Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain

Top Menu

  • About US
  • Join US
  • Books
  • Videos
  • Comment
  • Question and Answer

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Viewpoint
  • Islamic Culture
  • Da’wah
  • Media
  • People
    • Sheikh Taqiuddin an-Nabahani (Founder)
    • Sheikh Abdul Qadeem Zallum (Successor)
    • Sheikh Ata Abu Rashta (Ameer)
    • Abdul Wahid
    • Abu Yusuf
    • Jamal Harwood
    • Taji Mustafa
  • Palestine
  • Hindutva
  • About US
  • Join US
  • Books
  • Videos
  • Comment
  • Question and Answer

logo

Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain

  • Home
  • Viewpoint
    • When Democracy Favours the Capitalists over the Poor

      November 22, 2023
      0
    • Erdogan Preserves Western Hegemony and the Zionist Entity

      November 7, 2023
      0
    • 10 Ways to Liberate Palestine

      November 1, 2023
      0
    • War Crimes and the Hypocrisy of Western Powers

      October 27, 2023
      0
    • A Textbook case of Settler Colonialism

      October 27, 2023
      0
    • Dare to Speak: The Double Standards of Politicians

      October 25, 2023
      0
    • The Daily Telegraph on an anti-Palestine frenzy

      October 23, 2023
      0
    • Unveiling the West's firepower for Zionists in the Mediterranean

      October 19, 2023
      0
    • Peterson it is time to take off the blindfold

      October 18, 2023
      0
  • Islamic Culture
    • Virtues of the Month of Muharram

      July 18, 2023
      0
    • The Sublime Day of Arafah and its Merits

      June 26, 2023
      0
    • Merits of the first ten days of Dhul-Hijjah

      June 20, 2023
      0
    • Pragmatic Moon Sighting

      April 17, 2023
      0
    • Rabi ul-Awwal’s Greatest Gift: The Mercy to All Humankind, Muhammad ﷺ

      October 5, 2022
      0
    • Reading Quran

      The story of the man who was told to “Enter Paradise” and ...

      January 24, 2022
      0
    • Significance of Rabi’ul-Awwal

      October 10, 2021
      0
    • The significance of first 10 days of Dhul Hijjah

      July 10, 2021
      0
    • The Honour of the Prophets

      April 30, 2021
      0
  • Da’wah
    • DELEGATIONS IN LONDON VISIT THE MUSLIM DIPLOMATIC MISSIONS TO ACCOUNT THE GOVERNMENTS ...

      November 7, 2023
      0
    • NATIONAL DEMONSTRATION - LIBERATE PALESTINE: YES WE CAN!

      October 15, 2023
      0
    • The UK Muslim Community Statement on the Zionist Occupation

      October 14, 2023
      0
    • Birmingham Conference: Muhammad ﷺ: The Mercy, The Message, The Mission

      July 1, 2023
      0
    • London Conference: Muhammad ﷺ: The Mercy, The Message, The Mission

      July 1, 2023
      0
    • National Conferences: Muhammad ﷺ: The Mercy, The Message, The Mission

      June 12, 2023
      0
    • A Response to the Anti-Hijab Protests in Iran

      September 29, 2022
      0
    • Call to action against Hindutva and Zionist aggression

      July 16, 2022
      0
    • National Conferences : From al-Hind to al-Quds: Speak Out | Act | ...

      June 18, 2022
      0
  • Media
  • People
    • Sheikh Taqiuddin an-Nabahani (Founder)
    • Sheikh Abdul Qadeem Zallum (Successor)
    • Sheikh Ata Abu Rashta (Ameer)
    • Abdul Wahid
    • Abu Yusuf
    • Jamal Harwood
    • Taji Mustafa
  • Palestine
  • Hindutva
News Watch
Home›News Watch›Imams will have to register and face security vetting under Home Office plans

Imams will have to register and face security vetting under Home Office plans

By News Desk
September 14, 2015
1070
0
Share:

Imams, priests, rabbis and other religious figures will have to enrol in a ‘national register of faith leaders’ and undergo vetting.

Imams, priests, rabbis and other religious figures will have to enrol in a “national register of faith leaders” and be subject to government-specified training and security checks in the Home Office’s latest action on extremism.

The highly controversial proposal appears in a leaked draft of the Government’s new counter-extremism strategy, seen by The Telegraph, which goes substantially further than previous versions of the document.

The strategy, due to be published this autumn, says that Whitehall will “require all faiths to maintain a national register of faith leaders” and the Government will “set out the minimum level of training and checks” faith leaders must have to join the new register.

Registration will be compulsory for all faith leaders who wish to work with the public sector, including universities, the document says. In practice, most faith leaders have some dealings with the public sector and the requirement will cover the great majority.

The move marks a significant deepening of the state’s involvement in religion and is likely to be resisted by many religious representatives.

Maulana Shah Raza, an imam who is a founding member of the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (Minab), a self-regulatory body designed to promote best practice, warned the Government “not to meddle in religious affairs or to expand the state’s involvement in deciding on religious and theological issues”.

He said: “The Government needs to concentrate on ensuring that safeguards are in place to protect the public and treating all faith communities equally.”

Minab was launched with ministerial support under the last Labour government, but relations with Whitehall have cooled after the group refused to sever ties with extremist mosques and imams.

The new crackdown has emerged the week after the Government announced that it had killed two British Isil fighters in a drone strike.

It is believed Reyaad Khan, 21, from Cardiff, the main target of the drone attack, was radicalised at the Welsh city’s al-Manar mosque, which has hosted a series of extremist preachers, including Muhammad Mustafa al-Muqri, an al-Qaeda ally and former leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

Until 2013 the mosque’s in-house preacher, Ali Hammuda, who believes that music is a “sickness,” was allowed into Cathays High School, one of the schools attended by Khan, to run lunchtime sessions with students, teaching among other things that music and “free-mixing” between men and women were “not permitted in Islam”.

Another extremist preacher closely linked with a terrorist, Usman Ali, who taught one of the men who killed soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, was appointed chaplain at the area’s local hospital and was also on the management committee of a community centre. He was only sacked from his NHS role after an undercover reporter filmed him inviting a guest speaker who praised the Taliban.

A spokesman for the Catholic Church said it had not been consulted on the proposals. Other senior Catholic sources said any plan for state supervision of priests would be “firmly resisted”.

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, has said that the fight against Islamist extremism is the “struggle of our generation” and has to be won for the same reasons that Nazism was defeated. The leaked strategy is also sharply critical of the police and local councils for their failure to tackle scandals exposed by this and other newspapers, including the Trojan Horse plot to take over state schools in Birmingham, extremism and corruption in Tower Hamlets, and the child grooming scandal in Rotherham.

“The police response to Rotherham and Trojan Horse was hindered by a poor understanding of isolated communities and a fear of being seen as racist. This is not acceptable,” the document states. “We will therefore ensure that the police have a better understanding of extremist behaviour.”

The strategy states that local people will be given a new “extremism community trigger” – a right to “demand action where they feel the police and Crown Prosecution Service are not investigating and prosecuting people who have committed hate crime and other extremism-related offences”.

Under the “trigger,” the police would be forced to review the case and respond formally in writing.

The document says the Government will also set out a new “framework for intervention” when local councils “fail” to tackle extremism.

n a policy change stemming directly from Trojan Horse, which was largely led by hardline Muslim school governors, the document says that Whitehall “will compel schools, including academies, to have at least one governor or trustee with no familial or business ties to the school, and who lives outside the catchment area”.

More than a year after the official report into the scandal, by the former police chief Peter Clarke, only one person has been banned from becoming a governor and only one member of staff at the schools has been sacked. Other teachers accused of involvement in the plot have been reinstated, despite still being under interim orders banning them from the profession.

As revealed by The Telegraph in March, the extremism strategy also includes measures to remove benefits from people who do not learn English, review sharia courts, ban radicals from working unsupervised with children and use Jobcentre staff to identify potential extremists.

The strategy, which was supposed to be published in spring this year, has been delayed for months amid deep concern in some parts of government and most of the counter-extremism community about its most radical measure, to ban individuals whose behaviour “falls below the thresholds in counter-terrorism legislation” but which “undermines British values”.

Mr Cameron has said: “For far too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens that as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. This Government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach.”

n May, Haras Rafiq, director of the counter-extremism think tank Quilliam, described this proposal as “Orwellian and totalitarian,” saying it would “play into the hands” of extremists. He added: “It is very noticeable that the main Islamist groups are not really up in arms about this. They want it, because it will feed the narrative of grievance and victimhood they love. They will be able to use it to say, ‘look, we told you so’.”

The document defines extremism as “the vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs,” or as calling for the death of members of the British Armed Forces.

It also names a number of specific groups – including the Association of Muslim Schools, which has close links to a number of the Trojan Horse plotters. Significantly, it describes the Muslim Brotherhood, a loose global Islamist network, as an “extremist movement”. A Government review into the Brotherhood, completed months ago, has still not been published.

The Telegraph

Previous Article

Demonstrators demand release of women Calling for ...

Next Article

Hajj Reflections

0
Shares
  • 0
  • +

Join US on Telegram

Podcast

Latest Posts

Press Releases

O Egypt: Move to Liberate Yourselves and Palestine From Colonial Oppression!

The Muslim Ummah must reject the puppet rulers who serve Western interests, passively watching the genocide that is happening beneath their noses. We must appoint a sincere leader who will ...
  • When Democracy Favours the Capitalists over the Poor

    By Editor
    November 22, 2023
  • Erdogan Preserves Western Hegemony and the Zionist Entity

    By Editor
    November 7, 2023
  • DELEGATIONS IN LONDON VISIT THE MUSLIM DIPLOMATIC MISSIONS TO ACCOUNT THE GOVERNMENTS FOR THEIR INACTION OVER THE OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE

    By Editor
    November 7, 2023
  • RESPONSE TO A MEDIA INQUIRY FROM DOMINIC KENNEDY OF THE TIMES

    By Editor
    November 3, 2023
  • 10 Ways to Liberate Palestine

    By Editor
    November 1, 2023
  • Response from Executive Chairman of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain to Mail on Sunday Enquiries

    By Editor
    October 28, 2023
  • Gaza Ground Invasion: Urgent Message to the Muslim Community in Britain

    By Editor
    October 28, 2023
  • Press Centre