Instead of taking a hard line with Islamists and their extremist fringe following fresh jihadist attacks across Europe in recent months, the new Labour government, spooked by its hemorrhaging of Muslim votes at the last general election in July 2024, has done the opposite.
At the launch of the Orthodox Sunni-led British Muslim Network (BMN) at the Hilton London Kensington Hotel, Health Minister Wes Streeting begged 300 Muslim community leaders for forgiveness on behalf of the Labour government, declaring that he wished “to acknowledge with humility that successive governments have not got this relationship right.”
Streeting’s majority in his Ilford North seat was shaved to just 528 votes by 23-year-old independent candidate Leanne Mohamad, a British Palestinian activist backed by the Islamist-aligned Muslim Vote campaign. The Cabinet Minister told founders and members of the BMN that he wanted to “underscore my commitment to defending the space for Muslims across our country to participate and to have their voices heard” and that they had the freedom to “express your politics at the ballot box.”
Streeting’s forelock-tugging display followed more than fifteen months of weekly Islamist-led anti-Israel demonstrations, which since October 8, 2023, have disrupted the streets of Britain, Parliament and ultimately the electoral process during last July’s general elections in what Justice Secretary Shabhana Mahmood later called ”an assault on democracy itself.”
BMN Established in Response to Southport Riots
Attendees of the online briefing held in late February on the British Muslim Network heard that it had arisen from roundtable discussions where lack of Muslim representation was a chief concern, particularly when mosques were targeted during riots last August that followed a stabbing attack on young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.
The attacker, a British Rwandan autistic youth misidentified online as a Muslim in the hours after the attack, was later revealed to have been in possession of an online Al Qaeda training manual, a fact that was withheld from the public for months after the killings. At least twenty-two people were jailed for messages they posted on social media after the July 2024 attack and 400, including fifty under the age of eighteen, were charged with “hate crimes” and public order offences during the ensuing riots.
The BMN, which is being put forth as a replacement for the discredited Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), receives significant support from the Together Coalition, a charity linked to former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. It was co-founded by Brendan Cox, whose wife, Labour MP Jo Cox, was gunned down in 2016 by a far-right extremist in her Batley and Spen constituency in Yorkshire.
The Bishop of Bradford, Toby Howarth, a guest speaker at BMN’s launch, commended its efforts to push back against a “hard-right agenda.” Howarth’s complaints of such an agenda did not appear to include the activities of the Islamist hard right, who hounded into hiding a teacher at Batley Grammar School in March 2021, where he remains with his family after he showed students a cartoon of Muhammad.
New Name, Same Politics
MBN’s launch was framed as a unifying move, with early PR suggesting backing from respected figures like Mishal Husain, a former presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today program. However, the presence of Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a long-time political ally of the MCB—which has ties to numerous Islamist organizations—signals continuity rather than reform.
Warsi has championed the MCB, whose deputy secretary general until January, Mohammed Kozbar, has links to individuals named in Parliament as Hamas operatives. Warsi’s recent “political champion” award from the MCB, received in the presence of the Palestinian ambassador, underscores her role in promoting a broad definition of “Islamophobia” that critics argue conflates anti-Muslim bigotry with legitimate concern about Islamist ideology.
Islamist Allies Dominant at BMN
Moreover, BMN’s co-chair, Qari Asim, is no progressive. Like most of the MCB’s affiliates, Leeds Makkah Mosque—where Asim serves as senior imam—adheres to Sunni fundamentalist Deobandi doctrine. Asim was fired as an advisor on “Islamophobia” to the Conservative government in 2022 after he supported protests against screenings of Lady of Heaven, a Shia-produced film about the Prophet Mohammed’s daughter, where extreme anti-Shia slogans were recorded and some protestors were linked to far-right Pakistani Barelwi Islamist group Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP), which has incited and celebrated vigilante violence against perceived blasphemers.
In an apparent effort to distance himself from these controversies, Asim told the attendees of the briefing that he is “on record speaking against all forms of extremism, from those that have been inspired by the Islamist extremism or far-right extremism, and therefore that kind of violent extremism or terrorism has no place in our society.” (Asim has not responded to an email query sent to him through the mosque he leads.)
BMN co-chair Akeela Ahmed, a DEI campaigner and self-described “strategic storyteller,” is married to Nafiz Mossadeq Ahmed, a former campaigner with the Khomeinist Islamic Human Rights Commission, sponsor of the Iran-backed annual Al Quds march held annually in London to oppose Israel and Zionism, where Hezbollah flags have historically been flown.
Despite these affiliations, Ahmed is one of four consultees handpicked for a new working group called to create a definition of anti-Muslim hatred and “Islamophobia” led by former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who authored a glowing foreword to the 2018 “Islamophobia” definition spearheaded by Baroness Warsi.
Another BMN founding member, Julie Siddiqi, is former executive director of the Islamic Society of Britain, which, according to the book The Muslim Brothers in Europe: Roots and Discourse by Brigitte Marechal, is “based on a chaotic partnership” between members or former members of the Muslim Brotherhood and former members of Jamaat-e-Islami, whose earlier calls for an Islamic state have been toned down to a gradualist approach and the emergence of British Islam.
Another BMN founding member, Ministry of Defence advisor Imam Asim Hafiz, is a graduate of the Darul Uloom al-Arabiya al-Islamiya, a Deobandi seminary near Bury, Greater Manchester, whose website stated that Satan uses women “as his avenue to create evil in society,” The Times reported in 2016.
Saudis and Salafis represented
Invitees to the British Muslim Network launch event included Fauzia Saeed, program and partnerships lead at the Muslim World League, a group that has acted as a mouthpiece for—and is financed by the Saudi Arabian government—and was co-sponsor of the Global Peace and Unity Festival last October, described in a Policy Exchange research note as a “home for extremists, endorsed by officialdom.”
At the online media briefing for the BMN, Haniya Aadam, head of Civic Engagement at the Green Lane Mosque in Small Heath, Birmingham, a Salafi institution which has a history of alleged extremism and hate speech, defended the record of Mend. Mend was named in parliament in March 2024 by former Minister for Communities Michael Gove as one of three Islamist-led groups being assessed against a new extremism definition. Adam claimed Mend was simply trying “to bring about a positive change and positive change within society” and “political corridors.”
Another panelist at the briefing, the MCB’s new assistant secretary general, Naomi Green dismissed the council’s decades long recorded links to extremism as “fairy stories.”
Hardliners try to sabotage the British Muslim Network
The links to extremism of some of the founding members of BMN have not stopped other Muslims from trying to sabotage the network as too friendly with Jewish faith leaders and with a government they revile for having conditionally supported Israel’s self-defense.
This was seen days after its launch when 29 Barelwi Sunni imams called on Leeds Makkah Mosque to sack Qari Asim, accusing the imam of betraying his own community for personal or political gain. The MCB also denied it supported the British Muslim Network, contradicting the statement of Baroness Warsi at the launch event that it did.
No voice for Muslim reformers
Muslim reformers and minority Muslim sects do not appear to be included in the British Muslim Network. Stephen Evans, chief executive of the National Secular Society, asked at the online briefing whether Ahmadi Muslims would be welcomed.
Ahmadis were constitutionally barred as members from the MCB, whose affiliate Stockwell Green Mosque, displayed leaflets from Pakistani anti-blasphemy extremist group Khatme Nabuwwat calling for Ahmadis to be killed as heretics, the BBC reported in 2016. Asim prevaricated: “In terms of our membership it’s not fully fleshed out yet. Once our policy is fully designed, it will be publicly available.”
Taj Hargey, founder of the reformist think tank the Oxford Institute for British Islam, told Focus on Western Islamism he was not invited to the BMN launch and commented, “This proposed network is going to be meaningless if they only have a bunch of Muslim conservatives and right-wingers part of it and liberals and progressives and others like myself are just ignored. If they’re not going to have the whole spectrum including minority Muslims—the Shia and the Ahmadis and various other groups—then this thing could be stillborn, because they’ll be afraid to issue to tackle the issue of theology.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Assesment
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a longtime counter-Islamist, has written of BMN co-chair Qari Asim, “For far too long the British government has consulted and even partnered with duplicitous clergymen like Mr. Asim. They represent the non-violent but no less sinister arm of the Medina Muslims, the proponents of dawa — radicalisation that stops short of explicit calls for jihad, but points in that direction.”