When Tanveer Met Asad: Vibrant Vignettes from the Modern West
Is there such a thing as an admirable murderer? I’m not sure, but I do know a good candidate for the title: a New Briton called Tanveer Ahmed. He was the devout Sunni Muslim who drove hundreds of miles in March 2016 to hold a theological debate with a devout Ahmadi Muslim called Asad Shah.
The debate consisted of Tanveer stabbing and stamping Asad to death outside the shop owned by the latter in Glasgow. I don’t admire the murder, but I do admire Tanveer’s behaviour afterwards: he made no attempt to evade justice, pleaded guilty without hesitation, and happily accepted the long prison sentence that he received in August 2016. If Britain still had the death penalty, I’m sure that he would have accepted that just as happily.
Murderers for Muhammad
And why not? Like his hero Mumtaz Qadri, “The Martyr with a Machine-Gun,” he had committed murder for the noblest of reasons, defending the honour of the Prophet Muhammad and despatching a blasphemer to hell-fire. He had a subjective feeling of certainty and he acted on it in a way that has strengthened his version of Islam. Mainstream Muslims do not believe in rationalism, scepticism or liberal democracy. They marched in large numbers around the world to express their outrage at Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and the Muhammad cartoons published in Denmark in 2005. They did not march to express outrage at the Charlie Hebdo massacre or the murder of Asad Shah.
Murderer for Muhammad: Tanveer Ahmed








