Bunglawussi demands free speech, especially for Hizb ut-Tahrir

“All of us have a stake in upholding these freedoms.”

Guardian UK, 

Comments (37)

Inayat Bunglawala, the 36 year old media spokesman of the Muslim Council of Britain which claims to speak for “moderate Muslims” is the son of multi-million pound convicted drug smuggler.

   First they denied that they were Pakistani’s:  Gunmen had elite training ‘from Pakistan’

India says the killers were among 500 schooled by special forces

RELATED LINKS

• Indian terror suspects linked to Mumbai plot

• Think tank: If each of us carried a gun . . .

• Indian airports on alert for ‘9/11 attack
• PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — The death toll from an overnight car bombing rose to 29 in northwest Pakistan, unnerving a region already dangerously on edge following the attacks on India’s commercial capital, police and doctors said Saturday.

About 100 people were also wounded Friday when the bomb went off near Peshawar’s famed Storytellers Bazaar, wrecking a Shiite Muslim mosque and a hotel and setting a string of vehicles and shops ablaze, said Mohammed Khan, a local police official.

We are fast approaching the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet, just this week in Tunisia, al-Sadiq Shuru, a long-time political prisoner who was released last month after serving 18 years in prison for being a member of the Islamic an-Nahda opposition movement, was once again re-arrested by the authorities. His crime? No one yet knows, though his friends suspect that the interviews he recently gave to international news channels in which he criticised the Tunisian government may have angered the authorities there.

Here in the UK, we perhaps take for granted our right to criticise and even ridicule those who hold power. We should not forget that in many parts of the world, including some Muslim-majority ones, the people have no such comparable rights.

A couple of months ago, some Muslim organisations, including Hizb ut-Tahrir vowed to launch a campaign “against the publication, distribution and stocking” of Sherry Jones’s book, the Jewel of Medina.

All of us have a stake in upholding these freedoms.

I argued at the time that however ill-researched or trashy the novel may or may not be, Muslim organisations should by now have learned the right lessons from the Satanic Verses affair and not seek to prevent others from reading it. Indeed, any campaign against the Jewel of Medina would almost certainly have the opposite effect and end up giving the book far more publicity than it would otherwise warrant. Instead, Muslim organisations should utilise the very same freedoms enjoyed by Rushdie and Jones to promote their own understanding of the life of the Prophet Muhammad among the wider public.

It is deeply regrettable that Islam has come to be associated in much of the public’s mind with violence and the denial of basic freedoms. Muslim organisations have a duty not to make matters worse by playing up to this unfortunate stereotype.

Recent years have seen a demonstrable curtailing of the freedoms we have become used to in the UK. Several popular speakers from the Muslim world who in the past have visited the UK numerous times have now been unable to obtain visas on the most spurious of grounds. Muslims residing in the UK have spent years in jail without being charged in our courts with a crime let alone been convicted of one.

And Hizb ut-Tahrir – an organisation that is unjustly banned in many parts of the world – should appreciate this point more than most. Here in the UK, the Conservative party is also committed to a policy of banning HT once it gets into power.

* Here’s more on the Bungla-father drug dealer:

http://newportcity.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_archive.html
The Lone Voice.
 
Inayat Bunglawala, the 36 year old media spokesman of the Muslim Council of Britain which claims to speak for “moderate Muslims” is the son of multi-million pound convicted drug smuggler.

Bunglawala’s father Yusuf, an Indian immigrant was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment at Knightsbridge Crown Court in 1989 after he and an accomplice imported 82lb (37kg) of the killer drug, heroin hidden inside marzipan sweets and rugs. He served just six years of his sentence before being released on parole in 1995.

The story was covered in today’s (4th) Mail on Sunday and comes at an embarrassing time for the Home Office which has only recently appointed Bunglawala Jnr as one of seven to a task force commissioned to combat Islamic extremism amongst Britain’s 2 million Muslims.