(This article was originally published in Jordan’s Living Well magazine)

I always wondered whether there was a deliberate Western conspiracy for the “uglification” of Islam, or whether it was the Muslims themselves who did not need outside help in this regard. I accidentally coined the term “uglification” a little more than a year ago on these pages, and by that, I was referring to the stubborn campaign to reduce Islam into a peculiar sect of sorcery and senseless mythology.

This campaign is underway to represent Islam as devoid of beauty and good taste, despite the overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary, and the slanderous attempts to turn its prophet into a prolific babbler of jumbled fairytales, instead of the magnanimous humanitarian and genius – and even revolutionary women’s rights advocate – that evidence shows he truly had been. While I’m not usually prone to believing conspiracy theories, I did encounter personal evidence proving that the elaborate plot of “uglification” was a result of a mixture between the two: our own devastating ignorance and adherence to forged texts, but also the West’s active participation in promoting and perpetuating the outright lies.

One case in point which I shall never be able to forget took place exactly twenty years ago, during my first weeks at Charterhouse, the boarding school and bastion of the British establishment in which I landed at the tender age of 16. In that pillar of the English public school system, they used to invite certain speakers to address the students on various occasions, to educate the offspring of the British elite, so to speak, about other cultures and to promote tolerance and understanding.

At one such event, we were gathered to listen to a presentation about the different world religions and their contrasting beliefs and practices, given by a person introduced to us as an expert on this subject. After giving us a tour of the basic tenets of what everyone else believed, the lecturer then turned to Islam. I vividly recall the excitement I felt at that moment as a homesick student, proudly waiting for my schoolmates to find out what this misunderstood religion was all about.

Our guest speaker stood there with his aristocratic posture and impeccable upper class accent, and confined his description of Islam to the following short sentence: “Islam is a religion from the Arabian desert that set many teachings for its followers to abide by, for example, the requirement to eat food with their right hands, the rationale being that the left hand is designated for cleaning oneself after going to the toilet”. That was it. The time he allotted for Islam was over.

I swear by the God of all the religions which I learnt about that day that this was the only example that came out of his mouth. Coming from a supposedly learned authority, this incident confirmed to me that this guy came to the auditorium with a premeditatedly devious purpose, and could not have uttered what he said to this knowledge-thirsty audience out of sheer ignorance or lack of information. So, while Jesus died on the Cross for our sins and Buddhism preached peace and tranquility, Islam was apparently all about wiping your behind using the correct hand. So much for my pride amongst my peers that day.

Needless to say, I survived the racist atmosphere and bigotry purposely instilled in the minds of young Brits by such “educational” talks and, with the exception of a few fist-oriented episodes of defiance on my part, I continued on to law school at Southampton University quite peacefully. There, I came across an example of our own role in the same “uglification” project.

Philip, an older postgraduate friend of mine from Syria, wanted to marry his childhood sweetheart, Yusra, and was willing to convert to Islam to satisfy her father’s only condition. So he asked my advice on how to go about conversion, and I assured him that, if he must, no formalities were needed since it should all be in his heart. Still, he said there was paperwork that Yusra’s father in Syria demanded to see and that such proof of conversion could be obtained from the local – and only – mosque in Southampton. He asked me to drive him there to assist in getting one of these off-the-counter deeds of faith.

At first, I tried very hard to convince him out of it because I heard of no such proof of conversion to Islam before, and I didn’t particularly want to discuss the subject of his foreskin either (I also knew that this pathetic excuse for a mosque was right in the middle of Southampton’s unglamorous red-light district, and that it wasn’t exactly supposed to be the first monument on which Philip should feast his eyes upon entering his new faith). But Philip, who was an accomplished violinist, was also a hopeless romantic and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not being one to stand in the face of a love story determined to challenge traditions, I hopped with Philip in my car and headed down to St. Mary’s sleazy alleyways and drug-infested streets (the name given to that part of town was not very fitting from a Christian standpoint either). On the way there, I joked with Philip that in Islam he would already gain points (hasanat) with God by visiting the mosque, because the trip in itself involves a great deal of resisting temptations. He soon appreciated what I was talking about.

After getting past the hooker or two standing near the door (and convincing them that our visit to their seedy neighbourhood was to accomplish a somewhat different type of union), we entered the main room of this so-called mosque where a typical Taliban style madrasa for little kids was in full blown session. I noticed Philip was taken aback by the horrible stench of the place, but was being too polite to point it out. We walked over the shoulders of the young boys crammed on the floor – who were making noises like a swarm of bees while swaying their heads up and down in a trance, reciting what were supposed to be verses from the Quran, without understanding a word because none of them spoke any Arabic. The Imam then took us into a private multi-purpose bedroom where we could hear ourselves speak. In there, he sat on his bed and started fiddling with typed paper forms to choose one for Philip to sign in order to officially join the tribe. All of a sudden, Philip’s face twitched and froze in astonishment as the Imam took grab of the bed sheets underneath him and used them to blow his nose for what seemed to be a deafening eternity.

“Fill up these papers and take them down to the mosque in London for authentication”, the Imam with a flu said to my gobsmacked friend. Authentication in London? There is useless bureaucracy in God’s name as well? We took the papers and, again, stumbled over the bodies of the lost generation of future Bin Ladens on the way out. “Are you sure you still wanna do this”, I ironically asked Philip as we headed towards the car, waving goodbye to the same mini skirts stationed outside. “See you later, luv”, one of them winked back at me. Sounds like a dirty good idea, I said to myself. But seriously, there was Philip to worry about here. I could not be vindictive and give him the ‘I told you so’ routine. What could I say to him, I wondered? “We’re not all like this, you know”, I apologetically mumbled to my poor friend, who was now, whether he liked it or not, one of us: “the best nation bestowed upon mankind”.

Indeed, there was really nothing that I could say to make sense of why a nation with such a glorious history accepts today to be dictated in its matters of faith by the most ignorant of its sons. The tragedy was very complicated, and I could not do justice to it while leaving the vicinity of St. Mary’s brothels. Nor is it possible to do so in this short article, but I’ll try to summarize.

The clandestine relationship between that venomous British ‘expert’ on religions back at Charterhouse and the Imam who could not be bothered to reach for a tissue to clean his nose was not self-explanatory to me at the time, nor, in the least, to the love-struck passenger next to me. However, the sinister connection between the two became clearer later on when I researched the origins of the Wahabist ideology and discovered the role of the British colonialists in digging up and empowering this fundamentalist cult of absolute madness.

Apparently, through the laborious efforts of such evil men of empire as the one who visited us in Charterhouse that morning, this obtuse sect of Islam was rescued from oblivion and pumped up from an insignificant speck to become eventually capable of drowning the entire mainstream Islamic literature with oceans of austere edicts and perverted prohibitions. Using the infinitely generous petro-dollar funding to lay down the foundations of the religious education curricula for every Muslim child and adult from Qandahar to Southampton, our religion has been robbed from us and was being totally and irreparably deformed.

Today, I remain absolutely convinced that the same forces who have for decades persevered to keep Islam permanently associated with ugliness and bad taste are still at work, in Nahr El-Bared, Gaza, and other wretched places. They may be spearheaded by the same misinformation factories in the West, but they are also financed and embraced by the willing participants in our midst. In this grand scheme of “uglification” of Islam, the only innocent party is Islam itself. The rest of us are all guilty, either of complicity in action, or worse, complicity in silence.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

Tags: islam, media, rhetoric