Earlier this year, Hasan helped launch the Quilliam Foundation, a “counter-extremism think tank” created by former members of radical Islamist organizations. It was co-founded by Ed Husain, who used to belong to Hizb-ut-Tahrir before leaving and then denouncing the global Islamist group in a bestselling memoir. The foundation’s members believe Western Muslims should “revive Western Islam, our Andalusian heritage of pluralism and respect . . . free from the cultural baggage of the Indian subcontinent, or the political burdens of the Arab world.” To this end, they host debates, deliver lectures, publish articles, and engage in research. Their goal, they say, is to support British Islam as a modern, pluralistic, tolerant religion, and oppose Islamism, the political ideology.
Several Muslim groups and clerics have denounced the foundation and its members. Critics include the Muslim Council of Britain, the largest umbrella organization of Muslim groups in the U.K.—some of which have close ties to the Pakistani Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood. One critic, Abu Khadeejah Abdul-Wahid, an imam in Birmingham who preaches the orthodox Sunni strain of Salafism, believes the extremist ideology of al-Qaeda can best be confronted by teaching traditional, orthodox Islam. He rejects the Quilliam Foundation’s call for a modern British Islam and described Husain to Maclean’s as a “trickster.” Some non-Muslim liberals have also attacked the Quilliam Foundation and the similarly moderate Sufi Muslim Council. The headline on a recent Guardian newspaper column by Seumas Milne describes both groups as “clients and stooges” of the British government.
But Hasan, who regularly receives nasty emails and the odd death threat from other Muslims because of his stance, says it is his religion and concern for its future that drives him. “There is a battle going on for the heart and soul of Islam,” he says. “It’s a question of our faith. The Quran and Islam are very dear to my heart. I’m a believer, like the fundamentalists I suppose. They’re very passionate about their interpretation of Islam. I’m very passionate that Islam has to be understood in a very generous and merciful and balanced way. So the very nature of our faith and how it’s practised and presented is at stake here in the West. That’s why I persevere. The stakes are very high.”
The Quilliam Foundation claims it does not receive financial support from the British government, although it adds it would welcome such funding as long as it came with no strings attached. The British government, for its part, is funding a number of Muslim groups and organizations that say they are working to de-radicalize their communities. In June, the Home Office made available another $25 million for projects that “undermine extremist ideology” by “amplifying mainstream voices.” The Metropolitan Police Service’s Muslim contact unit is another example of efforts by British authorities to win over Muslim communities and marginalize extremist voices within them.
But among the hundreds of mosques, community organizations and lobby groups, whom should the government and police be supporting and seeking alliances with? It’s a difficult and important question. The British government has been heavily criticized in the past for promoting the Muslim Council of Britain and accepting its claims to represent mainstream British Muslims. “You had people who were essentially Islamists walking in and out of Downing Street, up and down Whitehall, pretending to be ordinary Muslims,” Ed Husain said in an interview with Maclean’s last year. On the other hand, if it were only to support the most liberal of British Muslim voices, does the government not run the risk of isolating large numbers of Muslims? As long as an organization is opposed to blowing up subways in London, does it really matter what its members feel about the Palestinian question, Kashmir, sharia law, or whether women should leave the house without a veil?
British authorities appear ready to compromise. In 2005 police teamed up with the Muslim Association of Britain, an arm of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, to remove a group of al-Qaeda supporters who had taken over the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park. The extremists were followers of Abu Hamza al-Masri, a one-eyed, hook-handed cleric who urged Muslims to kill “kafirs,” a derogatory Arabic term for non-Muslims. When interviewed by this reporter in 2002, Abu Hamza explained his statements by saying he was simply citing Muslim law. He is now serving a seven-year prison sentence for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred. Under his leadership, the mosque had served as a refuge for jihadis, including foreigners, who camped out in its basement. It is now unquestionably a more peaceful place. But does clearing out a group of radical extremists justify strengthening a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the world’s largest and most powerful Islamist groups?
