You would have to be sitting in a darkened room repeating the name of Allah since 7/7 to be unaware that the new front against Muslims by the Government is being led by Sufi cults.

It’s an old Russian trick, they used Sufi sects to pacify the Mujahadeen who were fighting for their freedom from occupation. These Sufi cults taught them to forget the world and be content sitting in darkened rooms repeating the name of Allah over and over and over again. The British used it in India too, creating groups who focused on every minor ritual and repeated the words ‘no politics’ over and over and over again…anyone guess who they are? …

However as we have been reporting on this website, Newsnight uncovered that these Sufi researchers had in fact forged the receipts to prove the case.

These Sufi researchers then fled the country to Mauritania for what the Zio-Con think tank called ‘religious purification’!

MPAC now wants to find out exactly who these Sufis are, who are working for the Zio-Con think tank. There were 8 Sufis who worked for them, and all apparently have gone abroad to hide while the storm is raging. They worked, according to Policy Exchange for over a year on the project, so some Muslim out there must have come into contact with them.

Who are they, what are their backgrounds … MPACUK will dig deeper and expose every last detail of the Sufis who tried to destroy their own community.

David T compares MPACUK’s call to the racist website Redwatch, which gives names and addresses of so-called enemies of their so-called struggle; people identified on the site have been attacked and one person was nearly blinded. From my experience of MPACUK, I strongly suspect that no such thing will happen as a result of this; after all, all these people did was buy books from the mosque bookshop, as probably many people have done over the years; they may well have paid only one visit to the mosques concerned. I would not mind knowing myself who the “researchers” were, although I do not want to see their addresses made public. I do not support vigilantism, but I would like to know if there are people in whose company I have to be careful of what I say, lest he twist my words and use them against me later. However, I do not want to see a wave of mutual suspicion with Muslims accusing each other of being “Zionists” or spies, as I was by some of them a year or so ago.

I find the Mauritania story, in any case, not all that believable. I find it difficult to believe that people sufficiently attached to Islam to go to Mauritania for any religious purpose - the rural areas, in particular, are not easy places to live - would snoop on other Muslims and pass their findings onto an organisation as biased against Muslims as Policy Exchange is well-known to be. If they did have Muslim, or “Muslimoid”, researchers, I suggest they may well have been Bareilawi sectarians, people attached to Schwartz and Alawi, or even Qadianis or other un-Islamic elements. The country is best known as the source of Shaikh Hamza Yusuf’s shaikh, Murabit al-Hajj, and one of the teachers at his academy in California, namely Abdullah bin Bayyah, and some of them took part in the recent Radical Middle Way lecture tour.

MPACUK’s tirade about “Sufi Zio-Con Frauds” displays their usual ignorance and recklessness about condemning other Muslims. Most Muslims in this country, particularly those of Indian Subcontinental backgrounds, are if not “Sufis” then followers of tendencies of which Sufism is part. These include both Bareilawis and Deobandis. The MPACUK article calls them “Sufis” over and over again as if this was what motivated them to snoop and spy for Policy Exchange, but the majority of Muslims, whether attached to a Sufi shaikh or not, would not even consider helping an anti-Muslim organisation attack Muslims. The majority would condemn such an act.

Among the idiotic claims in this report is this:

The Sufi Muslim council are the recognisable face of the new Government appointed cults. However there are many Sufi groups operating throughout Britain doing work to pacify the Muslim mind.

The reality is that the SMC is an outfit whose membership could probably fit on one piece of furniture, headed by Haras Rafiq, a nonentity until he popped up on Panorama in 2005. I very much doubt that they have (or, as I should perhaps say, that he has) any links with any of the “Sufi” groups in the UK, other than what exists of the US-based Hisham Kabbani group. The other Sufi groups do not “pacify the Muslim mind” but seek to train and purify them, to perfect Muslims’ faith and attachment to Islam. They do not, at least not all, instruct Muslims not to be active in their community, even if they do not stand up and shout and wave their arms around so we know who they are. As for the “old Russian trick” accusation, while there may have been Sufi groups which collaborated with the Russians, it is well-known that they helped keep Islam alive in areas where Muslims were being persecuted under Soviet rule.

This affair has confirmed some Muslims’ view of the entire group of Muslims following shaikhs like Hamza Yusuf and Nuh Keller, and others who participated in Radical Middle Way and those around them in the Muslim world, as a government project, when it originated as a grass-roots movement among English-speaking Muslim youth in the 1990s (I must say I had my doubts about RMW myself, because it would encourage precisely this suspicion). The truth is that there is no evidence that Policy Exchange’s informants were part of the movement, or that the movement endorses it (I do not believe it does). There is no excuse for blaming Sufism for activity which may possibly come out of a group which uses Sufism as a means of achieving dominance over, or the status of spokesman for, the Muslims but which has no connection with authentic Sufism at all. Whether deliberately or thoughtlessly, MPACUK has, once again, slandered a whole swathe of the Muslim community.

This is a Google Video of a recent discussion on BBC News 24 between Zulfi Bukhari of MPACUK and Nazreen Nawaz of Hizb-ut-Tahreer, regarding the recent HT-organised conference in Indonesia. The discussion is about whether Islam is or isn’t compatible with democracy; Dr Nawaz responds by raising the issue of whether democracy is really the only way of attaining accountable governance. Zulfi Bukhari says that HT have always been anti-western and anti-democratic, and favour a caliph elected for life.

(I should add that bringing democracy to the Muslim world faces a significant problem that nobody seems to address, preferring to accuse anyone who doesn’t support doing so at gunpoint of thinking Arabs, or other Muslims, are undeserving or incapable of democracy, and are thus racist. Western democracy routinely empowers minorities, meaning political minorities - either by transforming the largest minority of votes - and sometimes not even that - into a majority of seats in the legislature, or by empowering minor parties to form coalitions with major ones in order to dominate the legislature. We have learned to live with this in the West; it can’t be assumed that other peoples, Muslim or otherwise, would want to.)

I had been eagerly anticipating Channel 4’s Dispatches programme Women Only Jihad, which follows a group of female activists from the Muslim Public Affairs Committee as they fight to get admission to various mosques. One of these is in Ilford, Essex, and the other in Blackburn, Lancashire. The issue of women’s access to mosques is a major issue throughout the Muslim communities in both the UK and USA; Sara Umm Zaid has written about it many times, including about one incident (also here) where she and some friends were physically barred from entering by some rather unfriendly men. More recently, given the disgusting conditions of some women’s areas in mosques (Safiyyah Ally has an entry on one in Saudi Arabia, but the same situation is to be found in the West too), some women, including UZ, have changed their position to support women praying in the main prayer area behind a curtain. In a number of mosques, however, there simply is no facility and women are simply not allowed entry, which is something the girls from MPACUK were seeking to remedy. (More: Osama Saeed.)

The reason many mosques run by immigrants from the Indian subcontinent refuse to admit women is the same as that for which most mosques in Pakistan, probably among other places, do the same: they regard the mosque as the men’s space, on the grounds that Sayyiduna Omar, radhi Allahu ‘anhu, decided to stop women praying in the mosque on the grounds that the women in his time were not behaving appropriately. There is also the well-known fact that a woman’s prayer is more meritorious when conducted in private, preferably in the most private part of the woman’s home. There are a host of reasons why many people demand that women be admitted to mosques, including that a woman may be far from her home and still need someone to pray (such as when shopping or attending college), and a prayer offered in a mosque is vastly more private than one offered in the only other places available: the street, or the public park. There may be reasons why a woman cannot pray at home: it may be shared with, or owned by, hostile non-Muslims or there may be no peace and quiet there.

For these reasons and others, there are good reasons why women might demand space in mosques to pray. Since prayer in a mosque is compulsory for men living nearby and not for the women, and because attending the Jumu’ah prayer is obligatory for men and not for women, there are good reasons why the women’s space is nowhere near most of the mosque’s space, but it should at least be there. However, given past experience, I had doubts about what sort of approach the MPACUK women would take, and my suspicions proved to be justified.

The women’s approach was to doorstep the mosque, accompanied by a Channel 4 camera crew, and demand to be admitted to pray. The men at the mosque in Balfour Road in Ilford, unsurprisingly, refused them access, were hostile to the film crew which seemed to have appeared unannounced, and slammed the door in the women’s faces. At a mosque in Blackburn, their attempts had a similar result, and eventually an elderly man reasoned with them by telling them that the other men will not allow them, and that they should give up and go home.

MPACUK proceeded to take the matter up with the Muslim Council of Britain and the Lancashire Council of Mosques, and in a meeting with the latter, the limitations of the MPACUK approach to this, and to everything, became clear. Some of the MPACUK people, including the well-known Asghar Bukhari, proved unable to discuss the issue calmly and reasonably, instead talking over those with whom they were supposed to be negotiating. The talks degenerated into a shouting match. As on so many other occasions, he proved to be his usual hot-headed, blustering self, demonstrating once again that he’s in no position to represent the Muslim community or even to be anywhere near where sensitive negotiations are going on.

The mosque agreed to let the ladies into the mosque, but on their way from the LCM meeting to the mosque, they were met by a group of the brothers from the mosque and shown into the mosque’s ladies’ annexe, which they did not film but showed the ladies coming out, telling the world that they had not prayed because the conditions inside were filthy and smelly, which is quite believable given what has been written about women’s spaces elsewhere. It then turned out, however, that that mosque was allowing women in to hear the sermons in Ramadan, which begs the question of why they did not simply join them (unless they were not being provided with spaces to pray). There was also a house which was used by local Muslim women for prayer and teaching, so it is not true that there are simply no facilities for women in the area.

Two further issues must be raised regarding this programme. The first is that several of the women were not wearing proper hijab, by which I mean that hair was showing or that their scarves were thin enough to show the colour of their hair. Normally I would not criticise a Muslim woman who appeared in the media for this, because it is so common, but here it undermined any claim that this was a campaign by religious women, not “Islamic feminists” of the Asra No’mani type, seeking access to the mosque to fulfil religious duties. In addition, these women were demanding admission to the mosque for salaat, and salaat is not valid for a woman unless her hair is covered.

Second, the Balfour Road mosque is actually just a few streets away from Ilford’s own Albert Road mosque (you can see for yourself on this street map; the Balfour Road mosque is located roughly where the red and yellow arrow is, while Albert Road is the next road south from Winston Way), and Albert Road mosque, which is bigger, has always admitted women although it only opened in 1996 (women are also admitted to the mosques in Eton Road and Woodford Avenue). Access to Balfour Road is not exactly the most pressing of needs - perhaps they might have found one that is not a stone’s throw from a nice new mosque which does admit them? There are, in addition, ten mosques (including one run by Shi’ites) in Blackburn which admit women which are listed in the Muslim Directory (as of the 2004-5 edition), although there are depressingly many in that town which have no facilities for women, including one with space for 3,500 men.

In short, this programme was a useful guide to how not to campaign for better facilities for Muslim women. It showed the women as overly aggressive and confrontational, although it gave no indication of whether the women had approached the mosques concerned about gaining access. As a sister wrote on DeenPort this evening, “you don’t get a group of sisters to gatecrash jummah and cause havoc like that and expect to be listened to”. If it is necessary to force the issue, it cannot be done with just a handful of women from outside town turning up unannounced; you need a large contingent of the town’s own Muslim women to descend on the mosque, having forewarned the management of what will be happening.

LGF credit this article, which they call a “paranoid rant”, for confirming that the threat did indeed come from the place where Mr Bunglawala works:

MPACUK - Masajid and ISOCs Silent As Zionists Move In On Inayat Bunglawala!

As ever, we see MPACUK rushing to accuse mosques and Islamic organisations of doing nothing to help Muslims - in this case, the Muslim in question is a public figure who is suspected of sending an offensive email. Someone has been suspended over the email, and we now know that it wasn’t Inayat Bunglawala. The description of MPACUK’s article by Charles Johnson at LGF as a “paranoid rant”, however, was accurate.

The Zionist machine as organised and well funded as it is, tracked it back to the work place of Inayat. Now the central nervous system of the Zionist machine sent an alert around the world. Thinking they had him trapped, they launched a world wide campaign to have him sacked.

In reality, anyone can trace the IP address of someone who sent an email or replied to a web form. Any decent web application will tell the administrator the poster’s IP address - including Movable Type and WordPress. This is how Muslim bloggers were able to work out, about two years ago when we all used Haloscan, that a well-known nuisance commenter was posting under various names as well as his usual, and was able to rebut suggestions that a number of Islamophobic commenters were the same person. Have MPACUK looked to see if their content management system offers the same capability? If it was worth its salt it could.

Today we can reveal that Inayat Bunglawala the pro Palestinian Media spokesperson for the MCB was targeted by Zionists around the world last Thursday (25.05.06) in an all out campaign to have him sacked from his job. This is how quickly they can mobilise given even the slightest scent of blood. Someone from the same workplace sent an offensive email to a Zionist Blog. The Zionist machine as organised and well funded as it is, tracked it back to the work place of Inayat.

In fact, the campaign came entirely from LGF and was picked up by sympathetic blogs, as blog campaigns always are. And it started at LGF because LGF received the threatening email. The sole author of the LGF blog did what any sensible person would do, and traced the IP address, and read the comment thread which developed after the Da Vinci Code article was published to discover that the article may well have come from Reuters in England and not Sweden. It’s the sort of amateur detective work of which anyone is capable.

Of course, the business of pro-Israeli letter-writing campaigns which ensue whenever those involved detect that a news agency has not been sufficiently biased in their favour are well-known (one thinks of the “tears for Arafat” controversy a couple of years ago); there are known to be various websites and mailing lists dedicated to this. However, it doesn’t, to paraphrase Public Enemy, “take a nation of millions”, merely a few hundred people with access to computers, to produce a mass emailing campaign.

This piece by MPACUK shows all the weaknesses of this organisation - its obsession with Palestine to the almost total exclusion of anything else (the subject of the vast majority of the articles currently linked off the front page), to the extent where they think it takes a huge Zionist conspiracy to do something any web manager can do with a couple of clicks of the mouse, and the continual throwing of mud at the Muslim community, in this case for not alerting the Muslim community to “the attack against one of our spokesmen and a defender of Palestine” - an honour he seems to have earned solely by refusing to attend the Holocaust Memorial Day event. Do they think that Muslims check the blogs and news for reports on Inayat Bunglawala every morning, noon and night? Or that we even read Little Green Footballs, a blog notorious for its conveyor belt of Islamophobic propaganda? We Muslims simply have better things to do with our time.