David Rose: Are those working on an Islamophobia definition too close to the subject?

David Rose is Policy and Research Director of the Free Speech Union.

 The Free Speech Union has long been concerned that the Government’s plan to issue an official definition of Islamophobia – or ‘anti-Muslim hostility’, as leaks suggest it has been re-named – will, if adopted, gravely threaten freedom of expression.

Announcing her appointment of a five person “Working Group” tasked to produce it in February last year, the then-Communities Secretary Angela Rayner insisted it would be non-statutory, and hence “compatible” with free speech rights. Our Director, Lord Young, disagreed, arguing it would lead to self-censorship and the restriction of lawful discourse by both private and public bodies. He also pointed out that discrimination and hate crimes against Muslims are already sanctioned by the civil and criminal law. Any definition would thus either be pointless, or it would threaten freedom of speech.

Such a definition is a longstanding demand made by Islamist organisations with which successive UK governments have had a policy of non-engagement, such as the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), thanks to the extremist views expressed by some of their leaders, such as support for Hamas and other militant groups.

However, as I point out in Anti-Free Speech Hostility: The Islamist Links of the Government’s Working Group on Islamophobia, an investigative FSU briefing published today, it turns out that all the Working Group members have had close links to Islamist individuals or organisations, including the Group’s Chair, the former Tory attorney-general Dominic Grieve KC.

In a letter to Angela Rayner in June, Young raised a further, worrisome issue: that although Rayner claimed that the Group had been chosen to reflect  “a wide range of perspectives”, four of its members had already expressed strong support for an earlier definition, that issued by the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims in 2018. Its somewhat indigestible text  – that Islamophobia is “rooted in racism and a type of racism that targets expressions of  or perceived Muslimness” – was widely condemned by liberal and feminist Muslims, who said it would be weaponised by authoritarians to prevent both criticism of Islam and the highlighting of issues such as the disproportionately Muslim heritage of members of child sex grooming gangs. No one on Rayner’s Group shares that view.

Grieve, the only member of the Group who is not a Muslim, wrote a supportive Foreword to the APPG’s 2018 report. In coming to favour an official definition, he appears to have changed his views to a significant extent, although he denies this.

Yet until 2013, Grieve made a series of strong statements about Muslims’ religious and political attitudes, claiming, for example, that Muslims were trying to change society in ways that were inimical to pluralist democracy. He argued then that what he termed “political correctness” and “identity politics” arising from multiculturalism posed a serious threat to free speech and civil society. He told me he regarded his past and present views as consistent, saying the linking thread was his desire to reduce Muslims’ alienation from public life. Nevertheless, it is a matter of record that he said nothing supportive of an official  definition until 2017, when he chaired a “citizens’ commission” on British Muslims in 2017.

Its report, The Missing Muslims, thanked the then-head of the MCB as a key adviser, while its consultative “Muslim leadership group” included further MCB and MEND luminaries – including Sahar al-Faifi, MEND’s organiser in Wales, who had blamed the London Bridge terrorist attack that killed 11 people on “pro-Zionists, pro-war individuals such as Robert Rosenkranz, Lord Ashcroft and Lord Kalms the owner of Dixons”. She had also tweeted support for Hamas.

The other Working Group members also have questionable links. Asha Affi, billed by Rayner as an “independent consultant”, stood as a council candidate for the far-left, Islamist-aligned Respect Party in 2010. For the previous five years, Respect’s highest-profile figure had been an MP for the borough where Affi stood — its sometime leader George Galloway, Saddam Hussein’s erstwhile admirer and  an outspoken defender of the Iranian and former Syrian regimes. He had also praised the Hezbollah terrorist group, saying in 2009 he wanted to “glorify” because it was “right to fight Zionist terror”.

Group member Akeela Ahmed has long suggested that discourse must be regulated by the state to protect Muslims from harm. In 2018, as Young noted in his letter to Rayner, Ahmed told the APPG that the Islamophobia definition it was then considering must have “legal power”, so that it could be “implemented by the Government and the police”.

Meanwhile Ahmed has for years worked closely with Miqdaad Versi,  the head of the MCB’s media monitoring unit, trying to block “Islamophobic” journalism. Last year she set up a new body that aims to engage with government, the British Muslim Network. Working with her was its then and current co-Chair, Qari Asim, a Sunni imam who was sacked by the last Tory government for attempting to restrict free speech after supporting protests against the film Our Lady of Heaven, which takes a Shia perspective on Islam. He has also cultivated relationships with Pakistani imams who support the death penalty for blasphemy and venerate the killer of the liberal former Punjab governor Salman Taseer, and arranged speaking tours for them in England.

Ahmed is also chief executive of the British Muslim Trust, a newly-established organisation that last July was awarded government grants worth £2.65 million by Rayner’s department – to assist victims of Islamophobia. This followed a campaign against the previous recipient of such funding, Tell MAMA, which was founded and led by Fiyaz Mughal, a fierce critic of Islamists. The campaign embraced critical articles in the left-wing Byline Times by Akeela’s husband Nafeez, and speeches in the Lords by another Working Group member, Baroness Shaista Gohir, who claimed – without adducing evidence – that Tory governments had “used” Tell MAMA to monitor extremists, not support victims of hate crime.

As for Gohir, in 2014 she posted tweets supportive of Hamas, and her son, who ran her parliamentary office until last year, claimed Israel fabricated evidence of the Hamas massacre of 7th October 2023. She too supported the APPG definition, and authored a report saying that to discuss the Muslim heritage of child sex grooming gangs is Islamophobic.

The last Group member, Javed Khan, runs Equi, a think tank that published a report last year arguing that “misinformation’” about Muslims should be combatted by the state.

In September 2025, together with Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s former first minister, Khan was one of two keynote speakers at the launch of the UK branch of an international organisation based in Turkey, the Muslim Impact Forum (MIF), which has close ties to the  Islamist regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At the time Khan spoke, the MIF’s website had for months been featuring an interview with Asim Qureshi, the Policy Director of CAGE, the terrorist prisoners’ support group, who once described Mohammed Emwazi, the ISIS executioner better known as “jihadi John”, as a “beautiful young man”. In his MIF interview, Qureshi said he hoped to build support for destroying the “evil” state of Israel once and for all, since it “should not be allowed to exist”.

Meanwhile, Labour continues to haemorrhage support to the electoral umbrella group known as The Muslim Vote, whose leaders include key figures from the MCB and MEND. The Government is running scared: a TMV rival slashed Wes Streeting’s once huge majority in 2024 to barely 500, and as he noted in his published texts to Peter Mandelson, it is likely that Labour will lose both its seats in his east London borough, Ilford. Meanwhile in Gorton and Denton, TMV is backing the Green candidate, and its influence may prove decisive.

The cause of free speech faces a daunting battle.