The community leader wonderfully depicted by the sitcom Citizen Khan in his ever-failing quest to be relevant and respected first developed out of a genuine altruistic vision of community service in the 1970s. Many a non-English-speaking migrant needed help, from simple things like form filling to free translation assistance for appointments for jobs, housing, health and schools. The semi-educated community bod would take on these tasks mostly for free, although some were known to charge, and eventually became a regular face, a known entity for officialdom to use as a conduit to engage the Muslims. Some went on to serve on local quangos and some sought and won elected office, while others set up community organizations and sought to represent, speak on behalf of, lobby for and organize the Muslim community. These organizations dealt with everything from burial needs to parking restrictions outside mosques. They were well-intentioned and dealt with ‘practical issues’. Most, if not all, were male, predominantly South Asian or East African, and mainly first-generation migrants. Few had any formal campaigning or organizing skills and even fewer had an understanding of policy-making and the media. They were effective at a local level but perhaps not as prepared for national political work.
But amongst these one organization stood out: the Union of Muslim Organizations (UMO), led by Dr Pasha, an educated man, a trained lawyer, with experience of organizing in the US, an understanding of politics, having been involved in both student politics and in national political engagement with senior political figures.
The UMO was established in 1970 at a meeting at the Regent’s Park Mosque, London, as an umbrella organization for Muslim Organizations across the United Kingdom and Ireland. Although Dr Pasha was politically engaged nationally, it only really rose to prominence during and after the Rushdie affair. The UMO was an attempt to bring together a community defined by its ethnicity into one defined by faith. Funded generously by the Saudi and Iraqi governments, it was well resourced and initially well led. It seemed in its activities to cater for a broad range of sects focusing on the Shia communities’ important religious festivals as much as the more Sunni-focused ones and for the most part was interested in ‘provision’ of facilities, goods and services. Like most faith-based organizations, it was very conservative in its outlook.1
It was the UMO who demanded the use of the UK’s old blasphemy laws to protect Muslims during the Rushdie affair and led a delegation to meet the then home secretary Douglas Hurd to convey the Muslims’ ‘strong feelings’ at what was perceived as the continued inaction of the British government to ban the blasphemous novel.2 And it was the UMO who urged the prompt enactment of a bill of rights for the protection of the Muslim community in the UK.3
Alongside the UMO a new more politically focused group launched in 1988: UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs, born out of a growing frustration that the post-Rushdie era had created an environment in which British Muslims felt unheard. The desire to be heard, to influence, led to a flurry of activity amongst mosques, groups and individuals all united in the belief that the community needed to unite to organize and to create national bodies.
By the early 1990s Britain’s Muslims had made progress in local politics, but both the Labour and Conservative parties appeared uninterested in their having national representation.
Some thought that the answer to not being engaged by British politics was to disengage from Britain’s political system, an argument put most vociferously by Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), a group that in the UK came to prominence in the early 1990s. HT had become fashionable as a political home amongst the British Muslim chattering class and newly emerging university types. It was originally a political party formed in the 1950s in Jerusalem, Palestine, as a response to the creation of the state of Israel. Its founder, Muhammad Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani, an Islamic scholar and jurist, envisaged a unitary Muslim state ruled by a single elected Khalifa, with Arabic as the main language and the rule of law rooted in religious principles. This so-described utopia, which interestingly had never existed throughout the history of Islam, was the only answer to the many woes of Muslims worldwide. Much of the group’s views were a deeply intellectualized fantasy, and in the UK it provided the perfect space to rebel against the perceived passive elder generation, as well as to socialize and find a future marriage partner.
My own encounters with HT members usually left me cynical. I came away with the view that most were men, with huge egos, misogynists, usually confrontational and never wrong. It was the group that created the self-confessed extremists of the noughties, now much publicized as ex-extremists. Although many who claim to be ex HT may have changed their views, I believe that many haven’t mended their ways. HT was and is in many ways an old boys’ network, where women know their very defined place. The head of state, chief justice and other heads of authority in their utopia would always be male, though they regularly profess that women are not seen as inferior.4
Whilst HT advocated disengagement from the political process altogether, awaiting a worldwide caliphate, a new group that emerged in the early 1990s, the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, thought the answer was a very front-footed and confrontational demand for services and provision that would effectively allow for a separatist existence with Britain – or, as they described it, a ‘non-territorial Islamic state’ in Britain. The organization, although well-funded and vocal, lacked any depth of support amongst Britain’s Muslims and faded away.
What was more palatable to most was the emergence of a discussion calling for wider, deeper and more sophisticated engagement which eventually resulted in the most widely known British Muslim organization, the Muslim Council of Britain, the MCB. Officially named in May 1996, inaugurated in November 1997 and electing its first secretary general in 1998, the MCB was over three years in the making. Its purpose was – and still is – to increase education about Islam, and to ‘work for the eradication of disadvantages and forms of discrimination faced by Muslims’. It was well organized and had importantly reached out to try and build a genuine grassroots and accountable body through affiliates and elections. It fashioned itself on organizations in Britain’s Jewish community and both from structure to areas of interest copied much of what the British Jewish community had done in decades gone by.
This was a smart move, not only because the issues of concern from dietary requirements to health and school needs were similar but also because Britain’s Jews had proved that representative bodies were effective in engaging lazy officialdom.
But the MCB found itself accused of promoting self-interest and being unrepresentative, male-orientated and out of touch, the kind of accusations levelled at everyone from the Church of England to the Board of Deputies. Some of the criticism, as it is with other faith-based organizations, was to my mind justified. Power did become concentrated in the hands of a select few, it did suffer with problems of ethnic discrimination and it has consistently suffered from accusations of sectarian bias. It was accused of being Bengali-, East African- and Indian-heavy as well as over-representing the more conservative elements within the community.
In my view it made some bad political judgements: from its desire to invest time and energy in advancing overseas contacts with the Muslim world, the beneficial result of which to the British Muslim community at large is questionable, to its policy of non-attendance at the annual Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations between 2001 and 2007.
Although professing to be party politically neutral, it became close to New Labour early on. But then Labour was the party of choice for large sections of the Muslim community, so one could argue it was simply representing the majority view.
The golden era of the MCB was between 1996 and 2006. It was courted by government and the media. Dominating both the airwaves and government engagement, the MCB was seen as the answer to all things Muslim, both representing Her Majesty’s government overseas as a tool to engage the Muslim world and being the conduit for politicians engaging on Muslim issues. And during this time, to its credit, it produced some good reports on the needs of Britain’s Muslims. But despite lunches with cabinet ministers and hosting Prime Minister Tony Blair at one of its events, the MCB was not reticent in its disagreement with the government’s position on foreign affairs. Calling the US decision to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, in retaliation for the bombing of its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, ‘the law of the jungle … and a violation of international law’.5
It’s quite astonishing to think that it was as recently as a decade ago that Anas al-Takriti of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), an organization set up around the same time as the MCB and as New Labour took office in 1997, eyed the pole position the MCB occupied with envy. Although cracks started to appear between New Labour and the MCB during the time Hazel Blears became secretary of state for communities and local government, its accelerated fall from grace was during the political changes of 2010–15. And this fall was less to do with its ability, which often did seem questionable, and more to do with politics both in government and in Muslim communities.
The growth of Muslim organizations, or the ‘Muslim industry’ as I refer to it, grew organically from the late 1960s but under more ‘controlled conditions’ during New Labour’s term in office. New Labour started the revolving-door policy where organizations fell in and out of favour and where engagement, disengagement, government funding and withdrawal of funding was used to ‘create’ organizations it liked and ‘kill off’ those no longer in favour.6
Some, such as the Young Muslims and the Islamic Society of Britain (ISB), having been established in the 1980s, were very much social spaces where mainly young people and professionals could be Muslim and British. Their summer camp, which still runs, is a jolly boys and girls outing where culture and religion, art and academia rub alongside easily and for the oldies provides an opportunity to allow the youngsters to socialize under a watchful eye. Many a marriage has started with a smile at the ISB summer camp. And like many Muslim organizations the ISB became an affiliate of the MCB.
But one organization which pre-dates all of the above and is still going strong is the Federation of Students and Islamic Societies (FOSIS). Originally called FOISS (Federation of Islamic Student Societies), it was established in 1963 at a meeting hosted at the University of Birmingham. It is the umbrella organization for University Islamic Societies, although not all are affiliated. It was the organization I came into contact with during my student years and where the three things on the agenda seemed to be Middle East, meals and marriage. Set up as a support group for Muslim students, it has, as one would expect from students, been at times at the forefront of debate on Muslim identity, hosting Malcolm X at several universities in the 1960s.
As with most student bodies it has sometimes pushed the boundaries of debate. It is a broad church and over the years has been led by presidents with very differing political and religious beliefs and backgrounds. It has like many other ‘Muslim groups’ been accused of allowing platforms on campus for extremist views. Whilst some of these accusations are baseless, where it has come up short is its inability to attract and allow a platform for a wide range of speakers, both Muslim and others, its failure to see the many sides to a debate and to properly exercise its function as an umbrella organization. Many individual ISOCs (Islamic Societies) on campus are affiliated to FOSIS and yet often reflect views and practices not in line with broad national FOSIS thinking. Many ISOCs are too narrow in their representation of ‘British Muslims’, often judgemental and increasingly seen as spaces that many British Muslim students don’t feel like they belong. To remain relevant to the broadest British Muslim student community FOSIS must raise its game. Sadly, twenty-five years on they, like the Jewish societies on campus, continue to perpetuate the same entrenched positions with little space for genuine ‘new thinking’ amongst a ‘new generation’.
My own recent experience of FOSIS is both via my children on university campuses and my own time in government. For the most part FOSIS is neither politically savvy nor actually committed enough to effect real change. I found that action points agreed were rarely actioned and follow-up items were rarely followed up. The most memorable moment with FOSIS for me was an encounter with its top team and a refusal from one of their officers, a young kid around the age of my eldest, to shake my hand. Now I have no issues with deeply held religious beliefs that apparently forbid handshakes between the sexes; I’ve sat with many an orthodox rabbi or imam and engaged in constructive work without a handshake, but FOSIS are not a set of scholars, they are a student body. And I fail to understand the thought process of a young man who keenly puts himself forward to deal with third parties only to alienate half the country’s population at the first meeting. If your personal religious beliefs are fundamentally in conflict with the basic requirements of the job, then my advice is don’t accept the job. I’m sure plenty of others, hey, maybe even a girl, would have been prepared to accept the role. It would be like me getting a job in a pig abattoir only to insist on halal working conditions.
Like the ISB, FOSIS too is an affiliate of the MCB.
In 2005, a group of predominantly British Pakistani and Kashmiri Muslims, many of whom had felt unrepresented at the MCB, set up the British Muslim Forum (BMF). The BMF was the Sunni Barelwi fightback against what was perceived to be a Deobandi-, Tablighi- and Jamaat-dominated MCB. The BMF wished to speak for what they viewed as the ‘majority of British Muslims’, those from a Sunni Barelwi tradition of Islam. The BMF initially focused on spirituality and love for the Prophet. My ex-colleague Paul Goodman, MP for High Wycombe from 2001 to 2010 and currently editor of the website Conservative Home, was an early flag-bearer for the BMF,7 and more particularly the pirs, Muslim religious leaders with large numbers of followers around the world, revered as saints and rooted in Sufism. Pirs, not unlike peers of the realm before we working-class folk joined the Lords and spoilt it, are considered to be of the highest social order in some Muslim traditions, with the rights and privileges to pronounce upon matters both religious and personal. Most are deeply devout, lead with humility and provide a much-needed community service, acting as therapists, councillors and offering spiritual guidance. Others have been known to abuse their position for financial and personal gain. And, like the occasional pervy priest, the pervy pir is sadly not entirely uncommon.
The BMF, however, came to prominence with their post-7/7 intervention, when they issued an unequivocal and unconditional condemnation, albeit twelve days late. It set a more conciliatory tone and presented a more palatable text than the version of the bombings put out in the MCB-led statement which the BMF had put their names to a few days earlier.8
The BMF, the new kids on the block, were neither as well funded nor as well organized as the MCB, but what they lacked in pounds they more than made up for in people. They had the potential to mobilize large numbers at short notice and, unlike the MCB, didn’t feel threatened in allowing their congregations access to meetings with politicians. The social order and reverence for the pir meant the ‘followers’ wouldn’t use an encounter with an influential politician to subsequently cut out the pir and engage directly. The MCB, on the other hand, built its reputation on being incredibly effective gatekeepers, and meetings with influencers were always limited to a very small select group, something that is still occasionally a feature of the MCB.
Like the MCB, the BMF too spoke of its affiliates but didn’t necessarily speak to them when it mattered. And this approach spectacularly backfired during the 2008 passage of the Counter-Terrorism Act and the debate around the proposed forty-two days pre-charge detention for terror suspects. The then chairman of the BMF, Khurshid Ahmed, hailed as ‘Britain’s top Muslim’ by the Sun, made a statement on behalf of the BMF supporting Blair’s position.9
The Conservative party, led by David Davis MP, the then shadow home secretary, now secretary of state for exiting the European Union, opposed the legislation. The revised BMF position gave Blair some air cover of support from ‘the Muslims’. The Lords rejected the proposal and dramatically defeated the government. The winners of this saga were undoubtedly David Davis and his fellow civil libertarian warriors. Khurshid Ahmed was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list. Lord Ahmad raised the award in the House of Lords on 8 July 2008 and asked whether Khurshid Ahmed had been persuaded to come out with a statement in favour of detaining terror suspects for up to forty-two days in return for a CBE and funding for one of his projects. This was later dismissed by Khurshid Ahmed as nonsense.
Whilst the BMF made some real progress in pushing forward debates on issues the MCB had previously not engaged with, such as Muslims and their role in Britain’s armed forces, the two groups very much operated in isolation of the other until 2010, when swords were drawn during the Zakir Naik affair.
Zakir Naik is the much-followed televangelist, a cross between the pirs who are adored by the masses and the US-style evangelical preachers who are more celebrity than theology.
Naik had been controversial in India, considered sectarian by some, an intellectual by others, an inciter of hatred by some and an enlightened orator by others. But one thing that is true for sure is that he has a large following in the UK. Naik was seen by the MCB as a moderate, by the BMF as an extremist. His banning from the UK by the then home secretary Theresa May was seen as a victory for the BMF and by the MCB as further evidence that the government was playing a dangerous game of choosing its favoured Muslims, an interesting and odd position from a group which until that time had been the favoured Muslims.
Cage Prisoners, later simply called CAGE, hit the headlines in 2005 as Moazzam Begg, a British detainee at Guantanamo, was finally released without charge. CAGE’s role in campaigning for prisoners caught up occasionally in the excesses of state action in the name of counter terrorism has been important but is undermined by their unwillingness to find words of condemnation for those engaged in terrorism. In my experience this has set a tone and narrative amongst some young British Muslims which is destructive and dangerous.
The post-7/7 era also saw the emergence of British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD), set up in 2006, unusually for a faith-based organization, by two women: Nasreen Rehman, an academic and writer, and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the writer and journalist. The well-intentioned intellectual basis of much of their thinking was the development of a European Muslim community. But due to a simple misunderstanding amongst British Muslims of the word ‘secular’ in the group’s name and its liberal position on nikaabs and faith schools to name but a few issues, it was perceived by British Muslims out of step with the majority, which certainly at that time held very conservative views.
The year 2006 also saw the birth of the short-lived Sufi Muslim Council (SMC). The SMC was launched to a great fanfare, with government ministers praising what was effectively an organization that nobody in the British Muslim community had heard of, that had no affiliates, no visible grassroots support and an ideological leader, a foreign sheikh, little known to British Muslims. British Muslims saw it as a smokescreen body set up by government as a rival to the MCB.10
By 2010 the group was effectively defunct with a small handful of volunteers and administrators, and indeed government, left holding a financial failure.
Despite the political ambitions of its two co-founders and the political connections of its sheikh, SMC was sold as a non-political movement.11 It was marketed as turbans, tasbees (prayer beads) and evenings of zikr (religious chanting). They were heady, hippy and happy, the nice lot who just wanted to get stoned on spirituality and not prissy about politics. It was an easy sell and a sweeter pill for politicians, as SMC neither asked the tough questions nor made any demands. They told us policy-makers what we wanted to hear.
Sadly the romance was short-lived, and, like most things that have no roots and haven’t grown organically, the SMC withered, as did the relationship between the sheikh and Rafiq. The latter moved on to set up CENTRI, a counter-extremism consultancy, with Rashad Ali, and four years later he joined the Quilliam Foundation.
The Quilliam Foundation is a counter-extremism thinktank established in 2007 and is seen as one of Blair’s last gifts to British Muslims. It was established by three men: Ed Husain, now a fellow at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, Rashad Ali, of CENTRI fame and the least ‘visible’ of the three, and Maajid Nawaz, who ran as a Liberal Democrat candidate in 2015. All of them profess to have been linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir during their student days. All profess to have at some point ‘seen the light’ and turned their back on their extremist positions. They, along with a small but high-profile set of individuals, are the ‘ex-extremists’ popular in the right-wing press, and despite their self-confessed dubious pasts have been welcomed back into mainstream political life.12 The name of this group comes from Abdullah William Quilliam, whom I wrote about in chapter 1. Quilliam swore allegiance to the Ottoman Empire and advocated for a global caliphate, not dissimilar to that of HT, the teenage ideological home of QF’s founders and the very view the foundation today opposes.
Amongst British Muslims the Quilliam Foundation has been one of the most despised parts of the ‘Muslim industry’. From accusations that QF is a tool of central government and receives shady sources of support from the US to a view that it has dubious links with organizations and individuals with Islamophobic form,13 to the questioning by close family and friends of the ex-extremist stories of its founders,14 it has had a controversial place in the tale of Muslim Britain.
QF has become a depository for British Muslim anger, distrust and ridicule and invokes the most extraordinary reactions from the most rational individuals, views that Nick Clegg was vociferously confronted with during the 2015 General Election, when potential party donors questioned Nawaz’s selection and its impact on ‘British Muslim voters.’ So QF within British Muslim communities has arguably become the mother of failed experiments, but in a wider context it has been a huge media success, dominating the airwaves on ‘all things Muslim’ and making ‘red meat’ statements to the red tops.
My view is that QF is a bunch of men whose beards are tame, accents crisp, suits sharp, and who have a message government wants to hear. Its analysis of the problem – ‘it’s an ideology called Islamism’ – chimes with the government’s narrative. It’s a narrative set by Blair, promoted by QF, followed by Brown and Cameron and one which in chapter 4 I argued was fundamentally flawed.
Despite these concerns, I have had many a fruitful conversation with QF activists. Usama Hasan, a theologian at QF, is thoughtful and spiritual, and coffee with Maajid Nawaz, who was recently cited as an anti-Muslim extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Centre,15 is always an entertaining if often combative experience.
The post-2010 Coalition government era saw the rise of a number of dynamic ‘doing’ organizations rather than simply ‘saying’ organizations. This posed a challenge to the traditional UMO, MCB and BMF types whose main focus was engaging with officialdom, photo ops and press releases. Younger and more professional British Muslims were less tolerant of campaigns that delivered little and meetings that appeared self-serving.
IEngage was an early attempt to ‘do something tangible’ and tackle Islamophobia systematically. But they were discredited by sections of the Conservative Party, including Robert Halfon, MP, who used parliamentary privilege to do so.16 They also faced challenges from the likes of MCB, who seemed to feel their presence undermined their own position. By 2014 IEngage was no more, and out of the ashes rose Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND).
MEND has not been without controversy. It has been at the receiving end of a number of media hatchet jobs as well as facing the challenges of trying to appeal to a broad church and in doing so accommodating views that, although not illegal, are clearly illiberal. But it has matured, and I think it has the potential to achieve real change because not only is it grassroots-funded and run, it is also results-focused. It’s a doer not a sayer.
Its main nemesis is an anti-Muslim monitoring organization called Tell MAMA, which was born out of discussions at Tory HQ at a time when I was Conservative Party chairman. Fashioned on the community protection organization run by British Jews called the Community Security Trust (CST), its aim was to collect data and campaign for the proper monitoring of Islamophobic hate crime.
Tell MAMA started well, and my colleague Eric Pickles, the then secretary of state for communities and local government, was eventually persuaded to fund it. But a series of negative media stories questioning the accuracy and method of its data collection17 nearly destroyed the organization in 2013. Tell MAMA’s well-intentioned but highly emotional CEO Fiyaz Mughal was persuaded to engage CST help, which both resulted in administrative systems being put in place and provided the much needed political air cover which came with an association with the CST. Sadly a series of blunders, including becoming the source for Telegraph journalist Andrew Gilligan on a news story vilifying the cross-government working group on anti-Muslim hatred and some very respected members of the British Muslim Community, left Tell MAMA’s credibility amongst British Muslims questionable and thus in many ways not fit for purpose.18 The recruitment of the former Labour member of parliament for Dewsbury Shahid Malik as co-chairman in 2014 was an attempt to steady the community’s nerves. It, however, unfortunately continues to invest too much time and energy in ‘talking down’ other Muslim activists and groups.
On the one hand Muslim community groups work to tackle Islamophobia and other challenging issues facing British Muslims and on the other sadly undermine each other in a bid to be seen as the chosen ones for government and other officialdom. As they fight to take credit for the meagre crumbs of policy concessions that the government has chosen to throw ‘the Muslims’’ way, anti-Muslim hate crime continues to grow, in London alone rising by almost 60 per cent in the year to October 2016.19
The rise of ISIS has brought to the fore a series of smaller groups that have been involved in community work for many years, from Faith Associates to Active Change Foundation and more recently Imams online. These groups are trying to work collaboratively with government, putting out statements which are very much officially sanctioned and trying to mould the government’s programme on preventing extremism. They are making an important contribution.
The most recent group, Inspire, was set up in 2009.20 It is exceptional in that it is female-led – a positive – but because of its unexplained association with the government’s anti-extremism agenda it has been kept at a cautious distance by large sections of the community. The co-founder, Sara Khan, was recently questioned by members of the Home Affairs Select Committee about Inspire’s track record, project work and the funding it has received.21
These and others form Britain’s ‘Muslim industry’, and all profess to speak for or about British Muslims and thus have played their part in the tale of Muslim Britain.