There is perhaps less to this than meets the eye. Is Choudary a hypocrite? Only if he goes behind close doors and continues to live as he once did according to this article, while preaching the evils of this lifestyle to the world. He is more likely to be a true believer than a hypocrite — he appears to be someone who had some kind of conversion experience and came to believe that the way he had been living was wrong. The world is full of such people, converts to various religions as well as non-religious causes. It’s a story as old as Augustine of Hippo (which is by no means to equate Augustine and Choudary in any way), and older than that.
Nonetheless, there is an important lesson in this story: Sharia doesn’t allow for that kind of evolving consciousness. If the charges in this story are true, and Choudary had been living in an Islamic state, he could be imprisoned or dead by now. There is no mercy, no tolerance for the stages that Choudary himself had to go through in order to arrive at his present convictions. For indeed, convictions aren’t prized under Sharia — only outward conformity.
“Swilling beer, smoking dope and leering at porn, the other side of hate preacher ‘Andy’ Choudary,” by Neil Sears for the Daily Mail, March 14 (thanks to all who sent this in):
The British live ‘like animals in a jungle’ with their alcohol, gambling, prostitution and pornography.
That is the stated view of Anjem Choudary, the preacher of hate who this week insulted the families of dead soldiers and branded their marching comrades as cowards.
The extremist wants Britain to be brought under Sharia law, with women forced to wear burkas and put to death for adultery.
Yet before he grew his beard and turned to fundamentalism, Choudary, 41, was very much the life and soul of the party at Southampton University.
Photographs obtained by the Mail suggest ‘Andy’ – as he was then known – should be inflicting on himself the 40 lashes he prescribes for drunkenness.
As well as downing cider and lager, the cleric is shown playing drinking games with cards, clearly forbidden under his strict Islamic laws, and holding a cannabis joint between his lips before smoking it.
And the woman on the cover of the Mayfair pornographic magazine he is looking at is certainly not wearing a burka.
On the evidence of friends from his student days, Choudary had sex with numerous white Christian girls.
Under his version of Sharia law, he should be stoned to death for sex outside marriage.
One former friend said: ‘I can’t keep a straight face when I see “fundamentalist Muslim Anjem Choudary” in the papers attacking the British for drinking or having girlfriends.
‘When I knew him, he liked to be called Andy, would often smoke cannabis spliffs all day, and was proud of his ability to down a pint of cider in a couple of seconds.
‘And he was ruthless with girls. When he briefly worked as an English teacher for foreign students in London, he’d pull one of them every few days, sleep with her, then move on to another.
‘If Sharia law was introduced, he would have been whipped and stoned to death many times over.’…