Reciters appear on stage during final session of the National Qira’ah Competition at the Global Peace and Unity (GPU) Festival, held at London’s ExCeL Center in mid-October. The four-day event, organized by Islamist TV mogul Mohammed Ali Harrath, marked its return after a decade. The event billed as promoting “peace” and “unity,” actually encouraged British Muslims to view the United Kingdom, Israel, and the West in general with contempt.
(Photo by Hannah Baldock)
The ‘Global Peace and Unity’ Festival
The Global Peace and Unity (GPU) Festival, organized by Islamist broadcast mogul Mohammed Ali Harrath, returned to London’s ExCeL Center on the Thames after a decade-long hiatus. The event, which took place over four days in mid-October, with only the last two days open to the public, was billed as a grand celebration of Islamic culture and business.
In reality, the GPU festival served to foster alienation between British Muslims and wider British society. Attendees were greeted each day by the hypnotic and soothing sounds of Quranic recitation, or tajwid, by renowned Qaris, masters of this ancient art. Thereafter, the agonies of Gaza and the West’s complicity in an alleged “genocide” of Muslims weighed heavily in a succession of sermons, poems, raps, prayers, and polemics.
We are the future of Britain.
A striking moment came when a young girl, no older than six, began to squirm and cry during Sunday’s “Gaza Summit” as Palestinian-American lawyer Lamis Deek alleged that Israeli soldiers had gang-raped Palestinian prisoners to death in the post-October 7 fighting. As Deek railed against what she described as Israeli “crimes that scar the soul of all of humanity,” the young girl tearfully asked her mother to go home. “Can we go? Can we go?” she said plaintively. It was a jarring contrast to the nearby family-friendly attractions at the festival, such as Quranic recitations by children and fairground rides.
Islam TV founder Harrath touted GPU, which he founded in 2005, as “the largest Muslim, interfaith, and multicultural event of its kind in Europe.” However, the number of patrons was substantially fewer than the 100,000 projected. Despite being massed in the venue’s lobby for 45 minutes after the scheduled start time on Saturday, attendees filled no more than a third of the seats when the doors finally opened. Harrath nevertheless described the revamped festival as “wiser, stronger, inshallah, bigger,” and “back forever.” While in-person attendance was down, the festival was broadcast on Harrath’s English-language service, which broadcasts to 135 countries across continental Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Some potential attendees likely stayed away because of the pre-festival controversy, which prompted several speakers, including prominent British MPs, to withdraw from the event. Labour MP Stephen Timms, a survivor of a jihadi stabbing attack by a constituent in 2010, pulled out upon learning that Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Zwelivelile Mandela, who has reportedly praised Hamas leaders and described violence as “resistance,” would appear. (Mandela was subsequently denied a visa to enter the U.K.) Even Bradford West MP Naz Shah, who had previously advocated for stricter blasphemy laws in the U.K., withdrew from the event.
Event staffers had used the logo of the Metropolitan Police Department (the London police force) to lend legitimacy to the event, listing the police as a “supporting partner” of the festival. Police officials insisted that the logo be removed after the British think tank, Policy Exchange, objected. The Met told the Jewish Chronicle that GPU organizers had not received “formal permission” to use the logo.
Responding to the adverse publicity that preceded the event, Harrath emphasized that the GPU supported the rule of law. “We condemn terrorism. We condemn extremism. Islam is a faith of peace. And we mean it. We mean it because that’s what we believe in.” He did, however, emphasize that he and his audience were not “patsies” of former colonial powers, declaring, “We are not house slaves. We are ourselves. We will stand for justice. We don’t shy away; we stand with Gaza. We are against war. We are against the Iraq invasion. We are against the Afghanistan invasion. We are against killing our Muslim brothers and sisters anywhere in the world.”
Harrath seemed to suggest that national borders and sovereignty were modern notions that the descendants of Muhammad and the bearers of his message can ignore. “We are part and parcel of this land,” he said. “As believers, as Muslims, we believe Allah created the whole universe, the whole earth. And He created us. And with no planning, we found ourselves living here. So, when Allah sent us to this earth to live, we found ourselves here. We are as good as anyone else. We are not foreigners. Foreign to what?”
Israel – the Unifying Scapegoat
The 27 speakers who remained on the roster despite the controversy promoted a narrative of Muslim victimhood and Western hostility to Islam. Israel’s alleged atrocities served as a central theme in GPU’s liturgy of grievance.
For example, fourteen-year-old British “poet” Ayman Taslim read to the crowd, declaring, “They said that they would break me / so they tortured all my people. / My land became a graveyard. / Life was of no value, living on borrowed time. / I carry my sorrows and wounded soul. / They have shaken us to the core. / Still, they didn’t break me.”
Ismail Patel, founder of Friends of Al Aqsa and a key figure in organizing pro-Palestine marches in the U.K., reminded attendees that “the ideology that is killing our brothers and sisters in Palestine is the same ideology of the rulers in this country.” He urged listeners to “Stand up, speak up, and defend—not the Palestinians, but defend our own rights in this country,” warning, “if we are not going to speak now, my children and your children will be in danger in this country.”
Pro-Palestine activist Medea Benjamin, founder of the U.S.-based anti-war group Codepink, denounced U.S. foreign policy, expressing her disgust that “my government is providing 70 percent of the weapons that are going to Israel.”
Dr. Swee Ang, a British-Malaysian orthopedic surgeon, linked the Palestinian cause to a broader struggle against white supremacy, saying, “Believe in your own power ... If you want to take down racial supremacy, first deal with yourself and believe that you can do it.”
When it came to demonizing Israel, some of the heaviest lifting was done by Jews. Norman Finkelstein, a well-known anti-Zionist Jew, portrayed Gaza as a battered wife who snaps and stabs her husband, remarking that Israel had “forfeited its right to self-defense.” Similarly, Israeli academic Ilan Pappé portrayed the West as complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, urging the audience to “think out of the box” in their approach to making Israel “a pariah state.”
Pappé asserted that the conflict between Israel and Iran is a “distraction,” adding, “The issue is the genocide in Gaza and the genocide that is awaiting us in the West Bank.” He saluted the “very impressive positive side for the Iranian policy,” because, he said, “nobody else apart from Iran and its allies in the region is voicing some sort of opposition to the genocide.”
Anti-Western Hostility
Maulana Tariq Jamil, a prominent Pakistani cleric associated with the Tablighi Jamaat, a Deobandi movement, who once blamed the misdeeds of women for COVID-19, called on women to stay at home and out of the U.K. workforce. Along these lines, Fatima Barkatulla, who has worked as a Dawah (evangelism) trainer for the Sunni fundamentalist Islamic Education and Research Academy,subject of the 2014 report “Evangelising Hate,” called on the audience to take up the cudgel against “toxic modernity,” declaring, “We are the future of Britain. We are the fastest growing religious group in Britain.”
In a Sunday sermon at the festival, Sheikh Sajid Umar, a Leicester-born, Saudi-trained Mufti who promotes Islamic-compliant financing, argued that Gaza had exposed the “hypocrisy” of Western values, positioning Islam as the solution to the world’s moral failures. “The world is looking for an alternative,” he claimed. “O Ummah of Muhammad, they are looking for you.”
Chicago-based clinical psychologist Hooman Keshavarzi, program director for the Master’s in Counseling Islamic Psychology Program in Doha, Qatar, lent a faux scientific credibility to this anti-Western critique during his Saturday talk, declaring that for all their power and economic success, the permissive, nonjudgmental societies of the West ushered in by Freudian psychology do not score higher in happiness indices than other countries.
Selfish materialism, consumerism, and self-care did not fill the spiritual void, and there were traces of antidepressants in the water supply in the U.S., so prevalent was their use, he said. Predictably, Keshavarzi argued that Islam is a better recipe for happiness than Western culture because “what the Islamic tradition suggests, and what modern scholars in positive psychology suggest, is that the key to relational and psychological satisfaction is other care.”
Booths in the exhibition hall fostered a distinct and insular Muslim identity as well. Vendors offered “sharia-compliant” property investments, halal travel packages, Islamic arts, charities, news sites, and children’s books, promoting an economic microcosm that some argue discourages interaction with the broader British culture.
Harrath reinforced this sense of separateness, encouraging British Muslims to view their religious identity as paramount, above national allegiances, while affirming the status of Muslims as British citizens, saying, “Till now, we have been seen as an extension of foreign forces. We are part and parcel of this land,” with Fatima Barkatulla also chiming in, “For how long, brothers and sisters, are we going to not consider Britain our country? If you were deported, you’d be deported back to Britain. When you’re ill, you go to the NHS. Right? When you go abroad and you need help, you go to the British Embassy. Insha’Allah. It’ s time to embrace the fact that we are here, and we are here to stay.”
The abundance of empty seats at the festival indicates that Harrath’s brand of Islamist isolationism is not all that popular among British Muslims, who hopefully, do not look to Middle Eastern “resistance groups” or fundamentalists from Punjab as their guiding lights in twenty-first century Britain.