundreds and thousands of years ago

18:29 because of religion because of christianity but just because there's so much activity at the moment with what matthias son said i'm so sorry i'm not really well versed into this type of um argument but i feel that each uh each side have that has their own argument and it would be so unfair for people to vote that islam would be a religion of war because as i said christianity has also done its um has done its past uh has had its history in war and civil war um and i just feel that you don't see a lot of videos like this

19:15 going around and i'm quite glad to see this because honestly i don't know a lot about the islamic religion um i've not done a lot of research since a level uh gcse where i studied philosophy and ethics um so i can't really say too much about the topic um because i would just i would just be talking really stupid stuff but um this isn't super stubborn but i have not seen an argument like this at all in the way it has been set because it's not really openly accessible to the public and if it is i feel that the public would be more

20:01 more able to accept that islam is a good religion not just peaceful it's also good it as hassan said it so many people rely on it for their spirituality their uh their mental health probably in that the way the way they're living you know it's it's how they see themselves as how they identify themselves and for people to just you know smear it as you said and make it sound like a really bad religion just because of the activity that has been happening in the past it would be really unfair because we could say the same for christianity we could say the same for so many other religions who have started wars in the name of their god or gods you know

20:46 um and i feel like this was really really good to watch and i just hope that the public can the majority of the public can also watch this and stuff like this not just for islam and and for other religions as well so we can just accept to that we have different beliefs and accept that it's how we go about our lives and how we find inner peace how we find to have stable mental health and how we find to just go about the world and yeah um i quite like watching this i almost feel like i should take a breath for him because he didn't stop talking for about

21:32 13 minutes um but everything that he said uh was was you know made a lot of sense the only thing he did say in that which which i didn't agree with is that all atheists or agnostics think that uh all religion is evil i'm an atheist and i certainly don't think that any religion is evil including islam but uh i would like to have heard the other side of that the opposition what they had to say before that because his response to that suggests that they were saying some horrible things and if they were they need to take a look at themselves because you know it didn't it didn't seem like they were being very fair for what they were saying so i thought a lot of his

22:18 points you know that 99.99 of muslims um are peaceful they're just like anyone else on earth uh from you know doesn't matter what your religion is or you know no religion you know majority of people on earth are peaceful and they want a normal life they want to treat people with respect with compassion and that is no different from islam so i agreed with a lot of you know pretty much everything that he said uh across that video and um it actually strikes a chord with me a little bit i won't go on about this too long but in terms of religion and political ideology them two things are

23:03 separate and should always remain separate i'm from northern ireland where there has been a conflict there's been an irish conflict for hundreds and hundreds of years the aggressor being britain and a lot of people in britain still think that catholics and protestants who live in northern ireland disagree because of religion and religion only that is not the case catholics happen to be from an irish nationalist uh perspective and protestants tend to be from the british unionist perspective it happens to be the catholics the

23:48 original irish people want ireland to reunite the protestants are from britain and they wish northern ireland to remain part of the uk so i can see the parallels there um you know we had a conflict of our own and it wasn't about protestant and catholic because they're very similar they're under the same umbrella of christianity so it's not really like oh we we disagree with you because we believe in the virgin mary and you don't you know it doesn't come down to religion it comes down to political ideology and yes there will be some people out there who do fight palestine for example are they doing it because of religion because they because they don't believe in the jewish religion no they're doing it because they've been

24:35 bombed uh in syria sorry in in in the gaza strip for for for years and they're trying to defend their land they're trying to claim what is theirs it's a political ideology it's not religious and i think this video um brings that to light very good speaker that guy i must say um he knows his stuff very intelligent and very right you know what he's saying most definitely so i think again a lot of people from this part of the world should watch videos like that and open their mind not all muslims in fact the vast vast majority of them

25:21 are not violent and do not want to be violent yep so a lot to take in there um is islam a peaceful religion well i think it's very true what many uh many of the points made there you know it's like most religions you you can uh look at them you can interpret them in a way that they come from a good place they come from a place of love you know but there is a difference as well between the scripture the intention of the scripture the interpretation of the

26:08 scripture and the reality on the ground and the reality on the ground in in many places is that religions including islam are you know medi mentioned there that um [Music] you know a lot of people it is a source of their identity a source of uh solace a source of confidence you know and a lot of religions are empowering they are facilitating these people who are extremists to go forward and commit uh their acts with what they believe is the blessing of this religion and that's true for

26:54 extremists from any religion or cult or particular belief system really you know the question here really is looking at these politically motivated true extremists would they be more or less likely to go ahead with the acts they commit if they were muslim or belong to a different religion or were atheists or just you know were agnostic or any other denomination um you know does islam

27:39 actively promote peace compared with for example a non-believer you know um i know that the infrastructure of religion be that muslim or of another uh group of uh believers for example uh churches or mosques or temples or whatever these serve as nexuses as meeting grounds as training grounds people meet and share ideas and if those ideas are good that can be a force for good and if those ideas are bad then it can be a source of bad the fact that it is an organized religion that religion is organized it enhances

28:27 and it spreads the ideas are present in a community already we see this in christianity for a lot of very horrible christian communities in the uk in the us you know we see this in these mad like uh anti-abortion uh christians and like god hates gays god hates you know like this is fundamentally uh it is nurtured and it is facilitated by the organizational for religion and unfortunately the same thing happens with islam you know you have people with horrible ideas they're able to come together at not every mosque but you know their local society or mosque or whatever nexus there is in that

29:12 community that has that toxic problem and unfortunately i think that gives them a platform it gives them a place to talk about it and to you know but this is not exclusive to islam however the debate here is is islam a peaceful religion i think all religions have the power to be a force for good or a forced about and unfortunately i think most of them these days are doing more harm than good but that is a political thing that is stems from the inherent feeling in these communities