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Ofcom supports “Undercover Mosque”

by · 25th November, 2007

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Last Monday, the British media regulator Ofcom published a ruling that the Channel 4 documentary Undercover Mosque was not in breach of its code of conduct (PDF here; it’s on page 9). The complaints, and therefore the judgement, concentrated on five specific sequences in which the speakers, Dr Ijaz Mian in one case and Abu Usamah, the Birmingham imam, in the other four, spoke about dismantling British democracy and about jihad and related issues. They do not relate to the broader criticism of that programme which I published here: [2] after the West Midlands Police Complaint.

I do accept it as legitimate that, when an organisation presents a friendly public face while denouncing outsiders within, that this should be exposed. However, the passage where Abu Usamah talks about hating the kuffar, and other passages such as Bilal Phillips and his remarks about marriage of girls younger than 16, were not part of this complaint. I am not sure if the complaints that were made were “sample” complaints, but they covered only alleged injustices to the speakers themselves and not to the Muslim community generally.

Ofcom rejected viewer complaints, among them the suggestion that “extremists were presented as representative of all Muslims”. I would argue that two of the four so-called mainstream Muslims they presented were extremists. Taj Hargey’s belief, for example, that hadeeth (reported sayings of the Prophet, sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) are not a reliable source of information and should be discarded, is certainly not moderate or mainstream; people with this belief are not even considered Muslims. This individual came out of nowhere in 2005 when John Ware needed a “progressive” to attack the Muslims in his documentary. Simiarly, Haras Rafiq of the so-called Sufi Muslim Council appeared out of nowhere around the same time and is better known for his political connections than his work within the community. It is worth pointing out that leaders and spokesmen for any community have to be people who have paid their dues, which these two certainly had not. To present these men as moderate, mainstream reformers is not only false, it is injurious to the Muslims in general.

The fact that footage of women in niqab were shown alongside footage of the objectionable material from Abu Usamah was not part of the complaint either, although I commented on this at the time. To repeat my earlier complaint, Muslim women of all sectarian and political persuasions wear niqab. It is not a sign that she is a Wahhabi or any type of extremists. The majority of women in niqab in the UK are probably either Wahhabis or Deobandis, but I have even seen Shaikh Nazim followers wearing niqab, while HT and Muhajiroun women do (or did) not. The programme also raised the issue of the preacher encouraging parents to hit their children if they do not pray when they get older, which is certainly not specific to the group featured in that programme; as I said at the time, parents hitting children is not exactly unusual in the UK and it is often done for matters of considerably lesser importance than the prayer is for Muslims.

Despite the crowing by some of the usual suspects ([1], [2]), the Ofcom ruling is thus not really a vindication of the documentary. It will be interesting to see what happens if Hardcash Productions does sue West Midlands Police, as it was suggested that they might, because the other objections to this programme might well be aired in court. Some of the issues it raised are legitimate, but neither the complaint nor the ruling even considers other problems Muslims saw in the programme.

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