UK Islamic Sharia Council (ISC) scholar Khola Hasan told the BBC that “every Muslim” she knows is celebrating the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan.
Hasan, who has appeared in several programmes about so-called “sharia courts” in Britain, serving as a “judge” on what is supposed to be one of the more moderate examples of such institutions, claimed that the Taliban has “grown up” during 20 years of insurgency using hostage-taking, prisoner massacres, child suicide bombers, and insider attacks to retake Afghanistan.
“They’re learning. That’s not an easy thing to do, to come from hundreds of years of one way practising your faith, and then suddenly exposed to different ways to think, ‘oh maybe we got it wrong’,” she said in comments to BBC Radio 4, as quoted by MailOnline — as if the Taliban had given any indication that it any way regrets the way it ruled in the past.
“The problem is we don’t give them a chance,” Hasan complained, alleging that “Western media loves misrepresenting Muslims” and ranting:
The kind of language that came out from Western media when the Taliban took over — civil war, monsters, they’re going to slaughter people, it’s going to be awful, poor women, oh blah blah blah we’re going to cry our eyes out, poor women are going back into Medieval times, and all the rest of it.
It’s been misrepresented for so long that I’ve got used to it, I don’t even blink an eyelid anymore.
The sharia judge went on to say that “Every single person that I know as a Muslim, whether on social media, I don’t know them personally but I know them on social media or as friends, are celebrating [the Taliban’s victory] and saying ‘give them a chance’.”
Hasan has received some pushback from sections of Britain’s Muslim community, however, with Dr Taj Hargey, of the Oxford Centre for British Islam, penning an article for The Daily Mail lamenting that he found himself “wishing that the BBC still employed rigorous journalists instead of ‘wokelings’ who are afraid to question anything for fear of seeming sexist or racist” as he listened to her interview.
“[T]he BBC appeared terrified of contradicting Ms Hasan, simply because she is a Muslim woman and should therefore be allowed to assert any nonsense she likes without fear of contradiction,” Dr Hargey lamented.
“The show did feature a courageous campaigner for Afghan women’s rights, the filmmaker Diana Saqeb Jamal, who dismissed Hasan’s claims as ‘insane’,” he conceded, but noted that “Ms Hasan ignored her, and was permitted the last word. She was also allowed to assert that oppression of women in France was worse than in Afghanistan,” he continued, in reference to policies such as the French ban on face-veiling in pubic.
“Ms Hasan and the Islamic Sharia Council (ISC) operate in a theological bubble. The ISC is self-appointed, founded by her father Sheikh Suhaib Hasan in 1982 to promote sharia law in Britain,” Targey accused, insisting that he had himself “not met a single person in Britain who welcomes the return of the Taliban, not online, at the mosque or anywhere else.”