The greatest prize, of course, is London itself. By the time you read this, the capital may already have elected the first Muslim Mayor of London: Sadiq Khan. At the time of writing, polls predict that Khan, who is also Labour MP for Tooting, will win by a larger majority than either of his predecessors, Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson.
Khan has worked hard at projecting a moderate image as a modern, liberal Muslim with no sectarian baggage. He no longer protests, as he did in 2004, that Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi perhaps the most influential preacher in the whole Islamic world — is “not an extremist”. (The Sheikh says that Hitler “put Jews in their place”.) He has carefully distanced himself from Babar Ahmad, who was later convicted of terrorist offences, and other extremists with whom he was once associated. But he knows very well how important the Muslim vote is for Labour. At least ten London boroughs have large, mainly conservative Muslim communities, where children grow up in an Islamic monoculture and women are covered or veiled. Khan is not likely to challenge the self-appointed leaders of these communities. At all costs, he must maintain Labour’s near-monopoly of Muslim politics and prevent the emergence of an explicitly Islamist party.
We now know that in the past Sadiq Khan, who as a left-wing human rights solicitor represented Muslim extremists, was happy to make compromises with the Salafist attitudes that prevail in many London mosques. In 2004, he supported incorporating sharia law into the British legal system: “There are some . . . uncontroversial areas of Islamic law which could easily be applied to the legal system . . . in the UK.” What Khan had in mind by “uncontroversial” was the legitimisation of polygamy, by altering inheritance tax law to allow husbands to divide their estates between several wives while enjoying the tax exemption normally applicable to a single spouse. He called this “applying common sense”, but it was yet another step towards de facto recognition of polygamy by the law. Muslims have long been claiming welfare benefits for multiple wives; the only condition is that they must have married them abroad.
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