Yet another controversy over free speech and Islamism is unfolding in the United Kingdom, where a Labour government-appointed advisory group has been tasked with developing a working definition of anti-Muslim hatred and “Islamophobia.” Critics argue that the group’s opaque operations, ideological bias, and narrow composition signal an attempt to suppress legitimate criticism of Islamist ideology—a longstanding concern in the country.
It will be a miracle if [the working group] manages to produce a definition that does not silence legitimate debate and conflate criticism with racism.
Formed in February by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (which did not respond to a request for comment), the four-member panel is charged with refining the 2018 All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims’ definition, which controversially framed “Islamophobia” as a “type of racism.”
The 2018 definition, previously promoted by Islamist-led group Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), sparked fierce debate over free speech, counter-extremism, and the distinction between criticism of Islamism and anti-Muslim bigotry. Despite serious unresolved concerns, the definition was adopted in 2019, largely in response to the Christchurch mosque massacres in New Zealand the previous year, perpetrated by a far-right extremist. It was adopted by all political parties in the U.K. bar the Conservatives and by one in seven local municipalities in the U.K. Adoption of the APPG definition was one of 16 demands of the Islamist-led campaign The Muslim Vote, which backed pro-Gaza candidates against Labour in last year’s general election, slashing Labour majorities in dozens of wards.
Reports to Ring-Kisser Lord Khan
The newly established Working Group on Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia Definition will submit its recommendations to Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner by August 2025. Until then, it will provide monthly reports to Faith Minister Lord Wajid Khan of Burnley, who was filmed kissing the ring of a radical Deobandi cleric Maulana Tariq Jamil in February. The group’s terms of reference state that all advice provided by the Working Group will be private for Ministers and will not be made public.
Speaking to Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) after a mid-May Policy Exchange event on terrorism and national security, Conservative peer Baroness Jacqueline Foster recounted what she told Lord Khan, a fellow former Member of the European Parliament: “The first thing the working group has got to ask itself is, ‘Why has there been an increase in Islamophobia?’” Clarifying her point to FWI, she added, “They never speak out about Islamist extremism. They’re terrified to stick their necks out.” When FWI asked, “Muslim faith leaders?” the baroness replied, “No, Muslim MPs.”
Existing Laws Enough
Critics argue that anti-Muslim hatred is covered by existing laws. Indeed, Turkish atheist Hamit Coskun was convicted this week for a racially aggravated public order offense for burning a Qu’ran while shouting “f--- Islam” and “Islam is religion of terrorism” during a protest outside the Turkish embassy in February, a decision the Free Speech Union and National Secular Society plan to appeal, as they say it has revived a blasphemy law abolished 17 years ago. Coskun is now in hiding.
Group’s Non-Muslim Chairman Affiliates with Radicals
The new working group is chaired by former attorney general Dominic Grieve, whose prior affiliations raise doubts about his ability to arbitrate concerns. Grieve wrote a glowing foreword to the 2018 definition of“Islamophobia” by the APPG on British Muslims, many of whose consultees were the same as on his 2017 report for Citizens UK, The Missing Muslims. They included a number of activists from MEND and the Muslim Council of Britain, both groups about whom the government has unresolved concerns about associations with extremism. Grieve’s 2017 report was sponsored by the East London Mosque—itself linked to revolutionary Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami. Grieve cleared Islamic Relief Worldwide of institutional anti-Semitism in 2020 despite a slew of anti-Semitic references posted online by board members, including references to Jews as “grandchildren of monkeys and pigs” and to Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as a “Zionist pimp.”
Ahmed Part of Campaign to Stifle Journalists
Akeela Ahmed, a member of the government’s anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group since 2012, is a Muslim women’s rights advocate and self-described “strategic storyteller.” She also serves as a trustee of Nisa Nashim, the Muslim Jewish Women’s Network, and is a member of the Christian-Muslim Forum. As a consultee on Dominic Grieve’s Missing Muslims report, she pushed, together with the Muslim Council of Britain’s Miqdaad Versi, for the regulation of reporting on Islam and Muslims in the U.K. press.
Subsequently, she and Versi advised the U.K.’s largest regulator, Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO), on its 2020 guidance on reporting of Islam, which the MCB and other Islamist-led groups have since used to harass reporters and editors. For example, the Muslim Association of Britain complained to the IPSO about its characterisation in a 2018 Telegraph opinion column by Muslim reformer Ed Husain about an alliance between Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-war coalition and organizations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, in which Husain stated, “They have grand names, but they are essentially cut from the same ideological cloth of opposing the West, seeking to destroy Israel and to create Islamist governments across the Middle East.” The complaint was not upheld.
In another complaint, MEND used the IPSO guidance to challenge the reporting of poll results on sympathy among British Muslims for defectors to ISIS territory by The Sun newspaper. Out of five complaints listed in a sample published by IPSO, the regulator fully upheld only one.
Member Invoked ‘Genocide’ Against Israel
Baroness Shaista Gohir also serves on the working group. Founder of the charity Muslim Women’s Network U.K., Gohir, who did not respond to a request for comment, has been a non-party affiliated member of the House of Lords since 2022. Last December, the Baroness accepted an all-expenses paid visit to Doha, Qatar to attend the 22nd Doha Forum entitled “The Innovation Imperative; Diplomacy, Dialogue and Diversity” at which Dominic Grieve was a speaker.
In January, she criticized in parliament what she called the Israeli government’s “genocidal attitudes” two weeks before it agreed to a ceasefire. In March, Gohir launched a Muslim Heritage Month initiative in parliament while flanked by pro-Gaza independent MPs Shockat Adam (former Leicester chair of MEND) and Iqbal Mohamed. Mohamed faced claims that his supporters harassed and smeared Heather Iqbal, his Labour rival for the Dewsbury and Batley seat, as a “Zionist and genocide agent” and told a congregation of male voters to “follow the teachings of the prophet” and vote for him.
Former MCB Official Serving
A fourth member of the working group, Javed Khan OBE, former CEO of children’s charity, Dr Barnardo’s, is the founder of Equi, a new Mayfair-based, Muslim-focused think tank whose fellows include Labour MPs Afzal Khan, a former assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain and Naz Shah, who in 2021, effectively called in parliament for a blasphemy law in a discussion of the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill. Khan authored a September 2024 report for Equi on the riots that followed the stabbing murders of three little girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop in Southport last July, which were misattributed in online speculation to a Muslim, claimed that the protests “were not merely spontaneous outbursts but are deeply rooted in issues of racism, Islamophobia, and arguably were acts of terrorism.” The authorities did not reveal until October 2024 that the Southport attacker, an autistic son of Rwandan Christian parents, was in possession of a file titled “Military Studies in the Jihad against the Tyrants, the al-Qaeda training manual.”
The credibility of the Equi report, which lacks footnotes, interviews, hyperlinks or data, but includes an “action plan for government” was undermined on May 7, 2025, by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, which reported it found “no conclusive evidence that the 2024 disorder was deliberately premeditated and co-ordinated by any specific group or network” and declared that they were “mainly unrelated” to “ideology or political views.”
At the Women and Equalities Committee hearing on Community Cohesion in April, Khan said that to combat “Islamophobia” it was necessary “to improve Muslim representation, ensuring that their roles, whether it’s politics or media or leadership positions, are available and their voices are heard” and “to strengthen hate crime laws, making it easier to prosecute hate crimes.”
Hope for Pushback?
The campaign to silence criticism of Islamism’s impact on the U.K. faces opposition with Conservative Party continuing to reject the APPG’s definition on legal grounds. Former Conservative minister Lee Rowley said in a parliamentary statement January 2024 that the definition of Islamophobia as “a type of racism” was “not in line with the Equality Act 2010, which defines race in terms of colour, nationality and national or ethnic origins” and that it “could unintentionally undermine freedom of speech, and prevent legitimate criticism of Islamist ideology, or of unacceptable cultural and/or religious practices.”
Professor Steven Greer, the target of mendacious “Islamophobia” accusations by the Bristol University Islamic Society in 2020 while emeritus professor at the University of Bristol Law School, has written that “It will be a miracle if it manages to produce a definition that does not silence legitimate debate and conflate criticism with racism.”
Along these lines, the founder of the Oxford Institute for British Islam thinktank, reformist imam Taj Hargey told attendees of the launch of Greer’s 2023 book Falsely Accused of Islamophobia that “’Islamophobia’ is a canard to silence critics of Islam. We should delegitimize that word. Muslims like anybody else should be held to account.”
