Daud Abdullah, the Guardian and Me

Dr Daud Abdullah is the deputy head of the Muslim Council of Britain. Recently, he attended a meeting in Turkey in support of Hamas. It's unlikely he, or his fellow MCB leaders, thought anything strange about this: despite its claim to represent British Muslims in all their diversity, the organisation has, since its inception, been dominated by Islamists. Many of its founder members came to political awareness during the campaign against The Satanic Verses (described on an official MCB document as "profane and abusive"); its general secretary form many years, Iqbal Sacranie, notoriously claimed that death would be "too easy" a fate for Salman Rushdie. The MCB describes itself as an "umbrella organisation" with hundreds of constituent members - among these several of the most prominent and active (such as the Muslim Association of Britain) have longstanding links with Middle Eastern groups including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. An obsession with Middle East politics, to the detriment of issues of more direct relevance to the everyday lives of British Muslims, has long been a feature of the MCB's public discourse.

So it's unlikely that Dr Abdullah thought that his trip would cause him or the MCB any problems, even when he put his name to a statement of Islamist principles that has come to be called the Istanbul Declaration. It has, however, severely annoyed the government - or at least parts of the government - since it calls upon Muslims everywhere to resist international forces (including, potentially, British forces) that might be considered to be operating against the interests of Hamas. In fact the document, signed by Dr Abdullah apparently without reservation, contains considerably more than that. In line with the Hamas Charter, it withholds from Israel even the recognition of its name, preferring to call it the "Jewish Zionist occupying entity". By repeated references to Jews and Zionists, and none whatever to Israel, it implicitly inculpates and threatens all Jews as enemies of "the Islamic Nation". It declares that the Palestinian authority is illegitimate, and that all Arab governments are traitors to Islam. It invokes the blessings of Allah upon global Jihad, which it declares to be a religious duty. And it looks forward to the day when the whole of Palestine is in Muslim hands.

Hazel Blears suspended government links with the MCB until Dr Abdullah saw fit to resign. He apparently has no intention of doing so. In a statement, the MCB declares itself "appalled by the high handed and condescending action" of Blears' Communities Department. In this, it has had the wholehearted support of a Guardian editorial, which accused Blears of "grandstanding", and several of the paper's columnists. One, Seumas Milne, spoke warmly of Islamism as "a political trend as broad as socialism or liberalism". (Why not include fascism? There were, after all, considerable differences of emphasis between Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.)

The new government emphasis - outlined in its new counter-terrorism strategy Contest 2 - on countering "extremist" ideology, even of a non-violent kind was bound to have an impact on the MCB. For years, it has been the state's favoured interlocutor on all matters Islamic, despite its being less a representative body than a pressure group with a politico-religious programme all its own. Indeed, its role as the public face of Islam in Britain was largely bestowed upon it by a government which, true to the old colonialist principle of divide et impera, wanted to deal with Muslims as a block via "community representatives". Rather than as equal citizens. By doing so they empowered the religiously conservative and the politically radical. Now that the government suddenly seems less friendly, the MCB leadership feels seriously aggrieved, as though government validation was something that belonged to them by right.

Of course it's up to the MCB who it elects as its leaders. But it's also up to the government which groups they wish to include in official consultations, which leaders they wish to accord significance, who they wish to fund. If the MCB is nothing without government patronage, that is not the fault of the government - though it does say something about how "representative" it is of wider Muslim opinion. Personally, I'd rather the government didn't fund or bestow influence upon sectarian religious bodies at all. By privileging the Muslim "identity" above the other identities people of Muslim religion may have, the government necessarily empowers religious leaders, and religion generally, in areas of social or foreign policy where religion either has no relevance or (as in the Middle East) serves mainly to make a bad situation worse.

The Guardian's website yesterday featured a statement from Dr Abdullah in which he lambasted Ms Blears' "misguided and ill-advised" intervention and denied "calling for or supporting attacks on British troops anywhere in the world". He did not, however, resile from anything in the document - which is available in a PDF format. He gave the impression that apart from the paragraph the government took exception to, which he claimed was misinterpreted, there was nothing controversial in the declaration at all. No doubt that is his view.

For the benefit of readers who couldn't be bothered looking up a PDF file, I put up the entire text of the Istanbul Declaration over two posts. I neither added to nor omitted anything in the statement, though I did highlight the number of times words such as "Jewish" and "Jihad" occurred in it. The use of "jihad" was, I thought, particularly revealing since it was clearly being used in a military sense rather than that of "spiritual struggle" which we are often assured is its true meaning. But I didn't make the point - I just posted the text.

The CIF moderators saw fit to delete both those posts.

Does this mean that, by the standards applicable at the Guardian, the Istanbul Declaration amounts to hate speech? It certainly amounts to hate speech by my definition - but since the Guardian has seen fit to give Dr Abdullah a platform, that would indicate some inconsistency.

Or does it mean that the powers that be would rather people didn't know precisely what it was Dr Abdullah signed up to, and which he has in no way dissociated himself from?

Either way, it's quite remarkable. And I said so. And the post in which I mentioned the removal of the my earlier posts was also deleted. In fact, it was "disappeared"; in true Stalinist fashion, even the record of its deletion has been removed.

If you haven't read the Istanbul Declaration, I've posted it in the Dungeon, with some passages highlighted. It's certainly an eye-opener.