Azad Ali

Azad Ali is a British Muslim and community activist. Formerly Community Affairs Coordinator and spokesperson for the Islamic Forum of Europe, he is the founding chair of the Muslim Safety Forum, is Vice-Chair of Unite Against Fascism (UAF), and National Community Head at Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND). He has also been employed as a civil servant for the Treasury.

Early life

Azad Ali grew up on the Chicksand Estate where his parents ran a sweat shop in the heart of London's East End Bangladeshi community. He attended the Thomas Buxton Primary School and later the Daneford Boys School in Bethnal Green whose alumni include the Kray Twins. He completed his higher education at the Kingsway Princeton College whose diverse alumni range from Jamie Oliver to Sid Vicious. A regular on the East End football pitches as a boy he played in many tournaments for local team "Stars of the East End". His football skills reappeared in later life playing for Her Majesty's Treasury team in the Civil Service League.

Community activism

Islamic Forum of Europe

Ali began his career in community activism in the early 1990s when he volunteered with the IFE which was based at the nearby East London Mosque. It was there that he developed his skills as an orator, eventually becoming the IFE's spokesperson, and where he came into contact with activists working on the problem of the discrimination and hate crimes suffered by the Bangladeshi and Muslim community in London. Working with the IFE were anti-racism campaign groups United East End, Enough Coalition, an umbrella group which aims to tackle anti-Muslim hatred, and Unite Against Fascism of which he is now Vice Chair.

Muslim Safety Forum

Ali was founding-chairman of the Muslim Safety Forum from 2006. While in that post, he became a "key member" of the Metropolitan Police's 'Communities Together Strategic Group', chaired by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Rose Fitzpatrick, which met fortnightly to "oversee and review community reassurance and engagement measures" involving the Muslim community. Ali was also a member of the Kratos Review Group, to examine the Met's response to suicide bombings.

Ali successfully lobbied the Metropolitan Police to keep details of Anti-Muslim hate crimes separate from other hate crimes. In 2013 following a series of attacks on mosques Ali urged West Midlands Police to log Islamophobic hate crimes as a separate category "Police use the term hate crime. An attack on a Synagogue would be described as ‘anti-semitic’ so an attack on a Mosque should be Islamophobia." Then working with MEND their campaigning culminated in all UK police forces being required to separately record anti-Muslim hate crimes from 1 April 2016.

Ali's tenure as Chairman ended in 2008. In July 2010, he was re-elected as MSF’s chairman and continues to serve in that position.

Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND)

Ali joined MEND (formerly known as iENGAGE) in 2012 as Head of Community Development and Engagement and is currently MEND's National Community Head.

Other activism

While working for the UK Civil Service Ali was one of the founding trustees and a former President of the Civil Service Islamic Society. Ali is a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties (Liberty) and formerly a member of its National Council. Ali sits on the National Accountability Board for Schedule 7 Stops with the Police and Home Office. He is also a member of the IPCC Community Advisory Group and the Home Office’s Trust and Confidence Community Panel. He is a presenter on Muslim Community Radio’s flagship show Easy Talk and a presenter of Islam Channel’s Your Views on the News. He is a member and former Trustee of East London Mosque. He is a former Board Member of the London CrimeStoppers. Former chair of the Muslim Council of Britain's Membership Committee and member of its Central Working Committee. Former Vice-Chair of Canon Barnet School Board of Governors and former Chair of the Saturday Islamic School Board of Governors. He sat on the Strategic Stop & Search Committee and Police Use of Firearms Group with the Met.

Controversies

Portrayal in the media

Azad Ali and MEND have been the subject of many negative tabloid media articles. The most regular of their detractors is journalist Andrew Gilligan. He began targeting Ali in 2009 while working for the London Evening Standard, continuing as a freelancer in the Guardian, throughout his tenure at the Telegraph and most recently in The Times. He has admitted to having a personal "opposition to Islamism" and has been accused of being "obsessed with 'Islamists'". The frequent attacks prompted MEND to release a 25 page document titled MEND's Response to Andrew Gilligan rebutting the claims Gilligan made which included a section titled Gilligan's Crusade Against Azad Ali. Gilligan was made redundant by the Telegraph in 2016 shortly after the newspaper had to pay substantial damages for defamation due to false claims made by Gilligan about other prominent East London Bangladeshis. He continues to criticise Ali in articles published by The Times and from his blog and twitter account.

Comments on British soldiers

In 2009, Ali was suspended as a civil servant in the Treasury pending an investigation after his employer was contacted by the Mail on Sunday about an article they were planning to publish. The article accused Ali of writing a blog that justified the killing of British troops in Iraq. The blog in question titled Defeating extremism by promoting balance discussed the use of the word Jihad by contemporary Muslims particularly in the West and showed that even the founder of al-Qaeda Abdullah Yusuf Azzam did not believe there was a Sharia justification for killing troops away from the battlefield, ie that legitimate Jihad does not go beyond a typically accepted definition of self-defence. The point of balance he contended was that Muslims should not be extreme by using the word to justify violence beyond self-defence or extreme by claiming that the word had no military meaning.

The blog gave a quote from Huthaifa Azzam, a son of Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, which Ali had found published in a 2006 Irish Times article where he explained his fathers philosophy of Jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and his rejection of the methods of al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden, though in 2006 Huthaifa made reference instead to the USA/UK occupation of Iraq of that time.:

“If I saw an American or British man wearing a soldier’s uniform inside Iraq I would kill him because that is my obligation. If I found the same soldier over the border in Jordan I wouldn’t touch him. In Iraq he is a fighter and an occupier, here he is not. This is my religion and I respect this as the main instruction in my religion for jihad.” He is also quoted as saying, “That is the last thing my father would have wanted but he knew the dangers of it. He always warned people to stay away from the extremists, he even put it in his will. What is happening today with Al-Qaeda is not his way.”

The Mail on Sunday article claimed that by publishing this quote Ali himself was stating that it was all Muslim's obligation to kill British occupying soldiers in Iraq. Ali's bid to sue the Mail on Sunday for libel was unsuccessful but he was reinstated to his Civil Service role after their investigation concluded that the media claims were unfounded.

Dispatches documentary

In 2010 Andrew Gilligan produced a Dispatches documentary focused on the Islamic Forum of Europe. An undercover reported followed Ali for 8 months and recorded a live IFE radio show where they showed Ali saying "Democracy, if it means at the expense of not implementing the sharia, of course no one agrees with that." Ali subsequently claimed that the quote was taken out of context and portrayed as though it was his opinion of democracy in non-Muslim countries. "The comment was in response to a caller who asked a question about democracy in a Muslim majority country and whether I support it. I answered yes of course and I gave the example of how some of the Muslim rulers were elected in history. The caller then asked would people, that is Muslim people in a Muslim majority country accept democracy if it didn’t implement shari’ah – to which I answered of course they wouldn’t."

Ali later attacked the undercover reporter on the IFE's official radio station, saying: "We've got a picture of you and a lot more than you thought we had. We've tracked you down to different places. And if people are gonna turn what I've just said into a threat, that's their fault, innit?"

Comments on labelling terrorism

Ali has repeatedly challenged the use of the word Terrorism to describe some violent incidents perpetrated by Muslims claiming that it is selectively applied and not equally when perpetrators are non-Muslim. "My remarks about the kneejerk labelling of some atrocities as ‘terrorism’ but not others is not new nor is it unique to Muslims. When others have questioned the media’s labelling of an incident as ‘terrorism’, for reasons good or ill, their views are regarded as a legitimate contribution to the debate on nomenclature and its uses. Why am I, as a Muslim, not permitted to contribute to this debate and why, when Muslims question if ‘terrorism’ is the correct appellation for an atrocity are we demonised as diminishing the significance of a heinous crime?"

He questioned the labelling of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and claimed that the 2017 Westminster attack should not be labelled terrorism as the perpetrator had no known links to any terrorist group and acted alone.

External links

• Official Twitter account
• Official Blogspot Page