The MCB And Our Buddies Iqbal and Inayat

Sacranie smooth

Earlier this week, the government suspended ties with the Muslim Council of Britain after the MCB refused to condemn their deputy secretary general Daud Abdullah for signing a public declaration in support of Hamas.

The MCB has always been close to controversy.

Former secretary general Iqbal Sacranie has expressed admiration for both the jihadist group Hizb-ut Tahrir, which calls for a restoration of the caliphate and the implementation of Islamic law around the world, and Hamas co-founder Sheik Ahmad Yassin, referring to the latter as a "renowned Islamic scholar" and a "freedom fighter". He is also on record as saying, following the Salman Rushie affair of 1989, "Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him; his mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks for forgiveness to Almighty Allah."

Sacranie is also, along with MCB media secretary Inayat Bunglawala, a self-professed admirer of the noted Muslim thinker Sayyid Abul A'la Maududi (d.1979), who founded Jamaat-e-Islami, a group that is still working today in Pakistan and Bangladesh to make those countries into Islamic states, and explicitly rejects Western-style democracy. To read some of the "admirable" teachings of Maududi, see here.

Talking of Bunglawala, see the video below (at around the 3:30 mark) and witness him flat-out refusing to condemn hate-filled Saudi Wahhabi books, and even defending their right to be sold at British mosques.



The British government was right to sever links with this dubious "moderate" mainstream Muslim group. We may thank ourselves lucky that our country's Muslims aren't represented by such an odious organisation as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, but even so, it would be irresponsible to grant the MCB, which has failed to demonstrate adequately that it is committed to British values and opposition to jihadist ideology, any access to positions of power and influence in this country.