A Pakistani Islamist party that calls for the execution of “blasphemers,” especially Jews, Christians, and dissenting secular Muslims, is rapidly gaining traction in Britain, a top counter-extremism expert has warned.
“There are numerous examples of the rhetoric of Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan (TLP) having an impact in the United Kingdom,” Fiyaz Mughal, OBE, founder of the Muslim hate crime monitor, Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI).
The foundations for the TLP were laid in 2011, when Punjab governor Salman Taseer was killed by his guard, Mumtaz Qadri, for his statements and actions against the blasphemy law and his support for Asia Bibi, the Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy.
TLP leader Saad Rizvi and his supporters slammed Qadri’s guilty verdict and eventual hanging. Over 100,000 people attended Qadri’s funeral, which laid the foundation for the creation of the group also known as Tehreek-i-Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah. The party was formally established in August 2015.
TLP became the fourth largest party in Pakistan following the 2024 Pakistani general election, securing nearly 2.9 million votes.
“This is a violent Islamist extremist group that promotes the view that ‘blasphemers’ must be killed,” Mughal emphasized. “There is no reason whatsoever why the Home Secretary should not proscribe this group in the U.K. and any U.K. branches or activist groups. This group is an ongoing extremist threat to British citizens.”
“They showed themselves in Birmingham three weeks ago and mentioned Gaza, at a time when British Jews feel very scared, and when Maccabi Tel Aviv fans could have come to Birmingham in this environment,” Mughal added.
Instead of cracking down on Islamist extremists like the TLP, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were banned by Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group from attending an away match against Aston Villa after receiving a risk assessment from West Midlands Police.
Pakistan Bans Violent Islamist Network
While the U.K. government has ignored pleas from Mughal to proscribe the TLP, Pakistan banned the hardline network on October 23, a week after street battles between TLP activists and police in Lahore and the neighboring city of Murdike, in which five people were killed.
The anti-Israel protesters were demonstrating solidarity with Hamas following the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in Gaza. Police raided the house of TLP leader, Saad Rizvi, and sealed mosques and seminaries associated with the party.
[T]he TLP isn’t merely Islamist. It supports the use of violence.
“The TLP is involved in terrorist and violent activities,” the government said in a statement. The outfit rejected the ban, calling it “unconstitutional, vindictive, illegal, and dictatorial.”
Mughal said that TLP is now operating a local chapter in Birmingham, where most Muslims are of Pakistani origin. TLP members protested outside Birmingham’s Pakistani consulate on October 18 against what they described as “the brutal crackdown on unarmed protesters” in Pakistan after the ban.
“People there look at Pakistani websites, just as Jews take note of what’s being said and done in Israel,” Mughal told the publication Unherd. “And the point is that the TLP isn’t merely Islamist. It supports the use of violence.”
A video of the Birmingham protest posted on YouTube shows speakers using violent rhetoric, describing Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as “dogs of hellfire,” and calling for a “one-state solution” to the Israel-Palestine conflict with the “goal” of turning “back the clock to the time before the 1948 Naqba and the creation of the Jewish state.”
One speaker added that TLP founder Khadim Rizvi had “called everyone to the battlefield” to honor the Prophet Muhammad. The police did not intervene to stop the demonstration.
TLP Involved in U.K. Incidents of Blasphemy Extremism
This is the second time the TLP, which has its roots in the Barelvi movement whose “leaders have long worked to eradicate those regarded as blasphemers,” has been proscribed in Pakistan.
The Pakistani government first banned it in April 2021 after TLP demonstrators violently protested against French President Emmanuel Macron defending the Parisian teacher, Samuel Paty, who was beheaded in October 2020 by a Chechen student for showing cartoons depicting Muhammad.
“The party’s central platform has always revolved around the defense of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws—among the harshest in the world—and the demand for capital punishment for anyone accused of insulting Islam or the Prophet,” noted Massimo Introvigne, Italian sociologist of religion.
In March 2024, a report prepared for the U.K. government’s Commission for Countering Extremism warned that “anti-blasphemy activism in the U.K. is gaining momentum and showing signs of becoming increasingly radicalized.”
Titled “Understanding and Responding to Blasphemy Extremism in the U.K.,” the report noted that “some of the most prominent voices involved have links to violent anti-blasphemy extremists in Pakistan” and that “the most alarming recent development” is the “emergence of a U.K. wing of the extremist Pakistani anti-blasphemy political party, Tehreek-e-Labbaik.”
It also cited three infamous incidents of anti-blasphemy activism which involved the TLP—a religious education teacher at the Batley Grammar School forced to go into hiding after showing students a caricature of Mohammed (March 2021), a cinema in Birmingham forced to stop screening a Shia-inspired film The Lady of Heaven (June 2022), and the suspension of schoolboys in Wakefield who damaged a Koran (February 2023).
Tanveer Ahmed, who killed Ahmadi Muslim Asad Shah in Glasgow in 2016, had direct links to the TLP and its founder, Khadim Husain Rizvi. Ahmed referred to Rizvi as his mentor. Rizvi praised the murder, calling for Muslims in the West to follow suit, the report noted. Human rights activists have condemned TLP for its role in persecuting Ahmadi Muslims, a minority sect in Pakistan that believes Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who founded the sect in the late 1800s, is the promised messiah.
Ahmed, a Sunni Muslim, said he killed the Glaswegian shopkeeper because Shah had “disrespected” Islam by posting videos online in which he claimed to be a prophet.
TLP Born After Murder of Asia Bibi’s Defender
Banning the TLP “may be more symbolic than transformative unless accompanied by deeper structural reforms,” noted Massimo Introvigne, Italian sociologist of religion. “The violent, extremist organization has repeatedly demonstrated that it can overcome bans and reorganize with new shapes and names, as long as the broader problems remain unaddressed.”
“The party will never abandon its ideology, its uncompromising defense of the blasphemy law, and the idea that the Ahmadis are enemies of Pakistan and Christians, Hindus, and Sikhs are second-class citizens,” warned Introvigne.
“I have always said to U.K. government officials in previous Tory administrations that the TLP is a real and credible threat around blasphemy,” said Mughal, a longtime counter-extremism advisor to former Conservative-led governments.
TLP did not respond to a request for comment.
