Some American Thinker readers may be aware that at the end of December (2013) Tim Burton, a host for Liberty Great Britain (GB) radio was charged by West Midlands Police (England) with "racially aggravated harassment." Mr. Burton's "hate crime" was a post on Twitter which described Fiyaz Mughal (who runs an "anti-Islamophobia" website/organisation called Tell MAMA) as a "mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist."

As a result of all this, Burton was supposed to have stood trial on the 18th February 2014 at Birmingham Magistrates' Court. However, that court appearance has been postponed for seven weeks. Apparently, according to the court itself, that postponement has occurred in the interests of justice and the complexity of the case. This is partly because Tim Burton and his defense have been allowed time to arrange that certain expert witnesses appear during the hearing.

The latest twist in this tale, believe it or not, is that there's a newish (29th January) Tell Mama article on, of all things, taqiyya. That article tells us why the word is "misused" by "bigots", "Islamophobes" and "haters". That is, it tells us how all the critics of Islam misuse the word. In fact I'm surprise Fiyaz Mughal didn't use the phrase "myths about taqiyya"; as in the omnipresent phrase "myths about jihad".

Predictably, Tell Mama, or Fiyaz Mughal, is applying taqiyya to taqiyya. Or, to be pompous for a moment, he's using meta-taqiyya.

The prime example of (Sunni) taqiyya about taqiyya is that it's a "Shia phenomenon". And, lo and behold, this Tell Mama article is all about how Shia Muslims used taqiyya to stop their persecution... by Sunni Muslims! Yes, historically, that persecution was usually carried out by Sunni Muslims; a fact which this article conveniently misses out.

To sum this up: Sunni Muslims conquered and then ruled up to a third of the world for many centuries and therefore had no pressing need to employ taqiyya. Shia Muslims, on the other hand, did have such a need.

A Perfect Example of Taqiyya

My favourite example of taqiyya occurred when Mohammed Ayoub (a founder of the Muslim youth magazine The Revival) was being interviewed alongside Tommy Robinson by Catrin Nye for the BBC Asian Network. In this interview Tommy Robinson stated that shariah law was "barbaric". He then asked Mohammad Ayoub the following question: "Do women get put in a hole and stoned?" To which Ayoub replied: "That practice was stopped in the 7th century." (You will see this BBC interview being discussed in this edition of The Revival. And guess what. Sharia stoning is never once mentioned!)

There were no second thoughts on Ayoub's part. The lie came easy to him because lying is actually part of Islam. (The lie can be seen in this video at 2 minutes and 45 seconds.) In other words, Mohammed Ayoub most definitely knew he was lying. There have been tens of thousands of Islamic stonings since the 7th century. There have been hundreds of Islamic stonings, and worse, in the last twenty years. Somewhere in the Islamic world today there will probably be an Islamic stoning. How do I know that? Because there was a stoning in Iran just the other day.

Despite all that, the strength of Mohammed Ayoub's commitment to Islamic taqiyya must have led him to disregard the large video and photographic evidence of Islamic stonings which can be found on YouTube and elsewhere; as well as all the evidence in history books and other forms of documentation. Yet, none of that mattered to this particular Muslim.

The lie didn't matter at that precise moment because Mohammed Ayoub knew that the presenter was ignorant (which she was) of Islam and sharia law and that most non-Muslim viewers would also have been ignorant. That was all that mattered to Ayoub at the time. And that was all that was needed to win -- or so Ayoub thought -- that particular television battle against the non-Muslims.

Indeed Fiyaz Mughal will be hoping that this kind of thing will happen again during his court appearance with Tim Burton. He will be hoping that the jury, judge and viewers will all be ignorant of Islam/taqiyya and also sympathetic to his cause. What non-Muslims discover after the court case will simply be irrelevant to him.

Taqiyya and Ordinary Lying

Fiyaz Mughal seems to think that us "bigots" and "haters" think that "Muslims sit around talking about taqiyya whilst eating their family size KFC chicken buckets". Muslims don't need to because taqiyya is actually built into both the Koran and Islam generally. Even Allah called himself "the greatest deceiver" in the Koran. There are also many other references to Mohammed's own deceit. Muslims, on the whole, simply take it for granted that Muslims are allowed to lie in order to protect and advance Islam.

Mughal tries to make out that all critics of Islam are using the word "taqiyya" indiscriminately and that they also claim that all Muslims lie about everything. He says:

"Furthermore, imagine saying this about any other faith -- that a whole group of people are potential liars and are religiously sanctioned to lie so that they can gain positions of power."

No. Fiyaz Mughal is deliberately lying about what people are saying about taqiyya. No one is saying that all Muslims are compulsive liars on all subjects. We aren't saying that Muslim lie about, say, financial accounts or voting procedures. We are saying, specifically, that Muslims use taqiyya to protect and advance Islam/Muslims within a non-Muslim country.

Fiyaz Mughal also tells us that all the critics of Islam overuse the word "taqiyya". He says that all us "haters" repeat that word as if it's a "stuck record". Is that like the words "Islamophobe", "racist" and "fascist" which Muslims and their Leftist friends repeatedly use as a basic substitute for thought and debate? Or what about words like "haters" and "bigot" which Mughal himself continually uses in this very article? What about that "stuck record", Mr. Ughal?

In a similar vein, Mughal says that the "Far Right" (I forgot about that one!) indulges in the "caricaturing of a group of people [Muslims]." Is that anything like "caricaturing" all the critics of Islam or every single supporter of all the counter-jihad movements? Or is it a completely different -- and far more politically correct -- kind of caricaturing?

There's more of this self-referential stuff from Tell Mama. Here we encounter those "bigots" again. Apparently, critics of Islam "like nothing better than to live in a fantasy world in which they thrive on fear and insecurity." Is that like the "fantasy world" of Tell Mama's bogus Islamophobia epidemic? And is that also like the pretend Muslim "fear and insecurity" that supplies Fiyaz Mughal with a large income and a means to advance Islam?

Tell Mama on Shia Taqiyya

Let's get down to Tell Mama's application of taqiyya to taqiyya. Firstly we are told this:

"Wikipedia gives a fairly accurate description of the term which was developed because of Shia persecution and it provided dispensation to those Shias who were under the real threat of death and only in those circumstances."
Here Tell Mama is lying and dissimulating about Islamic lying and dissimulation. And the classic trope from Sunnis Muslims is that taqiyya is a "Shia phenomenon." It's not: as a large amount of evidence clearly shows. (For a brief introduction to Sunni taqiyya, see this article.)

Fiyaz Mughal even uses a bit of taqiyya about the Wikipedia article he quotes. Yes, that article does mention the Shia use of taqiyya. Nonetheless, it's hardly the case that the entire entry is devoted to how only Shia Muslims used taqiyya. And Mughal also forgets to mention that it was usually Sunni Muslims who were persecuting or oppressing Shia Muslims. Yes, he's talking about when Shia Muslims were persecuted by Sunni Muslims, as they still are all over the Sunni Muslim world still today: from Pakistan all the way to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

Finally, Tell Mama shouldn't confuse being critical of Islam with being ignorant of Islam. In fact what is usually the case is that Leftist Islamophiles are the ones who are truly ignorant of Islam. So ignorant that they see all expressions of Islam -- from the militant to the everyday -- as simple expressions of "poverty", "foreign intervention" and "oppression". Islam, to Leftists, is a mere "epiphenomenon of [bad] socioeconomic material conditions" and other political realities. So do Mughal's Leftist friends really have a better understanding of Islam, and taqiyya, than the critics of Islam?