Islamism in the United Kingdom

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Islamism (political Islam) has existed in the United Kingdom since the 1970s, and has become widely visible and a topic of political discourse since the beginning of the 21st century.

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Islam in the United Kingdom has grown rapidly due to immigration since the 1980s. In 2011, 2.7 million Muslims (4.8% of total population) lived in the UK (mostly in England), more than quintupling over a 30-year period (550,000 in 1981), with a continued tendency of rapid growth. [1]

Early history

Radical Islam has been present in Great Britain since the 1970s, but has not received wider public attention prior to the 7 July 2005 London bombings; terrorism in Britain during the 1970s to 1990s was mostly due to the Northern Ireland conflict, and it was only after the 2005 incidents that the presence of radical political Islam in Britain was widely recognized and studied.[ citation needed ]

Dawatul Islam is an Islamist organisation based in London, founded in 1978 [2] [ unreliable source? ] from the Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan-originated UK Islamic Mission to cater to East Bengali Muslims in Britain after the founding of Bangladesh in 1971.[ citation needed ]

Syrian Islamist Omar Bakri Muhammad moved to the United Kingdom in 1986, and established a chapter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, and later Al-Muhajiroun ("The Emigrants"), which was proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000 on 14 January 2010. Social disturbance began in the Muslim community in England in 1988 with the publication of the satirical novel The Satanic Verses in London.[ citation needed ] The book was condemned with a fatwa the following year. [3]

In 1989, an Islamic Party of Britain was founded by a Sheffield-born convert.[ citation needed ]

The Islamic Forum of Europe was founded in 1990. It was reportedly founded by former members of the Jamaat-e-Islami-affiliated group Dawatul Islam, with whom it came into conflict over management of the East London Mosque "throughout the late 1980s" [4] resulting in "two High Court injunctions" in 1990 in "response to violence" at the mosque. [5]

The Islamic Society of Britain (ISB) was set up in 1990 to promote Islamic values. [6] [7] The Young Muslims UK, established in 1984, was incorporated into ISB as its youth wing. In 1997, some supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood "broke off" from ISB to form the Muslim Association of Britain.[ relevant? ]

Development after 2005

The Saved Sect operated from 2005 but was banned in 2006. The extent of the phenomenon was illustrated during the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy of 2006, when Al Ghurabaa, successor organisation to the disbanded Al-Muhajiroun, called Muslims to "Kill those who insult the Prophet Muhammad", resulting in extensive protests in London.[ citation needed ]

Following the 2005 terror attacks, the phenomenon of Islamism within the resident Muslim population in Britain receive wider interest. An early publication was Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within (2006). Undercover Mosque aired in 2007 (with a 2008 sequel). Islam4UK led by Anjem Choudary (a British Pakistani born in the UK 1967) had been active from 2009. It has also been banned under the Terrorism Act 2000 on 14 January 2010.

Since 2006, the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) has been under scrutiny as fostering Islamist politics among Bangladeshi immigrants. [8] IFE and the East London Mosque, have hosted extremist preachers including Anwar al-Awlaki. [9] A Dispatches documentary aired on 1 March 2010 suggested the IFE are an extremist organization with a hidden agenda that went against Britain's democratic values. [10] Dispatches quoted Azad Ali, the IFE's community affairs coordinator, as saying, "Democracy, if it means at the expense of not implementing the sharia, of course no one agrees with that". [11] Responding in a comment piece in the Guardian newspaper, Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain suggested that many of the people interviewed on the programme had "hidden agendas of their own" suggesting that Jim Fitzpatrick's claim of the Labour Party having been "infiltrated" by IFE was motivated by upcoming elections. [12] The IFE and YMO were featured in the book The Islamist (2007) by Ed Husain, where he explains that the YMO attracts mainly English-speaking Asian youths, providing circles or talks daily at the East London Mosque; while teaching about Islam, it covers the political system of the religion. [13]

The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC, established in 1997) was classified as "a radical Islamist organisation that uses the language and techniques of a human rights lobbying group to promote an extremist agenda" by the Stephen Roth Institute in 2005. [14]

See also

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Islamic Human Rights Commission</span> Islamic non-profit organisation based in London

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Omar Bakri Muhammad is a Syrian Islamist militant leader born in Aleppo. He was instrumental in developing Hizb ut-Tahrir in the United Kingdom before leaving the group and heading to another Islamist organisation, Al-Muhajiroun, until its disbandment in 2004.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Al-Muhajiroun</span> Militant network based in Saudi Arabia

Al-Muhajiroun is a proscribed militant network based in Saudi Arabia. The founder of the group was Omar Bakri Muhammad, a Syrian who previously belonged to Hizb ut-Tahrir; he was not permitted to re-enter Britain after 2005. According to The Times, the organisation has been linked to international terrorism, homophobia, and antisemitism. The group became notorious for its September 2002 conference "The Magnificent 19", praising the September 11, 2001 attacks. The network mutates periodically so as to evade the law; it operates under many different aliases.

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Anjem Choudary is a Pakistani-British Islamist and a social and political activist who has been described as "the face" of militant Islamism or the "best known" Islamic extremist in Britain.

The Saved Sect, formerly and more generally known as The Saviour Sect, is an Islamist organization that operated in the United Kingdom from its formation in November 2005 until the British government proscribed it on 17 July 2006. It is widely believed, along with Al Ghurabaa, to be the reformed Al-Muhajiroun which Omar Bakri Muhammad disbanded in 2004. It is believed that Omar Bakri today still heads this organisation.

Al Ghurabaa is a Muslim organization based in United Kingdom which, along with The Saviour Sect, Islam4UK and others, is widely believed to be the reformed Al-Muhajiroun after it disbanded in 2004 by order of Omar Bakri Muhammad. Other members include Abu Izzadeen and Abu Uzair.

"Londonistan" is a sobriquet referring to the British capital of London and the growing Muslim population of late-20th- and early-21st-century London.

<i>Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within</i> 2006 book by Melanie Phillips

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<i>The Islamist</i> 2007 book

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Dirty Kuffar is an Islamic extremist 2004 Jihad Islamist extremist rap video produced by Muslim British rappers Sheikh Terra and the Soul Salah Crew.

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Quilliam was a British think tank co-founded in 2008 by Maajid Nawaz that focused on counter-extremism, specifically against Islamism, which it argued represents a desire to impose a given interpretation of Islam on society. Founded as The Quilliam Foundation and based in London, it claimed to lobby government and public institutions for more nuanced policies regarding Islam and on the need for greater democracy in the Muslim world whilst empowering "moderate Muslim" voices. The organisation opposed any Islamist ideology and championed freedom of expression. The critique of Islamist ideology by its founders―Nawaz, Rashad Zaman Ali and Ed Husain―was based, in part, on their personal experiences. Quilliam went into liquidation in 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Islamic Forum of Europe</span> Organization

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The Muslim Safety Forum (MSF) is a British-based organisation set up to challenge the "unfair focus on the Muslim community when it came to policing activities and enforcement of anti-terror policing legislation". It was founded in 2001 and comprised a number of Muslim organisations, including the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), the Islamic Forum Europe (IFE), and others. It was described in 2010 by the Human Rights Watch (HRW) as "a non-governmental umbrella group that represents over 40 Muslim organisations in the UK". The MSF has been described by Shiraz Maher in The Jewish Chronicle as "an extremist group dominated by Islamists who support Hamas".

References

  1. Perry, Keith (January 10, 2013). "Almost a tenth of babies and toddlers in England and Wales are Muslim, census figures show". The Daily Telegraph.
  2. Da'watul Islam UK & Eire on LinkedIn
  3. "BBC ON THIS DAY | 14 | 1989: Ayatollah sentences author to death". BBC News. Retrieved 2013-10-20.
  4. Husain, Ed, The Islamist, Penguin, 2007, p.24-5, 166
  5. Husain, Ed, The Islamist, Penguin, 2007, p.279
  6. Islamic Society of Britain. Last accessed April 15, 2008.
  7. "From scholarship, sailors and sects to the mills and the mosques". The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited. 2002-06-18. Retrieved 2008-04-22.
  8. Delwar Hussain, "Bangladeshis in East London: from secular politics to Islam Archived 2012-04-12 at the Wayback Machine ", openDemocracy, 7 July 2006
  9. Andrew Gilligan (16 May 2010). "Radical Muslims lose grip on London council". The Daily Telegraph.
  10. Andrew Gilligan, Backlash at the mosque, Daily Telegraph, 13 March 2010
  11. Andrew Gilligan, "IFE: not harmless democrats", The Guardian, 4 March 2010. Andrew Gilligan (22 October 2010). "'Britain's Islamic republic': full transcript of Channel 4 Dispatches programme on Lutfur Rahman, the IFE and Tower Hamlets". London: Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 24 October 2010. Retrieved 26 March 2014.
  12. Inayat Bunglawala, "Watch out: democratic Muslims about", The Guardian, 3 March 2010
  13. The Islamist, pp. 52-60.
  14. "The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) is a radical Islamist organisation that uses the language and techniques of a human rights lobbying group to promote an extremist agenda. Formed in 1997 by its current chairman, Massoud Shadjareh, the IHRC supports jihad groups around the world, campaigns for the release of convicted terrorists and promotes the notion of a western conspiracy against Islam. Shadjareh and the IHRC subscribe to the radical Islamist belief that Jewish conspiracies are afoot to undermine Muslims, and they liken Jews and Israelis to Nazis. Members of the IHRC's board of advisors have even called on Muslims to kill Jews. They include the Saudi Islamist Muhammad al-Mas‘ari and Muhammad al-‘Asi, an American convert to Islam who was banned from preaching at his mosque in Washington, D.C., and has been a frequent visitor to Britain. Antisemitism And Racism Archived 2013-10-03 at the Wayback Machine , 2005 United Kingdom Report, Stephen Roth Institute. Retrieved July 2, 2007.