The present street jihad in Leicester has either been blacked out by the media or blamed on Hindu ‘extremists’. Perplexed as to the reasons for the disturbances and trying to evade the obvious source, various reasons have been put forward. In doing so even right-wing media such as the Daily Mail have quoted active cyber jihadis as the source of truth. Established Hindu organisations as usual have remained mostly silent. However, this is not a new phenomenon. It has deep roots.

Social media has been awash with praising Enoch Powell. His 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood speech against race relations legislation and mass immigration of those deemed ‘different’ sealed his fate.

While his career in the Conservative Party was largely over, his brilliant oratory, deep thinking and mesmerising intellect made him an icon for nationalists, patriots and racists. While Powell made racism acceptable there was more to it than just pure prejudice. Watching race riots in America and having seen communal violence in India in its last days under the British, Powell feared that the same strife would hit Britain is different communities came to live here and inhabited their own areas. With the events in Leicester this week, he has been hailed as a prophet. So what was he referring to?

Jinnah’s Ghost

On the eve of India’s independence, its future projection changed forever. Direct Action Day, also known as the 1946 Calcutta Killings, was a day of nationwide communal riots. Leader of the Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah announced 16 August 1946 would be “Direct Action Day” and warned Nehru’s Indian National Congress, “We do not want war. If you want war we accept your offer unhesitatingly.

We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India.” Backed by Churchill and Viceroy Wavell, Jinnah used such violence to force partition on the country.

Succeeded Wavell as viceroy, Mountbatten was compelled to concede Pakistan as the only means of averting civil war on a mass scale. However, this was only the culmination of decades if not longer of British colonial sponsorship of Islamic separatism and power.

While Powell held a deep suspicion of the USA, he admired India, where he was posted in Delhi for Military Intelligence in 1945, Powell learnt Urdu in India. He termed the relationship between India and Britain as “a shared hallucination”. He may have been more accurate than he realized. That hallucination began in the British trying to be India’s new Islamic rulers.

The British East India Company posed as Mughal emperor Shah Alam’s protectors and saviours as his empire broke up. Rupees of the East India Company were struck in his name, and the Company’s seal acknowledged itself as the Mughal emperor’s legal vassal.

Most of the ulama viewed British rule as an improvement to Hindu Marathas. British imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism have enjoyed a mutually conjugal coexistence and axis against the common Hindu enemy.

The Skinners of Hansi, Gardeners of Khasgunge, and Begum Sumru of Sardhana were Anglo-Mughal landed families descended from European mercenaries who had married into the Mughal elite of Delhi. While mostly professing Christianity, some family members were Muslims, and Islam massively influenced their lifestyle.

All lived as Mughal nobility, even speaking Persian and Urdu. As the British East India Company gained power, its white masters adapted themselves to Mughal customs, shedding their Britishness by wearing Indian attire, writing Urdu poetry, taking harems and adopting the ways of the Mughal governing class.

After the failed uprising of 1957 known as the Mutiny, Muslim leaders desperately searched for an accommodation with their new rulers. Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan founder of the Aligarh movement and self styled Wahhabi, clamoured and won British support for Muslims to be spared oppression by majority Hindus. In 1898 his successor, Viqar-ul-Mulk, wrote that the fate of Muslims was entwined with the British.

In 1906 the movement won separate and special representation for Muslims from Lord Minto. That same year it created its political mouthpiece in the shape of the Muslim League which stressed loyalty to the Raj. Churchill forged close friendships with prominent Muslims such as the Aga Khan, Baron Headley (president of the British Muslim Society), Waris Ameer Ali (a London judge), Feroz Khan Noon (a future Prime Minister of Pakistan) and Jinnah.

The actual name ‘Pakistan’ was invented in Cambridge University. Choudhry Rahmat Ali from Punjab, moved to study law at Cambridge in 1930. Three years later he published ‘Now or Never’, in which he argued for a separate state of Pakistan to shelter Indian Muslims from being sacrificed to Hindu nationalism. He was writing on fertile soil.

Britain’s Islamic Roots

While the street jihad and razzias in Leicester have led to revived racism and xenophobia about how Powell was correct and all these foreign cultures should not have been imported, it ignores major flaws.

Recruits for the jihad cause have not only included British born Muslims of immigrant parents, but also native whites; Sulayman Keeler, Samantha Laithwaite, John Letts, Jordan Horner, Sally-Anne Jones. Laithwaite, Letts and Jones actually left Britain to join ISIS, part of a stream of jihad terrorists which the UK has actually exported to other countries. There is nothing here that can be blamed on foreigners. Indeed it has deep roots in Britain itself.

Churchill himself contemplated embracing Islam in 1907. By now Britain was an industrial giant where massive social changes were occurring. The change from a rural to urban society meant that Benthamite utilitarianism and capitalist materialism left a vacuum that could only be filled by some vague Oriental wisdom.

In 1841 Scottish thinker Thomas Carlyle wrote a sympathetic account of Islam in ‘Heroes and Hero Worship’, as like so many others he sought spiritual solace to counter the mechanistic world being thrust upon Britain by the Industrial Revolution. Others saw Christianity and Islam sharing a common spiritual enterprise. Indeed criticism of Islam could be used in exactly the same manner to undermine Christian doctrines. Hence some took the next logical step.

Henry Edward John Stanley, Third Lord of Alderney, became the first Muslim peer of Britain when he converted in 1859, and married his Catholic Spanish wife Fabia in Algeria according to Islamic law. His friend was the Anglophile judge and Indian Muslim leader Syed Ameer Ali (1849-1928) who reaffirmed Muslim loyalty to the British Crown. Rowland George Allanson Allanson-Winn (1855-1935), fifth Baron Headley, was born into Anglicanism. Lord Headley embraced Islam on 16 November 1913 and adopted the Muslim name of Shaikh Rahmatullah al-Farooq.

William Henry Abdullah Quilliam was born into a Methodist family of watch-makers in Liverpool in 1856. After conversion he founded the Liverpool Muslim Institute. Quilliam chose Islam because of its pure monotheism. He was active in giving lectures and literature to propagate the faith as well as defending the Ottoman Empire, issuing fatwas that pan-Islam overrode national identity, and that the umma should form a global caliphate.

Sultan Abdul Hamid II granted Quilliam the title of Sheikh al-Islam for the British Isles. Then there was Marmaduke Pickthall (1875-1936), a High Churchman and son of the Reverend Charles Grayson Pickthall. He converted to Islam in 1917, taking the name Muhammad. In 1919 he formed the Islamic Defence League, quickly renamed the Islamic Information Bureau, with support from native converts Khalid Sheldrake and Lady Cobbold – Lady Evelyn Cobbold was a Scottish aristocrat, who on conversion took the name Zainab. It was in India that he completed his famous English translation of the sacred text, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran. It was published in 1930.

The Dirty Pagans

The Reformation changed how parts of Christian Europe viewed Islam. While Catholic nations such as Spain likened the renegade Protestantism to Islam, the Protestants on their part saw the Turks as potential allies against ‘Popery’. Elizabeth I of England exchanged lavish gifts and cordial letters with sultans Murad III and Mehmet III, as means of consolidating an alliance against Catholic Spain.

The Queen emphasised that unlike Catholicism, her Christianity rejected veneration of images, and was hence closer to Islam. Indeed fragments of broken images were sent to the Turks as proof of Protestant iconoclasticism. English merchants were encouraged to export swords and gunpowder to the Ottoman Turks. In 1592 Francis Bacon defended this policy, and said that the success of Protestant England was due to both English and Turks worshipping the same deity, being foes of idolatry, the antithesis of Catholicism.

It was this which was carried over when the British came to India. Rudyard Kipling and Churchill could relate the monotheism and text based beliefs of Islam. But Hindu culture was too chaotic in its unfathomable polytheism. The fact that it had much in common with the ancient beliefs of the British Isles was of no consequence.

This was despite the basis of schooling on the classics; ancient Greek and Latin with the inescapable mythology of heroes, gods, demons and monsters. There was a Celtic revival looking at Britain’s pre-Christian past, similar to romanticism in Germany.

Unlike German romanticism this did not lead to that same spiritual identification with India. It did however lead to the Aryan racial myth and an aversion to the heathen Hindus, who as the largest surviving body of pagans were an affront to the progressive march of monotheism, in its religious and secular forms.

It is this which has been carried over into the reporting on the razzias in Leicester. Attacking Hindu ‘extremists’ not only avoids confrontation with Islam, but fits in the overall monotheistic framework which has allowed Protestant Christianity to see affinity with Islam, and especially Wahhabism as an analogous Reformation. It also suits political ends.

Pakistan was conceived in Britain. It was carried out in undivided India. The dominant narrative in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and UK was that it was necessary so that Muslims could live free from Hindu oppression.

This same message is beamed through the media and books. Hence when disturbances broke out in Leicester, media channels freely quoted from extreme right-wing Islamic sources that the problem was Hindu extremists, the RSS and even at source prime minister Modi of India. This was at complete variance with what has been happening on the ground. How to explain this deliberate gaslighting and cognitive dissonance?

Inventing Hindu Extremists

With the stabbing of author Salman Rushdie in New York the death sentence over his life is as fresh as it was in 1988 when Khomeini issued the fatwa over Satanic Verses. Back then Muslims burning that book in the cities of Britain was seen to harm race relations. It was seen by racist and neo-Nazi groups as a racial issue because most Muslims were brown and of Asian origin.

Of course this ignored whites such as Britain’s Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) and German-born Sahib Mustaqim Bleher who were very prominent in all this. When the scandal over sexual abuse, rape and trafficking on mainly white girls was exposed, it was called an issue of ‘Asian’ grooming gangs.

Again this ignored that the test ground had been the targeting of Hindu and Sikh girls by men from Muslim background, and only later did it spread its tentacles to the wider community. Ironically by not wanting to profile all Muslims, the mainstream media created a racial issue when it was never just a case of this.

So we return to the issue of Leicester. It is another reincarnation of Jinnah’s Direct Action Day. Just as the police ignored the grooming of vulnerable largely white children for decades, and dismissed the same happening to Hindu and Sikh girls as an ‘internal’ matter for the ‘Asian’ community, so they stand back from the street jihad targeting Hindus.

Again we see similar behaviour when Labour MP Liam Byrne joined and whipped up mobs of Islamic extremists to attack the High Commission of India in London in September 2019. The fact is that there is no Hindu equivalent to this. No extremist Hindus have attacked the High Commission of Pakistan. Gangs of Hindu men have not formed networks that targeted anyone from outside their ‘tribe’ for sexual exploitation just because they are from another ‘community’. Statistic of crime for Hindus in UK are if anything extremely low.

There is no Hindu equivalence to the bombings on London transport, Glasgow airport, Manchester Arena, the attack in a park in Reading, the cruel murder of a sitting MP, Sir David Amess. While these were done by a minority and cannot be blamed on all Muslims, the fact remains that the perpetrators acted in the name of Islam, in the cause of jihad.

Yet this very same cause is lauded from the positions of power in Britain. Liam Byrne is far from the only politician who supports jihad in Kashmir and its Anschluss with Pakistan; even if it is camouflaged as being ‘freedom’ and ‘self-determination’. Its most vocal supporter was Labour peer and now convicted child rapist, Lord Nazir Ahmed. But the issue enjoys support across all political parties. Again there is no Hindu equivalent for this.

With the media blackout and distortion of facts a very grave situation exists. Just as with denying the causal factors behind the mass sexual exploitation of children across Britain were ignored and indeed the children, the victims, were blamed, the issue cannot be suppressed. If not dealt with it will explode. In that situation Britain will face the same social dislocation which Jinnah caused in India in 1946 leading to its division. By trying to be true to their ‘anti-racist’ credentials the largely left-wing mainstream media will only succeed in proving Powell correct.