MCB in the dock

By John Ware - Prospect Magazine - London,UK
Thursday, November 23, 2006

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.

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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.