In 2015, it looked like Lutfur Rahman’s political career was over. After winning the election to serve as mayor of Tower Hamlets, a borough in East London, in 2010—and winning reelection in 2014—he was ousted as mayor and banned from running for office for five years after a judge ruled he had committed electoral fraud.
A five-year ban from public office, years of investigations, court rulings, and government intervention, and proposed electoral reforms failed to stop Rahman from winning the 2022 mayoral election. Nor did recent audits raising concerns and fresh government intervention in March 2026 prevent him from consolidating his power in the May 7, 2026, election, when his party, Aspire, expanded its control of the borough council by winning 33 of 45 seats, up from 22 in 2022. Aspire’s victory exposes an ongoing challenge to democracy in the U.K.: highly organized sectarian and patronage-based political structures fueled by demographic changes resulting from years of large-scale immigration.
Demographic and Political Base
Tower Hamlets, which houses the financial hub of Canary Wharf, the Tower of London, and soon, a 20,000-square-foot Chinese “super-embassy,” generates around £40 billion in GDP and £12 billion in tax revenues. Despite its economic importance, roughly 43 percent of the borough’s children live in poverty. Residents of Bangladeshi origin make up about one-third of the borough’s total population, fourteen percent of which was born in Bangladesh.
“Truly, in Tower Hamlets, if the EDL did not exist, like Voltaire’s God, it would be necessary to invent it.”
Rahman’s political base has long been concentrated within the borough’s Bangladeshi community. As Peter Golds, a Conservative councilor for the Island Gardens ward of Tower Hamlets, observed, “Lutfur Rahman has succeeded by mobilizing votes from Tower Hamlets’ Bangladeshi community to his Aspire Party, taking over from the Labour Party.” This shift has transformed local politics in the borough; nearly three quarters of the current councilors are now Bengali Muslims.
Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey’s 2015 electoral fraud judgment against Rahman lends credence to Golds’s assessment. Mawrey observed that Tower Hamlets’ Bengali-language media outlets were “all strongly, vehemently and occasionally intemperately supportive of Mr. Rahman and hostile to his political opponents.” Today, Rahman continues to benefit from a large and active Bangladeshi media ecosystem in the borough, where local outlets publish in both English and Bengali and eight television channels broadcast in Bengali.
Favorable media coverage represented only one element of Rahman’s political success and survival. Aspire achieved electoral dominance through a populist campaign focused heavily on generous local welfare policies, including free home care for the elderly, free school meals, school uniform grants, undergraduate bursaries and grants, free swimming, and new pledges of subsidized transport and laptops for low-income residents.
As the mayor wrote in Jacobin, a socialist magazine, in October 2023, “What we’re attempting in our borough is not only to meet people’s everyday needs … but to transform power asymmetries in the longer term.” With 73 percent of councilors now Bengali Muslims, Rahman has certainly reversed the power asymmetry in his community’s favor. Other asymmetries remain. While the 22 Aspire candidates elected in 2022 were all male and Bengali, the 33 Aspire councilors now include five women.
East London Mosque—Ideological Roots
At the heart of Rahman’s remarkable political resilience is his close alliance with the Tower Hamlets Council of Mosques hosted by the East London Mosque, which has functioned as a reliable bastion of ideological, organizational, and electoral support.
The mosque, which has a capacity of 7,000, has long been the target of scrutiny from government and non-government investigators in the U.K. In March 2009, a Department for Communities and Local Government paper described the East London Mosque as “the key institution for the Bangladeshi wing of [Jamaat-e-Islami] in the UK.” Mawlana Abu al-Ala Maududi founded Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) in 1941. After the partition of India in 1947 the organization spearheaded the movement to turn Pakistan into a sharia-governed Islamic state.
In his influential book Let Us Be Muslims, Maududi made his vision explicit: “We must fight until the sovereignty of all beings other than Allah is brought to an end, until only the law of God rules in the world, until the sovereignty of God alone is acknowledged, until we serve only him.”
Writing in the 1930s, Maududi described Islam not as a limited personal faith but as a total ideological and political order: “Islam is not merely a religious creed or compound name for a few forms of worship, but a comprehensive system which envisages to annihilate all tyrannical and evil systems in the world and enforces its own program of reform which it deems best for the well-being of mankind.”
Such ideas helped legitimize atrocities committed during the 1971 war of independence between Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and Pakistan. During the war, Bangladeshi Jamaat-e-Islami leaders helped the Pakistani Army perpetrate massacres against secular Bengali nationalists in a nine-month-long conflict that killed between 300,000 and 3,000,000 Bengalis. Following their defeat, many JI leaders fled Bangladesh for the United Kingdom, with Tower Hamlets serving as an important destination. Some have since been tried in absentia for war crimes.
Ed Husain’s Assessment
In his 2007 memoir The Islamist: Why I Became an Islamic Fundamentalist, What I Saw Inside, and Why I Left, author and counter-extremism analyst Ed Husain—now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations—recalled that leading managers of the East London Mosque, such as Muhammed Abdul Bari and Choudhury Mueen Uddin, derived their control of the mosque from their allegiance to Jamaat-e-Islami.
In his book, Husain recalls attending meetings of the Young Muslims Organization (YMO) at the East London Mosque. YMO is the youth wing of the Islamic Forum of Europe. According to a 2010 report by The Sunday Telegraph, the Islamic Forum of Europe is a secretive fundamentalist political network “dedicated, in its own words, to changing the very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed … from ignorance to Islam.”
Husain wrote in The Islamist that “as Islamists we believed that history was a clash between good and evil. We represented the former, the West the latter, and we had to prevail” and that “To us, being a Muslim meant being in conflict with non-Muslim society.”
In a 2007 interview with Time Out, Ed Husain said that although the East London Mosque and its affiliates did not advocate extremism, “their reverence for the teachings of” Maududi and [another Islamist, Sayyid Qutb], “and the solution these writers envisaged—an Islamic state under sharia law—engendered anti-Semitism, homophobia, intolerance of Muslim women who did not adopt the hijab, and hatred of ‘hedonistic Western lifestyles’—everything from clubbing to feminism....”
To be sure, this ideology had its opponents in London’s Muslim community. Husain stresses in The Islamist that his father strongly disapproved of his association with YMO. The East London Mosque he wrote, “was regarded by my family as a center for political activity for Jamaat e Islami rather than a place of worship for ordinary Muslims.”
Nevertheless, the movement was able to achieve influence in Tower Hamlets. A joint investigation in 2010 conducted by The Sunday Telegraph and Channel 4 Dispatches revealed that after Rahman became leader of Tower Hamlets Council in 2008, a man with close links to the IFE, Lutfur Ali, was appointed assistant chief executive of the council with responsibility for grant funding, though he was under-qualified for the senior role. More grants were paid to a number of organizations closely linked to the IFE.
Past Extremism Controversies at ELM
The East London Mosque has remained a target of criticism and scrutiny for years. After four Tower Hamlets schoolgirls were recruited in 2015 by the terrorist group ISIS to join its self-declared caliphate in Syria, The Daily Mail reported that family members of Sharmeena Begum—the first of the four to leave for Syria—suspected that rogue individuals in the Islamic Forum of Europe’s women’s wing, known as the Sisters Forum or Muslimaat, advised her to travel there after her mother’s death. Quoting Sharmeena’s step-uncle, Baki Miah, the newspaper reported that he was “500 percent sure that she was groomed at the East London Mosque.” Other family members called the claims “outright disgusting” and the Mosque issued a strong denial.
A 2019 report for the U.K.’s Commission for Countering Extremism by Quilliam, a Muslim-led counter-extremist think tank founded by Husain, reported that in the past, ELM had consistently hosted speakers who met the British government’s 2011 definition of extremism, including, on multiple occasions, future al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, “the world’s foremost English-speaking recruiter for violent Islamism,” according to research by Alexander Meleagrou Hitchens, senior research fellow in the Program on Extremism at The George Washington University.
In 2011, the U.S. military killed al-Awlaki in a drone strike ordered by U.S. President Barack Obama. The BBC reported at the time that officials believed al-Awlaki played a major role in the failed 2009 Christmas Day underwear-bomb plot by a London-based Nigerian student on a Detroit-bound flight, as well as the 2010 printer-cartridge bomb plot targeting U.S.-bound cargo planes (intercepted in the U.K. and Dubai). Al Awlaki had also been implicated in the 2009 Fort Hood shootings and the failed 2010 Times Square bombing attempt.
After The Telegraph reported in 2008 on Al Awlaki’s video appearance at the East London Mosque, mosque officials declared that the event was organized by an outside company. “We didn’t organize this event, they are just using our facilities,” an official said.
In 2010, British Bangladeshi King’s College London dropout Roshonara Choudhry stabbed Stephen Timms, Labour MP for East Ham in Newham, a borough adjoining Tower Hamlets, after watching more than 100 hours of al-Awlaki’s sermons online.
The same year, officials at ELM declared that Al Awlaki’s extremism “surprised the mosque management, as we had not read of anything like this in the British media before. We note that some commentators imply more was known, often citing sources written much later. It is important to judge events by the information to hand at the time.” ELM officials added, “We would like to reiterate our position on extremism, especially violent extremism, and the roads towards it, as having no moral or religious justification and we completely abhor it.”
Mosque’s CEO Support for Hamas
The 2019 report by Quilliam also identified Junaid Ahmed, East London Mosque’s current CEO, as a trustee of the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) and person of concern who spoke at the East London Mosque. In January 2009, at an event titled “Gaza: The Martyrs Meadow,” Ahmed expressed support for Hamas, stating: “Every single resistance fighter is an example for all of us to follow. And every child that dies, we wish our children would be in that similar position who would wake up and realize the aggression that is taking place amongst the believers.”
The Jewish Chronicle further reported that Ahmed paid tribute to several Hamas figures during the event, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, and Khaled Meshaal, who later served as the group’s leader. At the time, while Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, had been proscribed as a terrorist organization in the UK since March 2001, the political wing of Hamas itself was not fully banned until 2021.
London Citizens, a civil society organization that “organizes communities to act together for power, social justice, and the common good,” and for which Junaid Ahmed served as a director until 2014, responded that Ahmed “neither promotes or condones terrorism, nor expresses support for any proscribed organization in what he said in that speech,” The Jewish Chronicle reported.
Quilliam reported that the mosque has hosted hardline clerics like Salafist sharia judge of Palestinian origin Haitham Al Haddad. More recently, in 2023, Zimbabwean Deobandi Mufti Ismail ibn Musa Menk delivered Friday prayers at the mosque and recorded a fundraising appeal. Both Haddad and Menk currently appear on a national sanction list of preachers banned from entering Denmark “in consideration of the public order.”
Haddad is a pro-caliphate Islamist with a long record of misogyny and invective against Jews, gays, infidels, and apostates, documented by The Times. The Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain stated in a 2014 report “Evangelising Hate” that Haddad declared Muslims must aspire to institute Islamic states so that Islam can be implemented fully, and that this must be the aim of Muslims living in the West. The CEMB report also states that Haddad believes that criticizing suicide bombing is wrong because to do so would be to “nullify” “defensive jihad.” Haddad also declared it is a duty of Muslims to engage in jihad and “fight everyone until they establish the law of Allah.” Moreover, “Haddad has said that Female Genital Mutilation is not just acceptable, but obligatory according to some scholars,” the report states.
Controversies Had Real—But Not Total—Impact
The controversy caused by the appearances of such figures appears to have had an impact on the mosque’s willingness to allow extremists to speak on its premises. In 2019, Quilliam reported that “many of the problematic speakers who once spoke at the East London Mosque no longer appear at the mosque.”
The change, however, was not absolute. The National, an English-language newspaper owned by the United Arab Emirates, reported in 2021 that the East London Mosque hosted a keynote speech in 2020 by New York imam Siraj Wahhaj. Court documents named Wahhaj in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and prosecutors later listed him as a potential unindicted co-conspirator. In 1995, Wahhaj served as a character witness for Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted of masterminding the attack that killed six people and injured more than 1,000 others. During the trial, Wahhaj described Abdel Rahman, an associate of Osama bin Laden, as “a respected scholar.”
The National also reported that the mosque hosted several speeches between 2019 and 2021 by Irish-American Salafist Abdur-Raheem McCarthy, who claimed in October 2020 that the beheadings at a church in Nice, France, were “nonsense” and “fake news.” McCarthy appeared on controversial preacher Zakir Naik’s Peace TV, which has been fined for radicalization by media regulator Ofcom and shut down. Officials banned Naik from entering the U.K. in 2010.
East London Mosque told The National it vets all speakers. “The East London Mosque maintains a robust speaker and vetting policy, and we do relevant due diligence to ensure that all speakers who are given a platform here adhere to our guidelines,” it said.
Mosque’s Ongoing Partnership with Tower Hamlets Council
Despite these controversies, the East London Mosque remains close to the halls of power in Tower Hamlets. On March 6, 2026, Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman spoke at the mosque and declared, “The East London Mosque and London Muslim Centre is an extremely important partner for the council. They do invaluable work. We need our partners. We need our well-wishers and our supporters to deliver our services.”
The mosque reported on its website that its leaders met with Mayor Rahman, Chief Executive Stephen Halsey, and the rest of the mayor’s cabinet in December 2023 “to discuss potential opportunities for collaboration with the council for the betterment of the community.” It added that “Mayor Rahman pledged to continue working with the Mosque to build a more inclusive and prosperous Tower Hamlets.”
According to the mosque’s statement, the visit, which featured a presentation from East London Mosque’s CEO Junaid Ahmed—who, as stated above, expressed support for Hamas—concluded with “a roundtable discussion between the Mosque leadership and the Mayor’s team…on a range of issues, including community cohesion and safety, education, and economic development.”
Tower Hamlets Council’s website states that senior officers from East London Mosque and the Tower Hamlets Council of Mosques attend the council’s “Partnership Executive Group” alongside representatives of local public and private institutions such as Canary Wharf Group, the Metropolitan Police, and Queen Mary University. No Christian or Jewish institutions are listed in the partnership group, only the Tower Hamlets Interfaith Forum, which has had no meetings scheduled since 2025.
Quilliam noted that between 2006 and 2011, the East London Mosque received £2,873,572 in grants and other forms of public funding, and welcomed official visits from a wide range of politicians, civil society groups, and public figures, including then-Mayor of London Boris Johnson and U.S. Ambassador Louis Susman, who expressed his “great admiration” for the institution.
Mosque Still Enjoys Support of Islamists
In an April 2025 podcast interview with Islamist-oriented news site 5Pillars, Salafi cleric Haitham al-Haddad declared, “I always recommend that people go to East London Mosque and to pray Taraweeh [voluntary night prayers performed exclusively during the Islamic month of Ramadan] and to see how it looks like after Taraweeh. And people are shocked. They say, ‘We never expected that this is taking place in London. One mile or less than a mile from the hub of Canary Wharf and Liverpool Street and all of these big companies, banks.’ So, people are shocked. Which is a very positive sign for our Ummah.”
Elsewhere in the interview, titled “The Future of Muslims in Britain and Lessons from Gaza,” Haddad said, “The whole Ummah is waking up. And they are resisting and, you know, as we said, they have seen the decline of the non-divine Western values in front of them. And they are ascertaining their religion, their identity more. So, it is a matter of time. We need just to be more active.”
Recent Controversy—Whitechapel March
The East London Mosque became embroiled in further controversy when organizers of a march through Whitechapel—intended to counter a proposed demonstration by the anti-immigration U.K. Independence Party that police had banned—reportedly held a planning meeting at the mosque’s London Muslim Centre.
Lutfur Rahman’s close associate Alibor Choudhury, an IFE associate who previously called on Tower Hamlets Council to engage with the Islamic Forum of Europe “as a progressive organization,” apparently met with organizers of a menacing “jihadi-style” fringe march and public prayer session that took place that day on Whitechapel High Street involving 1,000 masked “brothers.” Video from the event went viral after an activist carrying a “Refugees Welcome” placard told one of the masked men, “We’re on the same side, bruv,” to which he replied, “No we’re not.”
Before the protest, a Bengali-language video had circulated featuring Rahman and associates calling on residents to defend Tower Hamlets from what he and his associates, including Deputy Mayor Maium Talukdar and Maulana Shamsul Hoque, chair of the Tower Hamlets Council of Mosques, described as a march by the “EDL,” short for the English Defence League—a street movement founded by Tommy Robinson to confront Islamist extremists and dissolved in 2013.
A Tower Hamlets Council spokesperson told The Daily Express that the mayor’s team neither endorsed nor attended the fringe march but instead attended a “family-friendly” event nearby and that Alibor Choudhury was working for the council as “a point of contact with police during the protest.”
Tower Hamlets officials also declared that images published by the media showed “Alibor asking some people to move from the steps of our Town Hall and to remove face coverings in the interests of having peaceful demonstrations.”
“This was in line with the Mayor of Tower Hamlets social media posts urging people not to put on masks and to remind people that the counter demonstration was a peaceful display of unity,” Tower Hamlets officials told The Daily Express. “While the council was not responsible for the protests, we have a responsibility to help support community cohesion and Alibor was trying to do just that.”
Choudhury No Stranger to Controversy
Alibor Choudhury’s role in managing the Whitechapel counter-protest was not the first time he found himself in the spotlight for his activities in Tower Hamlets politics. His name featured prominently in Commissioner Richard Mawrey’s 2015 electoral court judgment, which found Choudhury—then serving as Tower Hamlets Council’s Cabinet Member for Resources—and Mayor Lutfur Rahman personally guilty of corrupt and illegal practices during the 2014 mayoral election.
These included personation, postal-vote fraud, fraudulent voter registration, illegal payments to canvassers, spiritual intimidation of voters, and false accusations of racism directed at electoral rivals. Mawrey declared the 2014 Tower Hamlets mayoral election void and barred Rahman and Choudhury from holding public office for five years. Rahman was ordered to pay £250,000 in costs but later declared bankruptcy. The complainants reportedly received no compensation from government.
In his 2015 electoral court judgment against Rahman and Choudhury, Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey noted the long-term use of the threat of far-right extremism and “Islamophobia” to mobilize political support. In a section titled “Usefulness of the EDL,” Mawrey argued that groups such as the BNP (British National Party) and the EDL had become useful “bogeymen” employed to frighten minority voters, adding: “Truly, in Tower Hamlets, if the EDL did not exist, like Voltaire’s God, it would be necessary to invent it.”
It should be noted, however, that in his judgment against Rahman, Mawrey emphasized that allegations of ties to “extreme or fundamentalist Islamist movement[s]” had “played no part” in the case and that “the only permissible approach is that Mr. Rahman is not associated with extreme radical Islam and neither openly nor covertly seeks its support.”
Still, as a consequence of the verdict, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) struck Rahman off the register for life in 2018 after finding that he had shown neither “a shred of insight” nor remorse for his actions and had “unnecessarily” prolonged the regulatory proceedings through “obfuscat[ion] and prevaricat[ion].” The tribunal described Rahman’s conduct as “reprehensible, orchestrated, deliberate and dishonest,” adding: “His misconduct struck at the heart of the democratic system of elected governance. His misconduct could best be described as grievous wrongdoing.”
Mayor Rejects Allegations
Rahman has consistently rejected allegations of wrongdoing, most recently during a November 2025 interview on Islam Channel, in which he dismissed the 2015 judgment as a politically motivated “stitch-up.”
During the interview, presenter Mas Patel asked Rahman to respond to recent central government findings describing “a perceived culture of patronage” at Tower Hamlets Council and an administration that was “male-oriented from a particular background.” An inspection ordered by the Conservative government, published in November 2024, also identified serious governance failures, including contracts awarded without competition, opaque spending, retrospective paperwork, and a culture of fear and factionalism.
“First of all, I welcome external scrutiny,” Rahman replied. “An external health check on a private or public body of our size is extremely important. It helps ensure that governance is strong and that the administration is run as efficiently as possible. I welcome constructive criticism. It makes you a better person and a better administration.”
Investigations Continue
Despite this show of openness and willingness to accept accountability, a February 2024 letter from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities indicates that Rahman has attended only three of the 24 meetings of the Tower Hamlets Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee since resuming office in 2022. Moreover, Rahman allegedly threatened legal action against the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and its inspectors in late 2024. According to a report in the Middle East Eye, Tower Hamlets Council alleged that an ongoing inspection amounted to a covert fishing expedition for extremism and that inspectors questioned six Aspire councilors about their views on Gaza.
A year later, in October 2025, officials discovered that two Tower Hamlets Councilors—a former Aspire deputy mayor and a serving Aspire councilor—had been running for public office in Bangladesh while still receiving council salaries. Minister for Communities Steve Reed warned in March 2026 that government-appointed envoys would oversee improvements in leadership, scrutiny, and management of resources until 2028.
There’s a sense of déjà vu about the episode. A 2019 investigation by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary concluded that Metropolitan Police investigators ignored important lines of inquiry into the 2014 election and may have missed opportunities for criminal prosecutions. Five years earlier, a PricewaterhouseCoopers investigation into Rahman’s administration in Tower Hamlets found evidence of serious irregularities and a lack of transparency over the awarding of public grants, disposal of public buildings, and spending on publicity. It also found that officials had directed public funds to organizations aligned with his Bangladeshi Muslim support base, including grants to ineligible groups and organizations that had not applied for funding.
These “companies,” based in flats, derelict buildings, community hubs, and empty shops from Limehouse to Bethnal Green, either “did not exist” or operated under the direction of councilors and officers while receiving public funds, according to Poplar Papers, which featured in evidence released in January 2019 as part of an employment tribunal claim by Mark Edmunds, a former fraud investigator working for Tower Hamlets Council. The tribunal evidence spanned the council administrations of both Rahman and Labour’s John Biggs.
The Daily Telegraph reported in March 2026 that, as in previous administrations, Rahman continues “funneling cash to Bangladeshi groups.” Government-appointed envoys entered Tower Hamlets in January 2025, and a year later, ministers extended their powers until at least 2028 to investigate five areas: patronage, community grants and assets, planning and licensing, the mayor’s office and advisers, and housing allocations.
This may suggest change is in the offing, but Rahman’s political modus operandi has proven remarkably resilient in the face of repeated scandals, court rulings, and government interventions, largely because the East London Mosque has functioned as a powerful bastion of support.
By maintaining a close institutional partnership with the mosque—an influential Jamaat-e-Islami-linked institution with deep roots in the Bengali Muslim community—Rahman secures not only moral and religious legitimacy but also reliable grassroots mobilization, organizational infrastructure, and a loyal voting base. This alliance has allowed him to weather electoral fraud findings, extremism controversies, and governance failures that would have destroyed most political careers.
Shadow Home Office Minister Katie Lam cited Rahman’s recent victory in Tower Hamlets as part of “by far the largest single wave of successful sectarian candidates in modern British political history” after more than one in ten candidates elected to U.K. local councils were identified as Muslim sectarians. Lam wrote: “That should concern us all,” adding that sectarianism “fragments our society into a series of narrow group-based interests, and provokes conflict between those groups.”
The upshot is this: Britain’s political class can no longer dismiss this as an isolated scandal. It is a stark warning that, without real pushback, more communities will slide into fragmented, clientelist rule.
Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) has requested comment from officials at Tower Hamlets and the East London Mosque for this story and has not received a response from either institution.
