Yahya Birt

It may be tempting fate to say so, but the conviction of the ringleaders of the airliner plot last week represents the end of an era. MI5 believes that al-Qaida has no “semi-autonomous structured hierarchy” in the United Kingdom, and there have been fewer “late-stage attack plans over the last 18 months”.
Back in the 90s [...]

Muslim communities around the country have shunned al-Muhajiroun and its various entities for years and refused to give them a platform. Instead, they have to work through front organisations, hire private halls, set up high-street stalls or leaflet people with their poisonous little tracts. They are utterly marginal but are still able to generate huge [...]

As the Muslim Council of Britain marks its first decade, it seems an appropriate moment for reflection. As the largest Muslim umbrella body, it still remains primus inter pares among an increasingly large alphabet soup of representative bodies. The British Muslim Forum, the Sufi Council of Britain and British Muslims for Secular Democracy have all [...]

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent intervention on the recognition of Shariah in English law has sent the country into a spin. His address on “Civil and Religious Law in England”, which calls for “interactive pluralism” in law, is far from being a call for legal and cultural separatism. [1] However alarmed the reaction has been, [...]

What was the status of the Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles? Evidentially there is no definitive answer to this and my tentative conclusions are provisional as I do not have the immediate means to get to the bottom of what most would probably regard as an “historical footnote”.
The office has only had one incumbent: Sheikh [...]

The biggest political problem British Muslims have faced since 9/11 has been the division of their glorious multiplicity into the simplistic binary code of “moderates” and “extremists”. This has led to a conflation of the agendas around integration and terrorism. The millions now flowing into what will basically be ‘mainstreaming” Muslim communities only becomes politically [...]

The October report, “The Hijacking of British Islam“, of Policy Exchange, the right-wing think tank, alleged that a survey of one hundred mosques found that a quarter of them possessed or sold extremist literature on their premises. It was deftly timed to coincide with the state visit of King Abdullah to Britain so that David [...]

The Muslim Council of Britain has announced that it is to end its six-year boycott of the national Holocaust Memorial Day and will attend the 2008 memorial in Liverpool. The Council has also pledged to work towards the establishment of a general Genocide Memorial Day as well. The executive committee’s vote was won 18-8. Some [...]

In October the Racial and Religious Hatred Act came into force in Britain that outlaws anyone from stirring up religious hatred against people on religious grounds. From the late Eighties onwards, it was argued that while certain religious groups such as Sikhs and Jews were seen as ethnic groups under incitement to racial hatred legislation, [...]

Last week the question of Muslim unity came up, as it often does, on the English-medium Muslim blogosphere. One of the prominent young American scholars, Imam Suhaib Webb, who is currently studying at the al-Azhar in Cairo, Sunni Islam’s most august centre of Islamic learning, commented that:
Over the last 15 yrs the West has become [...]