As part of his stitch-up of the Muslim Council of Britain in Sunday’s Observer, Martin Bright made much of the fact that among the MCB’s 400 affiliates is the Birmingham-based Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadith, described by Bright as “an extremist sect”. If you look up this organisation’s website you’ll find that it prominently features a statement on the London bombings. You’d have to say, if this is the best Bright can come up with as an example of the MCB’s “extremist” connections, the MCB has little to worry about.
Category Archives: Liberal
Observer witch-hunts MCB
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”.
Observer accusations ‘preposterous’ says Iqbal Sacranie
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.
MCB responds to the Observer’s ‘investigation’
In an extraordinary attack today, The Observer (Sunday 14th August 2005) has published a front page article, a two page ‘Investigation’ on pages eight and nine, together with an editorial, all seeking to vilify the Muslim Council of Britain.
Over three years ago, the Home Affairs editor at The Observer, Martin Bright, achieved some notoriety amongst British Muslims when he penned a cover story for the New Statesman (10th December 2001) entitled ‘The Great Koran Con Trick.’ In that piece, Bright tried his hardest and quite miserably failed to disprove the Divine origin of the Holy Qur’an.
So it was surprising to say the least to see that the front page story (‘Muslim Leaders in Feud With BBC’ and ‘Radical Links of UK’s ‘moderate’ Muslim Group’) in The Observer today was authored by the very same Martin Bright. Given Bright’s background we were not exactly anticipating reading a work of meticulous research and even-handedness. And we were proven correct in our assumption straight away.
Nick Cohen resumes his bloc with the Right
And it’s over to Nick Cohen at the Observer for the usual outpouring of Islamophobic bile. We are subjected to yet another diatribe against “Islamism”, which apparently “wants an empire from the Philippines to Gibraltar – and which is tyrannical, homophobic, misogynist, racist and homicidal”. And just in case you are tempted to point out that there are plenty of “Islamists” who favour democratic reform and civil liberties, Cohen follows this up with a denunciation of the “Muslim Association of Britain and Yusuf al-Qaradawi who believe that Muslims who freely decide to change their religion or renounce religion should be executed”.
Foreign Office backs engagement with Qaradawi – Nick Cohen goes apoplectic
Nick Cohen retails another series of lies and distortions about Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Qaradawi “ruled that the an [sic] Arab princeling should be stoned to death” (in fact he didn’t), Aljazeera magazine “hadn’t withdrawn the report” (in reality they had) etc etc. And Cohen concludes this demonstration of ignorant bigotry with the smug announcement that his mission as a journalist is to “tell Truth to readers”! What a plonker.
And what has made Cohen so cross? Well, it’s the fact that the Observer has acquired a leaked Foreign Office briefing which recommends that Dr al-Qaradawi should not be banned from entering the UK. The document is a well-informed piece of work, by Mockbul Ali, which entirely bears out the positive assessment of Qaradawi’s role made on this website and elsewhere. See (pdf) here.
The FCO’s line on Qaradawi, as summarised by Cohen, is to “try to detach him and the millions who listen to him from al-Qaeda”. This amounts to wilful distortion. The FCO document in fact argues for engagement with Qaradawi precisely because he is one of the most authoritative and influential opponents of al-Qaeda. He hardly requires any “detaching”. Cohen’s colleague Martin Bright (author of the Observer‘s witch-hunt against the MCB) also tries to imply a link between Qaradawi and al-Qaeda, reporting that “the memo contains the warning that refusing Qaradawi entry could lead to further terrorist attacks”. See here.
Cohen holds up the FCO briefing as evidence that “the mandarins have been preparing for an accommodation with radical Islam”, and Martin Bright agrees that the leaked document “will further fuel concerns of increasing ‘Islamist’ influence in the Foreign Office”.
It is notable that nowhere does the Observer deal with the arguments in favour of Dr al-Qaradawi that are presented in some detail in the FCO document, and unless you consulted the link in the online edition you’d be none the wiser. So much for “telling Truth to readers”. For that you have to go to Islam Online, 4 September 2005
It’s also worth noting that Cohen’s article is warmly welcomed by the Zionist right. See Israpundit, 4 September 2005
London bombers lacked sense of British identity – Guardian
“July stands as proof that our model of integration, the way we absorb difference, has somehow failed.” Jonathan Freedland joins the anti-multiculturalist Right in arguing that the London bombings were caused by the state’s failure to inculcate a sense of “Britishness” in Muslims.
Freedland’s piece gets a recommendation from warmongering ex-leftist Norman Geras, the apologist for state terrorism and darling of the US neocons: Normblog, 3 August 2005 I rest my case.
‘A monster of our own making’
“These British bombers are a consequence of a misguided and catastrophic pursuit of multiculturalism”, according to the Observer‘s strap to an article by William Pfaff. The author explains:
“A half-century of a well-intentioned but catastrophically mistaken policy of multiculturalism, indifferent or even hostile to social and cultural integration, has produced in Britain and much of Europe a technologically educated but culturally and morally unassimilated immigrant demi-intelligentsia.”
Admittedly, this is only one point in a rather rambling article – but it’s evidently the point the Observer wants to highlight.
Al-Qa’ida aren’t behind these bombings
James Harkin, writing in the Independent (1 August), tells us that Al-Qaida is not a centralised worldwide organisation. Now there’s a revelation. He continues: “Turning the spotlight on Al-Qa’ida is a convenient lie. It helps us to avoid the uncomfortable truth that the London bombs were only the most poisonous fallout from the pallid recipe of multiculturalism, and its failure to inspire our ethnic young.”
Campaign against Hizb ut-Tahrir continues
The Independent on Sunday makes its contribution to the ongoing campaign to associate Hizb ut-Tahrir with the London bombings. The “authorities” quoted in the article are Zeyno Baran and Ariel Cohen, two hardline right-wingers in the US who are associated with such objective sources of information as National Review Online and The Counterterrorism Blog.
And in an interview with the Sunday Times General Musharraf repeats his call for a ban on the organisation.