The Muslim Association of Britain rejects Martin Bright’s attack on the Muslim Council of Britain and the Islamic Foundation in a leading article in today’s The Observer.
With this attack on the official umbrella Muslim organisation and one of the most respectable and reputable Muslim educational organisations in the West, Muslims in Britain would be excused for believing that we are witnessing an all-out attack on Muslim organisations.
“IHRC denounces yesterday’s vitriolic attack by Martin Bright in the Observer on the Muslim Council of Britain and its affiliates Jamiat-ahl-I-Hadith and the Islamic Foundation. IHRC strongly urges all campaigners to contact the Observer to complain about its shocking attack on both the MCB and on Islamic beliefs and values.”
Islamic Human Rights Commission action alert, 15 August 2005
“The Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) of UK and Ireland is alarmed at the attempts by some sections of the media to portray the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and its leadership as either ‘extremist’ or having links to ‘extremism’. We reject the supposition that MCB is unrepresentative and does not reflect the opinions of the mainstream of the British Muslim community.”
Let’s stop pretending Muslim hardliners are a tiny minority
By Leo McKinstry
Daily Express, 15 August 2005
Since the July bombings in London, there has been a remorseless barrage of official propaganda telling us we have nothing to fear from Islam. It is a religion of peace, we are told, compatible with the western values of democracy, freedom and equality. Politicians, police chiefs, broadcasters and church leaders have queued up to warn against judging the overwhelming majority of moderate Muslims by the actions of a few criminals.
Typical of this attitude was the claim of Brian Paddick, Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner, that “Islam and terrorism are two words that do not go together”.
But it is increasingly difficult to sustain this pretence in the face of all the evidence of dangerous Islamic fundamentalism in our midst. Far from existing only on the lunatic fringes, the hardliners are part of the Muslim mainstream. An investigation by BBC’s Panorama, to be aired next Sunday, has highlighted the extremism at the heart of the Muslim Council of Britain, the most important Islamic organisation in the country.
The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, Monday expressed serious reservations about the government’s new anti-terror plans, particularly extending the exclusion and deportation powers of the Home Secretary.
In response to the Home Office’s consultation document on the new proposals, Livingstone also raised concern about the government’s list of ‘unacceptable behaviors’ and called people to be allowed to express their views on issues as the Middle East conflict.
“People such as the founders of the United States, the founder of Israel, opponents of Ian Smith’s regime in ‘Rhodesia’ (Zimbabwe), Nelson Mandela and the Yasser Arafat have all been branded terrorists by someone at one time or another,” the mayor said.
“But nothing would have been gained by us banning either side in those conflicts. Today it would be totally counter-productive as it would reduce the trust, and therefore the information, from the communities whose help is indispensable to the police,” he warned.
See also GLA press release, 15 August 2005
More than 300 Muslims attended a gathering on Thursday organised by a group which the Government wants banned.
The jam-packed meeting was organised by local members of Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir in direct response to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s proposals – announced on August 5 – to review security measures in light of last month’s terrorist attacks.
It was the first Hizb ut-Tahrir meeting since Tony Blair’s announcement. Dozens more meetings are due to take place up and down the country over the next few weeks.
The Hizb ut-Tahrir group has publicly condemned the London bombings of 7/7 and has a policy of non-violence.
All sorts of people were present at the gathering, which took place at the Cygnet Hotel in Dunstable Road, Luton, including Mayor Councillor Haji Abid.
Women and children as well as people from nearby towns including Watford, Hemel Hempsted, Bletchley and Milton Keynes also attended the meeting.
Several people made speeches including businessmen, councillors, solicitors and doctors.
When Luton businessman Meherban Khan was given the chance to speak he said: “I have been present at several Hizb ut-Tahrir meetings and, while I am not a member, I respect its beliefs. But I have to say I think Tony Blair is the Hitler of the 21st century.”
That remark brought cheers – not for the first time at the gathering – from the scores of people present.
Under the headline “Radical links of UK’s ‘moderate’ Muslim group” (note the use of ironic quotation marks around “moderate”), the Observer tries to paint the Muslim Council of Britain as some sort of extremist organisation.
Predictably, the author Martin Bright quotes a comment from Salman Rushdie’s recent, much-reprinted article (see here) on the need for Islamic reform: “If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Mr Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem.”
A BBC Panorama documentary due to be screened next Sunday will apparently continue the campaign against the MCB, and it is the MCB’s protest about the content of that programme – see (pdf) here – that provides the hook for the Observer piece. See here.
The level of argument in the article is illustrated by this piece of “analysis” by Bright:
“The strain of Islamic ideology favoured by the MCB leadership and many of its affiliate organisations is inspired by Maulana Maududi, a 20th-century Islamic scholar little known in the West but hugely significant as a thinker across the Muslim world. His writings, which call for a global Islamic revival, influenced Sayyid Qutb, usually credited as the founding father of modern Islamic radicalism and one of the inspirations for al-Qaeda.”
So, by means of this amalgam, the MCB is associated with Osama bin Laden. The fact that Jamaat-i-Islami, the Pakistani party founded by Maududi, is a pragmatic, reformist, constitutionalist organisation that is part of mainstream politics in Pakistan and has participated in coalition governments – and whose methods are thus a million miles removed from the small-group terrorism of Al-Qaida – is carefully obscured. Instead, Bright tells us that Jamaat-i-Islami is “a radical party committed to the establishment of an Islamic state in Pakistan ruled by sharia law”.
Top Muslim group denies extremist roots
Reuters, 14 August 2005
Britain’s leading Muslim lobby group, thrown into the spotlight by last month’s bombings in London, rejected an accusation on Sunday that its roots lay in extremist politics in Pakistan. Iqbal Sacranie, leader of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), said the allegation, made in the Observer newspaper, was “absolutely preposterous”.
“I can’t believe that anyone who knows anything about the MCB could take that statement seriously,” he told Reuters. In a lengthy report on the MCB, the Observer alleged the council’s leadership and some of its 400 diverse affiliates had “links with conservative Islamist movements in the Moslem world” and “the extremist politics of Pakistan”. It said the links were particularly strong with Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s leading mainstream Islamist party.
The MCB has come under close scrutiny since July 7, when four British Muslims – three of them ethnic Pakistanis – blew themselves up on London’s transport system, killing 52 people. The Observer singled out two MCB affiliate organisations – the Islamic Foundation and Jamiat Ahli-Hadith – for criticism, describing the latter as “an extremist sect”. The Islamic Foundation is an educational institution based in central England while Jamiat Ahli-Hadith is a religious group based in Birmingham.
Sacranie defended both groups, saying the MCB was proud to have them as affiliates. Neither of them was involved with extremist politics, he said. He said the MCB was a loose organisation and that the views of the council’s leadership did not always concur with those of its affiliates.
The July 7 London attacks perpetrated by four British Muslims, including three of Pakistani origin, are having domino effects on the Pakistani minority in France, sparking an unprecedented Pakistanophobia.
“This close media and security scrutiny is really playing on the nerves of the Pakistanis in France,” Abdel Rahman Quraishi, the chairman of the Federation of Pakistani Organizations in France , told IslamOnline.net.
“A right-wing newspaper, for instance, launched a ferocious campaign against Pakistanis in France and placed them in one basket, calling them a ‘cause for concern.’”
Quraishi, who is also the imam of the main Pakistani mosque in Saint Denis, northern Paris , said the federation is planning to take legal action against the newspaper.
“A delegation representing the Pakistani minority went to the British embassy in Paris immediately after the attacks and offered heartfelt condolences,” he recalled.
Racially aggravated crime in the Thames Valley has risen by almost 40 per cent since the London bombings.
Police revealed that from when the terrorists struck on July 7, to August 1, there were 146 reported hate crimes compared to 105 during the same period last year.
And the fear among officers is that the figure may rise due to the hot summer weather, school holidays, and more people out drinking.
A Thames Valley police spokesman said: “We believe no members of our community should suffer because of the actions of terrorists and no one should use these attacks as an excuse to divide our communities or to threaten and harm individuals.
“Our officers will deal robustly with any incidents of hate crime and we urge the community to report any such incidents to us.”
He added: “Though there has been an increase in offences, the figures are still extremely low, and we have been working hard with communities to encourage people to come forward and report these incidents.”
Police said the detection rate for racial crime had gone up to 34 per cent compared to 16 per cent last year.