Civil servants have been forced to freeze funding worth more than £2 million to a Birmingham mosque described as “infamous” due to a history of alleged extremism.
The £2.2 million grant from the Department of Culture’s Youth Investment Fund was set to go towards a youth facility at the Green Lane Masjid and Community Centre. This was withheld after a video of a preacher discussing the stoning of women went viral on social media.
The clip features the mosque’s head imam, Sheikh Zakaullah Saleem, according to The Mail on Sunday, September 4th. This cleric said that Sharia law states these women should be placed in a “hole dug in the earth” to protect their decency.
Leaders at the Birmingham mosque say the footage has been taken out of context; that the imam was simply discussing the history—rather than advocating the modern-day implementation—of Sharia law. The clip was taken from a 45-minute video posted on—and later removed from—the mosque’s YouTube channel.
Such disputes should, of course, have been settled as part of the alleged “due diligence” checks that took place before the funding was approved, had they been carried out properly. These were performed by the independent Social Investment Business body, which is headed by the former Labour Security Minister and Communities Secretary Hazel Blears. But it appears the checks did not go far enough, and funding was only frozen after £77,000 had already been dished out.
Even if the checks had come across the video clip and found the criticism levelled against it unwarranted, there are other instances in the mosque’s recent history that might also have put a question mark on the appropriateness of government funding.
The Mail on Sunday points to a documentary in which another imam from the mosque was filmed preaching “violent jihad against ‘the kuffar,’” (the unbeliever), and where one of the institution’s leaders said wives must fulfil the “physical needs” of their husbands at all times—appearing to condone marital rape.”
A spokesperson from the mosque said its religious leaders were the victims of “an attempt to put us in our place.”
The ineptitude displayed in this case, which infects the whole of the British state, begs the wider question: How much government funding (that is to say, taxpayer money) has been handed to similarly dubious projects without even the slightest bit of notice or care?
