For the last nine years, the Muslim Council of Britain—the umbrella group for some 400 mosques and Muslim organisations that claims to be “the most forceful, most reasonable and most representative spokesperson for the British Muslim community”—has been the government’s interlocutor of choice for Muslims. But now Ruth Kelly, the communities secretary, has made it clear that the special relationship is over. “It’s not good enough to merely… pay lip service to fighting extremism,” she recently told a stunned audience of Muslims. “I want a fundamental rebalancing of our relationship with Muslim organisations from now on.”
The MCB was encouraged into existence by Michael Howard as home secretary in the mid-1990s, and has subsequently received government grants for educational projects, information booklets and the like. But now, said Kelly, funds will “shift significantly towards those organisations that are taking a proactive leadership role in tackling extremism.” By implication, the MCB had not.
The MCB has clearly been knocked for six. Noting Kelly’s comments with “some amazement,” the MCB’s secretary-general Mohammed Abdul Bari wrote to her, saying that what she had said was “arguably unlawful” and warning that sidelining the MCB would be “both dangerous and counter-productive.” But the prime minister is firmly behind this change of heart. He and Kelly have decided that the MCB leadership is in denial about the causes and the extent of extremism, just as I on Panorama and others—notably Martin Bright, the political editor at the New Statesman—concluded some 15 months ago.
There is no doubting the MCB’s abhorrence at the events of 7/7. But Downing Street no longer has faith that the MCB can produce a leadership that has the clarity, the conviction and the confidence to take on and defeat some of the ideas and ideologies that underpin extremism.
With a few exceptions, since 9/11 both America and continental Europe have been spared the sustained level of Islamist threat that seems regularly now to confront Britain. A bleak picture is emerging of Britain as the epicentre of Islamic terrorism in the west. Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, recently said that the threat of terrorism would be “with us for a generation.” But the MCB has asserted that Blair’s invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan and his expressions of support for Israel during the recent Lebanon war are almost exclusively to blame.
Ministers surely must acknowledge that the Iraq invasion has been a powerful catalyst. But as Kelly has suggested, can Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel really be said to be the root cause of young Muslims born and raised in Britain blowing up themselves and their fellow citizens? If the growth of extremism in Britain has no connection whatever to Islamic teaching or tradition, how are we to explain the alarming figures about Muslim attitudes that have recently emerged from perhaps the most comprehensive survey of its kind since 9/11?
Last summer Channel 4 reported that 51 per cent of young British Muslims still believe that 9/11 was a plot by Americans and Jews; 31 per cent agreed that 7/7 was justified because of Britain’s support for the war on terror; and that 36 per cent of all British Muslims believe Princess Diana was killed to stop her marrying a Muslim. The MCB has done little to disabuse British Muslims of these fantasies. Rather, they seem to see their job as fostering grievance and have sometimes sent out what a former minister described to me as a series of “intolerable” mixed messages over political violence abroad.
When I interviewed Iqbal Sacranie in August 2005 for Panorama, I suggested that however misguided Blair may prove to have been over Iraq, surely he, Sacranie, did not believe Blair had attacked Iraq “because he wanted to do down Islam”? I repeatedly pressed him on the point, but he declined the opportunity to explode this dangerous myth, saying instead that he did not think it his responsibility to challenge imams who preached that Blair was waging a war against Islam.
Sacranie was knighted despite being listed as a trustee of a global alliance of Islamic charities called the Union of Good, chaired by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has said of the Israel-Palestine conflict: “We must plant the love of death in the Islamic nation.” Like al-Qaradawi, several of Sacranie’s fellow trustees are members or supporters of Hamas and have extolled the theological virtues of suicide bombing directed at civilians in the Israel-Palestine conflict. According to Muslim Weekly, the new deputy MCB secretary-general, Daud Abdullah, referred to Hamas as “we” at a recent Trafalgar Square rally. And Abdullah was behind the MCB’s boycott of Holocaust Memorial day, successfully resisting the efforts of a sizeable minority of MCB members who want it lifted to repair relations between British Muslims and Jews.
The MCB leadership has also sent mixed messages on its support for the police. After the Madrid bombing, they appealed to all British Islamic organisations to “liaise with the local police and give them the fullest co-operation with any criminal activity, including the terrorist threat.” But at the same time, the East London Mosque—whose chairman is Abdul Bari—and the MCB’s spokesman Inayat Bunglawala were also signatories to the “Stop the Political Terror” campaign. This threatened non co-operation with the authorities if what the campaign described as “human rights abuses” by the “British Anti-Terrorist Police” continued: “We have come together to say that enough is enough and that Britain’s Muslims, as a community, will refuse to co-operate with the law enforcement authorities if this abuse continues.” The campaign’s website has only recently been taken off the web.
The MCB have also blotted their copybook on integration. Although Bari protested to Kelly that the MCB has “sought to develop a British Muslim discourse centred on the theme[s] of integration,” it has been integration on the MCB’s terms. The MCB leadership opposed government plans to put an end to the suffering of scores of young—mainly Muslim—women through forced marriages because it would “stigmatise our communities.” Nor did Sacranie’s strictures on same-sex relationships being “harmful” do him any favours.
One beneficiary of the government’s shift in funds away from the MCB to those who ministers believe are more likely to defend what Kelly calls “our shared values” will be an organisation called the Sufi Muslim Council. Haras Rafiq, a Manchester businessman who co-founded the council, says he represents the “silent majority of Sufi Muslims” who are weary of the MCB’s mantra that Muslims in Britain are forever victimised and believe that the MCB spends too much time on political issues. The problem is that for most of the MCB leadership, politics and religion are fused. As Sacranie told me: “We cannot totally disengage with religion, with politics. Islam is a way of life.”
Sidelining the MCB in favour of other less politicised Muslim groups, such as the Sufi Muslim Council and the London-based City Circle, is not risk-free. Bari’s letter to Kelly warns that promoting new Muslim bodies—some of which he describes as “sectarian” and “maverick” and accuses of having links to “US neo-cons”—will be “dangerous and counter-productive.” When the MCB is this angry, it comes out fighting, and its style is to make highly personalised attacks about the integrity of its detractors. Often they are accused of harbouring secret agendas, usually Zionist, as I and others have learned. While preaching moderation, the MCB is also good at keeping young Muslims angry.
The government’s attempts to redefine the limits of where core religious identity should find expression in the public sphere is tinderbox stuff. But it is a consequence of this and previous Conservative governments having been in denial for two decades about some of the forces off which extremism feeds.
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