Two weeks after Policy Exchange, a leading U.K. think tank, warned that Wajid Akhter’s views threatened Muslim integration and raised concerns about his role in the aggressive Muslim Vote campaign, the soon-to-be-elected secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) shifted his stance.
We shouldn’t try to fight fire with fire.
Once elected leader of the MCB, an umbrella body for 500 Muslim institutions in the U.K., Akhter began speaking in much more conciliatory terms. Displaying a newfound reasonableness, Akhter embarked on a campaign to mainstream the MCB, which has been in the political wilderness since 2009, when its deputy leader signed the Istanbul Declaration during fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. U.K. officials cut ties with the organization, saying the declaration advocated attacks on the British military and Jews around the world.
Akhter’s effort to rehabilitate the MCB surfaced in a January 26, 2025, interview on Islam Channel News after seven London mosques were daubed with hateful messages such as “Stop Islam” and “Remigration.” During the interview, which took place the day after his election as MCB general secretary, Akhter, a physician from Essex who speaks with a soft lisp and transatlantic drawl, said, “We mustn’t try to go in one extreme or the other. We shouldn’t try to fight fire with fire. We will always be better off fighting fire with water . . . so that we can reach out to the vast majority of people in this country who are fair and reasonable and have no hatred for other religions or other ethnicities.”
Akhter and the MCB’s Separatist Pasts
It marked a significant shift from the confrontational stance on Muslim-British relations that Akhter, who studied Islamic history in Saudi Arabia, had previously advocated in the online journal Muslim Matters in 2022. Back then, he wrote, “To be a Muslim today is an act of revolutionary defiance, standing at odds with the prevailing culture in many ways.” Such rhetoric echoed the historic stances of the MCB, an organization with extensive ties to both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Pakistani Islamist organization Jamaat e Islami.
The MCB has opposed a U.K. government ban on al-Qaeda, advocated veiling for Muslim girls,and boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day from 2001 to 2007. It has also consistently opposed U.K.’s counter terrorism strategy, Prevent, refused to stand in solidarity with theAhmadiyya Muslim minority after a Sunni extremist murdered one its members, tolerated links between its affiliates and a banned Pakistani Sunni extremist group, Sipah e Sahiba and overlooked a fatwa issued in 2001 under the letter head of MCB’s affiliate Glasgow Central Mosque, accusing Scottish publisher and Qur’an scholar Paigham Mustafa of “satanic thoughts” for questioning traditional Islamic practices such as stoning adulterers and apostates.
Compelling Debut
The change in Akhter’s approach was necessitated by the sharp decline in public tolerance for imported cultural attitudes in the U.K., as evidenced by the rising support for the anti-immigration Reform Party. During his conciliatory inaugural speech on January 25, 2025 at the London Muslim Centre at East London Mosque , Akhter urged listeners to “build bridges, not barriers.” He even referred, albeit obliquely, to the suffering caused by rape gangs comprised of Pakistani Muslims to thousands of young white girls in Britain over the course of several decades, telling a crowd at East London Mosque in his inaugural speech that “One groomer is one too many. Muslim or not. We must act to protect all children from this evil. But using the heinous acts of an evil few to misrepresent an entire faith and an ethnicity is also unacceptable. We will act against both injustices.”
It was compelling debut by Akhter, the well-known founder of Charity Week, which mobilizes young people internationally to raise money for the controversial charity Islamic Relief, notorious for its history of promoting antisemitism.
Others Remain Truculent
Akhter’s break from traditional Islamist grievance narratives clashed with speeches at the Muslim leadership dinner at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington. At the January 23 dinner, which was attended by Palestinian Ambassador Husam Zomlot, a notorious anti-Israel polemicist, former Conservative party chair Baroness Sayeeda Warsi fulminated about the U.K. government’s refusal to meet with MCB leaders.
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi expressed anger about the refusal of British officials to speak with leaders from the Muslim Council of Britain.
(Photo by By Chris McAndrew via Wikimedia)
“How dare they! How dare we be told who we can have to speak on our behalf. How dare we not be allowed the agency of our own representation. How dare we be told that we are going to be accountable for what somebody may have said two decades ago,” she said in a speech, video of which was posted on Facebook.
The MCB presented the “political champion” award at the dinner to former minister Warsi, who had previously resigned from the Conservative government in 2014 over its “morally indefensible position on Gaza” and led the charge of institutional “Islamophobia” against successive Conservative governments. She did this in tandem with the MCB and its political lobbying offshoot Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), another backer of the Muslim Vote campaign, in which new MCB leader Wajid Akhter was a central player.
After the election, outgoing general secretary Zara Mohammed claimed to have no idea why officials will not deal with the MCB.
“What is the issue now? We’re not illegal, we’re not proscribed. We do not harbor any extremist views. We have a broad-based demographic of British Muslims,” she told the BBC, apparently ignoring her group’s well-documented ties to Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat e Islami.
Improve MCB’s Access to Power?
Akhter’s change in tone has given an opening to British politicians who want to court the MCB by attending the MCB’s annual leadership dinner which took place on January 23. The dinner was attended by the Deputy Mayor of London and Labour Disability Minister Sir Stephen Timms, survivor of an Al Qaeda-inspired stabbing in 2010. Shockat Adam, a former chair of MEND’s Leicester chapter and a pro-Gaza independent MP, and Labour MPs Naz Shah, Abtisam Mohammed and Azfal Khan, the latter a former deputy secretary general of the MCB also attended the event.
Afterwards officials from Labour Central Office said they had “spoken to” Timms for attending the event in breach of the government’s policy of non-engagement with the MCB. That the ban was still in force had been confirmed in Parliament by Labour officials days before when challenged by Conservative MP Nick Timothy, who later called the government’s policy on the MCB “a complete mess.”
Other Factors Contributing to Akhter’s Move to Center
Akhter’s communications reset is likely a response to a decline in MCB’s fortunes since the October 7 massacre. Outgoing Secretary General Mohammed told delegates at the council’s Annual General Meeting on the day of the leadership elections that 2024 had been “turbulent and challenging . . . not just for British Muslims, but particularly for the MCB,” adding, “The end of 2023, Gaza, the post-October 7th reality . . . changed the landscape.”
Referring to former Conservative Minister Michael Gove’s efforts to redefine “extremism” in response to intensified pro-Palestine activism—and his decision to assess MEND under the new definition—she warned that the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) had also been at risk of being banned. “The MCB was being considered as one of these banned organizations, and many of our affiliates wondered: What does this mean for us? Is this the end of the MCB? It was, in and of itself, an existential crisis,” she said. MCB leaders also revealed that the group had an accounting deficit of £59,000 partly due to unpaid £100 annual membership fees, indicating that the group was failing to convince affiliates of its value and relevance.
At the meeting, Mahmooda Qureshi, a delegate from the Islamic Society of Britain from Birmingham, said she was unimpressed with MCB’s outreach and representation of Muslim communities and felt leaders focused too much on national media.
“I do see people really frustrated with MCB. I’m not happy,” he said. “There’s certain organisations that are coming up now, that people feel that because MCB is not representative of Muslim organisations, then they’re looking to alternatives as well.”
Akhter was clearly responding to these concerns inaugural speech during which he offered a plan called Vision 2050 which called on British Muslims to embrace a “unity of purpose” and encourage Muslims to excel in education, lead the AI revolution, reform and revitalize the National Health Service and “uphold the values that make Britain stronger and more just at home and abroad, confident in its faith, seamlessly integrating into wider society while remaining true to its traditions and values,” making “our cities more vibrant and our streets safer, our economy more dynamic, and our country more resilient.”
Akhter’s communications strategy can be traced back to a March 2024 podcast discussion with Jalaluddin Patel, a former leader of banned revolutionary Islamist group HIbz ut Tahrir, backer of The Muslim Vote campaign and host of The Thinking Muslim podcast. Akhter said the lesson he took from the Battle of Badr fought by the Prophet Mohammed is that “It’s important that you control the narrative, it’s important that you control the moral high ground.”
To this end, Akhter said in his inaugural speech January 15, “We must side-step the culture wars that forces us into a corner and label everyone who criticises us as racist or Islamophobic . . . . We must be willing to engage in good faith with even our most ardent critics. Build bridges, not barriers,” he said.
Whether the government is susceptible to this belatedly constructive rhetoric, despite the MCB’s storied history of extremist links, is open to question.