The hoops that Muslims in the UK jump through to be accepted by an openly hostile state are impossible. In trying to do so, we are simply reproducing the idea that we are not proper citizens, just blindly loyal subjects, argues Arzu.
Read the article below or listen to it here.
When this blog post was conceived just over a week ago, the world was a very different place.
It was already bleak, hopeless. Full of despair. A full-blown genocide livestreamed to the world had been running unabated for 20 months.
And we were all powerless to do anything about it. The few brave who resisted, who called themselves the resistance across borders, had been marginalised and vilified, possibly ignored. And amongst those that did the latter to them Muslim civil society has played a huge and unforgivable role. This post, no matter where it started, remains about them. Because really, what on earth?
The King and Di
This blog post really started when I heard that King Charles III was to visit Hujjat Islamic Centre of the KSIMC of London, in Stanmore, sometime soon.
I wanted to write a little, somewhat acerbic piece.
I began searching details of this trip and the date so I could make sure my comments were timely. In particular, I was going to allude to the fact that in the upstairs of that Islamic Centre, there is a little – I don’t want to say shrine, that’s horrible and sarcastic, it really isn’t – but a little bit of space, permanently in one of the areas associated with classes, both for children and adults, a series of photos from another royal visit circa 1990 / 1991.
“Don’t forget to take the shrine of Princess Diana down before the King comes,” I wanted to vent. I’ve said my little piece there about what I feel about that whole event. There is no amount of justification of ‘engaging’ with the system, that can in my mind justify the continued fascination with celebrity and royalty that has hold of our organisations’ leadership. As it happens the King seems to be a thoughtful fellow. Those I know who have met him in actual settings of engagement have all said so. But this performance of good and loyal citizenship, the fawning, it takes us nowhere. And particularly not in a time of genocide. Not a year after organised riots-cum-pogroms saw mosques, Muslims and migrants attacked en masse. Not less than six months after the Drunlaring Accords debacle: the agreement between wholly unrepresentative Muslim ‘leaders’ and significant figures within ‘religious’ Zionism in the UK. If you want to know more, see the declamation from the Convivencia Alliance of Muslims, Jews and Christians here. A relevant excerpt in this open letter to the King, outlines why this agreement, was amongst other things, a collaboration with genocide:
“We believe you are being misled by a vocal minority who seek to exploit inter-faith work in order to suppress criticism of Israeli war crimes.
“While we support faith organisations promoting mutual understanding and solidarity, we find it impossible to countenance interfaith initiatives which ignore the overwhelming evidence of genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes being committed in Gaza, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Lebanon over the last 16 months.
“As the horrors have played out on our screens, we are saddened that Jewish representatives who attended the recent event, such as Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, have consistently refused to criticize Israel but have instead given their support to its genocidal actions.”
The scars of this will not heal any time soon. I have more hope in the King as it happens understanding the error than those from the Muslim side. And maybe there will be a place at a later date to unpack in more detail, my concerns.
Death Does Not Become Us
However, this blog quickly switched to becoming something altogether other. It is now about what I found during my Google search for the date of the King’s visit. It was an open letter on the Muslim Council of Britain’s website from 2017. “Over 130 Imams & Religious Leaders[1] from diverse backgrounds refuse to perform the funeral prayer for London attackers in an unprecedented move” reads the Press Release headline.
You know, I think I do vaguely remember it, but so much has changed apace, and the world has degraded so much that I had forgotten about it. The top six signatories of this letter are:
- Dr Timothy Winter, University of Cambridge
- Imam Yunus Dudhwala, Head of Chaplaincy & Bereavement, Barts Health NHS Trust
- Dr Abul Kalam Azad, Director General, Muslim Family Institute (MFI)
- Mufti Mohammed Umair Zulfiqar, General Secretary, World Islamic Forum
- Sheikh Idris Watts, founder of Quranic Circle
- Dr Omer El-Hamdoon, President, Muslim Association of Britain
I know a lot of the names and in fairness, it is an unusually broad cross-section of the community ‘represented’ here.
The letter refers to a recent terrorist incident in London. I couldn’t really properly remember which one it was. But anyway, the perpetrators were killed along the way. As the headline states the letter’s signatories will refuse to perform the Islamic burial rites for the perpetrators and strongly urge others to also refuse, because:
“such actions in our own country – to our neighbours – requires a strong moral response from us. Our words will have little effect in far-flung countries, but they may have an impact at home.”
It took my breath away. Here in 2025. And it brought back some vague recollection that I had gone through the same thing eight years previously. But somehow in the track and trail of all subsequent horror I’d forgotten this little piece of hell that I just rediscovered. As it happens, Prof. Saied Ameli was here not too long ago, around the time I found this and I ran it by him.
He is a scholar. He is a scholar of the same school of thought of many of the signatories of that missive, albeit none of the top six.
There’s no such precedent he said: you can’t deny anyone who professes the faith their rites[2].
To those people who’ve signed that letter what on earth were you thinking?
I doubt any religion, but especially Islam, which is more than what we have defined in the west as a ‘religion’ is not simply for the perfect believer, the aspirational, the high-achieving, the ‘properly’ pious and overly and obviously practicing. It is not for those who are deemed by the state to be ‘the good Muslim’, or at least these days, the Muslims the state will tolerate (I think it should be pretty clear by now that there are no really good Muslims in the books of the establishment).
It really is extraordinary. It doesn’t matter if there are 200 of you making this statement today in all your much hyped diversity. Tomorrow, there will be another 200 who will come and deny you the same, because this is the divide and rule that we’ve been played by over and over again. It’s catastrophic, and it’s un-Islamic.
But now, sitting here in this world of genocide and nightmares I want to posit this to the signatories. We have been going through and witnessing the most unspeakable horror – genocide, war crimes, daily manifesting on our telephone screens, there is no denying what is happening. Where’s the letter?
Where is the equivalent letter from the Jewish community in the United Kingdom demanding that the perpetrators, the thousands of perpetrators of genocide and war crimes are denied a Jewish burial? And this has plenty of local relevance, many of those committing those crimes are dual nationals of the UK. Many of these have overtly claimed they are doing this in the name of their faith. Where’s the denial? Where’s the clamour?
And why is it that these 200 odd who have signed this, who, let’s assume, had some kind of justification for doing so, where is their clamour for the same, for the equivalence, for the fact that there has to be reciprocity? If Muslims have to deny criminals the rites of being Muslim in order to be good Muslim citizens (which is where I guess that whole discussion came from), why do you not expect it from everybody else then?
And while we’re at it? Where was that with regard to Bosnia? And those literally calling another Christian crusade in the Balkans?
Why are the ‘no Muslim burial from me’ brigade silent now? Surely they must push their stance into the mainstream of community relations, else all they have done is emphasise the link between Islam and egregious abominable political violence.
This is not something obscure, we know that there are people from the United Kingdom, fighting in Holy Land north and committing war crimes, we even have their names. We’ve been watching them on social media, boasting about what they’re doing.
We need to work out now what it is that we believe in is our faith about social relations – between each other as Muslims and between all communities and subsets thereof? How is it that we could not unite to call for a ceasefire in Syria (I know I was one of those who tried to do this) but can unite over this? Weren’t the dead bodies piling up in the Levant, again many slain at the hands of our citizens and faith brethren, worth a call for an end to the violence, let alone such punitive statements that the Winter et al letter carries?
We need to get a grip on the idea of citizenship. I mentioned Prof. Ameli, not simply because of what I asked him, but because of the work we’ve done together, and because of the idea, he had 20 plus years ago, to talk not about Islamophobia, or discrimination or racism as the overarching narrative of our experience but to talk about citizenship, the rights of it, the demands that we are able to make because of it from governments that are first and foremost there to serve the citizens and denizens of their country, not to dictate to us what our religion should be or how we perform it.
Our studies showed that the majority of Muslims in the UK had a high attachment the state as well as other markers to the emotional aspects of citizenship, including that of belonging – in and to the UK. They did so despite many, many legitimate grievances. Various shades of UK government, sitting astride an ever polarising society, even then in 2004 when we published our first findings, could have developed this model as a way to ensure satisfaction and even justice, not just for minoritised peoples, but for all the citizens of the United Kingdom. Prof. Ameli’s ideas highlighted throughout the 6 volumes of the British Muslim’s Expectations of the Government project, of which I was honoured to be a part of along with several other writers, researchers and academics, is to reimagine citizenship as a dynamic force – one where the emotional attachment, so many feel to the countries of our birth, or the countries of our residence is made meaningful by the reciprocal, emotional attachment of the states that we are living in. It cannot be that some citizens and some denizens are preferred over others. We are all the same, or we are nothing.
Right now. I’d really like to talk to Prof. Ameli. I’m editing one of his papers for the next edition of The Long View. Guess what? I can’t get through to the University of Tehran all that easily now. We are living in a completely changed world. Maybe this year, if God gives me life and ability, I will spend some time explaining how our words as Muslims civil society figures, have impact both ‘here’ and ‘abroad’, and that to date our track record has not been a good one.
To resist proper now – with our words or elsewise – is to overturn, not just this bloody genocidal movement and liberate Palestine. But to liberate all of us along the way. May that victory be near. Ameen. So be it.
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK.
Photo: The King enthroned in the House of Lords, July 2024 by Roger Harris CC3, Mosque silhouette from Pixaby, Union Jack from Free Images CC3
[1] The final figure runs to over 200
[2] There is a get out clause at the end, I wonder if it was added as a response to backlash, that states, ‘The statement is not a blanket forbidding of funeral rites (janaza), but rather the refusal by Imams and the religious authorities to publicly and formally perform one. The families of the attackers are of course perfectly at liberty to do so and it is not our place to prevent this.’
