Around 1000 religious leaders, politicians, academics, journalists, social and political activists, and Muslims from around the country attended events in London, Birmingham and Greater Manchester to welcome the launch of a new British Muslim organisation, MEND (Muslim Engagement and Development) set up to tackle Islamophobia is all its varied forms.

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A Bradford MP has called for a debate on what should be allowed in secular schools following the Trojan Horse row.

David Ward said that it was wrong to link events at schools in Birmingham and Bradford to issues of extremism and that the debate over promoting British values had become a distraction. He said that the problems which has surfaced were actually about governors wanting to pursue a more religious approach at non faith schools.

The controversy started with a “Trojan Horse letter,” now thought to have been a hoax, claiming Muslim governors were plotting take overs at some schools in Birmingham. It resulted in investigations being launched by the local council and the Department for Education and targeted Ofsted inspections which led to five schools being placed in special measures.

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Sir Stephen Bubb, head of the charity chief executives body Acevo, has said there is a perception that the Charity Commission is disproportionately targeting Muslim charities.

In a blog post published yesterday, Bubb said he had a meeting with the chief executives of Islamic Relief, Muslim Aid and the head of the Muslim Charities Forum, who had told him that it appeared that regulator was “targeting Muslim charities in a disproportionate way”.

The regulator rejected the claim of any bias in its regulatory work and said it was not possible for it to “remain silent about the risks and problems charities face”.

Bubb said the leaders had come to talk about their fear that recent actions by the commission were damaging the reputation of Muslim charities. He said it was the regulator’s role to examine and deal with complaints.

“In the turbulent world we live in, we are aware of terrorist threats from many parts of the globe,” he said. “But if that raises perceptions of a bias then that is in itself a problem. A perception is neither true nor false – it’s a perception – but damage can be done to charitable giving through bad perceptions.”

Bubb said it was worrying that the regulator had publicly announced a statutory inquiry into Muslim Aid. The regulator revealed that it was investigating the charity when it announced that it would in future name all charities that become the subject of statutory inquiries.

The charity said at the time that the inquiry was launched in November after Muslim Aid had itself notified the commission of “non-compliance with some operational aspects in two field offices”.

Bubb said that announcing the inquiry into Muslim Aid “had a devastating effect on its potential for fundraising now”. “Before even the results of the inquiry are known, it is now under a cloud of suspicion,” he said. He said the move had ramifications for the charity’s day-to-day business in making charitable payments around the world.

“How ironic that against the background of the most terrible suffering of the civilian population in Syria, it has become so difficult for Muslim charities to provide humanitarian aid,” Bubb wrote.

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The government and the police have been urged to tackle the swathe of harassment suffered by Muslims on social media.

Publishing a report into ‘Online Hate against Muslims on Social Media’, Imran Awan, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Birmingham University revealed that ‘Muslim Paedos’, ‘Muslim terrorists’ and ‘Muslim scum’ are the three most used Islamophobic terms used to attack Twitter users.

Mr Awan said: “This study shows that both government and the police need to do much more to tackle the rampant online abuse and harassment Muslims are suffering, often purely because they are engaging in social media in the same way as anyone else. The problem has been particularly extreme since the murder of soldier Lee Rigby last year in Woolwich, which appears to have prompted a sharp spike in online anti-Muslim hate.”

The academic undertook the Twitter-based study to find out if well documented physical Islamophobia-related incidents following the Woolwich murder were being replicated in the virtual world.

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